How to Install Don't Starve Together and Join a Server

Almost everybody dies on the first night, to nothing they ever see. The sun goes down, the screen goes black, there is a sound, and you are dead. No warning, no enemy on screen, no health bar draining slowly enough to react to.

The dark itself kills you in Don't Starve Together. Something lives in it, and the only defence is light — a fire, a torch, anything. That is the game explaining its rules by applying them, and it is the reason the first thing any experienced player does on a new world is find wood before it gets dark.

Don't Starve Together is Klei's multiplayer version of their survival game, and it is one of the few in the genre where a server means a world that keeps going: a persistent save with a day counter that a group builds on for months. Listings for it collect on the game's hub.

What you need

• A Steam account
• Don't Starve Together, a paid game and a cheap one, frequently given away in bundles
• Barely any disk space
• Nothing much from your graphics card

The game is small, old, and hand-drawn, which means it runs on effectively anything. If you are assembling a group with mixed hardware, that is a real advantage.Our Steam guide covers account creation, and securing it properly is worth the five minutes.

Note the "Together" in the name. The original Don't Starve is a separate single-player game with its own content, and owning one does not give you the other. Buying the wrong one is a common and annoying mistake.

Three bars and a calendar

Your character has hunger, health and sanity, and all three go down.

Hunger is the obvious one and the easiest to solve badly. Berries keep you alive and do not keep you strong; cooking is where the real food is, and a group that builds a crock pot early eats considerably better than one that does not.

Health is what everything else takes from you.

Sanity is the interesting one. It drains in the dark, near unpleasant things, and when you do unpleasant things, and as it falls the world starts to disagree with you about what is real. Shadows appear at the edge of the screen. Then they become solid, and then they attack. Low sanity is not a status effect you can ignore until it wears off — it manufactures a new problem while you are dealing with the old one.

Above all of that sits the calendar, and the calendar is what actually kills groups.

Autumn is generous. This is the season you are given to build a base, and a group that treats it as a holiday is a group that dies in about thirty days.

Winter freezes you, extends the nights, and kills the plants. Without warm clothing and a heat source you die of cold while standing next to a full larder. Deerclops arrives partway through to remove your base, and a base with no defences prepared is a base you rebuild.

Spring rains constantly. Everything gets wet, wet things stop working, and your sanity drains while you stand in it. Frogs are worse than they sound.

Summer overheats you and sets the world on fire. Actual fire, spreading, consuming the things you built.

Each season has a boss that shows up during it. Deerclops in winter, Bearger in autumn, Moose/Goose in spring, Dragonfly and Antlion in the heat. Klaus and Toadstool sit outside the rotation for groups that go looking for them.

The rhythm of a long-running server is therefore not "survive". It is "prepare for the next season during the current one", forever.

Characters, and why the choice matters more than usual

There is a roster, and unlike most games the differences are structural rather than cosmetic.

Wilson grows a beard that keeps him warm and can be shaved for materials. Willow is comfortable with fire and unbothered by things that would frighten anyone else. Wolfgang gets stronger the more he has eaten and weaker when he has not. Wendy comes with a ghost who fights for her. WX-78 eats machine parts and upgrades itself. Wickerbottom knows things nobody else does and cannot sleep. Wigfrid only eats meat and takes less damage for it. Webber can walk past spiders. Winona builds machines that need power. Wortox moves in a way nobody else can and heals by taking souls.

For a group this is the actual team composition step. A server full of Wolfgangs eats through food and has nobody who can farm efficiently. The groups that last have somebody doing the boring jobs, and the character choices reflect that decision rather than personal preference.

For a first world, take Wilson. He does nothing special and nothing punishing, which is exactly what you want while learning what kills you.

Servers, and the thing that makes this game unusual

Here is the part that matters if you are choosing where to play rather than what to play.

A Don't Starve Together world is a save file that lives on the server and accrues history. Day 400 servers exist. The base is a place with a layout everybody knows, the graveyard has names in it, and somebody has planted a farm that has been running since before you arrived.

That changes what a server is. On a shooter you pick a machine for a few hours. Here you are joining a household.

