Don't Starve Together

The first time we played Don't Starve Together, we died on night one. The screen went pitch black, our characters muttered the quite obvious truth that it was very dark and they could not see, and then something ate us both. The next time, Kurt died because he hungrily stole an egg from a tallbird nest and the parental tallbird chased him from screen to screen until he was eventually caught and headbonked to death. Then, as a "spooky ghost," he drifted sadly around me, haunting my avatar, which we later learned drains a living character's sanity. So I died too. The next time he became a spooky ghost, we saw online that, if a living character could mix together the right ingredients, she could make a new heart for a dead friend. Off we went, questing in different edges of the map for spider sacs and gold nuggets, but eventually it made more sense to just die and start over.

Starving is generally the least of our worries. Primarily, we die of insanity. Once our sanity meters dip below a certain level, shadow monsters like the Crawling Horror and the Terrorbeak grow pronounced and solid, acquire a distinct shape, prowl around us and take gulping bites out of our avatars when the sun goes down. Sticking together, we reasoned after a number of these unhappy demises, might raise our sanity a bit. So we moved across the map in cumbersome circles, as if rubberbanded to a shifting center of gravity, calling out plaintively over an open Skype call if the other one got too far away. When we finally looked up the wiki, it turned out that togetherness has its many advantages in terms of shared skills and objects—if he's near, Kurt can gift me food or stones or anything in his inventory if I need it, and vice versa—but it doesn't make you saner.

Mostly, science makes you saner. Once we learned how to find gold (make a pickaxe and break up rocks with striations of ore), we could craft a Science Machine and use it to prototype much more useful objects. Like Minecraft, Don't Starve offers you a world filled with natural bounty, if only you can figure out how to exploit it properly. A handy set of object categories and their recipes along the left side of the screen informs you that, if you put together 2 logs and 2 rocks, for example, you can make an axe. A science machine (or a magic machine) increases the complexity of your crafting, which means you can build a more permanent camp, grow food, collect and store objects more safely, and create a sense of home.

We still haven't managed anything too complex. It takes some time and anxiety each day to make sure you've collected enough berries to eat and chopped enough wood for the fire at night. And often your excursions take you far afield from your previous camp. It's important to keep exploring; the map is filled with microbiomes, each of which offer advantages and dangers (a rocky zone might provide tons of gold and minerals, but you can easily starve if you stay there too long). These extended explorations, however, mean that it's tough to put down roots. You're sometimes better off crafting a new science machine and a new campfire by yourself on opposite sides of the map.

But now that we've learned how to not die quite so immediately (Day 7, baby!), I'm excited to see what happens. Will we mistakenly attack the Pigs, who do not mess around, and get ourselves slaughtered? Will those creepily masticating Beefalos chilling on the plains stomp us into oblivion? Will we manage to grow long enough beards to survive the winter that, the internet informs me, begins on Day 21? Time will tell.

#crafting #struggle #death