Don’t Starve Update Adds Sanity, Sandbox and Story Modes

Klei Entertainment today released what they're calling the "Insanity Update" for their roguelike/survival game Don't Starve. If you thought the game was too easy (which it certainly isn't), the new update is intended to make the game even harder with the release of a new character named Wes.

Wes is a mime, and according to Klei, he's just not very good at anything. Kind of like mimes in general. You'd have think that with their diminishing popularity in the late 90s, they'd be extinct by now. No one likes mimes.

There's a reason for the update being called the Insanity Update, as it adds an all new feature to the game called Sanity.

In short, your character will lose his or her sanity when left alone in the dark, gets close to scary monsters, or does "crazy things" like eating monster meat or jumping through a wormhole. The player can regain his or her sanity by doing "dapper things" like wearing fancy clothes in the sunshine and eating candy.

Low sanity isn't fatal to the character, but according to Klei, "strange creatures from another time and place are attracted to madness." A bit like Cthulhu, in other words. If you kill these nightmare creatures, you'll gain resources to build new and powerful items, so playing with your sanity levels is a worthy gamble.

The update adds the long-requested save slot feature, allowing you to run up to four characters at a time. The game is also being split into Sandbox Mode, which is the game as you know it, and an Experimental Adventure Mode, which allows you to play the game in as a proper adventure, with five levels of difficulty and an actual story.

In addition to the new character, sanity meters, and the new gameplay modes, the Insanity update adds mod support for Steam, so you can tweak the game to your hearts content and share those tweaks, modifications, and improvements or what-have-you with others on the Steam Workshop. To that end, the developers are releasing some source scripts with the game, so you'll have full access to mess around with the inner workings of Don't Starve. Klei has launched a modding forum for anyone keen on meddling with the game to talk about their experiments.

As if the game wasn't hard enough, one of the most popular mods on the forum is a Hardcore Enabled mod that causes the monsters to do even more damage than they already to.

There's also an interesting mod called "A Brighter Night" which aims to add more things to do during those boring nights, which typically involve just waiting for the sun to rise and eluding the grue.