Don't Starve Together is a survival game with a hand-drawn Tim Burton aesthetic and a deeply unfriendly attitude. It does not explain itself, it kills you for experimenting, and it expects you to learn by dying repeatedly.
It is also one of the best co-op survival games ever made, once it clicks.
The structure is a calendar
There is no story and no ending. There is a seasonal cycle, and each season tries to kill you differently.
Autumn is generous. Winter freezes you and brings Deerclops. Spring floods everything and drains sanity through constant rain. Summer sets your base on fire.
Survival means preparing for the next season during the current one, permanently.
Sanity, hunger, health
Three meters, all draining. Sanity is the interesting one: low sanity spawns shadow creatures that attack you, but those creatures drop a resource several good recipes need.
So running low sanity deliberately is a strategy rather than a mistake.
Characters matter
Each playable character has real mechanical differences. Wilson grows a beard for winter insulation, Willow is immune to fire, Wolfgang trades sanity for strength, Wickerbottom cannot sleep.
Character choice is closer to class choice than cosmetic.
Playing together
The "together" version is meaningfully different from the single-player original. Reviving costs the reviver, so a group without a revive plan loses somebody permanently around day thirty.
Divide work. One builder, one farmer, one explorer.
The caves
Below the surface is a second world with its own biomes, its own dangers and the ruins that hold the best equipment in the game.
Light management is absolute down there. Losing your light source in the caves is usually fatal, and the game does not soften that.
Mods and settings
World generation is highly configurable. Resource abundance, season length, whether specific bosses spawn at all.
Playing with longer autumns and shorter winters is a common and entirely reasonable way to make a first world survivable.
Time commitment
There is no ending. Surviving a full year takes most groups several sessions, and long-running worlds go for hundreds of days.
The difficulty curve is front-loaded: the first twenty days are the hardest, and a well-established camp makes the following hundred comparatively relaxed.
Which character to start as
Wilson is the default for a reason. No drawbacks, a useful beard, and nothing to manage beyond the base three meters.
Willow and Wendy are forgiving. Wolfgang and Wickerbottom trade real weaknesses for real strengths and suit a second or third character rather than a first.
Food, and why the crock pot changes everything
Raw ingredients keep you alive badly. Crock pot recipes are several times more efficient and some restore sanity and health as well as hunger.
Meatballs are the early workhorse: cheap, forgiving about ingredients, and filling. Learning four or five recipes covers the whole game.
Food also spoils, which makes ice boxes and drying racks a priority rather than a luxury. A base without preservation is a base that forages every day forever.
Guides
The beginner's guide covers your first ten days, and the walkthrough runs the seasonal calendar in order.
