The highly integrated luminescence modes of inorganic luminescent materials provide opportunities for their multi-functional applications and interdisciplinary development. The multimodal luminescence mediated by energy traps is mainly based on the processes of carrier trapping and releasing. The carriers in a trap can escape from this trap under the stimulation of heat, light, or force, and subsequently recombine to produce thermos-luminescence, photo-stimulated luminescence, or mechano-luminescence. The multimodal luminescent materials with excellent photo-physical properties show potential applications in anti-counterfeiting, optical data storage, human-computer interaction, biomedicine, and so on. Herein, we reviewed the mechanism of multimodal luminescence, summarized the mechanism of trap filling and emptying, sorted out the research progress of energy-trap-dependent multimodal inorganic luminescent materials, and prospected the development trend of multimodal luminescent materials.