is a 2017 multiplayer survival Web Game by two French coders, collectively known as LapaMauve. In it, you must keep track of your thirst and hunger and avoid getting too cold, while also contending with the hostile animals and possibly other players. It uses cartoonish graphics and the movement resembles Agar.io - every creature in the game is seen from a strict top-down view, and they lack any animations besides slight pulsing. Includes the "Hunger Games", Zombie and Vampire modes in addition to the default one.The developers are now working on revast.io, which is intended to be a remake of this game, but with the graphics and mechanics of their later, more advanced post-apocalyptic survival game, Devast.io.
See MooMoo.io for another .io Game devoted to survival in prehistoric times.
Tropes present in Starve.io:
- 1-Up: Resurrection Stones act as these, and they can be crafted by combining sufficient quantities of either stone and diamond. However, they'll only work if the player also carries a dragon's heart with them, or wears Crown of an Angel.
- Artistic License – Geology: While the game downplays All-Natural Gem Polish a little (diamonds and amethysts are already mined in bright blue and light purple colors, but have irregular shapes), the idea of amethyst being a harder mineral than diamond is artistic license at its finest. At the actual Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, Diamond is obviously a 10, while Amethyst is a 7 - and there are twenty four gems that are in between the two!
- Bears Are Bad News: There are no normal bears, but there are Polar Bears, and they are tough indeed. They deal nearly twice the damage a wolf does, and just as much as a dragon, while possessing around half its health. Their only disadvantage is a relatively slow speed, which benefits spear users.
- The Beastmaster: Players who have defeated enough crabs to be able to craft Crab Helmet can do this, as the other crabs will then start following them, and fight for them. Moreover, crafting a Crab Spear too will allow you to heal them.
- Collision Damage: Any hostile creature in the game damages exclusively through contact. This happens even if they are not aware of the player (i.e. they are wearing Explorer's Hat) and accidentally touch them.
- Everything Fades: The defeated players or creatures instantly pop out of existence, often without even a visual effect of any kind.
- Fantasy Gun Control: Taken to an extreme, as there are no ranged weapons of any kind. Your characters can figure out how to sew with giant spider silk, or even turn it into bandages, but not how to turn it into bowstrings, or even a sling. Even throwing rocks is beyond their capabilities. This makes the bonanza of unrealistically crafted firearms in Devast.io particularly ironic.
- Friendly Fireproof: Present, to the point spikes will not harm you if they were placed down by yourself, or by your team-mate.
- Inverted for doors, which will only open for the person who placed them down, and their team-mates, if any.
- Giant Enemy Crab: While certainly much larger than average, the game's artstyle somewhat confuses just how large they really are. Moreover, they are not your enemy by default, and prefer to just be left alone, and will only start attacking players if one of them struck it first. They can even follow players that wear Crab Helmets - though that obviously requires killing a few crabs first.
- Giant Spider: Present, and look just like giant black widows, with the same red hourglass symbol on their back. However, their attacks do not inflict poison. However, they can still trap players for a few seconds with their webs. Moreover, they run faster than wolves (who move slower than the human players, contrary to Real Life), even though that violates Square-Cube Law.
- Gold-Colored Superiority: Downplayed. Every weapon, tool or even a structure has a golden version: it's absolutely possible to have golden walls, doors and spikes. In all cases, it acts as a Tier 3: better than wood and stone, but worse than diamond and amethyst, let alone dragon (only possible for swords and spears.) Somehow, metals conventionally used to make tools, like copper and iron, are completely absent in the game's world.
- Good Old Fisticuffs: The only thing you can do until you punch enough trees and the like to craft a weapon. Given that the reach of your fists is absolutely tiny, this should be done as fast as possible.
- Hair-Raising Hare: Averted; rabbits are the only creatures in the game that will never fight back; the only problem is in how to catch up to them.
- Have a Nice Death: There are death messages for every kind of death.
- "The wolf won't starve after eating you."
- "A spider killed you. At least it wasn't a rabbit."
- Healing Shiv: Crab Spear will heal crabs, while damaging everything else.
- Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Averted. In fact, due to the game's strict top-down view, helmets are actually the only kind of armor you can wear.
- Heroes Prefer Swords: Swords are the only weapon type in the game besides spears, and so many players use them.
- Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Downplayed; they are only found on the islands in the ocean, and so it's clearly implied that they were left behind by pirates, especially since you can find the otherwise unobtainable pirate sword inside those. However, they are present right there in the open, and not buried, like the pirates of legend are supposed to do.
- Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Chests can have locks placed on them to protect the stuff inside. Keys destroy the lock, and themselves.
- Item Crafting: An utterly necessary part of the experience. You start off with nothing but your fists, and have to start crafting everything else to progress.
- Holding an IKEA Manual makes any crafting process three times faster. Even when you are cooking, or obtaining seeds from berries. Not to mention that you always have to craft said Manual from Paper, Thread and Wolf Fur first, implying that the player already knew everything that they themselves wrote in that manual anyway.
- Luck Stat: Downplayed: wearing a Crown of Luck increases your chances of finding good stuff inside treasure chests.
- Mutants: The only aquatic enemy type besides is GMO Piranha. Appearance aside, they are identical to Wolves and Arctic Foxes stat-wise.
- Optional Stealth: Explorer's Hat allows you to engage in one, as none of the creatures in the game will detect you while you are wearing it. It obviously doesn't work on the fellow players, though! Moreover, attacking something while wearing will disable that effect for 10 seconds: so will mining something, due to the sheer noise it makes.
- Powerful Pick: Downplayed. Like with the Hammers, Picks are mainly useful for mining, and not as weapons.
- Our Dragons Are Different: There's a Winter Dragon, which stays in its cave there until disturbed. Players will want to disturb it, though, since that cave is the only place where the ultimate resource amethyst can be obtained. Moreover, holding Dragon's Heart is one of the preconditions for being able to revive after getting killed (the other is to avoid attacking other players or rabbits, or even placing down spikes, for 6 days, so that you may get Crown of the Angel.) Said dragon does as much damage as a bear, and has twice its health. Whether that makes the dragon weak, or the bear strong, is up to you.
- Regenerating Health: Health regenerates slowly on its own, as long as you are not actively starving, thirsty or freezing (i.e. the respective status bars haven't dipped below 35%. Applying a bandage speeds this regeneration up. However, bandages need to be crafted from thread, which is only obtainable through killing giant spiders.
- Crown of Life quadruples your health regeneration. However, it requires 200 Gold and 1 Green Gem to craft. Said Green Gem only becomes available if you survive 4 in-game days without stealing from other players, looting their death drops, or either looting others' chests, or building your own.
- Savage Wolves: Downplayed. Wolves might be the most common aggressive creature on land, but they are also the easiest one to defeat. Granted, they still kill an unarmored player in 5 hits. However, they can be outrun on foot...somehow. In fact, they actually move slower than both giant crabs and giant spiders; moreover, they are fully equivalent in stats to an Arctic Fox.
- Shout-Out: Plenty. For instance, the description for Crab Sticks, a food item dropped by the defeated crabs, states "Not a Krabby Patty."
- Spikes of Doom: The only trap that can be laid down. The damage from coming into contact with them ranges from 10 for the Wooden Spikes, to 50 for the Amethyst ones. Wooden spikes can be broken by any weapon, but the others require hammers, or amethyst swords/spears.
- Underground Monkey: Artic Fox is essentially identical to a Wolf; it's the cold of their biome that makes fighting them more challenging, since you can't afford to take your time. A popular strategy is to drop a campfire first, then have the fox keep chasing you around it while you strike back, so that you don't die of hypothermia during the fight.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: As possible as in the other multiplayer survival games. You can kill other players, steal from them, etc. Behaviours that are generally looked down include killing fresh characters with an advanced one, and destroying other people's locked chests: all the items inside will disappear, so there's no gain to you, it's just done to spite the other player.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: The challenges to get Crown of Life and Crown of the Angel, which are some of the game's best items, both require you not to behave like a jerk for a considerable amount of time. The former is about not stealing from the other players, alive or dead (and also not storing your stuff in chests), and the latter is about not attacking them (and innocent rabbits) under any circumstances whatever.
- Video Game Stealing: Players can steal random items from each other's inventories...as long as they are wearing a hood (or an even better winter hood) first. However, that'll prevent them from ever obtaining the Crown of Life item (among with looting other players' death drops, stealing from their chests, or, confusingly, making your own chests.)
