Now there's a tool for doing exactly this, with a nice interface and all: TerrariaDepotDownloader
The old guide is still here, if you want to do it manually. But I'd suggest taking a look at that tool first.
Hello! If you're reading this, I suppose your Terraria just updated by itself, without any warning, and now you can't
- join your favorite server, or;
- play with your favorite mods, or;
- both.
Well, that's not nice. Very not nice. But who cares? I do! And Steam doesn't. That's why I've made this guide, so you can go back to a previous game version while you wait for other things to add support for the new Terraria version.
"But Micael, it's impossible to downgrade a Steam game", you say. Well, that's what Steam wants you to think, and that's what many do in fact think, but that isn't truly the case. Steam does still have all the files from basically all versions of a game, even the very very early ones, and those files are downloadable, but they aren't exactly easy to get to.
It used to be a lot easier, mind you, with just a couple of commands that could be run directly in the Steam console, but they've broken that, so now we need a special tool to get the job done.
That tool is DepotDownloader. It's a command line tool that is capable of grabbing basically any file Steam has (given you have an account with access to it).
The repository for that tool has most of the instructions you need to start using it, but there are a few things that aren't exactly clear there:
- First, to be able to use it, you need access to the
dotnetcommand. Download .NET Runtime and install it. - Then, download the latest release of DepotDownloader (the file
depotdownloader-#.#.#.zip) and extract it to a folder whose path has no space on it.
That basically means that, if you extract it toC:\Users\My Name Has Spaces\Documents\Tools\, you are likely to have problems, so it'd be best to extract it toC:\Tools\if that's the case. - Once you have .NET installed, and DepotDownloader extracted, go inside its folder, and you should see multiple files, including
depotdownloader.bat. Now that you're here, open a command prompt on that folder (pro tip: click the address bar for that folder, erase the entire path and typecmdin there, then hit Enter) and you're ready to use it!
Okay, so now you have the tool set up and ready to go. To use it, you'll need a bunch of IDs, and you can grab the ones for Terraria from SteamDB.
The IDs you want are:
- APPID
- Depot ID
- MANIFESTID
On SteamDB, you can grab the IDs from the different tabs:
For Terraria, they are:
| Name | ID |
|---|---|
| APPID | 105600 |
| Depot ID | 105601 |
| MANIFESTID | 🤷 |
The MANIFESTID is what determines the version of the game you're going to be downloading, so it'll vary depending on what you want.
To know which MANIFESTID to use, go back to the SteamDB link from earlier steps and take a look at the manifests table:
There, you'll have the date of the manifest and its ID. Now, you just need to figure out when the version of Terraria you want was released, and find the MANIFESTID associated with that specific date.
Here are a few IDs as an example:
| Terraria Version | MANIFESTID |
|---|---|
1.4.1.1 |
8445078731500628527 |
1.4.1.2 |
7174777254123425714 |
Okay, so now you have all the IDs you need, but that by itself isn't yet enough to download the files. Since Terraria is a paid game, you need to use the Steam login of your account that owns Terraria on DepotDownloader for it to download those files. And yes, DepotDownloader works perfectly fine with Steam Guard, so you won't need to disable that.
As a side note, login information is something private and very sensitive. You should never ever use it on a software or website you don't trust. As far as I know, DepotDownloader isn't officially by Steam, so you should only use your login information on it if you trust it enough. Don't take my word for it, do your own research in order to decide if it's trustworthy or not for you.
Well, you have all the IDs, the login information, and what now? On DepotDownloader's repo, there are some basic instructions on how to use it, and you should totally read those. But basically, it's as follows:
depotdownloader -app <id> -depot <id> -manifest <id> -username <username> -password <password><username> and <password> are from your Steam account, and you can put them inside quotes if they contain special characters:
-username myusername -password "my_strong_&_fancy_password"
The multiple <id>s are the ones you obtained earlier.
To make it simpler, here's the command with the never-changing IDs pre-filled:
depotdownloader -app 105600 -depot 105601 -manifest <id> -username <username> -password <password>And here's an example of a dummy user donwloading Terraria 1.4.1.1:
depotdownloader -app 105600 -depot 105601 -manifest 8445078731500628527 -username dummy123 -password "dummy&friends"That's basically it. Now it should download that specific version of the game in the subfolder depots:
depotdownloader-#.#.#\depots\105601\
To play the game, you can simply run Terraria.exe from inside the files it downloaded. If desired, you can also move that folder to an easier place.
In the future, I highly suggest you keep a local backup of your Terraria installation, that way you don't have to go through all this process again when the game updates.
Or skip reading all this and just use TerrariaDepotDownloader from the official forums.