how to not starve

Overview

the all-you-need-to-know guide to surviving and not starving.

To start off…

So you just got this game and either dived into it once or twice, or saw someone else play it. Chances are your first run didn’t get past day 25 (No offence, this game is just hard). How can you get better? I think I can help.

Just a quick note, no DLC or mods of any kind will be considered in this guide.
**Helpful tip; Helpful tips like this will be highlighted by double asterisks, and have their own line.**

Managing your stats

Surviving can be hard. Keeping your stats up is key to not dying a horrible death.

Keeping yourself full is one of the most difficult tasks in the game. There are three major approaches to food collection: Foraging, farming, and hunting.
Foraging
Foraging relies on the fact that edible items are found all across the world. Foragers pick berries and carrots and gather seeds to support their appetite. Foragers take frequent breaks to pick that berry bush they walk past every time they go to the pig king. Foraging is easy, but it is also time consuming, and foraged foods must be combined in a crockpot to gain good effects.
Farming
Farming does not neccessarily involve farms. Farming involves using large quantities of some food-producing resource to support your appetite. Farms producing vegetables is the most common example, but contained Lureplants, spider dens, pig houses, and bunnymen houses can also be used as constant food producers. Farming requires large amounts of upkeep and preperation, but it is extremely effective and can be scaled to any size.
Hunting
Hunting is simple, yet effective. It involves following tracks and killing the Koalaphant repeatedly. This can be dangerous as you may find a Varg instead, but a single Koalaphant yeilds large amounts of meat.

When harvesting foodstuffs, keep in mind that you need to be able to eat it all before it spoils. In early parts of the game, it is best to pass up every food item unless you need to eat then and there. It is so easy to get distracted in the early game and forget about the berries and carrots in your inventory while you gorge yourself on seeds. Speaking of seeds, you should leave them alone unless you really need them. Those seeds will slowly spoil and rot, and you can use the rot for fertilizing crops.

Health is the most important thing to manage. If your health hits 0, you die.
Upkeep
There are many ways to keep your health up. the safest and easiest way is to pick and eat flowers. Each flower petal restores 1 health, making this method the slowest as well, however it also restores sanity. A slightly harder way is to hunt butterflies. each butterfly wing restores 8 health and some hunger. If posible, harvesting honey and reeds and using them to make poultices is a very quick way to restore a lot of health. A dangerous alternative is to hunt spiders for their spider glands. Each gland restores 8 health, and can be combined with 2 ashes and 1 rock to make a healing salve, which restores 20 health.
Sustaining
If you don’t lose health, you don’t need to restore it. Wearing a helmet at all times can help prevent accidental hits from dealing too much damage, but a full suit is highly recommended for fights, even if your kiting skills are grandmaster level. It is always best to retreat from dangerous areas when your health falls below half. This gives you a chance to recover before you are clinging onto life with 1 hp.
Backup plans
It is always best to prepare for the worst. Activating any touch stones you find is a good safety, but once you lose those, other things are necessary. A meat effigy will ressurect you, but it is very difficult to make and lowers your maximum health while it is active.

It is always best to keep your health high, but it should not be the #1 priority. If you have the spare time, grab some things to make healing items, but unless you are on the verge of death, you should only heal in your spare time. This is mainly because most food restores small amounts of health when eaten, so you will eventually heal just by eating.

Sanity managing is not required, but staying sane is a very good idea. There are a few circumstances where you WANT to go insane, so methods of restoring sanity AND depleting it will be covered.
Restoring sanity

• Eating a cooked green cap restores 15 sanity at the cost of 1 health.
• Eating a cooked blue cap restores 10 sanity at the cost of 3 health.
• Eating most crockpot foods restores sanity.
• Eating jerky restores sanity.
• Sleeping in a tent or bedroll restores some sanity and health at the cost of hunger.
• Picking flowers restores 5 sanity.
• Wearing certain clothing restores sanity over time.
• Killing a shadow monster restores sanity.
• Standing near followers restores sanity.
• Prototyping something or using a blueprint restores sanity.

