Survive the Long Dark Together

Don't Starve Together

A standalone multiplayer survival game from Klei Entertainment, set in the shadow-haunted wilderness known as The Constant. Gather, build, fight, and outlast the seasons — alone, or with friends who may or may not steal your food.

Don't Starve Together is the cooperative companion to Klei's cult survival classic. You arrive with nothing, the science is questionable, and night brings teeth in the dark. This Don't Starve Together guide maps every major system a survivor needs — from sailing the ocean to surviving a sandstorm.

6DST-only survivors
7Raid bosses charted
8Core features
2Era-defining updates

The Game at a Glance

What is Don't Starve Together?

Don't Starve Together (DST) is the standalone multiplayer version of Klei Entertainment's 2013 survival game Don't Starve. One to several survivors are dropped into The Constant — a bleak, hand-drawn wilderness ruled by hunger, darkness and a creeping loss of sanity — and left to figure everything out alone.

There is no tutorial and no quest log. You learn how to play Don't Starve Together the hard way: chop trees, mine rocks, build a Science Machine to unlock recipes, and stay near a fire once the sun goes down, because Charlie waits in the dark. Three meters govern survival — Hunger, Health and Sanity — and letting any of them bottom out has consequences, from starvation to shadow monsters that only the low-sanity can see.

Above the moment-to-moment grind sits a calendar of seasons. Autumn is gentle, winter freezes and starves you, spring drowns the world in rain, and summer brings wildfires and a desert sandstorm. Beneath the surface lie the Caves and Ruins, a second world of monsters and ancient loot. The longer a server survives, the bigger the threats become — culminating in optional raid bosses that gate the best gear in the game.

The short version: gather by day, hide from the dark by night, prepare for the next season before it arrives, and try not to die — though even death just turns you into a ghost your friends can revive.

Start Here

Find your way through The Constant

Updates

Expansions

The two free update eras — A New Reign and Return of Them — that reshaped the world.

Explore eras →
Systems

Features

Game modes, ghosts, the ocean, sandstorms, meteors, and how the world heals itself.

See features →
Survivors

Characters

Six survivors born in DST — from the engineer Winona to the cursed Wonkey.

Meet them →
Building

Crafting

How the crafting menu works, plus recipes that can never be prototyped.

Build smarter →
Threats

Mobs

Antlion, Bee Queen, Klaus, Malbatross, Toadstool and the rest of the raid roster.

Face them →
Seasons

Events

Hallowed Nights, Winter's Feast, the Cawnival, and the retired Forge and Gorge.

Join in →

Two Games, One Constant

Don't Starve vs Don't Starve Together

They share a world, an art style and a sense of humour, but they are different games. The original is a single-player puzzle of survival; Together is a living, multiplayer sandbox that Klei still updates today. New players almost always start with Don't Starve Together — it is the more active, more forgiving, and far more populated of the two.

Original · 2013

Don't Starve

A solitary, authored survival game. One survivor, permadeath, and a scripted Adventure Mode that pits you against the puppet master Maxwell.

  • Strictly single-player — death restarts you in a fresh world
  • Adventure Mode is the closest thing to a story and an ending
  • Expanded through paid DLC worlds: Reign of Giants, Shipwrecked and Hamlet
  • A finite, curated experience you can finish
Standalone · 2016

Don't Starve Together

The co-op standalone built for many hands. Survive together (or sabotage each other), and chase endgame raid bosses the original never got.

  • One to many survivors share a world; you respawn as a ghost, not a game over
  • No Adventure Mode — the focus is open-ended co-op and big boss fights
  • Caves and Reign of Giants content are built into the same world
  • Its own survivors, raid bosses and the entire ocean — with free updates instead of paid DLC

Which should you play, and who as? If you want company and ongoing content, pick Together. For your first run, a straightforward survivor is the best character for beginners — Wilson asks nothing special of you, while Wendy fights alongside the ghost of her sister Abigail, which makes early combat far kinder. See the full character guide →

Why It Endures

A survival game that never stops moving

Renewable wilderness

World Regrowth means forests and plants slowly return, so long-running servers never run dry.

An entire ocean

Build a boat, raise a sail, and explore the sea added during the Return of Them era.

Death isn't the end

Fall in battle and you become a ghost — haunt the living until a friend brings you back.

The Bigger Picture

The Don't Starve series & what's next

Don't Starve Together is no longer the newest entry in the franchise. The series now runs from the original Don't Starve (2013) and its DLC, through Don't Starve Together (2016), and on to Don't Starve Elsewhere — a brand-new standalone co-op survival game Klei announced in April 2026 at the Triple-i Initiative showcase.

Elsewhere keeps the franchise's core loop but adds genuinely new ideas: vertical terrain with cliffs and elevation, jumping and swimming, biome-specific climates, and a creeping Fog that curses everything it touches. No Don't Starve Elsewhere release date has been confirmed yet — Klei has only said it is in development for PC. Until then, Don't Starve Together remains the studio's flagship survival game, still receiving free updates and still one of the most-played co-op survival titles on Steam.

Pack your science machine

Every page in this almanac is written for survivors, not databases. Pick a thread and pull.

Browse the features