Overview
For those of you who went ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ crazy.
Welcome!
Hello there! I’m Fishtard, nice to see you here. Can I ask you a question? Have you gone COMPLETELY nuts?! Well then this is the place for you! I will teach you various ways to become sane again and no longer be haunted by shadow monsters and creepy background noises.
NOTE: THIS GUIDE IS BASED OFF OF THE SINGLEPLAYER VERSION OF THE GAME, WITH REIGN OF GIANTS INCLUDED
Flowers and garlands
If you didn’t know this one yet, you’ve probably just barely started playing the game. Flowers are your best friends when it comes to sanity restoration. Plucking a flower will result in an INSTANT 5 sanity recovery. This is very useful if you’re in a tough spot running from “creepy things” and need to rid of them. Raising your sanity above the “insane point” will cause them to become passive again within a few moments of raising the sanity, so plucking flowers is always good.
In addition to your sanity getting a helpful boost from these little plants, plucking them also results in petals. Eating a petal will result in gaining 1 health, and it is much more advised you save them for the following…
Garlands!
These little bad boys some ugly flower crown on your face can be worn on your head and doing so will raise your sanity by a WHOPPING 1.33/minute… Wow… But still a good investment as eating petals is worthless, so unless you need rot for your farm you should make a garland.
After 6 days of the garland existing it will turn into rot, so if you craft one, please make sure you actually USE it.
Prototyping items and blueprints
I actually didn’t find out about this one until I was about a solid 40 hours into DS and DST altogether since I simply didn’t notice it, but in case you didn’t know, prototyping an item or using a blueprint of an item you haven’t yet learnt to craft will raise your sanity by 15.
What’s prototyping?
Prototyping is crafting a brand new item you didn’t yet know the recepy of, hence it’s called prototyping. It doesn’t actually affect the item in any way, but creating a prototype will raise your sanity by 15. This means that if you’re low on sanity you can prototype stuff you’d never make, such as hay walls. (I personally never use them)
Prototyping can be done at crafting stations such as Shadow Manipulators, Science Machines, Alchemy Engines, Prestihatitators, and more.
How do I obtain a blueprint?
Blueprints can be rarely found in certain set pieces with chests, but if you really want to find a bunch of them for no reason your best bet is the desert. The desert naturally spawns TONS of tumbleweeds, which each have a 1% chance per item they drop to drop a blueprint. Each tumbleweed drops 3 items, so if you pluck enough of them eventually you’ll get one.
Note: Tumbleweeds are desert only, so if you don’t have ROG you won’t find any.
Eating food
Ah yes, the main point of the game. Don’t Starve. Stuff your face and be amazed! Don’t Starve has various foods that are easily / sustainably (with some setup) creatable and allow you to raise your sanity in no time.
Unprepared foods
The Don’t Starve world houses some pretty interesting plants. Some of these are good for your sanity and definetely help if you can’t tell the difference between a coconut and another human being anymore. The most important ones are:
- Cooked Green Mushroom
You lose 1 health and gain 15 sanity - Cooked Blue Mushroom
You lose 3 health and gain 10 sanity - Cooked Cactus Flesh Reign of Giants only
You gain 15 sanity and lose nothing
The three mushrooms, left to right: Green, blue and red.
These foods are easily accessable and almost any player can gather them. All you have to do is pluck green / blue mushrooms (Green at dusk, blue at night, I suggest you choose green) or take a walk through the desert and pluck cactus. Wear a log suit while you pluck cactus though, as you take damage when you do so. Wearing a log suit will reduce it to 0 – 2.
A cactus.
Prepared foods
In order to prepare foods, you need to create a crock pot. This can easily be done with 3 Cut Stone, 6 twigs and 6 charcoal. It should look something like this:
Once placed down, you can click the crock pot to open it up. A menu should pop up where you can insert 4 food items. (Regular items like cut grass aren’t allowed to be placed in it.) Using the crock pot well can result in some fancy dishes that can take your sanity back from zero to… a decent amount? I guess?
The first food that works great is Taffy. It’s some sort of candy created by adding at least 3 sweeteners to your food, and then not adding any meat products. The only sweetening foods are honey and honey combs, so I recommend you use honey.
How do I get honey?
Simple! Kill bees or build bee boxes. If you choose the second option, make sure to build them near flowers or catch some butterflies so you can plant them as flowers, or else no bees will move in and no honey will be produced. For the first option, grab a spear, a log suit, and get physical!
The 4 phases of a bee box, as the bees go to work and gather nectar the honey increases.
Be careful when harvesting bee boxes though, as once you take the honey off of them the bees currently in the bee box will immediately jump out and attempt to sting you. If you time your move right you can avoid them and outrun them though, so you should be fine. Just in case, wear armor though!
I’ve got my honey, I’m ready to go!
Put 3 honey and a filler like berries or a mushroom in or simply 4 honey, and hit “cook”. After 40 seconds, the crock pot will produce taffy! At the cost of 1 health, taffy restores 15 sanity when eaten. Having lots of bee boxes allows you to mass-produce taffy easily and restore large amounts of sanity quickly.
