Overview
How I kept my Smallbird alive, and how you can too! (UPDATED 5/27, now includes Deerclops combat tips & alternate defense strategies!)
Introduction
===GUIDE UPDATED 5/27/2014 — now includes suggested but untested strategies for fighting giants and a few alternative Hound Defense Strategies. I’ve also founded what I believe is the only Tallbird-related Steam group: The Tallbird Fanclub===
Do you want to raise a smallbird? Have you perhaps tried to raise a smallbird, and run into trouble? Feeling lost and sad because there just isn’t enough small, round bird in your life? Then you may have clicked on the right guide!
What follows is a loosey-goosey, general guide for how to keep your adorable little hopping eye-creature alive! It is not a comprehensive, detailed look at smallbird life, just some guidelines and tips that you can follow if you’re having trouble caring for your new friend.
The methods and strategies I’ll be outlining are the ones that worked for me and my particular playstyle / skill level. I wanted to take on the challenge of raising a smallbird without the help of outside guides, wiki articles, or advice, and what follows are the strategies I developed.
I make no claim that these are the best methods and strategies; there are probably better ones out there, and if you want precise data and Most Efficient Plans you should probably check wikis and forums. But I’m hoping that this modest guide may point you in the right direction if you’re at a loss, or just somehow be helpful in someway to someone.
After several forays into tallbird raising, I had my first true success playing as Wendy in Reign of Giants. So yes, RoG players: this guide applies to you! But it should also work just as well for plain old Don’t Starve. Though I have a few mods installed, I did not put any of them to use while raising my bird, and my world settings were all default. And, note to those also playing as Wendy: Abigail is indeed helpful for raising smallbirds!
Part One — Prep Work
Maybe I’m the only one who has trouble keeping smallbirds alive, but it took me at least four tries to raise one of the little beasts. I’ve learned from each failure, and I’ve determined that the prep work is the most important work. I used to think I could just plunk a smallbird into my normal life and it’d work out fine (after all, I was doing pretty well!), but no. This always led to smallbird death. 🙁 My way of life may have worked for me, but it didn’t work for the smallbird.
Here are the primary concerns of smallbird life:
-Keeping your bird fed (Don’t Starve: Smallbird Edition!)
-Keeping your bird safe from physical harm (e.g., getting chomped in half by hounds)
-Maintaing your own needs (food, sanity, warmth, light, etcetera).
The prep stage is about making sure you are equipped to address all these concerns, before you’ve got a flitty, whiny, fragile and insanely cute little bugger following you around everywhere. I for one find it hard to stay calm and collected when hounds are baying, my smallbird is screeching, and I’m running out of food, all at the same time. So here’s what I suggest you put in place before you even think about acquiring an egg!
Recommended: achieve stability in your everyday life.
I’m talking steady source of food (for yourself), no more struggling to survive, not much in the way of uncertainties or worries. Though I’m sure it’s possible to raise a smallbird in the early stages of the game, I think it’s easier (at least for me) to wait until a more mid to late stage (I’m talking 70 to 120 days).
So, take a moment to ask yourself these questions: “How will I keep my bird safe? How will I keep my bird from starving? How will I keep myself in top shape, so as to better serve my new bird overlord?”
Keeping Your Bird Safe
The number one threat to your bird’s life is HOUNDS. Your bird is a fragile little ball of fluff. It might as well be made out of sticks and dust. One bite from a hound, and your little darling is out like a light. You do not want your bird anywhere near hostile creatures. So I would also suggest keeping your bird away from swamp tentacles, merms, spiders, frogs, cave worms, fellow tallbirds, rutting season beefalo, so on and so forth.
As you know, hounds can attack at any time, and they will attack on a regular basis, and unless you’re in the very early days, they are going to appear in large packs that are difficult to deal with if you haven’t developed some sort of defensive strategy.
So, just as an example: if you do a lot of traveling around in your daily life, and your strategy for hounds is to just run from them until spiders or swamp tentacles or beefalo kill them for you, be aware that your smallbird is going to be in a pretty risky place. I have experienced smallbird death as we both ran from hounds (smallbirds can occasionally get stuck on terrain, and they aren’t exactly speed demons, so that doesn’t help anything).
