Don't Starve Together is a multiplayer survival game developed by Klei Entertainment, the standalone co-op release built on the original Don't Starve. You and your friends are dropped into a strange, hostile wilderness called the Constant, where every day is a race to gather resources, manage hunger, health, and sanity, and survive long enough to see the next sunrise.
At its heart, Don't Starve Together is about preparation. The world runs on a brutal day-night cycle and a rotating set of seasons, each with its own threats: Deerclops in winter, hound waves, and seasonal giants that can flatten a base in seconds. Players craft at the science machine, cook at the crock pot, tame creatures, and split the work of building a camp that can take a hit. Sanity is its own resource, and the dark is never just for show.
Don't Starve Together worlds are meant to last. A camp grows over weeks, the Caves open a whole second layer of the map, and seasoned groups push into late-game boss fights like Dragonfly and the Ancient Fuelweaver. Whether you run a quiet four-player camp on vanilla settings or a packed public server stacked with Workshop mods, the Constant rewards persistence: your base, your world, your progress, all kept safe across every session on a private dedicated Don't Starve Together server.
Don't Starve Together has a deep modding scene through the Steam Workshop. Community favourites like Combined Status, Global Positions, Wormhole Marks, and a huge library of character and quality-of-life mods change how the game plays without touching the core survival loop. Heavily modded worlds and busy public servers are far more demanding than a small vanilla camp and lean on dedicated hosting to stay smooth.
The thing that makes Don't Starve Together different to host is the Caves shard. A full server runs two linked worlds at once, the Forest overworld and the Caves below, so memory and a steady CPU matter more than raw core count. High-frequency CPUs keep both shards ticking in sync, NVMe SSD storage protects your save from corruption, and DDR5 RAM keeps everything responsive when a giant attacks with a full server online. Pick your plan around player count and whether you plan to run the Caves and Workshop mods.
| Server type | RAM needed | Players | Recommended plan |
|---|
| Small camp (Forest only) | 3 GB | 2–6 | 3 GB plan |
| Forest + Caves shards | 4 GB | 4–10 | 4 GB plan |
| Modded / large public server | 6 GB | 10–16 | 6 GB plan |
A private dedicated server is where Don't Starve Together really opens up. Your group controls the whole world: season length, day length, resource regrowth, boss difficulty, whether the Caves are enabled, PvP on or off, and which Workshop mods load. Unlike a PC-hosted game, a dedicated Don't Starve Together server keeps the Constant running 24/7 with a persistent world that does not vanish the moment the host closes the game.
Hosting with PingPlayers removes the host advantage, frees you from hardware limits, and keeps both shards stable through long winters and packed boss fights. Every plan includes high-performance hardware, full configuration control, automated backups, 24/7 real human support, and an integrated Ping AI assistant that spins up the Caves, installs Workshop mods, and sorts out common setup issues so your group spends its time surviving, not troubleshooting.
