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Waxwell Portrait
I plugged it a long time ago.

Maxwell

A Sinkhole is the entrance to a Cave or Ruins and can be found randomly in the world and in the first level of a Cave.

Each Sinkhole leads to a new Cave or Ruin. When first discovered, the Sinkhole will be a Plugged Sinkhole and is covered with a jagged rubble mound, the player can usually tell they are close to a Plugged Sinkhole on the surface when they find Rocks lying about in the Biomes for no reason. Mining the Plug reveals the hole with a rope going down into its depths while providing Flint and Rocks on the surface and Thulecite and Thulecite Fragments underground. It takes six hits from a Pickaxe to unplug it. Once unplugged, Batilisks will spawn from the Sinkhole at dusk and return underground in the morning.

In single player, there are only three Sinkholes in a surface world and one for each Cave. Plugged and open Sinkholes are marked on a map by a gray mound and a hole with a red arrow pointing downwards, respectively.

On default settings, the three surface Sinkholes are guaranteed to spawn in the following locations:

The number of sinkholes in the world settings can only be "Default" and "None".

Thulecite Sinkholes are usually found in Stalagmite Biomes.

Don't Starve Together iconDon't Starve Together

In Don't Starve Together, caves are only one extra world, so all sinkholes lead into the same cave. As the Ruins are on the same level with caves, there are no sinkholes in caves leading further below.

In default settings, the world will have 10 sinkholes, and caves will have the same number of corresponding staircases, scattered around in the "caves" part of underground. Notably, the relative location of either of them has no influence on the locations of their counterparts, so for example, a pair of nearby sinkholes will typically lead to staircases which are far apart from each other (or vice versa).

PrototypeTips(Don't Starve Together icon)

  • The high number of sinkholes/staircases often leads to one or more pairs of either spawning close to each other, allowing players to use them as a form of fast and no-cost travel.
    Stairs map

    A caves map with all staircases revealed. Notice the second staircase near the character's current location.

    Sinkholes map

    A map with all sinkholes revealed. Notice the pair in the upper left.

    Nearby stairs

    A pair of nearby staircases in a cave.

  • As a disadvantage of the above tip, most followers don't follow the players in or out of the caves.

Placeholder Trivia

  • The sinkholes were plugged up by Maxwell a long time ago, as revealed upon his examination quote.
  • Basalt found in previously generated worlds were actually placeholders for Sinkholes and were turned into Sinkholes when the Caves update was released.
  • Using DebugSpawn ("basalt") will still spawn Basalt, which doesn't change into a Sinkhole, compared to DebugSpawn("cave_entrance"), which directly spawns a Sinkhole.
  • Sinkholes originally had a lighter gray color.
  • As of v166227 of DST players are able to create their own dedicated, multi-layer server along with open sinkholes becoming available. These sinkholes, however, have a staircase going down rather than a rope.

Mosquito Bugs

  • Due to bad world generation sometimes there are no Sinkholes in a Cave.

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