Klei's season-survivor Don't Starve excels as a single-player experience, where a world full of dark forests, Moose-Goose (opens in new tab) , and warm beards tickles that roguelike itch in all the right ways. A missing and seemingly expected element of the genre—and a subject of heated debate across multiple closed threads on the game's official forums—is multiplayer support so friends can huddle together against winter's chill or place hats on neighboring pig-folk. Surprise: Klei's planning a multiplayer expansion (opens in new tab) out this summer and free for current Starvians.
The expansion, entitled Don't Starve Together, brings public and private co-op to the sandbox food-forager. That means we'll see "most of" the single-player features brought into a networked capacity, including the game's lovely crafting and constructing systems in addition to its gameplay-shifting seasons. The studio is still figuring out its preferred player limit, but four players stands as the current planned minimum.
Previously, Klei sold Starve as a solo affair, with the team stating (opens in new tab) , "If we were to implement multiplayer now, we would have to re-architect all of this code, which would have unavoidable spill-over effects for the single player." A well-received launch, Steam Workshop support , and a content-rich DLC bolstered Klei's confidence for Starve's staying power. After "quietly smuggling in some new people," Klei switched its stance on multiplayer from "Could Be a Thing" to "This Is a Thing Now."
Don't Starve Together should be out sometime this summer, but Klei says it'll toss up a beta on Steam Early Access soon after alpha testing. Owners of the game get the update for free, but the games price will jump to $20/£11 after the alpha kicks off, so grab it now (opens in new tab) if that's too rich for your blood. Lots of excited discussion is also underway in the expansion's new forums (opens in new tab) , too.
