Klei Entertainment has done it again, with a new update to Don’t Starve Together that reinvents the wheel when it comes to farming. The Return of Them: Reap what you Sow update is free to all players and reworks the entire farming system of Don’t Starve Together, giving players a new way to min-max food production. So prepare to get your hands dirty! 

You can say goodbye to the Basic and Improved Farms of the past, as the Reap what you Sow update has done away with those farming structures entirely, replacing them with the Garden Rigamajig, which can be deployed four times per build, producing 4 Farm Soil plots that can then be hoed with the new Garden Hoe to plant seeds. What these seeds grow into is now dependent on the season they were planted, with different plants having preferred seasons. The final tool, the Watering Can, can be filled at most sources of water in the game, such as Ponds and the Oasis, or with items such as Ice or Water Balloons. But if you really want to dive into the best ways to take care of your garden, you’ll also need the Gardeneer Hat to look into all the details. 

The Gardeneer Hat can be used to research plants and reveal the Plant Registry, a new item to the compendium tracking the growth stages of all the plants, veggies, and weeds you’ve cultivated so far. It’ll take a lot of experimentation and research, but the more you research, the more will appear in the compendium, including the preferred growth season, wetness, and nutrient desires of the different veggies. Yup, ground nutrients are now also a thing! Each plant adds to or pulls from the ground nutrients of a tile, with 3 values to track: Growth Formula, Compost, and Manure. If any of these values are unmet or unsatisfied by the plants, the plants gain stress.

Now, stressed plants aren’t the end of the world, but there is a big payoff to keeping the stress low on your produce. Not only do unstressed plants produce more copies of the desired veggies, they also produce more seeds for replanting. And if you keep the plant stress at an absolute minimum, you can get a new type of produce variant, the Giant Vegetables. While mainly a point of pride among fellow players (they can be weighed with the new Produce Scale,) they can also be hammered for even more veggies and seeds. Or rot, if you leave them alone long enough. Just don’t leave too many to rot or you’ll have to face the two new mobs, the Fruit Flies and the Lord of the Fruit Flies. Also rot leads to stressed plants. Makes sense, you wouldn’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of rotting corpses while growing up, would you? Very stressful. 

And that should be all the major points of the Return of Them: Reap what you Sow update to Don’t Starve Together. As with most of the updates to the multiplayer game, the game aspects are free to all players who already own the game, with cosmetic items and skins available for purchase at additional costs. Stay tuned for future guides, including one covering these new plant mechanics in closer detail, as the nutrient scores are their own can of worms in the Constant. 

Edit/Update 9/19/2023

Bonus fact! This update lends itself to Wormwood players, as he can access many of the plant aspects without the Gardeneer Hat, and can plant seeds without hoeing the ground. As resident plant boy, he can talk to plants and ask what they want or need. Combined with some recent buffs and skill tree additions to various characters, Wormwood can unlock the ability to make plants grow faster as well, so if you want to min/max your farm, consider playing as Wormwood.