Don't Starve Food Guide

An unofficial food reference, Crock Pot simulator, and recipe discovery tool for Don't Starve, Don't Starve Together, and their supported DLCs and characters. The guide is a static TypeScript/HTML/CSS application with reusable food and recipe data and no runtime package dependencies.

Use the live guide or the GitHub Pages version. The separate foodguide-app repository provides an Electron desktop wrapper and release builds.

Run locally

Use Node.js 24 or newer and npm. CI uses Node.js 24; nvm use selects that major version from .nvmrc. Dependency installation rejects older Node versions.

npm ci --ignore-scripts
npm run dev

Open 127.0.0.1:8080/. The development command generates the icon sprites, serves html/ on loopback, and opens a browser. Serve the guide over HTTP; opening the HTML directly with file:// prevents module loading in most browsers. Local use needs no internet connection after dependencies are installed, apart from external links to the game and wiki.

Using the guide

In the Simulator, choose a game version and character, filter ingredients, and add up to four items to the pot. Discovery accepts an inventory of ingredients and shows possible recipes. Food List and Recipe List provide sortable reference tables. The Statistics Analyzer evaluates ingredient combinations in batches and can be paused.

Use Tab to reach controls and page tabs. In an ingredient search, use Up/Down to highlight results and Enter to select. Shift+Enter removes one copy; Ctrl+Enter (Command+Enter on macOS) removes all copies. Escape dismisses the results; Up/Down or refocusing the search reopens them. Dropdown menus support Up/Down, Home/End, Enter/Space, and Escape.

Picked ingredients show a checkbox to remove all copies. When there is more than one copy, a minus also appears to remove one. The ingredient itself adds another copy in the Simulator and toggles membership in Discovery. Choose Compact for dense rows, Normal for larger rows, or Cozy for cards; list and icon-only views are also available. Compact icons pack into smaller tiles, with larger targets retained on touchscreens.

Group results by ingredient type or preparation, or leave them ungrouped. Groups appear as cards across wider pickers and stack on narrow screens. Auto sort prioritizes exact names and search relevance, keeps related preparations together while browsing, and uses character-adjusted values for stat searches. Explicit name and stat sorts remain available. Display, density, sort, grouping, and cooking preferences are saved separately for the Simulator and Discovery.

Use Cooking: Practical to focus on crock pot inputs: it hides duplicate cooked and dried foods, redundant substitutes, and uncommon ingredients without a named recipe role. Specialties such as Butter and Royal Jelly remain, and Warly-only inputs appear when Warly is selected. Cooking: Everyday also hides those uncommon specialties. Both retain needed prepared ingredients, such as Roasted Birchnut, and use fish meat in place of most interchangeable live fish. These are curated browsing suggestions; availability depends on your world and play style. Cooking: All, the default, restores the full list. Cooking views apply to searches too, leave selected food in place, and do not change recipe calculations, the Food List, or analyzer filters. When a search has hidden matches, its summary offers Show all to restore them without clearing the search or changing the other picker's view.

The Statistics Analyzer and Discovery's efficiency results group consecutive combinations for the same recipe across the full filtered dataset, preserving sort order. The overview shows 25 groups per page with each group's full count. Expand a group to browse its combinations, 25 at a time. Both levels support first/previous/next/last navigation and direct page-number jumps. The main paging bars let you choose groups per page and, separately, combinations per expanded group page (10, 25, 50, or 100). Expanded runs have a tinted background and borders marking where their paged results start and end. Sort by Name to browse each recipe's combinations together, or by a stat to compare outcomes. Each row shows the exact combination's values; click its ingredients to fill the crock pot and open the Simulator. Refresh results updates a running analysis without pausing or restarting it. Completion automatically refreshes the table, preserving your browsing position where possible. You can also pause to inspect a stable snapshot. Its progress bar reports combinations checked out of the full search, including combinations that produce no valid recipe. The table reports the group range and total matching combinations. Reset filters restores the analysis's original filters, including the Statistics Analyzer's default exclusions, and returns to the first overview page. Stat gains show absolute changes; percentages appear when the ingredient baseline is nonzero.

Ingredient searches accept display names and game identifiers, with spaces or underscores between words. For example, mushroom finds Red, Green, and Blue Caps and their cooked forms. Use tag:meat to filter by a food tag or recipe:butter muffin to find ingredients for an exact recipe name.