Losing sanity

• Standing near pretty much any hostile creature drains sanity.
• Standing near, picking, or eating evil flowers drains sanity.
• Dusk and Night steadily drain sanity.
• Standing in near darkness drains sanity quickly.
• Standing in complete darkness drains sainity extremely fast.
  **Helpful tip: You can equip a light source for a fraction of a second to prevent charlie from attacking. this can slo be used to make a light source last longer in an emergency.**
• Eating a raw green cap drains 50 sanity.
• Eating a raw blue cap drains 15 sanity.
• Eating raw meats drains sanity.
• Rain drains sanity.
• Using certain items like staves and wormholes drains sanity.

Sanity is generally much easier to lose than it is to gain.
Sanity thresholds.
Insanity effects only kick in after certain points.

• <=80%: You start to experience minor hallucinations.
• <=65%: You start to experience more hallucinations. Night hands start to appear.
• <=60%: More hallucinations. Colors become desatruated (less vibrant)
• <=50%: Shadow monsters start to appear, but are not hostile. Whispering is audible.
• <=45%: Whispering grows louder.
• <=40%: Rabbits and Bunnymen transform into their beard counterparts.
• <=15%: Shadow creatures become hostile and start attacking.

Setting sanity as a high priority can lead to a lot of wasted time, but setting it as a low priority can also be dangerous. Once you get a crockpot and start cooking crockpot foods, sanity becomes somewhat less of an issue. In the meantime, be sure to ignore flowers when your sanity is high and pick them when your sanity is low.
**Helpful tip: Willow gains sanity by standing near fire, making sanity management easier as you should be standing around fire a lot!**

Day 1, basic basics

When you first spawn in, you need to look for 5 core things:

1. Sticks in the form of saplings. Collect as many sticks as you can.
2. Flint and rocks on the ground. Collect as much as you can.
3. Grass tufts. Harvest as much grass as possible.
4. Seeds left by birds. When you see a bird, run at it to scare it away and it might leave seeds behind. You can eat seeds in a pinch.
5. Berry bushes. THE MOST IMPORTANT thing you can find early-game, collect some berries, but leave some for later.

Use your sticks and flint to make an axe and pickaxe in the tool menu. You can use these to mine rocks and chop trees. Mining rocks is a better source of flint, and it can also give you stone. Be sure to make a pickaxe first, as this will allow easier gathering of flint. Depending on the type of rock you can get another special resource. Gather some logs and grass and make a campfire when it gets dark.
**Helpful tip: Always remember to light your fires at night, not at dusk**
Gold rocks will give you 1-2 gold. This is very important to gather as it opens the door to the rest of the games content. Your goal at this stage is to find gold.
Other smooth rocks give nitre, but nitre is almost useless until late game.

In general, you want to wander around looking for resources, Craft a pickaxe as soon as possible followed by an axe. It is important to craft an axe before nightfall, as surviving your first night is next to impossible without a campfire. Before dusk, you should gather what you need to make a campfrie and keep a campfire stored (see “Storing Buildings and out-of-pocket slot”) at all times, so you can place it down once it starts to get dark. In your first few days you want to find gold veins, harvest them for gold, and make a science machine. Once you craft a science machine you should make a backpack and shovel first, as backpacks help you carry more (+8 inventory slots) as well as acting as a sort of storage, and shovels can be used to get an extra log out of trees as well as move saplings, grass tufts, and berry bushes.

Day 2-7, making camp

When choosing a spot for a camp, there are a few things you need to consider:

• Proximity to resources, particularly rocks. Everything else can be “imported”, however having everything nearby is helpful.
• Rabbits. these are impotant as they can provide an easy unlimited food source.
• Proximity to beefalo. Beefalo are large hairy creatures found in the savanah, they often spawn in herds. Beefalo provide protection, poop for fertilizer, wool, and in a pinch, food.
• Proximity to spiders. This is a bit difficult. You want it to be far enough away so the spiders don’t wander into your camp, but still close enough to be able to exploit for their resources.
• Proximity to pigs/pig king. The pig king can provide you gold in exchange for jerky and “trinkets”. Trinkets are anything you find that you cannot use for anything. When in doubt, just try giving him stuff.

