Don’t Starve is an amazing sandbox game, with great artwork and a brilliant world to explore. But anyone who has played this game, knows that it can be very hard when you first start out. You may find yourself asking lots of questions. Where are materials I need? Should I set up camp here or wait a bit longer? Should I attack that spider nest? These are just a few questions I had when I started playing the game, and I say a lot of other people did too. So I decided to write up this guide to help out anyone who is playing Don’t Starve for the first time.
1. Setting up camp
Picking the ideal place for your firepit is something every player must think about when playing Don’t Starve. Ideally you want to set up camp that borders a grass and desert area. This will keep you close to supplies like wood, grass, rabbit holes, boulders, and food sources. Try to be near a road as well. This will let you travel faster from your camp when exploring the world, saving valuable time.
2. Gathering food
Food is very important in Don’t Starve, so a good method of gathering food is a must have. First you should dig up berry bushes and move them to your camp. Setting up a lightning rod is a must when you do this. This will stop any lightning from hitting the berry bushes. Setting up a farm as soon as possible is also important. You should be relying on berries and food grown on farms to keep you fed during your prep time for winter.
A mixing pot and a bird cage will maximize how much hunger you can replenish with crops. With mixing pots, you can cook different food items together so you can better recover hunger and health. One great item for this is the dragon fruit. When cooked in a pot with three twigs, you will make the dragon pie, which gives 75 hunger and 40 health back to the player.
Once you get the dragon fruit, you feed it to the bird, which can give you two dragon fruit seeds. This process can give you a constant supply of dragon fruit to keep you fed.
3. Keeping sane in the wilderness
Your sanity meter is the most important thing to keep track of, after hunger. Your sanity can be brought down by a lot of things, be it fighting monsters, staying awake during the night, eating certain food and the rain. Luckily there is lot’s of ways to bring it back up. First, you can sleep through the night if you have a straw roll or a tent. This will replenish your sanity and, in the tents case replenish your health. However, this method takes up a lot of hunger so make sure you have a lot of food.
Hats are also a good option to get back sanity. The top hat is one of the best options for this. It restores your sanity at a rate of 3.3 points a minute, and will only lose durability when worn. Eating cooked green and blue mushrooms, as well as creating prototypes from your science machine are other quick and easy ways to get back sanity.
4. Preparing for winter
Trying to survive the winter can be quite tough when playing Don’t Starve the first time around. Crops don’t grow, the nights get longer, and there is a good chance you can freeze to death. Luckily, there is plenty of time to prepare for it.
First, you are going to need a lot of food. A good source of food is rabbits. Make sure to capture as many rabbits as possible during the days leading up to winter. Try to have 4 to 5 traps set up near rabbit holes. Once you start catching them, store them in your chests. This may take up a lot of wood, but you don’t have to worry about the rabbit morsels spoiling over time.
You’ll also want to have drying racks set up to turn the morsels into small jerky. Small jerky takes longer to spoil, and restores more health and sanity compared to cooked morsels. It will take a day for the morsels to turn to small jerky so make sure there is spare food to eat while you wait.
The next thing to deal with is the cold. Unprepared, you will not be able to venture far from your camp, and if you do, you will die in a few minutes. Make sure to craft warm clothes like winter hats and puffy vests. This won’t protect you from the cold, only delay the time it takes for you to start freezing to death. Thermal stones are also a great way to keep warm during winter.
And the last thing to worry about during winter is your sanity meter. This can be a serious problem, as your sanity drops very quickly during winter. An easy way to get your sanity back up is to sleep in a tent. This will cost a lot of hunger so make sure you have enough food for the morning. A quick way to recover hunger is with bacon and eggs. All you need for this is two eggs and either 2 meat or 1 meat and 1 monster meat.
You can get eggs by feeding meat or cooked monster meat to a bird in a birdcage, or from Pengulls. Pengulls can be hard to fight, as they are quite fast and always attack in packs. An easy way to kill them is to plant tree saplings around a herd of Pengulls, making sure the tree saplings are close together. Then set fire to a tree sapling. The fire should spread to all the tree saplings planted and kill all, if not most of the Pengulls, giving you eggs and more meat.
I hope these tips will come as a helpful hand in your playthrough of Don’t Starve — and remember, you better find something to eat before night comes.