The # links beside food and recipe names highlight an entry and can be copied or opened in another tab. The browser address links to the current section and game; use Share to include a snapshot of your pot or inventory. A shared inventory opens as a new named copy. Share lets you choose the current section, game settings, and ingredients or a highlighted entry, or omit all of them for a plain site link. You can also link to the development version on GitHub Pages or the GitHub source repository. These choices stay in the current tab between openings of the dialog. Ordinary addresses do not include ingredient selections. Back and Forward navigate between sections.

Share and Options sit beside the section tabs on wider screens and beside the title on smaller screens. On compact portrait layouts, a Food Guide mark and icon buttons keep the header short; the language menu still shows full language names when opened.

Discovery supports multiple named inventories: create, rename, duplicate, or delete an inventory using its controls. Inventories persist between sessions and synchronize across tabs on the same browser profile and site. Each tab independently chooses which inventory to view. Changing the game hides unavailable items without deleting them. Pot choices and picker preferences remain local to each tab; new tabs start with the last saved defaults. Theme and language synchronize across tabs.

Choose four pot ingredients and select Save dish to keep the combination in My cookbook, with its game and character settings. Loading a dish restores those settings and its ingredients. Cookbook cards show ingredient icons and recalculate the possible recipes using the saved settings, even when a dish has a custom name. Options includes language and Light/Dark/Device theme settings as well as backup controls. The header language picker and quick theme toggle remain available. Export all inventories and dishes as a JSON backup, or import additional copies without replacing existing entries. Backups support transferring data to another browser or the desktop app. Personal data stays on your device and is not sent to a server.

Development and deployment

npx playwright install chromium firefox
npm run check
npm run test:browser -- --browser=firefox

check runs formatting, linting, types, unit tests, and the full Chromium browser and accessibility suite. The next command runs the full suite in Firefox. Developers should run both for browser/UI changes. CI and deployment run the fast npm run check:ci checks and four Chromium smoke scenarios via npm run test:browser:smoke; full browser and accessibility audits are developer-run. On Linux, deployment tests also require Git, Bash, flock, and rsync.

• Development guide: commands, module layout, tests, and assets.
• Deployment guide: Basaltwater, GitHub Pages, and the optional server webhook.
• Browser console guide: state, calculator helpers, and paged analysis exports.
• Data and library guide: package exports, data shape, and mode filtering.

Reuse the data

Install this repository as a Git dependency:

npm install git+https://github.com/bluehexagons/foodguide.git

import { food, recipes, TOGETHER, matchesMode } from 'foodguide';
const togetherRecipes = recipes.filter(recipe =>
	matchesMode(recipe.modeMask, TOGETHER, recipe.charMask, 0),
);
const carrot = food.carrot;

The entry point works in Node and browser module environments. Collections are shared mutable objects with keyed lookups and array-like helpers; see the data guide before iterating or changing them.

Translations

UI strings live in src/strings.ts. Static HTML uses data-i18n="key", data-i18n-html="key", and data-i18n-attr-NAME="key" attributes. English is the fallback; bundled Spanish and Chinese dictionaries live in src/locales/ and are registered by the package entry point.

Food and recipe names, character labels, and game information are also localized. Names use the game's Spanish and Chinese catalogs where available, with guide translations for gaps in the older source snapshots. English names and prefab IDs remain searchable, and saved data and links retain their canonical identifiers. See localization sources and editorial exceptions.

The original Spanish and Chinese UI pass was generated by Anthropic Claude Opus; additional guide translations used OpenAI Codex and Luna assistance. Native-speaking Don't Starve players' corrections are welcome.

import { registerLocale, setLocale } from 'foodguide';
registerLocale('fr', 'Français', {
	pause: 'Pause',
	resume: 'Reprendre',
	names: { Carrot: 'Carotte' },
	// Missing keys fall back to English.
});
setLocale('fr');

For a bundled locale, add its module to src/locales/index.ts; the language picker uses the registered locale list automatically. Its exported dict must satisfy BundledLocaleDict from src/strings.ts, covering every UI string, tag, note, and game name. Tests check interpolation parameters and the HTML IDs used to populate game mechanics values. Custom locales registered through the public API can still provide partial dictionaries.

Contributors

bluehexagons, rezecib, levy9527, brewingcode, agathasilva28, 6lancmange, lakhnishMonster, lormico, and VaingloriousReptile.

Code is licensed under Apache 2.0. Don't Starve and its game artwork belong to Klei Entertainment.