'Don't Starve' Cheat Sheet

For those who don't know, Don't Starve is a basically a top-down Minecraft-esque survival game, set in a Tim Burton-inspired world.  Its charming appearance hides a surprisingly deep gameplay experience, with all sorts of items to craft, monsters to fight and a huge (randomly-generated) world to explore.  If you've heard about this game and are still on the fence, I strongly recommend you pick it up.  For those who are already on board, I decided to write a basic guide and provide some tips and suggestions for any new players.  Some of the stuff mentioned here could be considered spoilers, especially if you're the type of person who really values emergent gameplay.  However, I found myself increasingly indulging in this excellent wiki, and thought it would useful to have some of the more crucial information kept in one place.  I should emphasise that my strategies are not the only way of playing Don't Starve, and I don't doubt others have found equally useful alternatives.  I'd certainly recommend experimenting freely to find the best way of surviving, but these pointers should give you a hand.


One last thing before we begin: I'm going to assume anyone reading this already knows the absolute basics of Don't Starve: that is, forage food, build a fire before nightfall, keep an eye on your hunger, health and sanity metres, and craft items using a science machine.

Picking the right spot for your base

So you've wandered around the map for a little while, picking carrots and berries and chopping down trees to make a campfire each night, but it's time you got yourself more firmly entrenched.  The first part of your base you'll want to build is a fire pit, but don't just plonk it down anywhere.  This game is all about thinking ahead.  You'll want to be within easy range of the following resources:

An awesome base certainly not made by me!

• Wooden logs  }
• Twigs            } Important crafting items
• Grass            }
• Cute little bunnies (playing as a vegetarian isn't recommended)
• Manure (you'll be doing some farming)
• Flowers (for sanity purposes)
• Rocks (if possible, but not too crucial)

Ideally, then, you want to place yourself on the border between a forested area and a savannah area.  Also, make sure there aren't any hostile animals encroaching on your base - stay away from toads, spiders, and at arm's length from the beefalo, as they won't take too kindly to you when they're in heat.  You'll need quite a few rocks to build the fire pit, so you might want to focus finding a big group of boulders at the start of the game, which will allow you to stumble onto some nuggets of gold as well, which you'll need for science and alchemy machines.

Remember the name of the game

I know I mentioned this above, but I can't emphasise enough, keep an eye on that hunger gauge.  It's all too easy to get engrossed in crafting, collecting resources or just exploring the map, and suddenly realise you're down to your last three berries and very close to death.  Prioritise building farms and hunting animals, and once you have a full belly indulge in some of the crazier crafting ideas.  But try not to eat those
seeds, because you'll want to...

Get your farm on

Depending on what luck you had and how long it took to find the right spot (beefalo in particular can sometimes be hard to find) you should have at least some carrots and berries to keep you going for a few days.  You need to be ready for when they run out, so it's a good idea to gather manure and other crafting items to build some farms (ideally the "improved" variety, but these require an alchemy machine, which requires more gold; if this is a problem, the basic farm will do).  This way, you can plant seeds, roam about collecting grass/firewood/more manure and when you come back at dusk, harvest your crops - if they're not quite ready, you can use more manure to fertilise them.  In fact, you can plant seeds and just drop a load of dung on them to make them grow instantly!  This is useful if you have loads of manure but no food.

I call them "poop machines".

You can also collect berry bushes via a handy shovel - collect loads and replant them near your base.  Once replanted they need to be fertilised before they start to bear fruit; hopefully you're seeing why the beefalo are so important.  As I touched on above, they become hostile when in heat - if they have a red ass, they won't be very friendly when you get close.  You can still collect manure, but keep your distance.

Get Cookin'

I said "controlled"!

So now you have a steady supply of food, but each snack only fills your hunger bar up gradually.  There are ways to make your food go further.  Just putting it on the fire is a start, and makes most types of food more filling (with some exceptions, e.g. corn, which becomes popcorn when cooked).  The best solution, though, is to build a "crock pot".  You'll need an alchemy machine, and also some charcoal, so start a controlled forest fire.  Once it's built, you can place 4 ingredients in the pot and experiment with different recipes, resulting in ratatouille, meatballs, and lots else.  The great thing about these cooked dishes is that they're greater than the sum of their parts - so much more effective than eating the ingredients individually.  You can also throw one slightly "toxic" ingredient (e.g. monster meat, or raw mushrooms) into the pot and the dish won't acquire any of their ill effects.

Starting to feel settled in?  Well, don't relax too much...

Be ready for a fight

This guy's not your friend.

For the most part you can avoid combat if you don't to engage with enemies: for example, stay away from spiders, and they'll stay away from you (generally).  Roughly once every ten days, however, you'll be attacked by some fairly nightmarish large dogs.  They're coming for you sooner or later, so once you've built a science machine, remember to craft a spear and a log suit, which will make this pretty scary situation a lot more bearable.  If you're struggling with Don't Starve's combat, try zooming in slightly, to avoid missing the target of your mouse click.  If things get really stressful, you can try running away and leading them towards beefalo/spiders/pigs, who with a bit of luck should kill them for you.

