Seasons all come with their own environmental changes and hazards, each affecting gameplay in different ways. Although there is a larger variety of seasons across different DLCs in Don’t Starve, some of which aren’t exclusive to a particular DLC or otherwise (see: Seasons), Don’t Starve Together only has the following four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Autumn is mostly a peaceful season and the preferred starting season for newer or less experienced players, as opposed to other seasons—with both summer and winter being the most harsh seasons.

Each season lasts for a different amount of days, although their individual lengths may also be shortened or prolonged in the settings. By default, autumn lasts for 20 days, winter for 15 days, spring for 20 days, and summer for 15 days.

Daytime, dusk and nighttime segments also have different durations depending on the season: dusk during the first ⅔ of spring will be the longest, but will last for a shorter amount of time the last third as well as during summer where it will be the shortest. Similarly, nighttime segments' duration progressively increase during late autumn, being the longest throughout winter.

Many animals and mobs also see changes in their behaviour and/or activity periods during different season cycles. Renewable sources of food may differ depending on the current season as animals are only active during their specified season/s. To list a few examples:

Bees are fully inactive during the winter, meaning that players may only collect honey from a beehive or bee box once throughout the season, until they become active again upon entering spring. Note also that bees will be more hostile during spring—meaning they are more prone to attacking nearby players and mobs.

Rabbits change into a white winter coat, but remain both an active and stable source of food for the season. Rabbit holes will close once spring comes, forcing players to look for other food sources instead.

During hound waves, blue hounds may appear if it’s winter. They are replaced with red hounds instead if the current season is summer—the latter being a severe fire threat to flammable objects, items and structures in player bases as they will combust upon death.

First things off, gather lots of crafting materials such as cut grass, twigs, rocks/flint, etc. Make a pickaxe and an axe to mine boulders and chop trees. Don’t think about seafaring just yet as you’ll want to prepare for the coming seasons first in order to give you (and your teammates!) better chances of survival and escape.

Gather 12 petals to make a garland to wear as a hat to recover +1.33 sanity/min for your character, including most default characters except for Wurt. Do note that some modded characters come with passive abilities and such that allows for better sanity maintenance, meaning they might usually have little use for one, if at all.

It is advised to avoid eating your food too early into the game—overall, you’ll want to wait until your hunger bar is at 35-40 or below which you should try to apply throughout the entire game. Keep in mind that hunger decay speed may differ between different characters, and as such, you'll need to take that factor into account as well.

If you don’t have the resources to make a campfire or a fire pit yet by the time the first night falls, you can craft 1-2 torches to use as a source of light instead. Do NOT stay in the darkness as it will deplete your sanity bar.

By day 3, prefer having a base camp complete with a fire pit and a science machine. In addition, try making a crock pot as early as possible.

You may try building an alchemy engine as well if you’ve found sufficient materials for making one early.

Lastly, try finding a pig village—a settlement of pigs where the player will find 5-9 houses—near which to build your base as well. Pigs are neutral mobs who normally are harmless, although unfriendly towards Webber, Wortox, Wurt as well as some modded characters (e.g.: Gura). They are also hostile towards monster mobs.

Do take note not to settle down too close to a pig village however, as werepigs will spawn on full moons or after a pig has consumed 4× monster foods, turning them into hostile mobs. Typically, a werepig will transform back into a regular pig after 2 minutes or when the next day arrives, depending on which comes first.

If character change upon death is enabled rather than players turning into ghosts, making a base camp at the florid postern may or may not be better. Regardless, you may want to leave a bunch of necessities at your base should you be unable to retrieve your old equipment and any resources you may have been carrying with you until your death, especially if a portion of it may have been lost to fire damage or otherwise.

In the scenario of touch stone resurrection, other living players may want to stay off-screen whilst their friend is resurrecting as there is a chance for the produced lightning to hit them instead.

A Pig King may also lie in the village on wooden flooring surrounded by obelisks. Players can make offerings to him during daytime or dusk in exchange for gold nuggets. The gold value differs depending on what the player offers to the King, the full list which can be consulted here: Don't Starve Wiki/Pig King/#Exchange rate.

Generally speaking, trading eggs or non-monster meats will give the player 1× gold nugget. Various trinkets which can be found by means such as digging up graves using a shovel, picking tumbleweeds or befriending catcoons (among other means) may reward the player with up to 10× gold nuggets.

