Don't Starve Together Gets Free Reign Of Giants Features

Don't Starve Together [official site] takes the elements of 2D survival game Don't Starve and rebuilds them for co-operative purposes. The game has been in Early Access since late last year, and its most recent free update has just added all the extra monsters, items and features from the game's original expansion, Reign of Giants.

Reign of Giants expanded Don't Starve in terms of content, taking the procedural worlds and adding variety in every direction. That included two new playable characters: "Wigfrid, a stage actress who went a bit too far with method acting on her latest role, an ancient Valkyrie, or Webber, a young boy who lives inside the spider who tried to eat him long ago." It also included new biomes, creatures, and a full year of seasons by introducing spring and summer.

Porting these over to multiplayer wasn't as simple as simply copy-pasting sprites and code between games, and certain creatures have been re-balanced to better suit Togetherness. For example, fire spreads more slowly than it did in singleplayer and giants are a constant feature rather than "jerks who come down from the proverbial hills to harass one unlucky player per season."

The update also introduces some "relatively large mechanical changes", aside from the expansion content. From the Steam post about the update:

• Rabbits and other small creatures that can go in your inventory need food too! You can feed them to keep them alive, but if you lock a rabbit in a box and leave it there for days, it’ll starve and turn into meat. And then rot. Yuck.
• Food left on crockpots and on drying racks will start spoiling before you collect it. They would previously last forever until harvested.
• If you don’t have any gear that protects you from the rain (there’s some new things for that!), the rain will make your character wet. If they get wet enough, they’ll start cooling down and losing sanity. Previously, the rain would directly make you lose sanity.
• Structures with wood in them can burn. You can hammer down the burnt husk to get some resources back.

I like the sound of being able to keep rabbits alive, because I am a big softie and would like to keep them as pets. For the same reason, I am now terrified to play the game, due to the inevitable guilt of failing to do so and knowing that I could have kept the animals alive if only I'd been better or more attentive.