Be aware, also, that your bird is a true warrior. It will not stand idly by as you swing swords and do battle against fearsome beasts. Your bird will join in the fray. It’s adorable when your bird attacks a gobbler for you. It’s a little less adorable when your bird is throwing itself at a pack of seven snarling hounds. This means that it can be very difficult to dispatch enemies yourself without seriously risking your birds’ life.
My strategy for keeping my bird alive through hound attacks was to build “safe houses” amidst pig villages and cave bunny villages that I set up around my base. The idea was that I would barricade myself and my bird inside a stone box, while pigs or bunnies fought the hounds. Each safe house would include a fire pit, extra stone walls (for sealing the entrance), and extra wood, and be surrounded by at least six houses of pig or bunny. I also stuck an ice flinger (RoG only) outside each safe house, with the plan to turn it on at the start of an attack, to hopefully prevent utter destruction from flame hounds. (As it turned out, I raised my bird in Winter, so I did not actually have to deal with flame hounds).
This strategy is of course pretty resource intensive (more than one in-game week was spent just gathering materials for all the houses). It also required a certain amount of planning, because the villages needed to be close enough to my base that I could reach them quickly when I heard hounds, but also just far enough away that they wouldn’t present any problems (and I’m just anti-social; I didn’t want them near me, regardless!).
Why bunnies and pigs? It’s to cover night and day attacks. With pigs and bunnies, you’ve got a 24hour guard around your base.
What are the potential problems? Bunnies will attack you (with great aggression and persistence) if you have ANY MEAT AT ALL on your person (this seems to include hatching tallbird eggs??). It is very annoying (not to mention dangerous) to be attacked by a bunny when you are just casually cooking dinner, or just so happen to pick up some stray frog legs that were lying on the ground.
I built the bunny village a tad close to my base, so I built a wood wall between my base and their houses to discourage them from wandering up during dinner (this worked wonderfully. A bunny will make its way over very occasionally, but it’s less frequent thanks to the wall). I also made it a habit to keep my meat in the fridge unless I was planning to travel.
Pigs turn into werepigs that will attack you during the full moon. This is the reason that I kept the pig and bunny villages separate (I did not want pigs and bunnies fighting each other — I’m all for peace, not war!), and built the pig village further away from my base (it’s actually just barely close enough!).
Things I learned from my first attempt at using a safe house with a smallbird: if you do not “double layer” your walls by filling in the diagonal gaps, your little bird will phase through the walls, making them totally useless for keeping the hyperactive creature out of harms way. Once you’ve added another layer, your bird won’t be able to slip through the wall, and it will work as intended, keeping you and your bird safe.
Pic of the improperly layered safe house.
So what did I do on that one attack when the safe house didn’t work? I ran around like an insane loon amongst the pigs and hounds. Although my bird was in the thick of it, no hounds chomped it, which I suspect was simply luck aided by the distraction of myself, the pigs, and trusty ghost warrior Abigail. The hounds were dispatched quite quickly, and all was well.
I was afraid to make the safe house too large, but I should have worried more about making it too small; the pig safe house I built is actually too small, making it tricky (but not impossible) to actually get the bird inside. Your house should have room for a fire pit in the center, plus some space to walk around.
The safehouses work, and I find that seven houses, bunny or pig, plus Abigail, do a great job of dealing with hounds quickly. More houses = more security, but six or seven was enough for me to get by.
This strategy does of course mean sticking very close to my base almost all of the time. No big expeditions for me during Tallbird Time!
ALTERNATE STRATEGIES:
Houndius Shootius sentries would obviously be quite effective protection, but if your skill level is high enough that you can acquire them, you probably don’t need this guide at all. 😛
Some sort of safehouse surrounded by oodles of toothtraps would probably also do the trick! I imagine a long entrance away from the traps would be useful, to keep the bird safe. You might be able to lock the bird in the safehouse for a minute after the attack, while you collect the loot and reset the traps. I’ll test this sometime (or you can try it out and see how it goes!)
