Don't Starve/Version History

This page lists Don't Starve's release and patch version history.

February 26 2013 - A Winter's Tale (unimplemented)
Stuff that might have to wait for the next update:
 * Periodic snow + ground accumulation.
 * Wintermeter
 * Shorter days in winter
 * Ice staff (which freezes enemies to ice)
 * Warmth mechanic (like dapperness, but you can freeze to death).
 * Scottish Walrus Nobleman Father and Son Hunting Party.
 * Deerclops.
 * Ice Hounds.
 * Trash bins.
 * Blue gem.
 * Possibly new character
 * yeti (new boss)
 * Pengull swarms.
 * Angry, craftable snowmen who throw snowballs.

February 13 2013 Hotfix
New item: Garland - a pretty hat made out of flowers that gives a small sanity buff until it rots away

Bug fixes:
 * Abigail doesn’t hurt walls, and keeps more distance from you
 * Natural pig villages in new worlds won’t be too large
 * Bird traps take longer to trap birds
 * Wall repair is cheaper
 * Pigs say the right thing when they are befriended
 * Pigs don’t eat things off ground right when they are spawned
 * You have to force-attack to attack your own wall

Sanity Tuning:
 * Making a prototype gives a small sanity boost
 * Crawling Horrors and Terrorbeaks don’t hit quite as hard, and have a bit less HP
 * You always resurrect (slightly) sane
 * Wormhole sanity penalty is lower
 * Nightmare fuel drops more regularly from shadow monsters
 * Killing a shadow monster boosts sanity a bit
 * Shaving increases sanity
 * Ground Watchers come later and are less numerous
 * Cooked vegetables give a small sanity boost
 * Creepy eyes spawn farther away from the fire
 * Shadow monsters don’t teleport into the water when you hit them
 * Tophat is a bit cheaper to make
 * Pig friends give a smaller sanity boost
 * Max 3 shadow monsters at once (earlier was 4)
 * Mr. Skitts shows up less frequently
 * Wet goop does not restore sanity
 * Sanity penalty for eating spoiled food is not as strong
 * Reduced nightmarefuel crafting costs
 * Reduced night light insanity aura

==February 12, 2013 - Insanity ==



New Character: Wes - Do you think Don’t Starve is too easy? Try playing as Wes, the mime! He’s not good at doing anything!

Sanity - The player character loses sanity when he is left alone in the dark, gets close to scary monsters, or does crazy things like eating monster meat or jumping through a wormhole. Sanity can be regained through acts of dapperness, like wearing fancy clothes in the sunshine and eating candy.

Low sanity is not fatal, but strange creatures from another time and place are attracted to madness. There are new, powerful items that can be built from the nightmare fuel that they leave behind when killed.now

Save Slots - You can have up to four save games at once now. Your existing save will be imported into the first slot when you start the game for the first time.

Sandbox Mode - This is the game as you all know it. There will eventually be a customization screen before you start a level, but you just get the default generation for now.

Experimental Adventure Mode - When you start a new game, you can choose to play in adventure (ie story) mode. Currently, there are five levels of difficulty as you progress through the levels. This is an early test, so we have a lot of work to do to make these levels meaningful and fun. We also need to add the story’s ending. This is for experienced DS players who want a taste of the future.

Pathfinding - Monsters and followers can navigate around corners and walls.

Mod Support (steam only)- Modding is now allowed! We’re distributing the the source scripts with the game, so have a look in data/scripts, and see what you can do. There is an example (machine-translated) French language pack included with the game to get you started. See the modding forum for more details.

New Craftables:


 * Bush Hat - Hide from your enemies in plain sight.
 * Night light - Light your nights with nightmare fuel.
 * Night Armour - Protects the flesh, but sacrifices the mind.
 * Night Sword - Live by the sword, go crazy by the sword.
 * Cobbles - Build your own roads.
 * Taffy + Pumpkin Cookies - New recipes! Mmmmmmm!

Tuning:
 * The tent is cheaper to make, and doesn’t restore health any more.
 * Natural roads are curvy and look better.
 * There is a way for non-wilson characters to find beard hairs in the wild.
 * Sometimes, when you find pig villages, they will have carrot and flower farms.
 * Lots of small, under-the-hood changes to the world gen.
 * Seeds provide less hunger.
 * Birds drop a feather -or- a morsel, never both.
 * Rabbits take longer to respawn.
 * Hounds drop teeth less often.
 * Traps and Toothtraps have slightly fewer uses.
 * Farms take a bit longer to grow.
 * Birds won’t land on seeds if you are standing too close to them.
 * Spider dens spit out less creep.
 * Creep without a spider den disappears. (As a side-effect, creep can no longer be picked up and placed.)
 * Walls have more health.
 * Torches cost more to build, but last longer.
 * Corpses are back!

