Don't Starve Together has no ending. The walkthrough is a calendar, because the seasons arrive on a schedule and each one kills you differently.
Days 1 to 5: gather, do not build
Pick up everything. Flint, twigs, grass, logs. Do not settle yet.
Your first priorities are an axe, a pickaxe, and a science machine. Explore outward and note where the biomes are: rocks for gold, beefalo for manure and safety, ponds for frogs to avoid.
Eat berries and carrots. Do not fight anything.
Days 5 to 10: pick a base
Settle near beefalo or near pigs. Both give protection, and the beefalo herd doubles as a manure source for farms.
Build a fire pit, a crock pot, a chest cluster and an alchemy engine. Crock pot food is several times more efficient than raw ingredients and it is the difference between farming constantly and not.
Start a berry bush and grass tuft transplant. Future you will be grateful.
Days 11 to 20: autumn ends, winter comes
Winter arrives around day 21 and it will kill an unprepared character.
You need a thermal stone, warm clothing, and a food supply that does not rely on foraging, because the ground freezes. Dry meat on racks. Winter is survivable and dull; the mistake is treating it as a surprise.
Deerclops arrives during winter. Lead it away from your base or lose the base.
Spring: rain and hounds
Spring brings constant rain, wetness, and lightning. Wetness lowers sanity and makes your items slip out of your hands.
Umbrella or eyebrella, and a lightning rod at base. Frogs swarm.
Moose/Goose spawns during spring and is manageable early.
Summer: heat and fire
Summer will set your base on fire. Not metaphorically.
You need an ice flingomatic and enough ice to run it, or a second base underground where the temperature is stable. The caves are the standard answer and they bring their own problems.
Antlion sits in the desert and demands tribute or causes sinkholes.
The caves and the ruins
Once seasons are handled, the caves are the next tier of content: light management, new resources, and the ruins beneath them holding the best gear in the game.
Never enter without a light source you cannot lose.
Long term
Base automation, farms, and the bosses that gate the endgame content. There is no finish line, only a better-run camp.
Sanity, which is a resource rather than a warning
Sanity drops in darkness, in rain, near monsters, and from eating bad food. Low sanity spawns shadow creatures that attack you.
It also has an upside. Shadow creatures drop nightmare fuel, which several useful recipes need, so experienced players deliberately run low sanity to farm it and then top up.
Top up by picking flowers, sleeping, wearing a top hat, or eating cooked green mushrooms. Jerky raises it too, which makes drying racks doubly worth building.
Playing with other people changes the priorities
In a group, split the work. One person on base construction, one on farming, one exploring for the map.
Reviving costs the reviver health or sanity depending on the method, so touch stones and meat effigies are worth setting up before anyone dies rather than after. A group without a revive plan loses a player permanently on day 30 and the run usually ends there.
Share food. Hunger is the most common cause of death and it is entirely preventable with a working crock pot.
The Don't Starve Together builds guide covers character perks and sanity management.
