Don't Starve Together Beginner Guide: Surviving Your First 20 Days

Don't Starve Together drops you into a wilderness with no map, no tutorial, and a hunger bar that starts shrinking the second you load in. Night one kills more new players than anything else in the game. Winter, which starts on day 21, finishes off most of the survivors. Those first 20 days are really two deadlines: get light handled immediately, and get warm gear built before the snow lands.

The early game boils down to five jobs. Pick a forgiving character, grab the right resources, learn how fire works, put down a base that's worth defending, and then spend everything you have left prepping for the cold. Do them in roughly that order and day 20 stops being a wall.

Choosing Your First Character

Every survivor in DST plays differently, and a few of them have quirks that will genuinely get a new player killed. The smart picks for a first run are boring on purpose. Boring is what you want while the world is still busy surprising you.

Wilson, the safe default

Wilson is the gentleman scientist and the closest thing the game has to a tutorial character. He runs a flat 150 health, 150 hunger, 200 sanity, and he has no real downside. That last part matters more than it sounds, because plenty of survivors come with a catch (Wigfrid only eats meat, Wolfgang's hunger swings hard), and Wilson just doesn't.

His perk is the beard. It grows over time and works like free winter clothing, and shaving it off gives you beard hair for crafting. By the time winter rolls around, a full beard plus decent gear makes a real difference. Stack a Puffy Vest, a Beefalo Hat, and a maxed beard and Wilson can hit 615 total insulation, the highest number in the game. You won't hit that your first run. The point is simpler: his perk points straight at the exact thing that kills new players.

Wendy, if fighting scares you

Wendy summons her dead twin sister Abigail, who follows her around and throws hands on her behalf. Abigail shreds small stuff like spiders, bees, and early hound waves, and she soaks up hits that would otherwise be landing on you. If you haven't learned to kite yet (that's the hit-step-back-hit-again rhythm this game's combat runs on), she's a huge safety net.

The tradeoffs are mild. Wendy deals 75% of normal melee damage, so boss fights drag out longer. In exchange she drains sanity slower than everyone else, which is a quiet little bonus, since sanity is the stat new players ignore until the hallucinations start punching back.

Who to save for later

• Wolfgang hits like a truck but his hunger bar swings up and down constantly, and a starving Wolfgang is frail. Fun on run five, stressful on run one.
• Willow has a nice infinite lighter and Bernie the bear for sanity, but her max sanity is only 120 and the game explicitly flags her as hating the cold. Rough combo heading into winter.
• Wickerbottom is strong but can't sleep, and sleep is one of the easiest sanity fixes in a beginner's toolkit.
• Webber, Wortox, Wurt, and the weirder picks all change how the world treats you, friendly spiders and all that. Great on a later run when you know what "normal" looks like first.

So who should you actually lock in? Wilson if you want to learn the game clean. Wendy if combat is the thing that keeps deleting your runs.

Gathering Essential Early Resources

Day one has a script, and it works. Run it a few times and you'll stop dying to dumb, avoidable stuff.

The day one checklist

Start walking and grab three things above everything else:

• Flint, the sharp gray chips sitting on the ground
• Twigs, picked from sapling bushes
• Cut Grass, pulled from grass tufts

Three flint and three twigs covers an axe and a pickaxe, so make those the moment you have the materials. Chop a few trees for logs. Mine a couple of boulders if you spot any, since broken rocks drop more flint and stone. Then keep hoovering up every flint, twig, and tuft you pass for the rest of the day. A cushion of about 20 of each before you settle is the target, because resources you skip now are resources you'll walk back for later, and walking is the most expensive thing in this game.

Gold matters too. Look for boulders with shiny veins running through them and mine those first. A Science Machine costs 1 Gold Nugget, 4 Logs, and 4 Rocks, and that machine is the gateway to nearly every useful item in your first two weeks.

Eating on the move

Pick carrots and berries as you pass them, but don't hoard. Food spoils in DST, and a stack of berries grabbed on day 2 is rotten mush by day 10. Take what you'll eat and leave the rest sitting there for the trip home.

