Features

When you host a Don't Starve Together world you choose a game mode, and that choice decides what death means — for you and for the whole server.

Survival

Survival is the default and the canonical experience. Death drops your maximum health, and you return as a ghost until revived. If every survivor dies, the world ends and resets after a countdown — so a wipe genuinely costs the team its progress.

Wilderness

Wilderness is the lone-wolf mode. Players spawn at random points with no shared base assumptions, and there are no resurrection structures. When you die you simply respawn as a fresh, randomly chosen survivor — the world keeps going, but your story restarts.

Endless

Endless is the forgiving option. A glowing portal lets ghosts revive themselves at the cost of maximum health, the world never resets on a total wipe, and progress persists. It is the gentlest way to learn the game or run a long, casual server.

Choosing a mode

In Don't Starve Together, dying doesn't kick you to a menu. You become a ghost — cold, translucent, and still very much part of the game.

Becoming a ghost

When a survivor's health hits zero they rise as a Ghost Character. Ghosts drift through the world and chill the air around them, slowly draining the sanity and warmth of nearby living players, so a crowd of the dead becomes its own hazard.

Ghosts can haunt objects to nudge the world — sometimes helpfully, sometimes to everyone's annoyance — but they cannot gather, build or fight.

Four ways back

Reviving almost always costs a chunk of maximum health. The main routes are:

• Touch Stone — a one-use standing stone that resurrects the first ghost to reach it
• Meat Effigy — a crafted statue that binds a survivor and brings them back on death
• Florid Postern — the world's spawn portal, which can revive ghosts for a steep health cost
• A living friend — players can revive a ghost directly using items like the Telltale Heart

Why it matters

The Curio Cabinet is where Don't Starve Together keeps its cosmetics: character skins, item reskins, emotes, profile flair and more, none of which touch gameplay balance.

Collecting skins

Cosmetic items drop as you play, arrive through seasonal gifts, and can be earned from linked Twitch drops during events. Everything is purely visual — a fancy skin survives the night exactly as well as the default does.

Spinning and weaving

Duplicate skins can be unravelled into a currency called Spools. With enough Spools you can weave the specific item you actually want at the Curio Cabinet, instead of leaving your collection to chance.

What you can customise

• Character skins, including seasonal and event-exclusive looks
• Reskins for tools, weapons, structures and clothing
• Emotes, portrait frames, profile icons and loading screens

A survival game lives or dies on coordination. Don't Starve Together gives a small but expressive toolkit for talking, signalling and pointing across the map.

Talking and emoting

Players can type in chat, whisper, and trigger a library of emotes — waving, dancing, sitting, pointing — to react without a microphone. Emotes are also the closest thing to body language survivors get.

Marking the map

The shared map can be pinged and annotated so the team can flag a base, a boss, a pig village, or a 'do not wander here' patch of swamp. A clear map marker prevents far more deaths than any speech ever will.

Quiet coordination

Early survival games punish you with scarcity: cut every tree and the forest is gone forever. World Regrowth quietly fixes that for long-running Don't Starve Together servers.

How regrowth works

Over time, the world reseeds itself. Trees spread from stray pinecones, grass and saplings creep back, reeds and flowers return, and mushrooms repopulate their biomes. A world you've stripped for resources slowly grows usable again.

Why it changes long games

Regrowth is what makes hundred-day servers viable. Instead of ranging ever further for basic materials, a settled base can rely on the land around it to replenish, turning the wilderness from a finite quarry into a renewable garden.

Helping it along

• Replant pinecones, saplings and grass tufts near base to seed faster recovery
• Leave a few wild stands uncut as a regrowth source
• Use the world to your advantage — renewable fuel and food are how big bases last

The moonstone field is a rocky, cratered biome where meteors rain from the sky. It is one of the best sources of stone in Don't Starve Together — and one of the worst places to build.

The meteor field

Scattered across the world is a rocky region dotted with boulders and a central moonstone. Here, meteors periodically crash down, shattering rocks and occasionally your structures. The reward for braving it is a steady supply of rocks, flint and the prized Moon Rocks.

Mining the falls

Fallen meteors and the boulders they smash leave minable debris. Moon Rocks in particular feed into late-game crafting, so survivors brave the bombardment for them — usually with a thermal stone, repair materials, and an exit plan.

Build elsewhere

In the Oasis Desert, summer brings a sandstorm that blinds, batters and hides the world in a wall of grit — and an Antlion who can make it far worse.

The storm

During summer, the desert kicks up a sandstorm that obscures vision and chips away at survivors caught inside it. Without protection the desert becomes nearly impossible to navigate, let alone fight in.

Seeing through it

Desert Goggles cut through the haze, letting you move and work in the storm. They turn the Oasis from a no-go zone in summer into a workable, and even rewarding, place to be — the oasis pond is a rare summer fishing spot.

The Antlion's mood

The Antlion lurks beneath the desert and, when neglected or provoked, triggers sinkholes and intensified sandstorms that can swallow structures elsewhere on the map. Appeasing it with trinkets, or defeating it outright, keeps the ground under your base from giving way.

The ocean is the single biggest addition the Return of Them era brought to Don't Starve Together: a whole sea to sail, fish and fear.

Setting sail

Build a boat, fit it with a mast for speed, an anchor to stop, and a steering wheel to turn, and the open water becomes yours to cross. Boats take damage from waves and leaks, so seafaring is its own survival challenge layered on top of the land game.

Life at sea

The ocean is full of purpose: ocean fishing for big catches, kelp and sea stacks to harvest, the strange Lunar Island to discover, and the giant Malbatross guarding the richest fishing grounds. The hermit crab island even offers a slow-burn questline for patient sailors.

Respect the water