📖 Red Caps: Toxic Tricks Every Don't Starve Survivor Needs
Red Mushrooms in Don't Starve
The comprehensive guide to finding, using, and mastering Red Mushrooms in both Don't Starve and Don't Starve Together
Table of Contents
Introduction
If you searched for "red mushroom don't starve," you're likely a fellow Don't Starve adventurer looking for info on the red mushroom (also known in-game as the Red Cap). Players often want to know what Red Mushrooms do, whether they're safe to eat, and how to use them effectively.
Red Mushrooms in Don't Starve can be a blessing or a curse. Used correctly, they're a handy resource for filler food, trading, or even poisoning unsuspecting mobs. Used incorrectly, they can tank your health or sanity. This guide covers detailed strategies, character interactions, patch changes, and community tips so you can confidently handle Red Caps in any situation.
"Even though red is usually the 'bad color' as Wickerbottom warns, we'll show you how to turn this underdog item into a survival tool!"
Red Mushrooms 101: Overview and Identification
What are Red Mushrooms?
In Don't Starve, Red Mushrooms are a type of mushroom that spawn naturally in the world. When harvested, a Red Mushroom yields an item called a Red Cap (the red mushroom cap). There are three mushroom types in the game – Red, Green, and Blue – each with distinct effects.
Red Mushrooms are easily identified by their bright red cap with white spots, resembling the classic Amanita muscaria toadstool. They typically grow in Grassland and Forest biomes in DS and DST, often appearing singly or in small patches (and occasionally in a "Fairy Ring" circle as a set piece).
Red Mushroom in its natural state
When and How to Harvest
Red Mushrooms only pop up during the Day. At Dusk and Night they hide underground (you'll just see a closed mushroom cap or nothing at all). This is unlike Green Mushrooms (available at Dusk) or Blue Mushrooms (available at Night).
Harvesting Method #1
Pick an exposed Red Mushroom during the Day to get:
Mushroom spot remains intact and will regrow after rain.
Harvesting Method #2
Dig it up with a Shovel at any time to get:
Destroys the mushroom spot permanently, meaning no regrowth.
Cave Mushrooms
In Reign of Giants (RoG) DLC and Don't Starve Together (DST), you'll encounter Mushtrees in caves – giant glowing mushroom trees. The red variety (Red Mushtree) can be chopped with an axe to drop Red Caps.
Important Note: In single-player Don't Starve (including DLCs), during a Full Moon, surface mushrooms temporarily transform into Mushtrees! This doesn't happen in Don't Starve Together.
Stats and Effects: Raw vs. Cooked Red Caps
| Food | Hunger | Health | Sanity | Spoil Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Raw Red Cap
|
+12.5 ⚡ | -20 ❤ (damage) | ±0 🙍 (no effect) | 10 days |
Cooked Red Cap
|
0 ⚡ | +1 ❤ (minor heal) | -10 🙍 (sanity loss) | 10 days |
Eating a raw Red Cap is unviable as a food source for every character except Wormwood due to the severe health penalty!
Character Quotes About Red Caps
"Red usually indicates poison"
"POISONOUS FUNGUS"
"It smells funny"
"This seems like a bad idea"
Character-Specific Interactions
- Wigfrid: Cannot eat Red Caps at all due to her meat-only diet.
- Wurt: Gets +33% extra Hunger from vegetables, including Red Caps (~16.6 Hunger for raw Red Caps).
- Wormwood: Takes no health damage from eating plants, making raw Red Caps a viable food source for him!
- WX-78: Has no special interaction with mushrooms; still calls Red Cap a "POISONOUS FUNGUS".
Cooking with Red Mushrooms: Crock Pot and Recipes
Using Red Caps in Crock Pot
One of the best uses for Red Mushrooms is as a Crock Pot ingredient. When cooking dishes in the Crock Pot, the negative effects of ingredients do not carry over into the prepared dish. All Crock Pot recipes have fixed outputs and ignore the individual penalties of raw ingredients.
Red Caps count as 0.5 units of "Veggie" in Crock Pot recipes, same as carrots, berries, etc. They are interchangeable with other veggies for most recipes that require a vegetable or filler.
Crock Pot - perfect for transforming toxic mushrooms into safe meals
Popular Recipes Using Red Caps
Meatballs
- 1 Meat (any type)
- 3 Fillers (can be Red Caps)
Restores ~62.5 hunger with no health penalty, despite using potentially harmful Red Caps!
Ratatouille
- 4 Vegetables (can all be Red Caps)
A vegetarian dish that's perfect for using up excess Red Caps without suffering their toxic effects.
Pierogi
- 1 Meat (any type)
- 1 Egg
- 1 Vegetable (can be Red Cap)
- 1 Filler (anything)
Great healing dish that uses Red Cap as the vegetable component without any negative effects.
Important Cooking Tips
Cooking on Fire vs. Crock Pot
For Crock Pot usage, it's better to use raw Red Caps because cooked ones have lost their hunger value (0 hunger). There's no need to pre-cook them for recipes.