Cooked food beats raw most of the time, and raw meat costs you 10 sanity per bite, so it's an emergency option more than a plan. Don't waste your first day cooking though. Snack on berries raw while you walk and save the campfire cooking for tonight, when you're stuck standing near a fire anyway.

The torch rule

A Torch is 2 Cut Grass and 2 Twigs, and it burns for about 75 seconds. Make two of them. Total darkness kills you fast; something in the dark starts swinging and does not stop. A torch is the difference between finishing your evening and standing around blind waiting to die.

There's also a trick worth learning immediately: you can pre-craft a campfire and leave it unplaced. Crafting consumes the materials, but the built campfire sits waiting in your Light tab until you're ready to drop it. Pre-craft one before dusk and you can throw fire down instantly wherever the evening catches you.

Map first, base second

Spend days 2 and 3 walking instead of building. You're scouting for a base spot, and along the way you're memorizing where the beefalo herd lives, where the pig village sits, and which direction the swamp is in. That mental map is the real currency of the early game.

Grab a few pine cones while you're at it, if you've got the inventory space. Planting evergreens near wherever you settle gives you firewood you never have to walk for, and future-you will be grateful.

Building a Campfire Before Nightfall

Two facts about night in this game. One: you can't see anything without a light source. Two: the darkness itself damages you. Stand in full black for more than a couple of seconds and something starts hitting you, over and over, until you're dead. Light isn't cozy flavor in DST. It's a body function.

Campfire vs Fire Pit

• Campfire: 3 Cut Grass + 2 Logs. A fresh one burns about 2 minutes 15 seconds, up to around 4.5 minutes fully fueled. It's temporary. Once it dies it's gone, leaving ash or charcoal on the ground.
• Fire Pit: 2 Logs + 12 Rocks. Permanent. You relight it with fuel whenever you like, each unit of fuel burns about twice as long, and it won't ignite the trees and grass around it.

The classic beginner mistake is dropping a Fire Pit on night one. Twelve rocks is a real spend that early, and you're probably moving camp within a few days anyway once you find a better spot. Campfires are for the road. A Fire Pit is for the place you've decided to live, so build your first one when you actually settle, not before.

Fuel discipline

Logs are the best everyday fuel. They burn long and trees are everywhere. Cut Grass and Twigs work in a pinch but vanish fast. Rain deserves a mention too: a campfire in the rain can chew through fuel up to about two and a half times faster, so a stormy night eats into your wood pile quicker than you'd expect.

Don't overfeed a campfire that's sitting near trees or grass tufts either. A fire pushed to max size can set nearby flammables alight, and a forest fire in week one is a genuinely bad time.

One freebie worth taking: a campfire that's been fed at least 3 logs' worth of fuel drops a piece of Charcoal when it burns out. Charcoal is annoying to get your hands on early, and you need 6 of it for a Crock Pot. Cooking dinner over a well-fed campfire and then letting it die gets you there without torching half a forest.

Cook before morning

Dusk and night are when you're stuck in one spot anyway, so use them. Cook berries, carrots, morsels, and monster meat over the flames. Nearly everything comes out better cooked, more hunger per bite and health on some items, and cooking monster meat drops the sanity penalty the raw version carries. Eat what you need, top off your hunger bar, and let morning find you fed.

Watch the clock ring

The day splits into day, dusk, and night segments, shown on the dial in the top right. Dusk is workable; you can still see a bit and move with a torch. Night is not. When the dusk segment starts eating in, make a call: set a campfire here, or torch-march toward somewhere useful. Either is fine. Standing in the open with no plan is how day one ends runs.

Setting Up a Basic Camp

Somewhere around day 3 to 5 you should have a spot picked. Where you settle decides how hard the next hundred days are, so it's worth being picky for a couple of in-game days.