You generally won’t be able to satisfy all of these things. Any one spot will almost always have at least one flaw. Keep in mind a lot of stuff can be moved around. Rocks, rabbits, and beefalo should be your highest priority. Take advantage of wormholes and other terrain features. A short walk is acceptable, but try and have everything within a 1 minute walk of your base. Set up base by placing a fire pit. You should place the pit in the center of your base, so everything is accessable from the firelight. Place down your science machine/alchemy engine close by. Leave some room for other things, and make sure you don’t obstruct anything with anything.
**Helpful tip; Deconstruct lower tier tech stations using a hammer to reclaim some space and resources. Make sure you have an alchemy engine and shadow manipulator, as they give access to different tech trees.**

You should pick a wide open spot, with plenty of room to run around and build. After placing the science machine your first priority should be to make the alchemy engine. after that, making a chest or two to store valuable items is a good idea, but a bug net and miners hat is very important, and the miners hat in particular makes nighttime exploration easy. The bug net can be used to catch fireflies for miners hat fuel, as well as butterflies and bees. It is an esential tool for making advanced structures, and will come in handy multiple times in the future.
**Helpful tip: The miners hat is one of the few items that does not break when it reaches 0% durability. Instead, it becomes inactive and must be refueled before it can work again**

Day 10-17, reaching self sustaining

If you have a stable base you have managed to make it into the next stage. From here, it is only going to get harder, so you will need to build a few things to help you along the way.

1. Crockpot. This is THE MOST important aspect of a functioning base. The crockpot can cook better, healthier, meals using easy to get ingredients. More info in the “crockpot” section of this guide.
2. Chests. Use these to keep your junk in a safe place.
3. Alchemy engine. Upgrade your science tech with the alchemy engine.
4. Berry bush farm. Use the shovel to dig up and place berry bushes near your base for easy access.
5. Grass/twig/tree farm. Basically the same as the berry bushes.
6. Lightning rod. Many a base has fallen to an unfortunate lightning strike. Lightning rods will prevent this, AND provide light.
7. Trap system. Having some traps placed over rabbit holes will provide a steady stream of tasty morsels to eat.

During this part of the game, go out and use a shovel to gather grass tufts, saplings (not to be confused with planted pinecones), and berry bushes. Take these to your base and plant them to have easy access to these resources later. Use beefalo poop and rot to fertilize the tufts and bushes so that they grow again. Saplings require no fertilization. Don’t dig up unfertilized plants, as they will be destroyed. It may be beneficial to leave some food out to spoil. A good candidate would be monster meat, as no character can eat it without losing heath or sanity. Seeds are also a good option as you will make tons of them just by walking around. Be sure to not to put yourself in a situation where you spoil all your food. It takes approimately 30 berry bushes for an average character to be self-suficent.
**Helpful tip; Every time you pick a berry bush there is a 10% chance for a gobbler to spawn. These creatures run from you and eat every food item in sight. To protect against them, place a tooth trap in front of every berry bush. You can also drop three red mushrooms. The gobbler will eat these and poison itself to death. If you want to avoid spawning them altogether, you can just harvest bushes at night or during dusk, as spawned gobblers will instantly retreat to a bush wthout eating anything.**
Plant spare pinecones as well, but make two groups of saplings, one to harvest for wood and another to burn for charcoal. Make sure the burn group is far away from flammable objects. You can use this charcoal to make crockpots and drying racks, both of which can help prolong food spoilage time and increase it’s value.
**Helpful tip; food in crockpots or on drying racks will never spoil, providing an infinite food storage system.**
The bee box produces honey if there are flowers nearby, you can catch butterflies in a bug net to plant flowers nearby, or you can put it in a flower field. either way, a bug net is essential for these. Keep in mind, bees don’t like you taking their honey, so run as soon as you hear the “ding” or make a beekeeper hat to negate bee damage.