By day 9, prefer having an alchemy engine added to your base. Continue gathering supplies, and start catching wild animals for stocking up in food.

Rabbits are a common example source of morsel, and also serve as components for making a prestihatitator, to make nightmare fuel, in turn allowing to create a divining rod among other things—certain recipes for modded characters also require the use of nightmare fuel.

Try finding graves to dig up gems and trinkets if your sanity isn't too low, and find gears for making an ice box and divining rod; the latter which serves to locate the things in order to build a portal to the next world, as well as find Maxwell's door, which transports the player from survival to adventure mode.

If you’ve succeeded in finding a swamp, lead hostile mobs to it to have them help you kill tentacles to loot its spikes, as tentacle spike is a powerful weapon if you don’t already have a viable replacement.

During this period, focus on preparing for the harsh conditions of the winter—freezing temperatures, and scarcer food. This means you’ll absolutely need to have an ice box ready to store lots of food in it

Keep in mind that crock pot food typically is much better, and again, only eat when you are hungry enough to help your food supplies to last for the entire winter.

Have a farm at your base camp—whether an actual farm or fertilised berry bushes, and make a bee box to store honey for the winter.

Keep in mind that farms don’t grow during the winter, hence produce should be harvested beforehand. Bees also don’t come out of their nests (or here, the bee box) during the set duration for winter either. You may either leave the collected honey to rest in the bee box until it’s necessary to collect it, or go ahead and store it in your ice box.

Make warm clothes and have materials ready to make thermal stones for facing the harsher temperatures in winter. Optionally, you may want to craft higher tier weapons depending on what you already have or what your character comes with (especially if modded), as Deerclops may pay you a visit during the winter.

The Deerclops eyeball looted after killing one can be used to craft an eyebrella, which provides its wearer with 240 points of protection against overheating and absolute protection from rain and lightning, making it a highly valuable dress item for both spring and summer.

During this time, try eating the least amount of food possible. If the team has characters who get hungry at a faster rate or otherwise, you may need to go on hunts and set up traps for catching rabbits or moles.

Keep in mind that killing too many innocent creatures within a short amount of time generates naughtiness, which after reaching a certain threshold (random number ranging between 31 and 50) will spawn Krampus, a neutral mob that steals items left on the ground.

Each minute of restraint lowers the player’s naughtiness by 1. As such, players can reduce their naughtiness by 8 if they restrain from killing any of the specified critters for an entire day.

Stay warm! The freezing temperatures will eventually make you lose health points, which will only make going about your day much rougher until spring comes. If you haven’t had the opportunity yet, make a thermal stone to carry with you on your short trips, and preferably have warm clothes to wear.

You can either reheat your thermal stone regularly to maintain its high temperature and prevent you from losing too many health points to freezing, or restore its durability with a sewing kit or have materials to make more thermal stones afterwards. Do note that regardless of how you’re playing it, you’ll want to reheat your thermal stone every once in a while so as to not freeze to your own doom.

During winter, going on a koalefant hunt will result in finding a winter koalefant instead. Players can use the winter koalefant trunk to make a puffy vest to face the freezing temperatures of the aforementioned season.

Pengulls are only active during winter, making them a good source for eggs, albeit they typically will try to hide their eggs, which they only drop until they are either killed or the eggs have rotted.

Keep in mind that certain modded characters like Nahida may be able to approach pengulls without them attempting to hide their eggs, saving players the trouble of needing to kill the pengulls first as any nearby animals will start swarming the offender once one of them is attacked by the player.

Once spring comes, glaciers will begin to melt as temperatures start rising again. Bees will also turn red and become more hostile, albeit they aren’t considered killer bees. Beefalos enter their mating phase, which lasts for the entire season.

Sanity drain during spring may be more important as dusk segments will be significantly longer, especially in the first ⅔ of spring, although they become much shorter once entering the last third before summer hits.

Flowers will randomly grow regardless of whether there are any insects nearby or not. Regardless, players may also plant flowers by catching a live butterfly, and planting it—which can be used to restore sanity and gather petals to make a garland, among other things.

Trees also take 25% less time to grow and reach their next stage.

Rabbit holes close during spring, forcing players to look for other sources of food.

Rainfall periods are much more frequent in spring, making fuel less efficient when lighting a fire. Lightning strikes will occur more often as well, causing damage to the player and vulnerable structures if unprotected—particularly during this season, you may want to protect your base camp with a lightning rod to derive lightning bolts and prevent flammable items from catching fire.

