How the Caves Work on a Don't Starve Together Server

Your server runs two worlds at once, the surface and the caves, each on its own port. Here is what that means in practice.

3 min read · Updated Sep 24, 2026 · By GuavaHost Team

Two worlds, one server

Don't Starve Together splits a world into shards. The surface is the master shard, the caves are a second one, and they talk to each other so a player can go down a sinkhole and come out underground. They are separate worlds with separate saves, running side by side.

Your server is set up this way from the start. Every time it starts, it launches both shards together from the same cluster folder, DoNotStarveTogether/config/server/, with the surface in Master/ and the caves in Caves/. Both shards are included on every plan.

Two ports

You can see both ports in your control panel (sign in at customer.guavahost.com, open My servers and click Manage on the server):

• The surface listens on your server's main port, the one shown at the top of the server page and as Server address in the Ports & network card on the Overview tab.
• The caves listen on a second port. It is shown in Startup settings on the Settings tab as Caves port, and it is listed under Other ports in the same Ports & network card.

Both need to be reachable, because when your character climbs down, your game opens a fresh connection to the caves port. A surface only setup lets you play above ground and drops you when you try to descend. Yours has a real second port allocated for it, so descending works. The Caves port field is locked, listed under Set by GuavaHost, for that reason: pointing the caves at a port that is not allocated to your server would make them unreachable.

The two shards also talk to each other on an internal port inside the server. You will see it in cluster.ini as master_port. Leave it alone; it never leaves the machine.

What this means for mods

Every mod has to be enabled in both shards, in a separate modoverrides.lua file for each: Master/modoverrides.lua for the surface and Caves/modoverrides.lua for the caves. A mod switched on in only one of them loads in only one world.

On your server you do not have to keep the two in step by hand. List your mods on the Mods page (under Game tools in the server menu), and every time the server starts it adds each one to both files. See Installing Steam Workshop mods for the details, including how to give a mod different options underground.

What this means for memory

Two shards means two game processes, each wanting about a gigabyte. That is why our starting plan is 2 GB rather than 1 GB, and why a mod list costs twice what you might expect: each mod is loaded in both. How much RAM a Don't Starve Together server needs goes into sizing.

The caves are always on

Some guides tell you to save memory by setting shard_enabled to false in cluster.ini. That does not apply here. Your server's startup always launches both shards, and the panel sets shard_enabled = true in cluster.ini every time it starts, so the caves stay on. That is a good thing: underground is a large part of the game. If memory is tight, a bigger plan is the fix, not a smaller world.

If the caves stop working

• The Console tab shows the surface shard. The caves keep their own log, DoNotStarveTogether/config/server/Caves/server_log.txt, which you can open from the Files tab. Look near the end of it for errors.
• Leave the [SHARD] section of cluster.ini and the server.ini files in Master/ and Caves/ alone. The panel rewrites their ports and shard settings every time the server starts, so hand edits there either get overwritten or break the pair.
• Press Restart at the top of the server page, which brings both shards up together.

Still stuck? Jump into our Discord at discord.gg/GuavaHost and the team will help you out.

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