The next dish is really difficult to obtain, but oh, oh so worth it. It is ice cream!
Now, I said it was difficult to make, and the reason behind this is because you need a dairy product and ice for it. Ice is easily obtainable during winter, so make sure you stock up on it by then! As for the dairy product, you can either choose to gather electric milk or butter.
Electric milk is extremely difficult to obtain, as you need to kill a CHARGED volt goat to obtain it. Charging a volt goat is the difficult part: Lightning must strike it, or you must hit it with an electrical weapon (the Morning Star) which can be crafted with a volt goat horn.
A charged volt goat, ready to be killed!
If you want butter instead, just go on a massive butterfly killing spree! Killing a butterfly has a 1% chance to drop butter instead of butterfly wings, so try your luck I suppose.
Once this is obtained, you must also add a sweetener to the crock pot, and you must add NOTHING ELSE. The best way to create this recepy is with 1 dairy product (your milk or butter), 2 ice and a piece of honey. Once done, you now have a dish that restores a whopping 50 sanity! On top of that, it decreases your temperature when consumed for an added bonus in the summer. (Don’t eat it during the winter unless near a fire!)
Maxwell standing next to a crock pot with a freshly prepared portion of Ice Cream.
Finally, pumpkin cookies are the way to go for some quick sanity! To obtain a pumpkin you must create a farm and then plant some seeds on it. The seeds have a certain chance to grow a pumpkin, so keep trying until you get one! If you want, you can feed the pumpkin to a bird in a bird cage to get pumpkin seeds. There’s a 50% chance you get 2 pumpkin seeds from it meaning you can create more pumpkins!
A pumpkin.
Once obtained, use 2 additional sweeteners (2x honey) and any other ingredient that is not a mandrake or another sweetener (things like morsel or berries are safe to use). Pumpkin cookies are relatively easy to make and grant you 15 sanity back making them a good choice if you have a pumpkin to spare! You don’t lose any health and they restore more hunger than taffy, so if you can, make this instead.
Some freshly baked cookies ready for eating!
Wearing clothes
In the unforgiving world of Don’t Starve you can find comfort in some fancy pieces of cloth that actually have some sort of sentimental value. That’s right! Clothing can help you raise your sanity in the blink of an eye! (Or a bit longer, depending on what you’re actually wearing.)
Top Hats
One of the cheapest to make sanity restoring hats (not counting the garland) is the top hat. This fancy piece of equipment will not only make you look fashionable as all hell and leave everyone around you in awe, but it will also restore 3.3 sanity to you every minute. It costs 6 silk to make, but all you have to do for silk is PWN some spiders and I’m sure you are capable of doing so. The hat can be repaired with a sewing kit to regain 66.7% of it’s durability.
Webber wearing a top hat
The almighty Tam o’ Shanter!!
This magnificent hat (my favorite way to restore sanity!) will restore your sanity by a whopping 6.6 per minute. For comparison, at dusk and night you lose 5 per minute. This means that not only this is offset, but you still gain sanity during the night as well! (As long as you’re not standing near or doing anything that decreases sanity) The hat also has a high amount of durability (it lasts 25 days!) and can be repaired with a sewing kit to regain 20% of it’s durability. On top of all this cool sanity restoration the hat also provides quite a bit of heat, so pairing it up with a thermal stone means you’re all set for winter.
(note: this hat is only obtainable in RoG and Vanilla, not in Shipwrecked!)
So how do I obtain this thing?
Well, you’re going to be in a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle bit of trouble. You see, this hat is not craftable. You must SLAY A BEAST WITH THE POWER OF A THOUSAND SCOTTISH! In other words, a creepy walrus with 2 hounds and his son going on a hunting trip. They spawn at a certain little igloo that only appears in the winter. If you can’t imagine what it’s like, here’s some visual support.
Mac Tusk chillin’ with his 2 hounds and his son
So how do I kill Mac Tusk?
Simple! During the winter little penguins also known as Pengulls will appear. They will emerge from the sea, jump onto land, and make a little nest. These nests have 2 – 3 mini-glaciers and they are shown by a small circle of ice. Mac Tusk is agressive to everything and Pengulls are neutral, meaning they are only hostile to whatever attacks them first. This means that if you lead Mac Tusk to the Pengulls they will take care of him for you! Pengulls don’t eat meat off of the floor or anything like that so the loot is all yours to keep. Plus, if any of the Pengulls die, you can take their meat and eggs too!
A nest of pengulls.
If you can’t seem to find any Pengulls near MacTusk, you can attempt at combat yourself. Arm yourself with a log suit and a spear or a tentacle spike, and start fighting! The hounds are easily distracted, so take care of them first. Lead them away from the pack, then kite them! Kiting is running at the hounds for an attack, then immediately retreating to dodge their attack. You can hit a hound twice, then you have to run away immediately. However because you’re using a log suit you can just tank the hits.
