Don't Starve Together News

Originally posted on the official forums by Bigfoot:

Hello everyone!

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post here, I’d like to share with you our plans for 2019, which are extensive!

First, I’d like to recap what happened in 2017/2018:
In 2017 we launched the Forge, and followed it up in 2018 with the Gorge. The idea was that we could offer a new way of playing Don’t Starve Together, in a limited-time format. We were a bit burned out on creating DST core game content and this format allowed us to try something a bit different, so we made these crazy game modes and provided them to the community for free.

Every time we launched these events, tons of players came to play, and in every instance we hit our highest ever DST concurrency. We’re super thrilled that so many people came to play the our weird game events!

While we enjoyed the events and are happy with the result, there were some drawbacks:

• They took WAY longer to make than we expected, so we weren’t able to make as much content as we wanted, and it left little time to do things like bug fixes and Quality of Life updates for the base game.
  
• Because we run the servers for these events, we also incurred the cost of these servers. Those of you who have been here a while know that Don’t Starve was not architected to be a multiplayer game, so running them on our servers was extremely inefficient. In short, even though we loved that everyone came to play, the item sales were only barely covering the costs of the servers.
  
• We found that it was exceedingly difficult for us to run these events on console and as such underserved our console players.

It has been a valuable experience and we think the game is better for it, however we feel that it’s time that we turn our attention back to the core Don’t Starve Together experience: surviving together.

Here’s what we’re doing for 2019:


The team is now working on brand new content for Don’t Starve Together. Survivors will be able to travel to new lands with new biomes, creatures, and more.

The first drop of this new content will come in mid-April, and we will continually be adding to the content every couple months afterward. As we said before, we think it’s important that everyone can play together and we don’t segregate our audience, so all of this content will be available for free to everyone!




The team also felt it was high time we gave our core cast some love (yes, we heard you). Over the course of the next year, we will be bestowing every character with revamped abilities, and give a glimpse into their backstory. Our goals here are to make each character unique, interesting and valuable in their own right and we expect this to be game changing in many ways.



Starting in March with Winona, we will be releasing a character refresh once a month.

These character refreshes will again be free to all players, and we will be selling new skins for these characters on the month they are refreshed.

In addition, the Triumphant, Guest of Honor and Survivor skin packs will be available to purchase for the character on that date. All owners of these skins prior to that date will be upgraded to an “Heirloom” rarity, with a higher unraveling value.


A fresh batch of four characters have been unwittingly ensnared and brought into the world. These new survivors will be released into the wild starting in Mid-March, and a new one will be released every 2 months



We are still deciding the final price of these characters, but we currently think they will be $6.99 USD each, which includes a full character skin set. You will also be able to weave the characters with spool.

Since we do not want to charge players for the new world content, these new characters will be our main way to fund development of this new content.


We are working hard on keeping the console versions of the game up to date. Specifically, we are investing in technology to allow us to more quickly update the game without going through lengthy certification on every small change, and we've also added more staff to work exclusively on updating the console versions.

We're happy to say that the next update for the Year of the Pig King event will launch within 2 days of the PC version.


We will also be continually updating the game with bug fixes, QoL updates, new skins for Twitch drops, and more things that we’re not quite ready to announce yet.

Speaking of which, the Year of the Pig King update is going live on Thursday! Long Live the (Pig) King!

And that’s it folks!

In short, we are significantly increasing our support of Don’t Starve Together in 2019 with new game content, character refreshes, new stories to be told, new characters, and new skins.

Thanks so much for playing this crazy game, once again. I’m still amazed at how it’s evolved over the years. Please give us your feedback and thoughts!

The nights are growing colder, and a distinctive holiday cheer has permeated the air. That can only mean one thing - Winter’s Feast is upon us! Take a break from enduring a hostile world to spread some holiday cheer. You could enjoy a tasty sugar cookie and decorate a tree or two… or three. Be wary though… something terrible lurks nearby, watching our survivors' every move with laser-like focus.

An Uncommon Holiday
Winter skins have appeared to get our survivors into the winter spirit, and for a limited time, the chances of receiving a rare gift have been substantially increased!

Everyone will also get a small set of skins to enjoy, including a festive Gingerbread Chest skin. These skins can be accessed in players’ item collections, but will only be around for the duration of the Winter’s Feast seasonal event - so enjoy them while you can!

We also have a special gift for all players that play online during the Winter's Feast event, so make sure you check that out.

Happy Winter’s Feast, everyone!



Full post on the official forum: https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/100132-game-update-298000-happy-winters-feast/

Hey Everybody.

We have some things coming up in DST and I thought now would be a good time to give you all a quick update on what we have planned to finish out the year and where we are going in 2019. I am not going to get into a lot of detail here but there is definitely some cool stuff here, we'll post more info as we get closer to the release of these updates.



Winter's Feast is coming back this year however we haven't made any substantial changes this time around and we won't be offering new skins.

However, we do have a special gift for all players that play online during the Winter's Feast event, so make sure you check that out.

Winter's Feast begins this Thursday morning December 6th (Pacific time).

Winter's Feast on console is being submitted right now and will come out as soon as it is approved - We expect Thursday for PS4 and Xbox One should be shortly after that. Please note that this is subject to change depending on console approval processes.



We had a great time with The Forge and The Gorge, but we're ready to move on to new things for a while. Beginning with Lunar New Year we will return to concentrating on more new game content for Don't Starve Together.

This doesn't mean that The Gorge and The Forge will never return, it's just not where we are going to be focusing for a while.



Similar to the Year of the Gobbler and Year of the Varg, We have an update planned for Lunar New Year with a small set of new skins. This update will remain in the base game and will continue to be playable beyond the holiday. More details will be coming just before that update.

You can expect this late January or early February, just shortly after Winter's Feast ends.





Similar to "A New Reign" Don't Starve Together will once again receive new content updates primarily centered around a elements that progress the world of Don't Starve and the Survivors that find themselves within it. We aren't ready to discuss details at this time about the content in these updates, but we know many of you want to see new game content updates and with the end of The Forge we thought we should let you know that it's coming.

Hey Everybody,

Once again, The Forge has officially come to a close.

Thanks to everybody who played. We tried some new things that we think turned out pretty well, and some other things, maybe not quite so much. But we hope you had fun all the same.

We have decided to not bring down the The Forge Collections this time. So if you didn't have a chance to pick them up when the event was live, you still have a chance. We'll let you all know if we decide to bring them down again in the future.

We have plans for things coming up that we're not quite ready to talk about just yet. But look forward to more information about that coming up very soon. We think you're gonna be pretty happy about it.

With the Ancient Gateway activated our survivors find themselves trapped in a hostile world of fire and battle. They’ll need to team up to defeat the Battlemaster’s army and his champions if they have any hopes of returning home.

The Forge is a free limited time 6-player co-op challenge, where the goal is to try and defeat the Grand Forge Boarrior in an arena. The only way to survive will be to work together.

The Forge is played on official Klei servers that are available only during the event. There are no community hosted servers during this event.

• This year's Forge has had many balance, content and progression changes.
  
• Character skins, emotes, item skins and more. Including skins from last season with hundreds of items.
  
• Free on-demand dedicated event servers (Forge Only).
  
• Simple Matchmaking with friends / community groups.
  
• Event drop system (Forge only).
  
• And more!
  
• And new for Season 2 we have added community and personal goals replacing last years achievements. Complete matches to help the community unlock new bosses and items!

For more details about The Forge, check out our post on the official forums.