The caves are a second server

This is the piece of DST architecture that confuses everyone, and it is worth understanding before you rent anything.

A full world is two linked processes — one for the surface and one for the caves underneath. They run at the same time and pass players between them. A server that has caves is running twice the work of one that does not, and the caves need to stay up even when nobody is down there, because somebody's base is sitting in them.

The practical consequence is that a DST server costs more resources than the size of the game suggests, and that a host offering a cheap DST server may be offering you only the surface. Ask before you pay.

Running one for a group

Klei supports dedicated servers properly. The tool is distributed through Steam alongside the game, and a server is authorised with a token tied to a Klei account — you generate it on their account page and place it in the server's configuration.

That token is the piece people get stuck on. It is not a Steam thing and it is not a password. Without it the server runs and refuses to appear, which produces a very confusing half-hour.

Beyond that, the decisions are the ordinary ones. How many slots to buy matters here because DST worlds do not scale well past a modest number of simultaneous players — the interesting number is how many people share the world across a week, not how many are on at once. What hosting costs covers the money.

If the world is going to be a long-term one, think about who gets in before you open it. A public DST world with a day counter in the hundreds attracts people who will burn it down for entertainment, and there is nothing in the game to stop them. Our guide to running a whitelist people actually apply to is directly relevant, more so for this game than for most.

World settings are half the game

Before a world is generated the host chooses how it behaves, and these are not minor toggles.

Survival is the standard mode. Dying makes you a ghost, ghosts can be brought back by the living, and if everybody is dead at once the world resets.

Endless is the forgiving one. There is a way back from death that does not require anybody else, and the world does not wipe.

Wilderness is the harsh one — you arrive somewhere random, and death is death.

Resource regeneration, season length, difficulty of specific creatures and dozens of other values are all adjustable at generation. A server that describes itself as relaxed and a server that describes itself as hard are running genuinely different games, and reading the description before joining saves an argument later.

Connecting

The in-game browser is the main route, and unusually for this site it is quite good. It has a search field, filters for mode and modded status, and a favourites list. Finding a specific server by name works, which is why the listings on the hub are worth reading first — pick the world, then search for it by name rather than scrolling.

Where a server hands out a direct address, take the whole thing including the port. Anyone running more than one world on a machine has moved most of them off the default. The game has a console for entering an address directly, and the server that gave you the address will also tell you the exact form it expects — take that from them rather than from a guide, because the syntax is theirs to specify.

Mods sort themselves out. If the server runs Workshop mods, your client downloads them when you connect rather than asking you to install anything in advance. The first join to a heavily modded server takes a while for that reason and is fast every time afterwards.

The advice in finding servers worth playing on applies with one adjustment for this game: join the same world repeatedly rather than sampling. A DST world is only interesting once you know where things are and who put them there, and that takes more than one evening.

Problems you will actually hit

You died on the first night. Everyone does. Gather grass and twigs, make a torch, and treat sunset as a deadline rather than a suggestion.

You are starving with a full inventory of berries. Berries barely feed you. Build a crock pot and cook properly.

Something invisible is attacking you. Your sanity is low and the shadows have become real. Eat cooked green mushrooms, wear something that helps, or stand near a fire and calm down.

Winter arrived and killed the whole server. The classic wipe. Warm clothing and a heat source needed to exist before the season changed, not after.

You cannot find your base. Everything looks like everything else. Build something tall and distinctive, and use the map markers.

The server browser shows nothing. Filters. Check whether you have accidentally excluded modded servers, which is most of them.

If this is your kind of game

The closest relatives on this site are the persistent co-operative worlds where a group builds something over months. Valheim is the obvious one, and it has the same shape of problem — a world that lives on a server and a group that has to agree on where the base goes.

Terraria and Starbound share the two-dimensional building and the boss progression with far less hostility from the environment. Core Keeper and Necesse both take the overhead survival idea in their own directions.

Project Zomboid is the one to try if what appealed here was the punishment rather than the whimsy. It runs long-lived servers, it kills you for small mistakes, and it does not have a cartoon rabbit to soften the blow.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Don't Starve Together servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.