Just started playing Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked but having trouble staying alive? Check out our beginner’s tips,tricks and strategies for crafting tools, healing your hero, unlocking new recipes finding gold, dealing with monsters and more.
Last week, Klei Entertainment finally released a mobile version of its hit survival adventure game, Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked for iOS and Android users. While the game has been around a couple of years for PC and platform gamers, mobile fans are finally getting a chance to give the game a try themselves.
If you’ve just started playing Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked, you’ll find it fun, but incredibly challenging. Like the title indicates, your shipwrecked hero must do his or her best to stay alive on a remote island where he or she has landed. Players must learn how to forage for food and materials to craft needed weapons, build fires and cook meals all the while keeping their health and sanity intact. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock more and more items to build and create as well as useful new recipes for your beloved crock-pot.
We’ve been playing Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked since it first released on iOS last week and have started to get the hang of how the game works. As a result, we’ve put together a simple beginner’s tips and tricks guide to Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked, to help you learn how to play the game, strategies for staying alive longer and preserving your health as well as information on how to craft and use various materials you’ll need most. As we progress through the game, we’ll be putting together additional guides on farming, crock-pot recipes and more, so stay tuned for those.
Don’t Starve Shipwrecked Beginner’s Tips and Tricks
Part 1: How To Play and Survive Day 1
If you aren’t familiar with adventure type games that involve survival and crafting, Don’t Starve may initially seem daunting or its gameplay unclear. In this part of the guide, we’ll discuss basic gameplay elements along with what various stats icons on your screen mean and how to use them to keep your hero alive.
- How to Move - If you tap and hold on your screen, you hero will move in the direction of your finger. Release and he/she will stop walking.
- Interacting With Objects – As you begin exploring the island, you’ll find various types of objects lying on the ground as well as a number of island creatures stirring about. You have two basic actions for most objects – grab or attack as noted by the green and red hand icons on the right-hand side of the screen. For items like grass, flint and saplings you need only grab those to forage them. Other items like palm trees, bamboo, and rocks, however, require crafting tools in order to obtain them. In the next section on crafting we will include some important items you should craft and collect on your first day to help you stay alive.
- Crafting – as mentioned above, you will need to craft various tools and items to help you stay alive on your first day and beyond. Your crafting menu can be found on the left-hand side of the screen. If any icon on that side is green, it means you have gathered enough resources to craft one or more items in that menu. To craft an item, simply tap on a green menu, tap on the available item, and tap the build button. If there are items you want to craft, but you aren’t sure what items you need, tap on the silhouette of the item, and a menu with required resources will appear. Here are a few items you need to craft the first day to help you stay alive. We will discuss more crafted items later in the article.
- * Ax – will be needed to cut down trees. Trees provide three essential resources: logs, palm leaves and sometimes coconuts. You need to collect one flint and one sapling to craft an Ax.
- * Pickaxe – This is useful for breaking boulders and other large stones. You can acquire rocks, flint, nitre and sometimes gold when breaking these boulders apart. To craft a pickaxe you need two saplings and two flints.
- * Fire or Fire Pit – When evening draws near, if you don’t have a campfire, you probably won’t survive the night. You can build a very simple campfire with three grass and two logs but I find building a fire pit is more useful in the long run as it requires less fuel overall. You can make it through a whole night with just 2 logs in a firepit, whereas with a simple fire you’ll daily need 2 logs and 3 grass. The firepit can be built by collecting 12 rocks and 2 logs.
- Gathering Food To Feed And Heal – an important part of staying healthy and alive in Don’t Starve is, of course, having enough food to eat. In addition to gathering and crafting the items listed above, on your first day, you’ll want to find foods to cook and eat. You can eat raw foods, but cooking them will help to heal you hero and increase his or here health, hunger and sanity stats. If you eat raw foods, sometimes they can have adverse effects. The same is true with cooked foods that you keep too long. If cooked foods don’t show up with a green background in your inventory, they may not be safe to eat. Here are a few items you can find around the island to eat cooked or raw:
- * Seeds – You’ll see these lying around. Grab them anytime you can find them. They can be cooked on your campfire/fire pit for greater benefit. You can also get seeds sometimes by attacking birds on the island. You can catch or kill them but they do drop seeds occasionally.
- * Coconuts – You’ll notice some of the trees have coconuts in them. If you chop them down and gather the coconuts, you can chop them in half with a machete and cook them or eat them raw. The recipe for crafting a machete can be found in the recipe list at the bottom of the article.