The only time you might deliberately cook Red Caps on a fire is if you intend to eat them for sanity loss (to go insane safely for nightmare fuel).
Preservation Tips
You cannot dry mushrooms on the Drying Rack (that's for meats). The best preservation is an Ice Box or Salt Box (DST) to slow spoilage.
If your Red Caps are about to spoil, cook them into a Crock Pot dish like Meatballs, which will give you 10 days of shelf life with actual food benefits.
Remember: Even if Red Caps rot, don't throw them away! Rot is good fertilizer and a crafting ingredient for items like Booster Shots (rot + nitre + stinger).
Clever Uses and Hazards: Using Red Mushrooms in Survival
1. Baiting and Poisoning Mobs
One of the coolest tricks is using Red Caps to harm or kill creatures that eat them. When a mob eats a raw Red Cap, it suffers the same -20 health penalty that players do.
Killing Gobblers (Turkeys)
"Gobblers eat raw redcaps, and three kills one. No chasing required, no tools required, just your bare hands and some red mushrooms. EASY!"
- Drop 3 raw Red Caps near a Gobbler
- Step back and let it eat them
- Gobbler dies after 3 caps (50 HP / 20 damage per cap)
- Collect 2 free Drumsticks without any chase!
Killing Beefalo Safely
"Find beefalo, feed it red mushrooms until it dies, profit."
- Feed a Beefalo about 13-25 raw Red Caps
- The Beefalo will show a hurt animation with each bite
- It eventually dies, dropping meat and wool
- The rest of the herd stays peaceful – they don't realize you "caused" the death!
While using Red Caps as poison, be careful not to accidentally feed them to your own follower mobs or yourself. If you have a pet Pigman friend following you, he might try to eat the Red Cap you dropped for another mob.
2. Manure Farming (Feeding to Pigs)
Another practical use: feeding Red Caps to Pigs for Manure. Red Caps count as vegetables, and despite being toxic to players, pigs don't lose health from eating veggies.
- In DST, a single pig produces roughly one manure per vegetable eaten
- Take a stack of 20 Red Caps to a Pig Village and feed them all out
- You'll get a bunch of manure piles in return
- Since Red Caps are often abundant, this is a convenient way to convert mushrooms into valuable fertilizer
Valuable Manure - perfect for gardens
3. Sanity Management
There are times you want to induce insanity (for farming nightmare fuel or to use certain character perks). Cooked Red Caps are a cheap way to knock off some sanity in a controlled fashion: each cooked cap is -10 Sanity.
Since cooked Red Caps only hurt sanity and actually heal 1 HP, this is a relatively safe way to lower your sanity without risking health.
4. Emergency Suicide / Health Reset (Fringe use)
If you need to die quickly (perhaps to use a Meat Effigy or Touch Stone), eating raw Red Caps can expedite the process. Since each raw Red Cap is -20 health, a handful can kill a character at low HP.
"The red cap will save you since it kills you – but the game is called Don't Starve and ghosts can't starve, so perfectly fine to eat the mushroom."
5. Light and Fuel Uses
Red Caps can be used as fuel for fires – both raw and cooked are flammable. A Cooked Red Cap provides 7.5 seconds of burn time in a fire pit or campfire. That's pretty low (for comparison, a log gives 90 seconds).
Using mushrooms as fire fuel is generally inefficient unless you're out of twigs and logs. Consider it a last resort fuel source.
Don't Starve Together Exclusives: Planters, Spores, and New Crafts
Mushroom Planter – Farming Red Mushrooms
DST introduced the Mushroom Planter, a craftable structure that lets you grow your own mushrooms at base. It requires 8 Rot, 5 Manure, and 2 Living Logs to craft (Science Machine prototype).
How it works:
- Plant either a Red Cap or a Red Spore in it to grow Red Mushrooms
- Takes 3.75 days to fully grow a batch
- A planted Red Cap can yield up to 4 Red Caps on harvest
- A planted Red Spore can yield up to 6 Red Caps at full growth
- Planters started with spores have a 50% chance to spawn a new spore when fully grown
- You can harvest up to 4 times before the planter needs re-filling with Living Logs
Mushroom Planter - for renewable mushrooms
On the surface, planters function in all seasons except Winter – winter cold causes the mushrooms to wither into Rot. Either plan your grows to harvest before winter, or bring the planters into caves, where seasons don't affect them.
Why Farm Red Mushrooms?
Crock Pot Filler
Large-scale crockpot filler production. Pair with farms for meat to make endless Meatballs or Meat Stew.
Rot Production
Let excess caps rot for buckets of fertilizer, useful for farms, berry bushes, and crafting.
Wormwood Synergy
Wormwood can eat raw Red Caps safely and also has skills to plant Moon Shrooms in planters.
Aesthetics and Light
Planters emit a gentle light when mushrooms are fully grown, with red caps giving a warm red glow at night.
