Originally posted by Rock&StoneTorture:

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First I suggest you play the vanilla game so you can determine what mods are of interests to you. QoL should be your first go to if you feel some time sinks are too tedious ( I find most of them relaxing so It depends on personal preference), when you eventually go trough most of the content and you still "need" more you have a bunch of armor/enemies/weapons/tools/builds mods that would satisfy most players.

I tried most of the popular mods and eventually went back to vanilla but the only mod I can truly recommend is crafting with containers it helps so much with base building and keeping track of how much mats you have