Deerclops & Friends
“What about giants??” I hear someone shout, anxiously. “Deerclops, for example?”
‘Hope and pray’ was my only plan for dealing with giants. Hope that they never showed up. If they did: run. Run away as soon as I heard them coming. Run and hope that will keep them from showing up at your base and smashing everything.
Lo and behold, this actually did work for me! I heard a deerclops, and took off running without any pause or thought, and it didn’t appear until I was quite a ways away from my base. Of course, when it did appear, it chased me, coming dangerously close to my smallbird, and I was very afraid for both our lives. I was also starting to freeze. Luckily for me, playing as Wendy, Abigail engaged the giant in combat, and Smallbird and I ran far enough away to build a fire. Abigail was dispatched, but the Deerclops had gone, and I never saw it again. What would I have done if Abigail hadn’t distracted it? That, I’m not certain of. Things might have turned out differently!
The following are some Giant Defense Strategies that I have not yet tested in game, but in theory would totally work. Most involve / would reccomend using a panflute to make your smallbird sleep, so you can leave the area and fight (or whatever you need to do) without having to worry about the little beast!
Some of these were reader suggestions from the comments (thank you, commenters!).
–With just an ice staff, you can simply freeze the giant and run away, getting it away from your base, off your trail, and then hopefully off your back forever.
–A stack of 10 gunpowder is enough to defeat a Deerclops. A suggested strategy would be to freeze the deerclops, set the stack of gunpowder up close, light it with a torch, run away. Kaboom! Hopefully the result is a dead Deerclops.
–If you use the entirety of one firestaff against a Deerclops (which I think is about ten hits), that should be enough firepower to kill the beast. Keep in mind that this is a major firehazard, anything that’s been struck by a firestaff will light surrounding objects on fire, so only use it in areas where nothing you care about would be burned down. It will also burn up all the loot, so don’t use it if you want Deerclops treasure.
-A minimum of 35 toothraps should kill a Deerclops. So you can try making a toothtrap area and leading it there.
If you use any of these strategies while smallbird raising, let me know! I’d like to hear how they turned out! Keep in mind that the other giants (RoG) have more health than Deerclops and various other variables, so strategies may need to be modified accordingly.
Feeding Baby Bird
I was under the impression that smallbirds only ate berries, so I made a large berry garden right next to my base, containing about 25 bushes (and I worried that wouldn’t be enough). It turns out smallbirds also eat seeds, which are much easier to get a hold of (especially in RoG, if I’m not mistaken–seeds seem more plentiful). If you have at least one full stack of seeds (ideally, you will have more than one), and a large supply of berries in and/or around your base, you should have no trouble keeping your smallbird fed.
If, however, you are short on berries or seeds, your bird may be in trouble. I suggest making sure you have plenty of seeds and/or berries in ready supply before acquiring your bird! I’ve been in the situation of being forced to travel to get more food for my bird, and depending on your chosen methods for bird safety, unplanned travel can make your dear little friend very vulnerable indeed (again, I say: HOUNDS! The scoundrels! Also, your bird may starve, if you can’t find enough food fast enough.).
Staying Alive Yourself
Sometimes your needs clash with your smallbirds needs. Keeping your bird safe might conflict with an urgent need for warmth, food, or sanity. My Smallbird Safety Strategy involves sticking very close to my base, and this means everything I could possibly need must be at my base. I cannot travel far, because if I do, I’m risking my bird’s life.
Make sure YOU have an adequate supply of food that’s not going to run out while you’re raising your bird. My lifestyle involves having loads of different jerky in my fridge at pretty much all times, and so I can pretty much always make bacon and eggs without any fuss or hassle. This is a fantastic food, significantly refilling both hunger and health, and it doesn’t spoil quickly. I get my eggs from a bird in a bird cage (feeding it expendable jerky or other misc. meats). If you choose to go this route, remember that in RoG, you need to feed your caged bird seeds to keep it from dying within a few days! I did not know this, and thought birds just had short lifespans you couldn’t do anything about! (EDIT: a recent update prevents caged birds from starving!) A major advantage of bacon and eggs is that it doesn’t depend on seasonal or weather-related resources — no waiting for vegetables, berries, or mushrooms to regrow — and isn’t affected by seasonal variabilities. Its ingredients are in consistent supply!
