Welcome to the canonical guide for the question you just asked. If you have been referred here, you have asked a question that falls into one of the following categories:
- We've heard this question so many times, it hurts our heads.
- This question itself proves you may not want to use TShock in its current form.
- We've answered this question so many times, it gives us headaches.
TShock for Terraria is software made by volunteers across the globe. We have developers in America, China, Portugal, Australia, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom. None of us are paid for this development effort, and the donations we take accrue a year over year loss (we pay more for our hosting services and software for development than we take in via donations).
Read this guide in full and do not ask this question again.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
That depends. It might be, or it might not be. If you see a big notice at the top of the forums that says we're currently working on it, we currently are working on it.
In other words: some but not all functionality required for the new version of Terraria might not work, depending on the state of development. If you're reading this right after an update, nothing probably works. If you're reading this a week after, maybe everything does. We don't know 100%.
You can get them from the unstable builds download service, Travis. But read this warning first...
- These copies of TShock may perform in unique, weird, or unexpected ways.
- Your world may be deleted or corrupted upon startup.
- Your plugins from existing versions of TShock probably don't work.
- Your character data may be permanently corrupted or lost on connection.
- Your TShock database from past versions may be irreversably damaged or corrupted.
That depends. It's probably best to go with the highest number. If there was a recent version of Terraria, there might be a branch for it (e.g., Terraria 1.3.5's branch was 't-1.3.5' on Travis and builds appeared there). However, if you see a bigger number in the 'general-devel' folder, you should go there instead.
FInd the build on Travis and verify that it's the latest on either the Terraria branch that you want or on 'general-devel'.
A release is a fully supported release that we created specifically for a version of TShock, Terraria, the OTAPI, and the TSAPI. These releases are fully supported by us as much as volunteers can: we actively work to debug issues and attempt to help you if you need help.
An unstable build is an experimental copy. It's like beta software, but worse. If something goes wrong, we want to know about it. It's for testing -- so tell us if something does break. But we probably won't help you fix it. The community of users who use unstable builds before everyone else is how we release stable releases (mentioned above).
Maybe. If you know how to get unstable builds, install them, backup your worlds, backup your databases, and backup your characters, yes. If you know what an error message looks like and how to write a good bug report, yes.
If you have never used TShock before, you shouldn't download an unstable build. If you have no experience using modified game software before, you shouldn't download an unstable build. If you have to ask this question, you probably shouldn't use an unstable build.
We aren't going to help you if anything goes wrong. We will remove you from the community if you become hostile, have too high of a support burden, or if you constantly nag the developers. This is all in the context of unstable builds, though -- not stable ones.
Here.
Nobody knows the answer to that.
If you have asked this question and been referred here, you may be banned if you ask it again. It's extremely annoying and inconsiderate. This is a volunteer effort. We aren't paid.
If you don't think your question fits here, it probably does. Perhaps you don't speak English well or non-natively? Please wait for an official release -- we can't really take time to translate our instructions into every language. Sorry.