Day 18-21, preparing for winter

Winter, in standard worlds, Will start on day 21. During this time, many very bad things happen.

1. Berry bushes, farms, saplings, and grass tufts will no longer regrow.
2. White hounds will join hound attacks, and freeze everything in the vicinity when killed.
3. Frogs, mosquitos, bees, and butterflies will no longer appear.
4. Walrus camps will be inhabited by the dangerous macTusk n’ son hunting party.
5. Koalaphants will be replaced with their winter variety.
6. Ponds will freeze over and can not be fished in until summer. They can be walked across though.
7. The Deerclops can (and will) spawn.
8. Snow covers the ground, making it hard to see roads.

But by far the biggest threat of winter is freezing. If you get too cold, you will freeze and begin to rapidly take damage. You can warm up by standing near fire or carrying a warm heatstone. Wearing insulated clothing will slow the rate at which you get colder. During these days leading up to winter it is crucial you craft a heatstone. If you can, make a breezy vest to stay warm. You can make a breezy vest out of a koalaphant trunk. A koalaphant is a rare creature that only spawns when you follow the tracks left by suspicious dirt piles. You can craft a beefalo hat to insulate yourself further using beefalo wool. Beefalo wool is the major reason you craft a razor if you do not play as Wilson. Speaking of, WIlsons’ beard also provides insulation, so after you reach day 18 don’t shave it until summer starts again. Be sure to let your berries grow on the bushes on the days leading up to winter, so you have more available when food gets scarce. Try not to let other things get in your way, as winter is the biggest challenge this game will have to offer for a while.

Day 21-36, Winter And The Deerclops

If you prepared, winter should not be an issue. You should have plenty of food and warmth. The only remaining challenge of winter is the deerclops. This massive monstrosity will directly target your base structures and will completely destroy an unprepared players base. You can attack him when he comes to lead him away from the base and then its the issue of killing him. If you lead him far enough away, and don’t return to your base, The deerclops won’t target it anymore. then you can wait for him to despawn when the snow melts. if you are feeling a bit more violent, you can lead him into a swamp. Leading him into beefalo is not reccommended as he will wipe out even the largest of herds completely. The tentacles and merms in the swamp will be more effective at dealing damage, and drop better loot when they fail. If you need to get personal, you can kite him by baiting him into attacking and then running out of his range, then running back in and hitting him 3 or 4 times. Remember to wear armor and have sanity regen stuff ready to deal with the insanity the deerclops will give you. If kiting seems like too much work, you can wear a football helmet and log armor and wield a tentacle spike (or two) you can actually tank him with most characters and survive with a small amount of health left. If you dont have anywhere to lead the deerclops to kill him, you can put him to sleep using 4 sleep darts or a pan flute. He will wake up a little later, but this will provide a little time to catch your breath.
**Helpful tip; You can make another, smaller, base for winter use. This will be a base that simply can sustain you until winter ends, so that if it gets destroyed it doesn’t matter as much. **
Despite the other challenges, freezing will be the biggest nuisance by far. It is vital you aquire a stockpile of resources in your base, as the distance you can go will be severely limited due to the constant need to heat up. Winter also brings the MacTusk N’ Son hunting party to the walrus camps. Hunting a few of these is a good idea, as the tusk can be used to make a walking cane and the tam o’ shanter restores large amounts of sanity. Be sure to note the locations of a few walrus camps so you can get there easier when winter comes.

