Terraria has a passionate and wide-spread modding community—and the jewel in its crown for many years was Calamity, a mod that was on a scope of an expansion pack, adding new bosses, weapons, and so on to the survival crafter. It’s existed for 10 years, but it’ll now be shutting down due to some heavy allegations levelled at the mod’s currently absentee owner.
In an announcement currently posted to the mod’s Discord server, the development team writes: “Hey, everybody. We’ve been having a lot of internal discussion, and after much debate, we’ve come to announce a very difficult decision: We will unfortunately be ceasing all development of Calamity.”
The announcement goes on to state: “We’re sure most of you are aware of the troubled past of Calamity’s development. At this point, many of us have felt personally betrayed time and time again after being promised something better that never ended up coming. We’re just tired at this point, and almost all passion we had for the mod has been soured, with many of us having chosen to leave as a consequence.
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“Most of us want to simply move on and would be far happier working on our own projects that aren’t and won’t be tied to something with what we feel is an irrecoverably tainted reputation.”
The tainted reputation in question includes allegations that Ozzatron, who was leading development over the mod, was heavily involved with—and permissive of—a NSFW server that knowingly included minors. Ozzatron took over the mod’s development after Fabisol, its prior leader, was accused of similar grooming behaviour in 2022.
I won’t go into every sordid detail (and this is certainly not the first controversy that has spawned from this development team), however, you can see a collection of evidence here, which lays out a grim pattern of misconduct—notably, when the server’s existence leaked around 2020, those involved are accused of instating an 18+ rule without removing the underaged users who were already present within, even allegedly reinviting those minors who had left in a panic.
As a result, many who produced assets for the mod have requested their contributions be removed: “the lack of anybody to work on the mod, combined with the staggering amount of these we’ve received since, makes removing and replacing every single one functionally impossible. Ceasing development is frankly the closest thing we can do to fulfilling everybody’s requests.”
Ozzatron themselves appears to be completely AWOL, as a follow-up message from yesterday reads: “Ozz has been totally uncommunicative for more than a day now about owed bounties for labor and what he intends to do with the several thousand in saved Patreon money.
“We have not been compensated for our labor, and due to this, we have strong reason to believe Ozzatron is currently combative with us and has no intention of compensating us for our work.”