I want to be upfront that I went into this game with a negative perception of survival type games. My last two survival games: Force of Nature and The Parallax Effect; were not great to play. That unfortunately put me in a bad headspace when starting this game. Luckily it didn’t take Don’t Starve long to knock me out of my slump.
I decided to write about both these games together as they are very similar. Don’t Starve Together does streamline some of the things as your playing making the game a little easier to pick up right off the bat. It also allows for multiplayer options which made the game even more fun! Definitely would suggest getting Don’t Starve Together out of the two options.
There isn’t any sort of walk through in the game which I usually complain about but in this game it actually works. As per usual I didn’t look anything up so that I could get a real feel for the games dynamics to a newbie. It really was very straight forward to understand what to do.
Managing Stats
Managing the three required stats can be really difficult. This can largely depend on your character and their likes/fears. Health, Hunger and Sanity are the three things that you need to keep track of through the course of the game.
Hunger. This one is the most straight forward to keep track of. There are even some things that will bump up your health in the process. Be mindful there are a lot of food items that will also take your health down when you eat them as well.
Health. The easiest thing I have found across all maps is eating cooked items. They bump up your health and hung bars at the same time. There are also other items that can significantly increase your health but again be mindful that they can do damage to your hunger and sanity.
Sanity. There are a few things that you can eat that will help with your sanity. More likely what will help you out the most are different actions to increase your sanity. Picking flowers and being near fire are some of the ones that work for my favourite character.
Learning the Game
There are a few things that you need to get done right away to make it through the first night. You won’t survive the darkness since there is something out there to attack you. You’ll need a fire and to get to that you’ll have to craft an axe. Aside from that, the game is really manageable to learn as you go.
For a while I was trying to build up a base of operations and return to it every night. While doable, this was not an effective way of exploring at all. Since you can’t be out at night just be sure to have the supplies with you to make a campfire at any time. With that ability you’ll be able to run far and find some really interesting things. Some of them might even be worth making a permanent camp around.
Once you get a little ways into the game it can get difficult to advance further. After dying a few times I decided to create my next world with all the items that help you advance set to maximum occurrence. Now you do not need to do this in order to get through the game. I did it simply to help me get further faster and learn more about what you can do.
There are a lot of things to explore and a lot of advancing that you can do through the game. Take your time and build up a world you can call your own.