Ideally, you may want to place a lightning rod every 14 tiles to optimise the number of lightning rods for 100% lightning strike coverage. 2 to 4 lightning rods would be the recommended number for a base of 1-6 ice flingomatics (2× gears, 15× ice, 2× electrical doodad per unit structure)—a craftable structure that can be prototyped to launch snowballs and extinguish smoldering objects or fires within range.

If you happen to be stranded on the island with a certain blue or green fellow, you may be in luck as they tend to set up lightning rods as early as during the first 10 days of the game…

In addition to more frequent rainfall, frog rains may also occur (16% chance), spawning 1 frog every 0.1-2 seconds within 60m of a player. This makes frog rains a great opportunity to obtain frog legs.

Generally speaking, attacking frogs individually isn't advised as they spawn too fast to be killed, which results in them stacking up and stunlocking the player.

Different strategies may be used to deal with frogs spawned from a frog rain, such as luring them to various mobs--among which are beefalo, moose and pig, using area damage or effect, traps or simply running away as frogs issuing from frog rains will despawn once unloaded.

If lunar rifts have been activated, bright-eyed frogs will replace 60% of the frogs.

Days are much longer in summer, with dusk segments being the shortest during this season, and nighttime being of average duration. Longer daytime segments make daylight-related sanity drain a minor issue during summer compared to other seasons.

During periodic hound waves, red hounds may spawn which pose a severe fire danger to bases as they ignite upon being killed, although they are an important source for red gems.

Antlion appears in the desert biome during summer—players can either offer tributes to appease it or kill it, lest it creates tremors on the surface, and results in cave-ins when a player goes inside the caves. During a rare rainfall, the antlion will temporarily burrow itself underground, preventing players from interacting with it.

If undealt with, your character will alert you whenever tremors are about to occur, in the same way they do before a hound or deerclops attack—preferably, stay away from any objects or structures to mitigate the actual damage caused by the antlion disturbances.

New structures cannot be built on top of sinkholes on the surface (not to be confused with sinkholes leading to the caves), and players will be slowed down when walking on them. They cannot be removed by the player, and will only begin to self-repair after 21-22 days since their formation, taking 9-11 more days to fully repair.

In addition to antlion disturbances, other seasonal hazards—overheating and wildfires combine to make summer the most challenging season in the surface world.

Stay fresh! To cool yourself down under the blazing sun, you may use and combine keeping a cooled thermal stone in your inventory, wearing an fashion melon, ice cube (2× electrical doodad, 4× rope, 10× ice), eyebrella (1× deerclops eyeball, 15× twigs, 4× bone shards) and or summer vests, hiding in the shade of a leaf-bearing tree or using tools such as an umbrella (6× twigs, 1× pig skin and 6× silk).

Spring, summer and fall are pretty much indistinguishable in the caves outside for their total rainfall (highest in spring, nearly nonexistent in summer, and moderate in autumn)—this makes summer an ideal season for cave exploration as the player won’t need any thermal protection, and wetness protection is usually unrequired.

If you’re able to mitigate the sanity drain from being in a low light environment, cave bases and gardens benefit from 100% wildfire and overheating protection.

2× units of eggs, 1.25× units of meats

Monster meat may be used as part of the recipe, although it has a 50% chance of producing monster lasagna instead, unless combined with any normal meat.

Cooking time: 40s

Perish time: 20 days

Restores: 75 hunger, 20 health, 5 sanity

1.5× units of fruits, 1× butter, 1× honey

Cooking time: 40s

Perish time: 10 days

Restores: 150 hunger, 60 health, 5 sanity

At least 3× units of meats

Note that adding twigs, mandrakes, tallbird eggs, any sweeteners or more than one monster meat will result in kabobs, mandrake soup, bacon and eggs, honey ham or monster lasagna respectively.

Cooking time: 15s

Perish time: 10 days

Restores: 150 hunger, 12 health, 5 sanity

Meaty stew ties with cooked mandrake, fresh fruit crepes and tall scotch eggs as one of the most belly-filling foods in the game. While it lacks a significant sanity or health boost compared to the other mentioned foods, it doesn’t require any non-renewable or exceptionally rare ingredients, possibly making it one of the easiest to make along with tall scotch eggs.

1× tallbird egg, 1× unit of vegetables, 2× filler

Cooking time: 40s

Perish time: 15 days

Restores: 150 hunger, 60 health, 5 sanity