What makes a good base spot

• Near a road, ideally an intersection. Roads make travel faster and they're easy to spot on the map.
• About one screen away from beefalo or pigs. Close enough to run to when hounds show up, far enough that werepigs on a full moon or an angry beefalo in mating season never wander through your stuff.
• A few rabbit holes nearby. Rabbits stay active all winter when almost nothing else does, and traps placed right on the holes catch them without bait.
• Ponds nearby are nice early on for fish and frogs, with the obvious downside that ponds freeze solid in winter.
• Avoid walrus camps entirely. The MacTusk hunting party moves into them when winter starts, and they shoot you on sight.
• Give sinkholes (cave entrances) some space as well. Bats pour out at dusk.

The Science Machine, then the good stuff

The Science Machine runs you 1 Gold Nugget, 4 Logs, and 4 Rocks. Stand next to it and a whole tier of recipes opens up, and every first-time prototype hands you 15 sanity back, which is a pleasant little side effect.

A rough build order for the first week or so:

1. Backpack (4 Cut Grass, 4 Twigs). Eight extra inventory slots. Build it first, pretty much every time.
2. Spear (2 Twigs, 1 Flint, 1 Rope). Your first real weapon at 34 damage a swing, good for 150 uses.
3. Log Suit. Wooden body armor. Cheap, and it eats the hits you'd otherwise take during a hound wave. Skip the Grass Suit; it's barely worth the grass it's made of.
4. Shovel. For digging up grass tufts, saplings, and berry bushes to transplant around your base. A base ringed with transplanted bushes feeds itself.
5. Hammer. For smashing the pig heads around touchstones (free pig skin) and for tearing down your own misbuilt structures.
6. Crock Pot (3 Cut Stone, 6 Charcoal, 6 Twigs). The single biggest food upgrade in the game.
7. Ice Box (2 Gold Nuggets, 1 Gear, 1 Board). Nine slots, and food inside spoils at half speed. That gear means fighting a clockwork or two, so this one usually lands closer to day 10 than day 5.

The Alchemy Engine

Tier two is the Alchemy Engine, which costs 4 Boards, 2 Cut Stone, and 2 Gold Nuggets in DST. It unlocks the winter gear, the Thermal Stone, and a big pile of quality-of-life recipes. Getting it standing by roughly day 7 to 10 is the goal, because nearly everything in the winter section below hangs off it.

Cooking actual food

The Crock Pot turns junk into meals. The starter recipe is Meatballs: any meat plus almost any three fillers, 15 seconds of cooking, and out comes a meal worth 62.5 hunger. One Monster Meat plus three berries or carrots is the classic version, since it converts a food item that's actively bad for you into a genuinely solid dinner.

Two warnings, both learned the hard way by everybody. Put two or more monster foods into the pot and you get Monster Lasagna, which is a punishment, not a meal. And Meatballs fix hunger, not health, so for actual healing you'll want better recipes or Healing Salve down the line.

Get some Drying Racks up too (Science Machine tier, and cheap). Meat on a rack becomes jerky, which keeps for ages and gives you sanity back when you eat it. Around ten racks is a real winter food system, especially with rabbit traps feeding them.

The hounds are coming

Hound waves arrive every few days, and they're the number one surprise death for a first-week base. You do get a warning: growling sounds that get louder, and your character commenting on them two or three times before the dogs actually show up. The first wave is at least two hounds, each biting for 20 damage, and each one drops Monster Meat when it goes down.

The play is to not fight them at your base. The second you hear growling, start walking toward your beefalo herd or the pig village. The dogs will find something else to bite, and beefalo in particular will grind them into paste for you. Run to the herd, circle it, and let the big fuzzy bodyguards do the work.

Preparing for the First Winter

In DST the first winter starts on day 21 and runs through day 35. Fifteen days of cold, and it's the wall most first runs hit head first. Everything above was about surviving. This part is a deadline.