Now it’s time to kill MacTusk! MacTusk’s AI was programmed never to go too far from it’s camp. You can abuse this by luring him far away from his walrus camp. As soon as he hits the borderline distance he is allowed to be away from his camp he will automatically turn around and start slowly strolling back to camp. At this point he will completely ignore the player, so just run up to him and start hitting him. He only has 150 health, so 5 hits with a spear should already do the trick.
You might have to perform this multiple times as MacTusk only has a 25% drop chance for the Tam o’ Shanter, but he will respawn every 2.5 days! Good luck!
Now, almost any clothing in the game will restore some sanity, but sadly these are all too much to cover so I only used the two clothing items I craft the most to restore my sanity with.
Character specifics
So, eating mushrooms, wearing top hats and plucking flowers is nice and all, but many characters also have a unique way of their own to raise their sanity! This section is all about that, and we’re starting off with good old mr. I need a haircut!
Wilson
So, as you all know, Wilson is “l’original”, the first character implemented. Over time his interactions and the like have changed a lot, and he has also obtained a unique way to raise his sanity!
You see, as time passes, Wilson begins growing a majestic beard. Said beard has 4 stages: No beard at all, a small beard, a mediocre beard, AND A MAJESTIC DUMBLEDORE-WORTHY PIECE OF PURE CRAFTMANSHIP!
To the left you can see the three stages of growth (I’m assuming you know how wilson looks like without his beard). To restore sanity, all you have to do is wait for your beard to grow! THEN, craft a razor with 2 twigs and 2 flint at a science machine / alchemy engine, et voila! Shave the hairs for an instant 10 sanity bonus.
This is of course a very inefficient way seeing as the first stage of the beard takes 4 days to grow and you don’t get increased sanity bonuses from bigger stages, but it’s good for short bonuses if you’re just barely insane and need a bit of a boost.
Willow
Willow is a little pyromaniac with a thing for fire (hence why she’s a pyromaniac!). However, this obsession with setting things aflame and BURNING IT ALL DOWN >:D it also has a good side! When standing near a fire, Willow regains sanity! I don’t know the exact stats but I have done some research and depending on the size of the fire (tiny, small, normal, large) you can gain up to 10 sanity per minute! If we do some simple maths, that’s 2.5 sanity per stage of fire. Now, this is where the fun starts!
You see, the coding takes into consideration that there might be multiple fires. This means that if you have 2 fully fueled fires you gain 20 sanity per minute! This makes restoring sanity super easy if you have a bunch of cheap items for fuel. The more fires you can pack into a small space, the more sanity!
Look at her, isn’t she pretty?
WX-78
This soulless automaton might look like he’s a piece of junk, but if you’re manly enough to murder some clockwork monsters or dig up a couple graves OR search through tumbleweeds enough you can get yourself some gears! Eating gears is something only WX-78 can do, and although it’s kind of eating food, I don’t count gears as food and WX-78 is the only one who can actually eat gears, so… y’know… :/
Gears are pretty hard to come by, but if you’re fully upgraded from eating them enough they will still restore a whopping 75 hunger, 60 health and a pretty solid 50 sanity, so get out there and get yourself some GEARS!
Don’t they look delicious?
Maxwell
Not much to say about this guy, he just has TWENTY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PASSIVE SANITY RESTORATION PER MINUTE, ♥♥♥♥ YEAH! …Yep that’s about it
Wigfrid
This day we fight! Tö death and beyönd! ÖÖÖÖÖÖÖÖ you get the point. (When she talks, all the O’s are turned into Ö’s) Wigfrid, our beloved fighter restores sanity when she PWNS stuff! Killing a monster will restore a certain amount of sanity and health to her depending on whatever she just took the life of. This means that if you just murder out a spider nest real quick you can restore a bunch of sanity easily! Having 200 base health and a 1.25x damage modifier means Wigfrid can quickly slaughter anything that comes her way, so prepare to siphon the souls of your enemies for your own good 😀
A spider’s soul flying off after wigfrid kills it, indicating she got the bonus
Webber
Last but not least we have spider boy! This little feller got stuck in a spider’s body, and for some reason this spider’s silk comes out of his chin, not his behinds…
Err, anyway: Much like Wilson, Webber’s beard has 4 stages (no beard at all, small beard, medium beard, and dumbledore worthy (gandalf too would be proud! (so many references))).
Upon shaving this beauty with a razor, Webber restores an instant 10 sanity. Just like Wilson the beard stage also doesn’t affect this in any way unless you don’t actually have a beard to shave, and again: Very inefficient, even if you shave the beard as soon as the 1st stage appears.
Webber’s fully grown silky smooth beard! The shape is the same as Wilson’s, so just compare.
Conclusion
Thank you for taking your time to read my guide! Of course there are many more ways to raise your sanity, but I’m too lazy to write all of it down so I hope this will be plenty to help you survive. Lastly, remember you don’t always have to be maxed out on sanity as long as it’s at a decent number!
A huge thank you to all the wiki contributors whose information I have taken for this guide and also all the pictures they’ve uploaded. You’re a big help to everyone, I’m just passing on the information!
I hope the guide helped you! If you thought there were some flaws, please leave some constructive feedback in the comments section. I tried my best to make this guide AMAZING, but for now…
Fishtard out.
