Don’t Starve Together

Don’t Starve Together is a multiplayer survival game built on the standalone single-player game Don’t Starve that is equal parts friendly and unforgiving. The goal is pretty simple: don’t starve.

Don’t Starve Together Gameplay

This game is one of the handful of popular video games out there that has co-op built into its very core, but in a very strange way.

When you play Don’t Starve Together, you’re plopped into the wilderness with very few amenities to protect yourself. You have an avatar you control from above and three main meters to maintain: Health, Hunger and Sanity. Simple, right?

Hahahaha. No.

The concept of Don’t Starve is simple for just about anyone to pick up. You gather resources to craft items and your goal is consistently the same – you don’t want to starve. But you also don’t want to run out of health or sanity. If any of the meters hits zero, you die.

Our Take

Alex and I have a love-hate relationship with Don’t Starve Together. We get hooked for a few days then get really, really frustrated with the difficulty and abandon it for a few months. This process then repeats.

We’ve not gotten very far into the end-game content. At the time of this writing, I’ve got about 60 hours of gameplay on record and Alex has about 40.

It’s a blast when you have multiple people playing this game and exploring it together, but it’s a massive challenge. More people means fewer resources nearby and more food to provide for everyone.

Don’t Starve Together is one of the best co-op games we’ve played but absolutely one of the most stressful ones, too. And it’s one of the few we consistently ragequit on.

Fortunately, the level of difficulty is easy to tweak as you set up a world. But if you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re trying the game for the first few times, you are inevitably going to die a lot.

Some basic tips we offer when you’re building a co-op game to play through together for the first time:

• Set up your game with the Wilderness mode. It’s far more forgiving than the other modes and it means that once you die, you’re plopped right back into the game – you just have to go find your stuff.
• Make a base camp and make it near beefalo, those cow looking things on the field terrain. It might be hard to find them but it’s an easy way to cheat the game. I used to die pretty consistently when the hounds would show up every 3 to 13 days. Since Alex is more of a Killer in this game and I’m more of an Explorer, I just never want to fight things. With beefalo nearby when the hounds come, if you just run towards the beefalo then the hounds and beefalo will end up fighting each other and you can go on about your business.
• Be wary of the seasons. If it’s your very first game, turn them all off except for Autumn/Fall. Winter and Summer are extremely difficult.
• Have some patience as a) you’re going to die a lot and b) you’re going to have to communicate to figure out what you want to get out of the game. Some people want to explore, some people want to craft, some people want to focus on building a base, some people want to just survive and chat – there’s no wrong way to play it.

This game can be a ton of fun for the right people and it’s affordable enough that you should check it out, especially if you can get a game going with 3 or 4 people. The technical max cap on a game is 64 but the optimal size is 6 or fewer. Feryae’s review on Steam sums it up:

But, man. This game can be ridiculously trying at times too. You’ve been warned.

Our rating: 6/10

Title: Don’t Starve Together
Developer: Klei Entertainment
Game Type: Survival
Bartle Type: Explorer, Achiever, Socializer, Killer
Player Count: 2-6
Average Play Session Time: 30 minutes
Type of Co-Op: Online
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC, Linux, macOS
Complexity: 3/5