Don’t forget about sanity. Especially if you’re planning to raise your bird during the winter, with it’s long, insanity-inducing nights. Insanity and baby birds aren’t a great mix, in my opinion. You want normal sanity maintenance, but you also want to keep emergencies in mind–those unexpected monster attacks or other such events that might make your sanity drop really low really quickly. A top hat and dog-tooth vest takes care of my sanity needs, and I’ve got enough silk (and a sewing kit) stockpiled at my base to make as many as I’ll ever need. And in RoG I’ll also make the occasional foray for flowers growing naturally around my base to make a flower parasol.
Resources! I suggest stockpiling extra everything, just on general principle. I keep full stacks of extra grass, twigs, logs, stone, and flint at my base, because you never know what you might need or when you might need it, and emergencies and unexpected things do crop up (usually at the worst times–like when you’ve got a hungry baby bird to care for!). More than once I’ve found myself critically low on vital resources without realizing it. Make sure you’ve got plenty of wood, especially for winter or very rainy seasons when you’ll probably be using a lot of it for your fire. You’ll probably want materials for torches, extra fires, that sort of thing. When I found I needed to reinforce my safe house walls, it was very helpful to have an extra stack of stone sitting there in my chest; otherwise, I would’ve had to travel to get more, if I wanted two functioning safe houses. More stuff can equal more security. Keeping it somewhat organized is also usually a good idea!
Weather! Do you have your winter gear all ready? All your hats and coats maintained? Got your thermal stone and fire-making supplies? Is weather something you need to worry about?
Don’t forget to think about seasons, and factor them into your plans! I’m not sure about regular Don’t Starve, but RoG seems to have tallbird eggs available all the time, so you’ve got your pick of seasons. Autumn or Winter would be my pick. I raised my bird successfully in Winter (the egg started its hatching process on the very last day of Autumn). I personally would not try raising a smallbird in Summer (RoG), because I find Summer to be an incredibly brutal season that’s plenty stressful and lean without a baby to take care of. Chester nearly burst into flames on me once; I would hate to be in that same position with a Smallbird! As far as I can tell, hatched Smallbirds are unaffected by cold, so that’s not something you’ve got to worry about!
Part Two — Dealing with the Egg
So, have you planned out your strategies? You know how you’re probably going to keep you and your bird fed, sane, healthy, happy? Any items you need are in your possession, and any infrastructure that ought to be in place has been built? Then leap forth, and grab yourself an egg!
If you are fortunate, you might find a tallbird that died of natural causes, leaving behind an orphaned egg! However, it’s more likely that zero of the eggs on your map are orphans. This means you’ve got to be a kidnapper, if you want a tallbird of your very own. (Abducting wildlife and kidnapping children is bad! Don’t do it in real life! This has been a Public Service Announcment.)
A natural death via frogs.
Be prepared to deal with the parent. The moment you take the egg (it does not matter if the parent is on screen or not–they know), the understandably unhappy parent is going to chase you down. And this parent, as far as I have been able to tell, will never stop chasing you. It may very well follow you across the entire map, though I have not tested this. So you’re probably going to want to kill the parent. Making you not just a child-snatcher, but a murderer. Feeling a little guilty yet?
Just be sure to stay safe, however you decide to deal with the parent–tallbirds are strong, and if you’re unarmored, a few strikes can kill you. Use your weapons/traps/strategies of choice. I like the armor and tentacle spike path, for its blunt simplicity. I’m sorry, Tallbirds.
So you’ve got an egg, somehow! Now you’ve got to hatch it. This is simple. Just plunk it down on the ground near a fire, and wait for a minute. It’s going to take a minute or two, but then a crack will appear in the egg, and it will begin the hatching process.
