Don’t Starve Together is an action-packed survival game with a quirky atmosphere and dark, menacing tones. From the second you start the game a sense of urgency to craft and survive becomes apparent. It is also an absolute blast to play with friends.

While Klei Entertainment did a great job creating the base game of Don’t Starve Together, there are a few modifications you can find on the Steam Workshop that make it all the better, while not taking away from the experience the developers intended. Here are 10 essential “Don’t Starve Together” mods for better gameplay.

Updated May 18th by Russ Boswell: Don’t Starve Together released in 2016 but it’s still going strong over 5 years later thanks to a fervent modding community. Players are constantly pushing new content for the exciting multiplayer Indie survival game and some of the mods developed truly change the gameplay (in a positive way!). If you’re jumping into Don’t Starve Together for the first time in 2021 and are looking for some quality-of-life changes to make the adventure even better, definitely consider these helpful Don’t Starve Together mods.

15 Global Positions

Don’t Starve Together took the hit Indie title and transformed it into something that could be enjoyed with friends. The end result is something twice as fun as its predecessor but definitely not without its flaws. Case in point, the fact that developers didn’t offer players a way to see their teammates on the map.

Some will make the argument that this is “all part of the difficulty of Don’t Starve Together,” but it’s hard not to see it as a massive oversight. The game is plenty difficult enough without spending the extra time trying to meet up with your teammates or lead them in your direction via “landmarks on the mini-map.”

Thankfully, modders Sarcen and rezecib solved this problem with Global Positions, an add-on that will let you easily spot players no matter where they are. This is easily one of the best Don’t Starve Together mods available.

14 Geometric Placement

Don’t Starve Together is perhaps one of the most charming Indie games ever made from a visual standpoint. The victorian Tim Burton-esque graphics elevate entertaining gameplay mechanics to a higher level and the ability to build your own bases and “towns” gives you customization over the quirky world.

But the top-down style and slightly-tilted view can make it a headache when you’re trying to place items, especially when it comes to planting crops. Thankfully, modder rezecib developed a handy grid system that will snap items into place, allowing you to create beautiful plots and designs in no time.

13 Display Food Values

Resource management is the core of Don’t Starve Together. Every area is unforgiving and it’s easy to find yourself overrun with enemies but there are other facets to surviving that players need to pay attention to. Hunger, Health, and Sanity have their own meters in Don’t Starve Together and proper management of these things is paramount to surviving the harsh world.

Unfortunately, developers left things pretty ambiguous when it comes to filling these meters (likely to keep things more difficult). The base game won’t give you any idea just how much a particular food item will affect your meters but one crafty modder gives you all the information you’ll ever need to keep yourself healthy. Display Food Values will showcase just how much Health, Sanity, and Hunger a particular item will restore.

12 Less Lags

Don’t Starve Together runs smoothly in most cases but, depending on the number of players (and mods available) in a particular server, it’s not strange to see lag. Players know that lag can be a life-or-death thing depending on what you’re playing and experiencing a lag spike in Don’t Starve Together can spell doom in certain situations.

Modder Astro sought to end these annoying stutters with Less Lags, an add-on that gives server-owners a way to help reduce and eliminate lag. There are multiple settings and proper setup will see the mod cleaning your server regularly, deleting useless items, and culling monsters in faraway areas. This keeps everything streamlined and ensures there is never too much clutter filling the world and causing performance issues. It’s amazing that some DST mods can even help the game to run better.

11 Simple Health Bar

One of the things that makes Don’t Starve Together so difficult is the lack of information available to players. There are meters, tooltips, and item descriptions, but they’re vague and hardly anything goes into detail.

This can be exceptionally frustrating with combat, as it’s difficult to determine just how much health an enemy has. Usually, you’re forced to strike an enemy, using “how much health it loses” as a gauge for whether or not you can kill it. This can spell disaster if you pick the wrong fight.

The Simple Health Bar mod from DYC solves these woes by giving a customizable health bar that’s much more informative.

10 Giant Size

Bigger maps are better maps. You and your team have more to explore, harvest, and fight in the game when you install Giant Size. The mod is as easy to understand as it is to implement, making map sizes not only bigger but also makes them customizable in how large you want to make them.