- * Crabs – you can occasionally catch a crab to eat if you build a trap and set it up on the beach. You can place seeds in the trap as bait but I usually don’t as I found the birds tend to eat them. Trap recipe can be found in the recipe list at the bottom of the article.
- * Flowers – Flowers can be used to craft things or as fuel for your fire, but you can also eat them. They can only be eaten raw.
- * Limpet – Around the island, you’ll sometimes notice a limpet rock. If you go over to it and tap the “grab” button, you can gather limpet from the rock which can be cooked an eaten or eaten raw.
- * Eggs - These don’t appear on every island for every hero, but you will find them occasionally. I think they are acquired by chopping down jungle trees, but I’m not certain.
- * Mushrooms – if you go into the forest/jungle portion of an island where the vines, flowers and jungle trees are, you’ll occasionally find a mushroom to gather as well. It can be eaten raw or cooked.
- * Seaweed – You’ll have to make a raft or other sea vessel first, but if you hop on it and head into the ocean you can grab seaweed to eat raw or cooked. Seas vessel crafting recipes can be found in the recipe list at the bottom of the article.
- * Berries – There are some weird and scary looking large leafed, spotted plants in the jungle/forest areas that you can pick berries from.
- * Snake/Monster Meat – While you may not encounter these guys on the first day, if you head into the jungle at all and start chopping trees or vines, you’re bound to run into some snakes. If you do, either run away or attack them. If you don’t, they’ll keep attacking you and your health will quickly diminish. After you kill them, sometimes monster meat will appear. I wouldn’t suggest eating it, though. The one time I did, it killed me on the spot. I think some characters can eat monster meat and not die, but I’m not taking further chances with it.
Don’t Starve Beginner’s Guide – Day 2 And Beyond
Keep Food Supplies High And Pay Attention To Life/Health Stats - Once you’ve successfully made it through your first day, the second should go relatively smoothly if you make sure you have gathered enough materials to light a fire at night and keep your stomach full. In the next section, we’ve put together a guide of some basic recipes you’ll be using to craft stuff to stay alive. You can check your hunger, sanity and health ratings by looking at the stomach, brain and heart icons in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and checking how high they are. I like to keep these in the 75 percent range if possible. As mentioned before, the best way to keep all these stats high is by eating plenty of fresh cooked food. Later in the game, you'll be able to create Healing Salve with ashes from your fire, but initially, cooked food is your only tool for staying healthy. Sanity is probably one of the trickier health stats of the game. If it gets too depleted, you’ll start to see these faded shadow monsters that become more “real” the further your sanity drops. These creatures will begin to attack you if your sanity gets too low. Eating monster meat is a main cause of insanity.
Pay Attention To Condition Of Tools - In addition to having plenty of food, you also want to keep an eye on the condition of your tools like the machete, pickaxe and axe. Anytime one of mine gets below 50% I go ahead and start gathering materials to craft another. There’s nothing worse than needing a pickaxe, for example, and it dies before you can mine enough flint to replace it.
Consider Sailing The High Seas– a few days into Don’t Starve, you might find your island getting a little sparse on supplies. If you build a sea vessel, you can actually go out into the ocean in search of new lands. Just make sure you start your voyage early in the day and have plenty of food with you. When I go on the ocean, I frequently check my map by tapping the icon at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen to see where I am and if there is land or other objects near me. On the ocean, you can find valuable supplies like food, better ships, tools, clothing and of course, other islands. If it gets to midday and you haven’t found new lands, you’ll probably want to head back towards your island, charting your course by checking the map. Otherwise, if you are out to sea when it gets dark, you likely won’t survive.
Try To Build Science Machine – the Science Machine is key to unlocking more recipes for crafted items, however, it can be a bit tricky to do. In order to build the machine, you need four logs, four stones and a gold nugget. Gold nuggets can be hard to come by on the island. They require finding a boulder with gold veins in it. If you mine it, gold nuggets should be inside. I couldn’t find one on my initial island. I had to discover another island with a stone that was gold veined.
Beginner Recipes For Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked
Once you build a Science Machine, tons of new recipes for crafting items will become available but until then, here are some beginner recipes everyone can use to survive. A full and detailed listing of every recipe in Don’t Starve, however, can be found at the Don’t Starve Steam Community page, here.