It will take roughly three days to hatch. Keep it in on the ground to keep the hatching going. You can put it in your pocket, with no ill effects, to move it around, but the hatching process halts while it’s in your inventory. PROTECT YOUR EGG. I like to make sure it’s in sight at all times, and I try to keep it on the ground and hatching as much as possible. Something I learned the hard way: PIGS WILL EAT TALLBIRD EGGS. If you have a companion pig and you want to keep hatching your bird, get rid of your companion pig. The pig will try to eat the egg when you set it on the ground, and the pig will succeed, if you don’t reach the egg in time. Cave Bunnies also may attack if you have a hatching egg in your inventory! This happened to me once — I guess it counts as meat? Don’t know if this is a glitch or not so be cautious.
Eggs, unlike the bird that will soon hatch, are temperature-sensitive. That’s another reason to keep an eye on it. If it turns white and starts shivering, it’s cold; move it close to a fire. If it’s red and sweating, it’s too hot; move it away from the fire. They get cold at night and hot during the day, so it’s just a little shifting around you need to do. Not very difficult.
Double-check your supplies, do your chores, frolic through the hound fields—soon, you will be a parent, so enjoy your freedom now! 😀
Part Three — omg, Smallbird
This is a very exciting time. If you have friends, force them to admire your beautiful new child. Take lots of pictures. Spend countless in-game hours (and maybe real life hours) admiring it. Enjoy your smallbird. I just spent a whole bunch of time talking about how you can be really strict and all about keeping your smallbird alive, but if this is your very first bird, don’t be afraid to live a little. Go travel, if you want to, or take it hunting, or out frolicking through a field of flowers. That’s honestly what I did with my first bird, and it was a great experience. But if this is your fourth or fifth bird child and you really just want to watch it grow up, then you can basically just sit in front of your fire while reading a book, feeding it occasionally and stuffing it in a box when hounds come.
I feed my smallbird every few minutes, or at least try to give it food to check if its hungry (I generally don’t wait for the bird to tell me–not anymore). Rest assured that the bird will tell you when it needs food. There is no way to miss the cues when your bird is really hungry, so no need to worry about accidentally starving it. It probably goes through four to seven seeds/berries each day. That’s a very rough estimate, ‘cause I’ve never quite kept track (don’t rely on that number, if you’re trying to calculate exactly how much food you’ll need). It’s not a huge amount of food, but it’s not nothing. Whatever you’re feeding it, you’ll probably want it in your inventory all the time.
Smallbirds will not take food when they’re full, so you don’t have to worry about wasting your food (your Smallbird is, thankfully, not a black hole). Your bird will eat food off the ground, too, for what that’s worth.
Your bird will follow you everywhere. You cannot teach your bird to ‘stay’, and aside from confining it, there is no way to make it stay in one place when it’s awake. It goes where you go, and attacks what you attack, and hops about randomly when you are standing still. It sleeps at night, and even then, if you move away while it’s sleeping, it will get up within a few seconds to follow you again.
Whenever hounds attack, you will hopefully be able to keep it safe. Whenever it’s hungry, you will hopefully be able to feed it. You simply take care of it, as best you can, until it grows. And it will grow.
Part Four — The Next Phase
For me, part of the thrill of tallbird raising was discovery. I liked that I didn’t know what was going to happen. I also enjoyed forging my own path, and coming up with my own strategies for taking care of it.
So the only thing I’m going to say about the next phase in the life of your smallbird is that yes, it is going to grow, and when it does, it will require more food–but its diet will also broaden. This guide has given you all my tips for keeping it safe, and preparing for your life with bird, and armed with that, it’s likely you can handle the continued development of your bird child.
(This section of the guide may expand in the future, when I have more experience with the later years of Tallbird life. For now, though, this is a SMALLBIRD guide, focused on getting you through the most difficult stage when your bird is at its most vulnerable!)
Best of luck, and have fun raising bird! 😀
Feel free to leave comments, suggestions, and Tallbird raising stories! Also don’t be afraid to ask if you need more help and advice or if you’re running into a problem not covered by the guide. I’ll try and help if I can! You’re also welcome to join my crazy Tallbird Fanclub group, if you are so inclined, if your life revolves around Tallbirds, if you really, really like Tallbirds. 😛