What winter actually changes

• Cold becomes a damage source. Get cold enough and your health drains until you warm up.
• Berry bushes, grass tufts, and saplings basically stop regrowing. Whatever you've got on day 20 is what you're working with.
• Ponds freeze over, so no fishing and no frogs. Bees stay home, so no honey production. Nights get longer, which quietly eats your sanity all season.
• Rabbits stay active. They turn white but keep coming out of their holes, which is exactly why traps near base matter so much.
• Hound waves start bringing Blue Hounds, which freeze everything around them when they die.
• Pengulls waddle ashore in big flocks. Leave them alone and they're mostly scenery.
• MacTusk moves into walrus camps, and Deerclops starts stomping around. You'll hear Deerclops before you see him, and your first winter, the correct response to that sound is to lead him away from anything you own and let him wander.

One genuine upside: food spoils 25% slower in the cold. Winter slightly preserves whatever's sitting in your ice box.

The Thermal Stone

If you build one winter item, build this one. The Thermal Stone costs 10 Stone, 1 Pickaxe, and 3 Flint, prototyped at an Alchemy Engine. The recipe accepts a pickaxe at any durability, so hand it the nearly dead one in your inventory instead of a fresh tool.

How it works: keep it in your inventory near a fire and it soaks up heat. Walk away and the stone slowly feeds that warmth into you, delaying the freeze. A stone heated on a good fire even glows red-hot, giving off enough light to hold the dark off your back. Veterans carry a second stone and leave it warming by the fire pit, so you swap cold for hot instead of standing around waiting.

Two cautions. A stone that's gone fully cold in winter will chill you, so don't carry a dead one around. And parking a stone next to a fire around the clock grinds its durability down for nothing. Heat it, grab it, go.

Warm clothes, with the real numbers

Clothing doesn't make heat, it slows how fast you lose the heat you've got. So clothes plus a thermal stone is the actual combo, not one or the other. Insulation adds up toward how long you can stay away from fire:

| Item | Insulation | Recipe | Station | |---|---|---|---| | Rabbit Earmuffs | 60 | 2 Rabbits, 1 Twigs | Science Machine | | Breezy Vest | 60 | 1 Koalefant Trunk, 8 Silk | Alchemy Engine | | Winter Hat | 120 | 4 Beefalo Wool, 4 Silk | Alchemy Engine | | Puffy Vest | 240 | 1 Winter Koalefant Trunk, 8 Silk, 2 Beefalo Wool | Alchemy Engine |

The Winter Hat is the value pick for a first winter. It's 120 insulation, the materials are easy if you've got spiders for silk and a beefalo herd for wool (shaving a sleeping beefalo works too, if you're feeling brave), and it restores 1.33 sanity per minute while worn, which quietly fights those long dark nights.

Want to go further? A Beefalo Hat is warmer still, and tracking a Koalefant through the snow (follow the suspicious dirt piles) gets you the trunk for a 240-insulation Puffy Vest. Neither is required to survive. Both are nice.

Food and fuel stockpile

Targets to hit before day 21:

• Ice box loaded with cooked meals and Crock Pot output
• Eight to twelve drying racks with jerky cycling through them
• Rabbit traps sitting on the holes near base, no bait needed
• A visible wood pile next to the fire pit, since winter fires burn day and night
• A Bee Box, if you got one up during autumn. Bees won't defend it in winter and the honey inside doesn't start spoiling until you harvest it, so it's basically a pantry

Sanity through the long nights

Winter nights stretch out and sanity drains during every dusk and night, so the drain stops fully resetting during the short daylight. Let it slide and the hallucinations start, and some of them hit back. Cheap fixes: jerky off your drying racks (about 10 sanity per piece), the Winter Hat's passive regen, and prototyping new recipes for the 15-sanity kick each one gives.

The day 20 checklist

Before you sleep on day 20, you want a Thermal Stone in your bag, a Winter Hat on your head (or earmuffs at minimum), an ice box with food in it, racks drying, a wood pile you can see from the fire pit, and traps set on rabbit holes. Miss one or two and winter gets hard. Miss them all and winter gets short.

Hit day 21 with a hot stone and a full ice box and the season turns into a long, dark camping trip more than a fight. If you only have time for one prep item, make it the stone. It's 10 rocks, 3 flint, and a pickaxe you were going to throw out anyway, and it does more for you than any three hats combined.