📖 Thick Fur Tactics: Slay Bearger & Craft Winter Wins

No, you have options. In Year 1, you're often under-geared to take on Bearger safely.

A popular approach is to lead Bearger away from your base – let it follow you to a forest or distant grassland. If you have a Pan Flute, use it to put Bearger to sleep and then just walk away; it will wander off when it wakes.

Another trick: drop some Honey or Meat on the ground – Bearger will eat it and fall asleep after gorging on ~10 units of food. You can then ignore it until winter, at which point it hibernates.

Bearger won't despawn at season change, but as long as it's far, it won't bother you. This way, you avoid base destruction and can postpone the fight to a later time.

In the meantime, you miss out on Thick Fur, but that's okay – you can survive winter with simpler gear (Rabbit Earmuffs, Beefalo Hat, etc.) and revisit Bearger in year 2 when you're stronger.

It depends on what you want. Many players actually deliberately don't kill Bearger immediately because they value it as a wood-chopper more than the Thick Fur drop.

If you kite Bearger through a dense forest, it will flatten trees quickly, yielding tons of logs and living logs (from angry treeguards) – a resource windfall. If you kill Bearger at the start of autumn, you lose that utility (no more free logging).

Plus, Bearger's loot beyond Thick Fur is just meat, which isn't unique. So the opportunity cost of slaying Bearger is missing out on easy resource gathering.

On the other hand, if you really want a Hibearnation Vest for winter, you'll need that Thick Fur. One compromise strategy is to use Bearger for logging early autumn, then fight it at the end of autumn to claim the fur before winter (keeping it asleep until you're ready to deal the final blow can work).

Community consensus: Don't risk your life or base solely for Thick Fur in the early game – you can thrive without those items. But as you become more experienced, the fight is very manageable and the goodies become just reward for demonstrating dominion over the giants.

Ah, yes – Fur Tufts are a DST-exclusive mechanic: as Bearger roams around (in Summer and Autumn only), it periodically sheds some fur.

In fact, Bearger drops 1 fur tuft every 45 seconds or so while active, and has a 20% chance to drop 3 tufts when ground-pounding. These tufts look like small clumps of brown fur.

It's a way to get additional Thick Fur if you keep Bearger alive long enough or over multiple years. Some players joke about "fur farming": for example, trap Bearger in a Panic Room (like fencing it in or keeping it stuck on a boat) and come back later to find tufts on the ground.

But beware: fur tufts blow away after a short time (like Ashes do), so you can't leave them indefinitely. A Geometric Placement mod trick or just paying attention is needed to grab them. Also, if Bearger hibernates (winter/spring), it stops shedding.

Advanced Exploit

Some ingenious survivors use a Construction Amulet + Deconstruction Staff combo to essentially duplicate tufts:

1. Wear a Construction Amulet (green amulet) to craft Thick Fur at half cost (might consume only ~45 tufts but still give 3 Thick Fur)
2. Use a Deconstruction Staff on those Thick Fur items - normally that returns the full original recipe items
3. If it returns the full 90 tufts, you just turned 45 tufts into 90
4. Rinse and repeat

This is a resource-intensive exploit (you need green gems, etc.), and it skirts the edge of cheating.

Welcome to the late-game club. Yes, in worlds where you've activated the Lunar Rifts (post-Celestial Champion content), each giant has a mutated form.

For Bearger, if a Brightshade Gestalt (those little lunar spirits) finds its corpse, it will reanimate into the Armored Bearger, a.k.a. "zombie Bearger". This boss is significantly tougher:

• It has armor plating (requires Planar Damage to effectively harm)
• An altered attack pattern (no long yawns to exploit, continuous swipes, plus a butt slam attack)
• 7200 HP (compared to 6000 HP for normal Bearger)

If this surprise boss is not something you want to deal with, there is a trick to prevent it: immediately after killing the regular Bearger, you can burn the Bearger's corpse with a torch or fire staff. Turn that fur into ashes (sadly you lose the Thick Fur drop, but you avoid the Armored fight).

Most players who trigger rifts are prepared for these fights or want the challenge, but if you accidentally triggered it ("I just wanted the insulating pack, now this monster won't die!"), either run away (Armored Bearger will eventually despawn if not engaged) or gear up for a tough fight.

Yes (with a catch). The Loot Stash from the Klaus boss fight in winter has a chance to drop Thick Fur.

Klaus is a December-ish boss that requires a Deer Antler to open his stash. When you defeat Klaus and use the correct antler on the Loot Stash, it yields several bundles of loot.

In the fourth bundle, there are two boss loot drops which could be a Thick Fur. The odds aren't bad: about 14.3% chance for Thick Fur per drop, and it won't drop the same item twice, meaning roughly up to one Thick Fur in the stash most of the time.

In other words, Klaus's stash usually gives one item from a list including Thick Fur, Royal Jelly, Bee Queen Crown, Deerclops Eyeball, etc. So over many winters, Klaus can supply some Thick Fur.

This is actually how some long-term worlds end up with chests full of Thick Fur – they kill Klaus every winter for fun and accumulate rare boss drops they don't immediately use.

However, relying on this is iffy: Klaus himself is not trivial early on, and the drop is luck-based. So consider it a bonus. If you get a Thick Fur from Klaus before even seeing Bearger, congrats – you basically got to skip to the loot.

This was a real player concern up until recently. Once you have a Hibearnation Vest (you rarely need more than one, maybe two if playing with friends) and an Insulated Pack, additional Thick Fur tended to just sit in a chest as a trophy.

There were forum suggestions to add more recipes – ideas like Thick Fur carpet/turf, fur rugs for base decor, or new tools – because it felt underutilized.

Klei's answer was the Polar Bearger Bin, effectively one more sink for Thick Fur that's very worthwhile but only for late-game folks.

If you're not in the late-game, extra Thick Fur could be traded with other players on a server or just collected as bragging rights.

Some people make multiple Insulated Packs and use them like additional ice boxes (drop one at a secondary base, etc.), though you're limited by only one can be worn at a time.

In modded servers, who knows – maybe someone made a Fur Rug mod or decorative items (check Steam Workshop for "Thick Fur uses").

But in unmodded DST, don't stress: you're not expected to need dozens of Thick Fur. It's a limited commodity and the game's progression reflects that.