Guides/How to Make a Pretty Decent Base Camp

Here is just my personal strategy on how to survive in don't starve and make it easily through the winter- The absolute first thing you want to do when you start the game and are collecting supplies is to wander around until you find a herd of Beefalo. Beefalo are usually found on a savannah, as are rabbits, so if you can find a herd of Beefalo on a savannah which borders grasslands, this is the prime spot to make your camp. If you can also avoid being near water then that would be ideal, as it lessens your chance of having pengulls in your camp at winter, but don't worry about it too much as they are only aggressive if you attack them, for the most part. Once you have set up your camp with a fire pit and your science machine and alchemy engine and a chest, you can really get things going. When setting up camp, make sure you are within walking distance of the Beefalo, but not able to see them on screen from your camp, as they do become aggressive every now and then when you are too close during certain times of the year for a few days. Another bonus of being near Beefalo is that when the wolves spawn, you can lead them to the Beefalo and run in circles until the wolves attack the Beefalo and the Beefalo will kill them.

Anyway, after you have a camp, adventure around. Have a string of rabbit traps on the savannah- preferably 3 near each other and your camp- and set them directly over a rabbit hole. This is a sure way to get 2-6 rabbits daily, if you check them each morning or evening. The next step is to collect manure, probably about 20. Also make sure you have prototyped a shovel, whenever you see a berry bush, pick the berries and then dig it up and plant it at your camp until you have about a dozen bushes, and fertilize them with the manure so they can start producing berries. At this point it is also very helpful to have a lightening rod and have it placed near camp to protect your berry bushes as they are likely very close together. If you are playing as willow, who is my preferred character, be very careful when your sanity is low so you don't light your berry bushes on fire- I've done it before. As willow, or any other character, I nearly always have a flower crown.

Once you have your berries set up, you might want to collect more manure and set up 4-5 improved or basic farms- they will produce food every 2-4 days and are very easy to maintain as birds drop seeds fairly often. Then you need to take a day trip to a forest far away from your camp, and then burn it. Chop down a decent amount of the burned trees until you have a stack or two of charcoal, which will provide you with the materials to build jerky racks. Charcoal is also a decent fuel for fires, so having a couple of full stacks dropped near the fire can be useful during the winter to make it through the long nights.

Sidenote- when you're burning down the trees, if a treeguard spawns, you do NOT have to kill it. It would be very difficult to do so. When cutting down or burning trees, always have about 5 pinecones on you. If a treeguard spawns, run away for a minute and then run back and very very quickly plant a pinecone near the treeguard. You have to be very near them for this to work, and it will probably take a few pinecones, so it will take a couple attempts, but when you have planted a couple pinecones close enough, the treeguard will be pacified. It may revert to tree form or continue to walk around for a while, but it will not attack you again unless you chop down any sort of tree. This does limit your resources for fires, but I would suggest scavenging logs by digging up trunks and keeping them in a chest for backup and crafting and using other materials for fires- it isn't too difficult. In fact, once you have your berries and farms, I would actually suggest planting 20 or so trees near your camp and cutting them down, digging up the trunks, and replanting them with the pinecones they drop every few days until a treeguard spawns. Even if it means it will be difficult and generally inconvenient to get wood in the future, a pacified treeguard can actually guard from enemies in the surrounding area and will generally just wander around. Don't walk too near it for too long, as it does lower your sanity, but it is generally more help than hurt in the long run.

Anyway, back to the drying racks. I would suggest making 5-10 of these at your camp, and place morsels from the rabbits you catch on them. Every 2-3 days they will produce jerky, which you can harvest. Not only does jerky restore food, sanity, and health, but it also has a very long lasting time before it spoils, particularly because as you add more brand new jerky to the older jerky stack the lasting time will go back up a little. You can just put the jerky in a chest as long as you keep an eye on it, but I would suggest finding the materials needed to craft an icebox to optimize how long the jerky- as well as plants from the farms- will last.

So, now you have a good camp set up. Either trees or a treeguard, Beefalo nearby, manure, farms, berries, rabbit jerky- and winter is probably right around the corner or already there, as default winter starts around day 20. Admittedly, I usually extend the seasons in settings so it starts around day 50, but that solution has its own problems. If winter hasn't started yet but is nearly there, then stop harvesting your jerky and let it stay on the racks so that it doesn't start spoiling- it can be your emergency source of food. Farms and berries will not provide food during winter, and if the berries do keep growing, it will be a very long time before they regrow. Build another couple of chests and fill them with un-murdered rabbits- you can use these rabbits to make rabbit earmuffs or food. Having a pair of rabbit earmuffs is a necessity, unless you have a Beefalo hat. I would not suggest going out and trying to kill Beefalo for materials. There is a much more affective way to do that later, but in the meantime, Beefalo in heat near bees may anger the bees and be killed, so you might be able to achieve the materials for a Beefalo hat that way. I would also suggest crafting a thermal stone for winter.