Bug Fixes:
 * There is much less mist in the graveyards, since it was causing performance and visibility problems.
 * Stuff that falls near the ocean shouldn’t disappear.
 * Stone walls don’t take fire damage.
 * Hounds don’t follow you through the teleportato.
 * You can’t be killed while you are using the teleportato.
 * Stumps no longer rain from the sky on loading some games.
 * Rabbits no longer phase through obstacles.
 * Placers for campfires won’t disappear into the night when trying to build them.
 * Heated beefalo won’t go out of their way to aggro walls.
 * Spider queens no longer give birth to unlimited spiders when they have a combat target.

Deprecations: The old world gen and the old research system have been removed. If you have an existing save game that was using the old research system, you will have to build some science machines to unlock your recipes.

January 29, 2013 – Progress!
You can escape the world by finding Wooden Thing, and activating it. You get to keep your inventory, and you cash-out any XP that you have and unlock characters without dying. This is the first step towards story mode. The world that you escape to is no harder than the first, but this will change soon!

New Research Method: Under the new research method, you unlock access to tiers of recipes by building research machines. You can unlock a specific recipe by building it near an active machine, after which point you can build it anywhere. Your known recipes last as long as you do - they will travel with you to new worlds if you escape, but you will lose them if you die. There are no more research points or grinding. The science machine is now a bit cheaper to make, and the alchemy engine is a bit more expensive.

This is a big change, so we’ve made it optional for the time being. When you start a new world, you will get to choose between the new research method or the old one. Your progress in the old method is not available in the new method, but will be there if you switch back. We will be phasing out the old method soon, but wanted to introduce the new one carefully.

New Character:
 * Wickerbottom the Librarian can be unlocked with XP. She gets a bonus research tier, because she is so smart.

New Creatures:
 * There are Baby Beefalo. You can eat them, if you are a terrible person.
 * Worm Holes are sprinkled throughout new worlds. I dare you to click on one!
 * Koalefant, an elusive herbivore that you can hunt. He is hard to find, and harder to catch. He drops Koalefant Trunk and lots of meat.

New Craftables:
 * You can build three types of defensive Walls (Hay Walls, Wood Walls, and Stone Walls). These can be destroyed by monsters, and repaired by you. The AI pathfinding is not done yet but will probably go in the next update, so enjoy confusing the heck out of pigmen while you can.
 * You can make wooden floor tiles and place them like turf.
 * You can make a Boomerang and throw it at other creatures. Just be careful when it flies back at you!
 * You can build a Pitchfork, which takes over turfing duties from the shovel.
 * You can craft a nice, comfy Breezy Vest.

New Other Stuff:
 * Spider dens produce creep tiles (Sticky Webbing) that slow down movement. You can dig them up and place them if you like.
 * Added a better death effect for creatures.
 * Spline-based Roads look better, and make you walk faster.

Balance Changes:
 * Every new Meat Effigy that you create takes a chunk of your max health. It gets returned when you die, or when you destroy the effigy.
 * Made “Monster Lasagna” recipe that shows up when you use too much monster meat in the crock pot.
 * Cooked / crocked foods inherit spoiledness from their ingredients (with a small bonus).
 * The “new world gen” is now the default. The old method will soon be deprecated.
 * Added a character quip when Hounds are approaching.
 * The Tent no longer swaps characters - it is now acts as a super-powerful bedroll that restores all health and hunger.
 * Honey Nuggets and Honey Ham spoil a bit faster.

Misc Bug fixes:
 * Birds don't spawn seeds when flying away if there's already seeds nearby.
 * Teeth trap can be reset with Right-click.
 * Beard fountain doesn’t... fountain.
 * Teenbird and Tallbird aggression fixes.
 * If you die with something in your hand it will drop on the ground instead of disappearing.
 * Fix for missing Pig King in new world generation.
 * Fix for hangs in new world generation.
 * Massive speed up for new world generation.
 * Fixed bird/wilson animation freak-outs on slower machines.
 * Darts and poop won't magically accumulate at the world origin.
 * Berries won't show up in farm plots.

January 15, 2013 – Spoiled Rotten

 * Food spoils over long periods of time. Stale and Spoiled foods are less beneficial. Rotten food is practically inedible, but can be used as fuel or fertilizer.
 * Health and Hunger values have been re-tuned across the board. Characters have a larger hunger buffer now.
 * Crock Pot foods are stackable up to 40.
 * You can build an Ice Box to mitigate spoilage.
 * New unlockable character: WX-78, a robot who can eat spoiled food with no penalties, and who hates all living things.
 * Smallbirds grow up to become angsty Teenbirds ("Smallish Tallbirds" in-game). Teenbirds grow up to be Tallbirds and leave the player.
 * The mysterious Otto Von Chesterfield (an Eye Bone item that spawn a Chester) can be found in some Marshes, and is befriendable (a new world is needed to find the Eye Bone).
 * Beefalo travel in proper herds now. Herds regenerate off-screen (currently with adults)
 * Beefalo herds become agitated when they go into heat, and will chase away the player if they are not wearing a Beefalo Hat.
 * Beefalo sometimes drop a Beefalo Horn, which can be used to move beefalos around.
 * The Spiderhat is no longer craftable - the player will just wear the Spider Queen's head directly. It also can't be used to steal Spiders from an existing Queen.
 * Steam cloud can be disabled (details below)
 * Camera controls: CTRL+P will freeze the camera in place; CTRL+H will hide the HUD.
 * Minor tweaks and fixes
 * Fixed various save/load issues