Resource Depletion

Most things in the world are renewable, meaning they can be produced indefinitely. However some items have a severely limited count in any given world. Some additional items can be unintentionally lost like spiders or pigs. Caves can be utilized to make more items renewable (See my other guide “Spelunking: A Comprehensive Guide” for more information on the caves and what you find down there) but they can be dangerous. If you fancy starting (sort of) anew, then you can always piece together the wooden thing (aka the teleportato) and go to a brand new world. In order to do this you need to find the ring thing, box thing, crank thing, metal potato thing, and wooden thing at various places in the world. The first four things can be picked up and carried and brought to the wooden thing to assemble it and complete it. Upon activating it, you can generate a whole new world, but you can take everything in your inventory and all your recepies with you. It’s like a sort of new game+ that gives you an intermediate characters’ inventory and recepies while allowing you to choose a new character in a new world.

A Brand New World

When “world hopping” you can take everything in your inventory and backpack, as well as your unlocked recepies, so you wont be starting from scratch. here is a quick checklist of things to take with you.

• Grass.
• Sticks.
• Stones.
• Flint.
• Logs.
• Gold.
• Tools (Axe, pick, shovel, hammer, spear). Alternetively you can chose to carry extra stacks of resources instead.
• Armor (Preferably log suit and football helmet).
• Berry bushes.
• Fertilizer (Rot is preferable as it stacks higher and is easier to get).
• Food (Jerky works best, as it takes a long time to spoil).

If you are particularly successful, you may have been able to obtain some things that are useful to have, but dificult to aquire.

• Bush hat for hiding (Made from a berry bush and a straw hat).
• Ice staff for freezing stuff and putting out fires (Blue gem and sticks).
• Spider glands for healing (Dropped by spiders 25% of the time).
• Boomerang for ranged combat (Remember to hold “action” to catch it!).
• Mining helmet for light (Made from gold and fireflies (See below)).
• Fireflies for mining helmet fuel (Caught in a bug net, they come out at night).
• Bug net for catching more fireflies.
• Tam’o shanter (Dropped from Mac’tusk, who spawns at walrus camps during the winter) for sanity regen.
• Sewing kit to repair the Tam’o shanter.

You also get to take your stored buildings with you. Here is a checklist of things to store.

• Crockpot for food making and storage.
• Drying rack for jerky production and storage. Again, jerky is a really good food for exploration and early game as it takes a long time to spoil.
• Fridge (You can use the gears from defeating the clockworks guarding the portal to make another one).
• Fire pit, of course.
• Chest for storage.
• Alchemy engine for crafting.
• Shadow manipulator for crafting.
• Lightning rod to protect your base from thunderstorms.
• Meat effigy should the worst happen.

Of course, if you REALLY went far and got all the way down to the ruins, there are some endgame items you will really want to take with you.

• Thulecite crown for armor (Provides amazing protection and prevents being stunlocked.
• Lazy explorer for teleportation.
• Thulecite club as a weapon.
• Houndius shootius (Made from thulecite, a deerclops eye, and the ancient guardian horn) for protection from hound attacks (note this is one of the most difficult items in the game to get).

The eye bone will turn into ashes if brought to the new world. DON’T take it. you will have to find chester again.

WARNING: Once you create a new world, the old one will be lost forever. No take-backs!

Storing Buildings + out-of-pocket slot

Remember how I mentioned “storing” buildings in the world-hop checklist and didn’t explain that?
Well I hope so, because you JUST came from that part.
Basically, whenever you craft a placeable structure, a hologram will pop up over the cursor.

You can then press “secondary action” (default right mouse button) to store the building.
A tab with a stored recepie will turn blue, and the recepie itself will turn blue as well.

Storing a building will not return resources, but it will enable you to place it again later at no cost. A building will aslo be stored when you attampt to place it in an invalid location (On another object, in total darkness, etc). Storing is a neat way to take more resources with you in the form of things you will want to make anyway.