New Crafts: Sunrise Lure and Funcaps (Mushroom Hats)
Sunrise Lure (Daylight Fishing Lure)
- Sunrise Spoon: 2 Twigs + 1 Red Cap
- Sunrise Spinnerbait: 1 Twig + 1 Silk + 1 Red Cap
These lures are most effective during Day to attract certain fish (100% effectiveness during day, 30% at other times).
Mushroom Hats (Funcaps)
- 1 Shroom Skin (from Toadstool boss)
- 1 Red Cap
- 1 Rope
The Red Funcap slows hunger drain by 25%, provides insulation, and periodically spawns Red Spores around you. It perishes after ~6 days of wear.
Character Updates and Interactions (DST)
Wormwood (2022 Update)
- Can eat raw Red Caps with no health penalty
- His Lunar perk allows planting Moon Shrooms in planters
- Perfect character for utilizing Red Mushrooms as food
- Still takes sanity damage from cooked Red Caps (-10)
- Can use Red Caps to intentionally lower sanity when needed
Wurt (2019 Update)
- Gets +33% extra Hunger from vegetables including Red Caps
- Raw Red Cap gives her ~16.6 Hunger (vs 12.5 for others)
- Still takes normal health damage from raw Red Caps
- Her quote on cooked Red Caps: "Bit better..."
Wigfrid
- Cannot eat Red Caps at all due to her meat-only diet
- Will refuse with: "Umami or not, I don't want it"
- Can only use Red Caps indirectly (feeding pigs, crockpot filler)
- No direct benefit from Red Mushrooms
Walter (2020 Update)
- No special mushroom ability
- Says "I'm pretty sure red is the bad color"
- Doesn't gain sanity from food, but likely still loses sanity from cooked Red Caps
- Limited benefit from Red Mushrooms overall
Community Tips and Meta
"Red Mushrooms are good for giving to pigs, luring Gobblers, and using as Crock Pot filler."
- Common community mantra
Community Wisdom
Generally, the community jokes that Red Caps are the "worst" mushroom of the three. Many experienced players still pick Red Mushrooms when they see them because they know they can turn them into something beneficial rather than let them go to waste.
Top Player Tips
- Use Red Caps for poop farming and gobbler bait
- Use Green Caps for sanity management
- Use Blue Caps for healing and hunger
- Store mushrooms in an Ice Box to prevent spoilage
- Let extra mushrooms rot for fertilizer or Booster Shots
Creative Challenge Ideas
- Try to kill a boss with Red Caps (Bearger would need 150 Red Caps in DST!)
- Create a Red Cap surplus with multiple mushroom planters
- Design a "Death Garden" trap for mobs using Red Mushrooms
- Combine Funcap hats with Pig followers for a mobile spore farm
Funny Community Stories
"There's even a Reddit post titled 'I dare you to kill Bearger with Red Caps' celebrating this absurd idea. In normal play, you're better off using Bearger's own habits against him rather than 300 mushrooms. However, there is a recorded incident on Klei's forum: a Bearger did accidentally kill itself by eating a Red Cap that someone left on the ground!"
The community has embraced the underdog status of Red Mushrooms, turning their "weaknesses" into creative strategies. While Blue and Green mushrooms may have more straightforward benefits, Red Caps have earned their place in creative play styles.
Recent Updates and Changes
July 2024 Update
Ghost Haunting Fix: "Fixed Mushrooms changing form by Ghosts haunting them getting added to world regrowth"
This patch closed an exploit where ghosts could haunt mushrooms to trigger regrowth or transform them in unexpected ways. You can no longer use ghost haunting to manipulate mushroom spawns.
2022-2023 Updates
Wormwood's Skill Tree: Allowing Lunar Mushroom planting
Wormwood gained the ability to plant lunar spores on the planter in addition to regular ones, giving Moon Shrooms. This keeps mushrooms relevant for advanced players and expands mushroom farming options.
2020 Farming Update
Reap What You Sow: Farming vegetables became different
Mushrooms remained outside the farm plot system, keeping their unique identity as wild foods or planter-grown. This made mushrooms a reliable off-grid food source unaffected by nutrient cycles, increasing their relative value.
Quick Reference Summary
Basic Facts
- Available during Day (hides at Dusk/Night)
- Pick for 1× Red Cap, dig for 2× Red Caps
- Raw: +12.5 Hunger, -20 Health, ±0 Sanity
- Cooked: 0 Hunger, +1 Health, -10 Sanity
- Spoils in 10 days (both raw and cooked)
Best Uses
- Crock Pot filler (counts as 0.5 veggie)
- Gobbler poison (3 kill a Gobbler)
- Feeding to pigs for manure
- DST: Mushroom planters for farming
- DST: Crafting Sunrise Lures and Red Funcaps
Character Notes
- Wormwood: Can eat raw without health penalty
- Wurt: Gets +33% more hunger from raw
- Wigfrid: Cannot eat mushrooms at all
- Everyone else: Use in crockpot or for utility
"Don't judge a mushroom by its color! With the right knowledge, even the humble Red Cap can be a valuable survival tool."