January 16 Hotfix

 * Tuning
 * Health values for a lot of food items are higher! Rejoice!
 * Default stomach size reduced to 150
 * Spoilage happens *slightly* faster overall
 * Three new crockpot recipes: Honey Nuggets, Meatballs, and Fistfull of Jam
 * Teenbirds take longer to grow up
 * crockpot works a little faster


 * Fixes
 * Fueled hats shouldn't keep running when you reload. (You'll have to equip and unequip existing hats to reset them)
 * Tooth trap stays set across save/load
 * Cooked mandrake doesn't crash when you eat it

January 9, 2013

 * Ground can now be dug up using the Shovel to reveal the bare dirt underneath and creating a Turf item.
 * Turf items can be placed down on bare dirt tiles to change the biome.
 * New art for the Rockyland biome.
 * Minor bug fixes and tuning.


 * Patch (January 11)
 * Butter Muffin is no longer invisible in the Crock Pot
 * Items drop from Bee Hives when destroyed by Abigail
 * Fixed some typos
 * Fixed Rabbits not respawning from Rabbit Holes sometimes
 * Mobs keep their targets between save/loads
 * Birds render in the Bird Trap again
 * New items will try to stack into existing Backpack/equip stacks
 * Fixed an infinite Mandrake exploit

December 20, 2012 (hotfix)

 * Blank out attacks on spiders just after den spawn
 * Disable pighouse exhaustion (for now)
 * Warrior spider have somewhat random attack periods (so that they don't pounce you at the same time)
 * Fewer spiders are released when hitting a nest, and fewer of them are warriors
 * Warrior spider attacks less frequently, and does less damage
 * Seeds grow time and drop rates are a bit less nerfed
 * Fix gold getting stuck on pig king's head
 * Fix exploding beemine-in-backpack
 * Treeguards shouldn't spawn invisibly any more

December 19, 2012 – Long Live the Queen

 * New features
 * Spider dens have a full life cycle. Tiers are more meaningful, and higher tiered dens will require strategy to overcome.
 * Spider queens come out of the highest-tier nests to wreak havoc and spread spideryness.
 * A new type of warrior spider protects high-level dens and the queen. They are resistant to kiting, so a frontal assault is not recommended.
 * Wilson can build fire darts, and light pretty much every creature on fire.
 * Wilson can build a spider hat from egg sacks that lets him control spiders. Just be careful when you take it off!
 * Wilson can build tooth traps and use them for defense or for guilt-free rabbit hunting.
 * There is a new, experimental map gen algorithm that you can use. It is a work in progress and is largely untested and unbalanced, so you may not live for very long! (Don’t worry, though - the old map gen is still the default!)
 * Pet Smallbirds will demand food when hungry, and can starve to death.
 * Wilson can build a warm hat. It... makes something happen.
 * New “epic fight” and “dawn” music.


 * Tuning
 * High-level hound attacks are more intense.
 * Krampus is silent until you reach a certain threshold of naughtiness.
 * Farming takes longer.
 * Some fruits and cooked foods are a bit less potent.
 * Seeds drop less frequently.
 * The birdcage seed sorter is less reliable.
 * Pig houses wear out after a certain number of its pigs are killed.
 * Werepig monster meat threshold increased to 4, werepigs drop normal meat.


 * Fixes
 * Stuff that falls out of bounds will disappear after a bit.
 * Most monsters will ignore things that are out of bounds.
 * Gobblers and Krampusses try to avoid getting caught against the edge of the world.
 * Fireflies drop individually.
 * Mobs shouldn’t get stuck in sliding animations.

December 12, 2012 (hotfix)

 * Bug fixes
 * Profile saving should work again on Chrome. Unfortunately, there's no way to get back any data that was lost to the bug while it was live.
 * The 1% phantom trap issue should be fixed.
 * There is a workaround available for those having trouble starting up with low-memory video cards (see below)
 * There is a workaround available for those having trouble starting up with low-memory video cards (see below)


 * Tuning
 * Krampus comes a little less frequently, and in smaller numbers.
 * Krampus will start to forgive naughtiness if you aren't naughty for a while. So you can still kill lots of bunnies with impunity if you pace yourself and diversify your food sources.
 * Krampus will target loose items on the ground before going after chests.
 * Krampus runs a little slower.
 * Krampus runs a little slower.