Try not to go insane

Sanity is the third metric you have to watch carefully and at first glance it can be rather bewildering to work out: it always seems to be on a downward trend, then appears to randomly spike up again.  Lots of things in the game affect your character's sanity, but the most common one is just being anywhere near darkness, even with a really big fire.  One way to get around this would be to craft a bedroll and sleep through the night, but this increases your hunger drastically, so it's not a great idea if you're low on food.  An amusing quick fix is to go around picking flowers, which is surprisingly effective.  As a more long term strategy, eating higher quality food (see Get Cookin') usually raises sanity slightly, and often health as well.

If you ignore sanity, you'll start to see hallucinations of monsters all around you.  And if it drops completely those hallucinations become real.  So unless you crave nightmares, don't neglect your noggin.

Winter is coming

Brrrr!

At the start of day 21, the game's season changes to winter, bringing with it some new problems to
grapple with.  First of all, farms become non-functional and berry bushes won't bear fruit.  Secondly, if you move a small distance from a source of heat the chilly conditions will lower your health, communicated via an icing-over effect on your screen.  When I first reached this stage of the game, I died in minutes.

Once again the solution is to plan ahead.  A crucial item you'll want to craft is the heat stone, which will absorb warmth from your fire overnight and keep you toasty during the day.  It doesn't last that long, but it's better than nothing.  In terms of food, you really have to try to stock up during the summer, and this is why I offended all the vegetarians earlier.  Vegetables go off rather quickly, and in my experience the best option is to turn raw meat into jerky, which perishes very slowly.  There is a makeshift refrigerator in the game, called an "ice box", but it requires some gears, which are very hard to come by.  If you can acquire some gears (good luck with that), and want to attempt a veggie playthrough, more power to you!  But for the rest of you...

Become a serial killer of bunnies

It's really the only way to go.  If you took my advice and set up your base near a savannah, there should be no shortage of rabbits.  Traps don't require much effort to craft, just a load of twigs and grass, and don't even need to use bait!  Place traps directly over the rabbit holes and they'll obligingly hop right in.  Then do what must be done and you've got a measly portion of meat.  Even cooked on the fire it won't fill you up much, and obviously it spoils fairly quickly.  The trick, as I said above, is to turn it into jerky.  To do that you'll need drying racks, which means more charcoal, plus some rope and twigs.  The more racks and traps you have, the more jerky you can stockpile, and it should last the entirety of winter.  Simmered in your crock pot, they'll turn into meatballs, and one of those a day should easily sustain you.  You can also eat jerky on its own to regain sanity.  See?  Killing bunnies is awesome.

Notes on the different characters

After a few deaths in Don't Starve, you'll unlock more characters to play as, each of which has some cool features.  I won't touch on characters I haven't played as yet.

• Wilson is the default protagonist.  A good choice (mandatory, at first) for new players, he doesn't have any drawbacks but neither does he have many bonuses.  He grows a beard, which I approve of, and you can shave if off - which I disapprove of, but doing so will regain some sanity.  His beard also helps keep him warm during the winter.
• Willow ("the firestarter") is a creepy little girl, and a pyromaniac.  This means the lighter she carries is effectively a torch that never goes out, but when her sanity is low she may start a forest fire.  At least you'll never be short of charcoal?
• Wolfgang ("the strongman") gets stronger as he fills his belly, but is weaker when close to starvation; he's also afraid of monsters and the dark, which affect his sanity to a greater extent than other characters.  His strength bonus when stuffed with food makes him useful in a fight later in the game when you've got a decent stock of provisions, but early on when food is scarce you could have some nervy moments.
• Wickerbottom ("the librarian") has some very useful perks.  She starts with all items that normally require a science machine available for her to craft, and can use a science machine to research items that would normally require an alchemy machine.  This could save a lot of time searching for gold early on.  Her drawbacks are that she's an insomniac and "hates spoilage" - that is, she loses sanity if you eat spoiled food.  Seeing as sleeping is (in my opinion) overrated and obviously you shouldn't be eating spoiled food, this character has a lot going for her.
• Woodie ("the lumberjack") starts with a special axe called Lucy.  Lucy doesn't deteriorate at all, chops down trees faster and talks to Woodie.  His character sheet says he has "a dark secret", which I spoiled for myself by looking him up on the wiki.  Suffice to say, you'll want to find out his secret naturally; it's pretty damn funny.

That's all for now.  This guide is a work-in-progress as I learn more by playing Don't Starve.  If you haven't bought it yet, I hope the fact that you've read this far means you're at least a little bit tempted.