Another pro tip is to utilize your out-of-pocket inventory slot. AKA the cursor slot, the offhand slot, or the swapper slot. You know when you pick up something and it wont fit into the inventory or you pick up something in the inventory to move it and the item goes to the cursor? This is the out-of-pocket slot. You can actually use this slot to carry an additional item. You can still interact wth the world as normal, but you will have to put it down to do things like open chests, travel in/out of the caves/ruins, add fuel to a fire, place a building, or anything else that requires a left click action. You can also use items on the cursor for crafting, so you can make that thingy without putting the whatsit in your inventory and then forgetting to put it back in the chest or dropping it due to a full inventory.

Other things to know

Here are explanations of a few game mechanics. In order to beat the system, we have to understand the system.

Armor absorbtion
Wearing armor absorbs damage. Whenever you take damage, the armor absorbs damage and loses durability based on damage absorbed, so basically the armor takes damage for you. Wearing two peices of armor will “stack” the protection values. For example, a log suit has an absorbtion of 80%, and a shelmet has an absorbtion of 90%. Say you take 100 damage in this scenario. The log armor will absorb 80, then the shelmet will absorb 90% of the remaining damage (20) which amounts to 18 more damage absorbed. It doesent matter what is equipped first, the total absorbtion will be the same with the same two peices of armor. However, the first peice of armor equipped will be the “primary” armor peice and will take most of the damage because it absorbs first.

Crockpot recepies
The crockpot works off a material based system. You put four things in, and another thing comes out. Each output is determined by “ingredient values” of the input items. The different types of value are meat (Meat, morsel, moster meat, fish, frog legs, leafy meat, eel, drumstick, koalaphant trunk, egg), Monster (Monster meat, durian), Fish (Fish, eel), Eggs (Egg, Tallbirg egg), Fruit (Pomegranate, berries, dragon fruit, durian), Vegetables (Carrot, corn, eggplant, pumpkin, mushrooms, mandrakes), Sweeteners (Honey, honeycomb), and filler. Filler is unique as it can be anything that does not cause another recepie to be valid or the current recepie to be invalid. Sticks are filler, along with any other food item. Some items have ingredient values in more than one category, like the durian and fish. These values are worth 1 or 0.5 points for an ingredient, depending on the item. Morsels have 0.5 meat value, monster meat has 0.5 monster value and 1 meat value. Some recepies have a restriction, for example meatballs cannot have sticks. If a recepie is valid with 3 or less ingredients, filler will need to be added. If no recepies can be created, wet goop will be made instead. Many recepies are not very useful, however meatballs (0.5 meat, no sticks) are very good for hunger restoration, pierogi (1 egg, 1 vegetable, 0.5 meat) are good for health gain, and honey ham or honey nuggets (1 sweetener, 2 meat/ 1 sweetener, 0.5 meat respectively) are good for restoring all 3 stats.

Breaking the system

Why stop at beating the system when you can break it? There are a few things you can do that can completely break the game, making it easier and/or funner to play.

The first thing you can do is use monster meat to make meatballs. Since monster meat has a monster value of 0.5 and you need to have a monster value of 1.0 to make monster lasagna, you can use one piece of monster meat to make meatballs instead of morsels or other meats. This means you can be completely self-sufficent off of hound attacks with any character.

Another strategy you can do is very hard and risky, but has a large payoff and is repeatable. It involves playing as WX-78 and going down to the ruins, where a structure called the Ancient Psuedoscience Station is found frequently. These stations strike you with lightning whenever they are damaged, and since WX-78 gains power from lightning, this strategy involves baiting a clockwork rook into ramming into a station to get struck by lightning a bunch of times. You can also hammer it as well. This can get you weeks of overload, although the ruins are hard to survive, especially in the early game, and it also causes massive sanity drain.

Whenever you kill a pig, it instantly respawns inside its’ house. However it will not leave the house for three days. If you want more pigskin immediately, you can set the house on fire then extinguish it with an ice staff to force the pig out instantly.

Things to NOT do

Do not walk into a fight or dangerous area with low health or poor armor.

Do not pick every food item you see, this will lead to a food shortage once what you picked spoils.