== December 11, 2012 – Naughty & Nice ==


 * NEW FEATURES


 * Krampus will punish you if you are too naughty.
 * Don’t make the bees angry.
 * Spider nests are crawling with activity.
 * Bird and rabbit traps are more animal friendly.
 * You can build a bird cage.
 * You can hatch Tallbird eggs to gain a new friend.
 * Steam client runs at 60hz on fast computers.
 * Game saves on exit. It also auto-saves every mornings.
 * Updated minimap art to make biomes more readable.


 * GENERAL FIXES


 * Traps should work properly again.
 * Dead pigs respawn more slowly
 * Tweaked the fire fuel values a bit (they were too high after the hot fixes)
 * Cooked mandrakes actually have effects now.
 * Tallbird eggs are no longer stackable.


 * FARMS


 * Farm plots are fully fertilized when they are built
 * Farm plots have much higher fertilizer capacity (used to be 6, now is 10,20,30)
 * Poop fertilizes farms more efficiently and speeds crop growth more efficiently


 * DEPLOYING / BUILDING


 * an unsuccessful deploy will not consume the deployable
 * chests can be placed closer together
 * non-colliding deployables can be placed closer together
 * twigs and grass to not become exhaustible until you transplant them (in existing saves, everything counts as not-yet-transplanted, because I wasn’t tracking this before)
 * transplanted grass is good for 20 cycles per poop


 * USING GRASS


 * fillers (other than twigs and petals) can no longer be used in the crock pot
 * traps can be used 10 times instead of 5
 * recipe changes to reduce grass usage:
 * Trap uses 2 less grass
 * Bugnet uses 1 less rope
 * farms cost less poop to make
 * Golden tools use 2 less gold
 * Panflute uses 1 less rope
 * rope uses 1 less grass
 * papyrus uses 2 less reeds
 * logsuit uses 2 less rope
 * spear uses 1 rope instead of 2 grass
 * strawhat uses 12 grass instead of 25
 * beefalo hat, beehat, tophat use no grass
 * football helmet uses 3 less pigskin, 1 less rope


 * PIGS


 * pigs don’t eat off the ground as often
 * pigs don’t eat mandrakes
 * pigs can be given veggiesmore often, and will refuse them if you try to do it too often
 * pig houses take 3 days to rebuild a dead pig
 * pigs drop either a meat or a pigskin (75%-25% split)
 * pigs, spider, and hounds can eat pigskins


 * MISC


 * Axe, pickaxe (and gold equivalents) last a bit longer
 * Minerhat lasts twice as long
 * Fire fueling values have been updated

Intel Integrated Graphics Patch
10 more spaces in every chest built
 * Fixes the game to run without a graphics card
 * Backpacks
 * Falling birds, for more opportunities for meat and feathers
 * Sleeping birds and Jackalopes for more opportunities for meat and feathers
 * Any kind of trap won't work
 * Jackalopes are invisible
 * Need pig skin to build pig houses (Not that bad)

November 13, 2012 – Enter the Gobbler

 * New features
 * Character differences! Now it matters who you pick!
 * Pond fishing
 * Hammer time - use the hammer to break apart structures
 * Build and deploy preview interface to help you place things carefully
 * New lighting equation, for more nighttime fun
 * For steam: Chrome save/profile import
 * For steam: Chrome save/profile import


 * New stuff
 * A new bird type, and regional bird variation
 * New hats: Feather and Miner
 * Some new cooking recipes to discover (5 of them!)
 * The Gobbler...
 * The Gobbler...


 * Tuning and Bug fixes
 * Graves don't reset when you load
 * Never-closing chest now closes
 * Crafting interface doesn't close automatically when you build something
 * RMB drops deployables
 * Gold doesn't always drop from rocks
 * Fire now hurts you if you stand too close!
 * Max stack size is a little smaller
 * Max stack size is a little smaller

October 2, 2012

 * A new unlockable character!
 * Feeling stabby? You can craft a spear now! (Tools have been made less effective in combat).
 * Upgradable tools! You can now build extra durable golden tools.
 * Traps are reusable, but they wear out.
 * New bedroll item lets you skip through the night. Sleeping on it consumes the bedroll.
 * The tent now allows you to change your current character. This consumes the tent.
 * You can remove tree stumps with the shovel.
 * Tentacles can now be attacked and they can die.
 * Characters have shadows. Graphical!
 * Seeds dropped by birds can turn into pumpkins or carrots.
 * Low level spider dens do not drop egg sacks when they are destroyed.
 * Meat farming takes longer.
 * Bees are less aggressive. Their loot drops and combat behaviour have also been tuned.
 * You can build a beekeeper’s hat to protect yourself from bees.