The next thing to do to prepare is to have stacks of manure and charcoal and cut grass (and wood if you haven't woken a treeguard) dropped next to your fire pit. Venture a ways away from camp and dig up a dozen or so saplings. This will limit your resources in that area, but a single sapling can keep your fire lit through the entire night if not through the evening as well. With your saplings, rabbits, and jerky, you should be able to make it through the winter- especially if you have an icebox with some of the food from your farms before winter. If your traps are close enough, you can even harvest more rabbits for morsels throughout winter. Also, if you do end up right next to a pengull nest, then you can steal their eggs- but you absolutely have to wait until it's night and they are asleep, or they will kill you instantly. There might be only one or two eggs left out at night, but still- free food.

If you have chosen to extend your seasons and have a decent amount of time left before winter or your winter has just ended, then here are the next steps. First, craft a log suit and a spear and spend a day venturing out to kill spiders and destroy their nests. If at all possible, only target the spider nests with no extra lump on them, as they will not have a golden spider within and so be easier to defeat. I personally don't bother collecting monster meat, but the silk can be very valuable.' For crafting. Kill spiders until it is either nighttime, or you are rather hurt, or you are satisfied with the amount of supplies you have, and then head back to your camp. Make a top hat. This is important in the future for crafting a prestihatitator. Don't wear it too much- I would suggest keeping it in a chest for the time being. Next, search in the general area and on the map for a lureplant. They can show up anywhere you have walked before, so one should have shown up by now. If the lureplant is new enough that it has not spawned aggressive eye plants and a leafy meat lure yet, then you're in luck. Just go right up to the plant and hit it with an axe until it dies and drops a fleshy bulb. If it has spawned eye plants, be very careful around them, don't get too close. You may want to get a log suit and spear. Then, avoiding the eye plants as much as possible, kill the main part of the lureplant quickly and pick up the leafy lure, which you can eat, and the fleshy bulb. As soon as the lureplant is dead, all the eye plants will disappear.

The next part is a bit tricky and more than a bit evil. First off, make sure that all of your drying racks are empty and there is at least one space in your icebox. Turn any more rabbits you trap into morsels instead of jerky for the time being. Then, take your mini lureplant (fleshy bulb from before) and plant it smack dab in the middle of a herd of Beefalo. Be careful with this part- make sure they're not in heat first and won't attack you- and make sure that there are AT LEAST 5 Beefalo in the herd very close together. If there are only 2 or 3, the lureplant could extinct them. If you are in an area with more than just one herd of Beefalo, then you have backup, which is great. Anyway, once the lureplant is planted, it will take about 2-3 days before the eye plants appear. You should probably check on it every day regardless to see how it's doing. This is the tricky part- once eye plants start popping up, the Beefalo will unknowingly wander into them, be attacked, and become agitated. Thankfully, they will still not attack you (unless they're in heat) as the Beefalo are being attacked, hang around for as long as you can. Watch the lure that the plant holds up- when it changes from a leafy meat to Beefalo meat or a morsel, it means that it has undigested meat stored inside it. If you watch a Beefalo die and there aren't too many eye plants near it, you might want to rush over and grab the meat. If there are a lot of eye plants, then what you want to do is wait and look around the lureplant- because the Beefalo do temporarily kill some of the eye plants and stick very close together, there is likely a mostly clear path to the main plant. Avoid the eye plants as much as possible- they don't hurt too much, but there are a lot of them. Kill the main plant as fast as you can. If this is day two or late in day one of the plant having eye plants, then there should be about a dozen pieces of meat that it drops, probably half way to being stale. Now here's the awesome part: you got a dozen meat from that without having to fight anything that can fight back, and another fleshy bulb- so you can plant it again and after another 2 days it'll start getting more meat! If you let it keep going for too long the Beefalo will eventually kill it or it will digest all the meat and killing it will get you nothing, so be careful. Also, once the process has been completed a couple times, you might want to wait for a couple heats so the Beefalo don't all die. When winter is around the corner, leave jerky on the racks so it won't spoil as the lureplant will not produce eye plants in winter.

So, now that you have probably a dozen meat, and more on the way, you can start making jerky with it. Cook 4 of your meat and save it for making a meat effigy, which will resurrect you in case of death. To get the other main part of the ingredients, beard shavings, you have to get your sanity down to below 50- make sure that you already have 4 rabbits in your inventory so as soon as your sanity lowers enough they will turn into beardlings and then you can raise your sanity as soon as possible. This is another reason I like the character willow- she starts at a lower sanity level but literally all you have to do to raise your sanity in 5 seconds is start a forest fire.

Anyways, that should get you set up to not starve forever. You now have berries, farms, infinite jerky and/or meat and morsels or rabbits, 2 forms of protection from the treeguard and Beefalo, probably chests full of rabbits, and a means of being resurrected when you die. That all sounds pretty awesome to me. Have fun not starving!