This mod is simple all the way around, from installation to implementation all the steps are laid out in front of you. It’s recommended you use a mod that adds some extra biomes to the game alongside Giant Size so the areas don’t get repetitive.

9 Skin Queue

Skin Queue is a big time saver. The ability to queue up items you want to unravel or weave every time can be as boring as it is time-consuming and this mod seeks to deal with that tediousness.

Another key feature of the mod is the ‘Unravel All Duplicates’ option that the game so desperately needs. There are countless situations where players could save hours of time by having that simple button available. Also, as it takes no skill to unravel something, this does not make the game an easier, just more fun.

8 Automatic Gardener

Not everyone has a green thumb. For some, gardening in DST is an enjoyable pastime reminiscent of games like Stardew Valley or Farming Simulator, but for others, it’s a time-consuming chore.

For those in the latter group, Automatic Gardener is the mod for you. The mod enables you to craft a machine, out of supplies that are not too difficult to find, that does every aspect of gardening for you. All you have to do is put seeds in, choose the area you want the machine to operate in, and voila, all those pesky tasks are done for you.

7 Beefalo Settings (Taming, Riding, Loot etc.)

Beefalos are awesome. They can be anything from a noble steed to a quick meal in a tight spot. This mod lets you change anything and everything about a Beefalo to fit your preferences.

One of the things this mod does well is give the player the ability to make the game easier or harder depending on what they want. Want Beefalos aplenty that all let you ride them as long as you want? Want scarce Beefalo that hate your guts? Well, this mod has the best of both worlds.

6 Fast Travel (With UI)

Fast travel is something that has been in modern video games for years, and this mod seeks to help usher DST into this modern trend. Using signs to fast travel, and a helpful UI alongside it, this mod makes crossing vast distances easier and less tedious.

One drawback of the mod is it makes the game significantly easier, especially in the early stages. There is less of a sense of fear of finding out what lays just ahead when you know you can skip it. This mod is helpful and fun, but is best saved for later in the game.

5 Drops Reset Countdown

Collecting skins is a fun and important part of Don’t Starve Together. Every DST player knows the annoyance that comes along with trying to remember the last time you collected a weekly or daily skin drop.

Questions like: “Did I grab that yesterday, the day before, or a week ago?” Will no longer haunt players thoughts with this simple and effective mod. There are color indicators of Red, Yellow, and Green that show if there is no drop, you’ve collected the drop, or the drop is available, respectively.

4 G10MM-3R

G10MM-3R is a simple and easy way to automate collecting resources. Leaving all of the hard parts of labor to the easy-to-build robot, this mod is one of the most well designed and polished you can find on the Steam Workshop.

You can tell G10MM-3R what resources to pick up and which ones not to, which is key in letting the player decide how much impact the helpful collector will have on the game. All the resources picked up will also be stored in a base that is both easy to access and nice to look at.

3 [Gorge] Victorian HUD

Not every mod needs to have a direct effect on gameplay in order to enhance a player’s experience with the game. Some of them can be purely visual. This mod replaces the old textures used in multiple heads up displays with a Victorian texture that was used in the Gorge event some time ago.

After the event ended, many players felt that the Victorian HUD fit the theme of the game more than the default one. The creepy undertones that make DST so great are enhanced by this awesome mod.

2 ActionQueue Reborn

ActionQueue Reborn is the definitive mod to use when playing Don’t Starve Together. It is the most helpful, time-saving, and easy to use mod for the game.

In its simplest form, this mod allows players to hold SHIFT, click and drag the mouse over the area you need to do the action in and the mod queues up the uses of the tool you have equipped, so you do not have to click action after action over and over. This can automate so many mind-numbing tasks and frees up time spent doing repetitive actions that really only take away from the enjoyment of the game. If you have to choose just one mod, make it this one.

1 Character Mods

Individual and unique characters are what make multiple sessions of DST with your friends continue to be engaging and fun. While the base game has a litany of cool and quirky characters to choose from, mods have taken this aspect of the game to another level.

While it is impossible to choose just one character mod (It really depends on your play style and aesthetic choice) some of the most popular include: Jak, Wort, and Sue-Shi. While these are certainly fun characters it is best to do a deep dive in the mod list and find the right one for you.

NEXT: 10 Games To Play After Don’t Starve