Don’t Starve Together: How to Get Pig Skin Fast

Pig Skin gates some of the most useful gear in Don’t Starve Together. Football Helmets, ham bats, umbrellas, and extra Pig Houses all pull from the same resource, and nothing early on drops it in bulk unless you know where to swing a hammer.

Quick answer: Craft a Hammer from twigs, cut grass, and rocks, then smash a Pig Head near a Touch Stone for 2 Pig Skin each, or smash a wild Pig House for 2 Pig Skin plus Boards and Cut Stone.

Pig Skin drop rates by source

Not every source is worth the trip. Structures give guaranteed drops with no fight involved, while killing pigs is a coin flip that costs durability and health early on.

Source	Pig Skin	Other drops
Pig Head (hammered)	2, guaranteed	2 Twigs
Pig House (hammered)	2, guaranteed	Boards, Cut Stone
Pig (killed)	50% chance of 1	1 Meat instead if no skin
Werepig (killed)	1, guaranteed	2 Meat

Note: Pig Skin is renewable because pigs respawn from their houses every four days. You can farm it indefinitely once you have a village.

Get Pig Skin on day 1 from Pig Heads

Four Pig Heads on sticks sit around every Touch Stone, and they are the fastest early payout in the game. Each one drops 2 Pig Skin and 2 Twigs when destroyed, so a single Touch Stone hands you 8 Pig Skin before you have fought anything.

Gather twigs, cut grass, and rocks while you explore. These are the only materials the Hammer needs, and none of them require a Science Machine.

Open the Tools tab in the crafting sidebar and build the Hammer. Its description reads “Smashes all kinds of things,” which is exactly the job here.

Tools crafting sidebar open with the Hammer recipe and its material list — The Hammer sits in the Tools tab and only needs twigs, cut grass, and rocks. Image: Klei Entertainment

Walk up to each buzzing Pig Head around the Touch Stone and hammer it. Collect the Pig Skin and Twigs from the ground before moving to the next head.

Do this early. If a player resurrects at that Touch Stone, lightning strikes the platform and burns the remaining heads, and the Pig Skin is gone for good.

Pig Heads also turn up scattered around swamps and occasionally around pig villages, so hammer any you pass.

Hammer wild Pig Houses for skin, Boards, and Cut Stone

Pig Houses are scattered across the map as a randomly placed point of interest, usually in forested areas and clustered into villages near the Pig King. Open your map and look for clumps of small wooden houses.

World map paused while characters stand in a forest clearing near Pig Houses — Pig Houses appear on the map in forested areas and are placed differently in every world. Image: Klei Entertainment

Equip the Hammer and walk up to a wooden Pig House. Attacking the structure does not aggravate the pigs living around it.

Hammer recipe selected in the Tools menu with the Build button highlighted — Select the Hammer and hit Build before heading to a Pig House. Image: Klei Entertainment

Keep hammering until the house collapses into a cloud of dust. It drops Cut Stone, Boards, and Pig Skin in one pile.

Pick everything up. Hammering only returns half the materials a Pig House costs to build, so demolish isolated houses far from your base and rebuild them at home rather than gutting the village you plan to live in.

Pigs wander a clearing near wooden houses after a structure is smashed — Pigs stay friendly while you smash their houses, though killing one directly is risky early on. Image: Klei Entertainment

Farm Pig Skin from werepigs on a full moon

Once you need Pig Skin by the stack, the werepig farm is the answer. A werepig always drops 1 Pig Skin and 2 Meat, and every pig outside during a full moon transforms. The trick is a walled pen with permanent bait, which locks pigs into an endless attempt to reach food they can never touch.

Build a small square wall enclosure with a hollow center. A 4×4 footprint with a 2×2 gap inside is the reliable shape. One wall thick, square or rectangular, no door.

Drop bait in the hollow center. Use Pig Skin, a powdercake, glommer goop, a rotten egg, or Halloween candy. Ordinary food rots and washes away in rain, which is what breaks most farms.

Use stone walls rather than wooden fences. Wood burns, and a single summer fire wipes out the whole setup.

Place the pen close to Pig Houses, within roughly seven tiles, so the pigs prioritize the bait over going home. Build it away from your main base, or your village pigs will ignore hound attacks to stare at the food.

Arrive before dusk on the day of the full moon and confirm the pigs are outside and locked onto the bait. Pigs that already went home will not transform, and pigs that transform while unbaited attack walls and everything else.

Once they turn, force-attack a single werepig with ctrl+click and back off immediately. Only the one you hit will aggro. Hit it as it enters melee range, retreat, and repeat until it dies, then move to the next.

You know it is working when werepigs keep walking into the walls all night without swinging at them, and killing one does not pull the rest. Werepigs do not chase, so kiting them one at a time is safe with any decent weapon.

Why werepig farms break

If werepigs are smashing your walls instead of queuing up at the bait, one of a short list of things went wrong.

Symptom	Cause and fix
Pigs attack the walls	The bait is gone or unreachable. Use a non-perishable bait and keep the enclosure a single wall thick.
All pigs aggro at once	They were not baited before the moon rose. Show up during the day and confirm they are fixated first.
Bait disappears	Food rotted, or vultures spawned inside a pen built in the oasis. Switch to Pig Skin or powdercake.
Pathfinding fails	Rabbitmen or spiders nearby disrupt it, or the pen is too large. Keep the layout tight and the area clear.
Pigs eat the bait	It sits too close to the wall. Center it in the hollow space.

If pigs cannot see a path to the bait at all, they treat the walls as the obstacle and break them. Dropping a sculpture nearby that they get stuck on can restore the illusion of a route.

Turn pigs into werepigs without waiting for a moon

You do not have to wait for a full moon. Feed a single pig 4 monster meat and it transforms on the spot, then drops 2 Meat and 1 Pig Skin when killed. Monster meat comes easily from spider dens, and two dens always spawn near a pig village bordered by forest.

A lone werepig has a readable attack pattern. Hit it twice, step out of range to dodge its swing, then close back in. Any weapon works.

There is also the pig war. Befriend two pigs, then force-attack each without landing a hit by cancelling the swing mid-animation. The two turn on each other, nearby pigs join in against the aggressor, and the fight chains outward until the area is cleared. In a large village that converts two morsels into piles of meat and Pig Skin. Grab the drops before the survivors eat them, and keep spare Pig Houses in reserve, since wiping out your pigs leaves the base undefended against later hound waves.

What to spend your first Pig Skin on

Armor first. A Football Helmet needs Pig Skin and rope at an Alchemy Engine, and it is one of the strongest head slots in the game. Spend the first few skins there before anything else.

Character standing on a wooden platform with an on-screen action prompt visible — Crafting armor is the first priority once Pig Skin starts coming in. Image: Klei Entertainment

After that, everything you gather should go into Pig Houses. Each one costs 4 Pig Skin, 4 Boards, and 3 Cut Stone, and every house you plant adds a pig that fights hounds, spiders, and tallbirds for you while renewing your Pig Skin supply on a four-day cycle. Beyond that, Pig Skin also feeds ham bats, umbrellas, piggybacks, and one-man bands.

The short version: is that hammers beat combat every time in the early game. Smash the Pig Heads you find on day one, demolish stray Pig Houses on your way to a permanent base, and let a bait pen handle the bulk supply once winter is close.