A Pig House is the only structure that permanently adds pigs to your base in Don’t Starve Together, and pigs are the cheapest standing army in the game. Each house spawns one pig that patrols during the day, fights anything hostile that wanders close, and walks back inside at dusk. Building one is not a crafting-station-free recipe, though, so you need an Alchemy Engine and a steady supply of pig skin before you can start expanding.
Quick answer: Open the Structures tab, prototype the Pig House at an Alchemy Engine, then build it with 4 Boards, 3 Cut Stone, and 4 Pig Skin and place it inside your base.
Pig House recipe and crafting requirements
The Pig House sits in the Structures tab of the crafting menu. It cannot be prototyped at a Science Machine, so an Alchemy Engine has to be standing nearby the first time you make one. After the first prototype, the recipe unlocks permanently and you can build houses anywhere you have the materials.
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Crafting tab | Structures |
| Station | Alchemy Engine (needed to prototype) |
| Materials | 4 Boards, 3 Cut Stone, 4 Pig Skin |
| Result | One pig that respawns from the house every 4 days |
Where to get Boards, Cut Stone, and Pig Skin
Boards and Cut Stone are refined from logs and rocks, so the real bottleneck is pig skin. It is fully renewable because pigs keep respawning, and a single monster meat run at a spider den can pay for several houses.
| Pig Skin source | Yield |
|---|---|
| Killing a werepig | 1 pig skin (plus 2 meat), guaranteed |
| Killing a normal pig | 50% chance of 1 pig skin, otherwise 1 meat |
| Smashing a pig head on a stick | 2 pig skin |
| Hammering an existing Pig House | 2 pig skin, plus boards and cut stone |
Turning a pig into a werepig is the most reliable method. Feed one pig four monster meat, back off, then fight it with a simple two-hit-and-move pattern. Its attacks are slow and predictable, and every kill returns a guaranteed pig skin.
Relocating a Pig House with a Hammer
Pig villages generate randomly, usually in a deciduous forest biome near a cobblestone road, and a typical village has five to nine houses. Any house that spawned far from where you want to live can be knocked down and rebuilt at your base instead.
Note: hammering returns only half of what a house costs to build, so demolishing the houses already inside your own village is a waste. Save the Hammer for outliers you would otherwise never use.
How to confirm the Pig House is working
A newly placed house spawns its pig on its own. The pig wanders during the day, sleeps or goes inside at dusk and night, and comes back out at daybreak. If you kill it, the house produces a replacement four days later, which is what makes a large cluster of houses a renewable meat, pig skin, and manure supply.
Placement rules that keep your houses alive
Where you drop houses matters as much as how many you build. Pigs come to help when one of them gets attacked, so a spread of houses around the edges of your base catches hounds before they reach your chests and farms.
- Space houses apart instead of packing them together. Clustered houses all burn if a red hound dies among them, and giants clear grouped pigs faster with area attacks.
- Keep an Ice Flingomatic covering as many houses as possible for fire protection.
- Do not build houses right next to your food stores. Pigs eat meat, berries, seeds, mushrooms, petals, and rot straight off the ground.
- Expect werepigs on a full moon. Any pig left outside at night transforms, and they turn back to normal at daybreak.
Pig House layout for a bait farm
If the goal is farming rather than defence, houses can be arranged around a sealed bait pen so pigs stay permanently distracted and easy to kill. Build a small square of Stone Walls, drop one food item such as rot or pig skin in the centre tile, then close and upgrade the walls to full height so nothing can reach the bait. Wood walls burn, so stone is the only sensible choice, and a Wood Gate lets you get in to swap bait later.
Place four or more Pig Houses tightly around that pen. The spawned pigs will keep pushing against the walls trying to reach the food, day and night, and they stay locked on the bait even after a full moon turns them into werepigs. That makes them safe to hit one at a time with a Spear for meat and pig skin.
Build this away from your main base. Pigs stuck on bait will not break off to fight hounds or giants unless one of them is attacked directly, so a bait pen sitting inside your village quietly disables your own defence.
Once the first Pig House goes down, the rest pay for themselves. Every werepig you kill hands back the pig skin for another house, so a base that starts with three or four pigs can grow into a wall of them well before the hound waves get serious.
