The Dragonfly is one of the strongest and most dangerous bosses in the game, while also fielding some of the best loot that Don’t Starve Together has to offer. Fighting and dealing with the Dragonfly is a real challenge and requires extensive preparation, but she is not considered a boss that is particularly dangerous due to her behavior and the way she is placed into the world.
In Don’t Starve Together, you can safely ignore the Dragonfly for as long as you wish for, and only need to engage her when you want to go after her precious loot. Some of the items she drops are very important for other special recipes, so seeking her out may be required at some point in the game.
This guide aims to explain everything about the behavior, how to prepare for a fight with her, and what strategies you can implement to beat her.
Dragonfly Stats
Health: 27500
Damage: 75 per swipe, 37.5 from the ring of fire, double the damage to mobs, double damage when enraged
Attack delay: 4 seconds (3 when enraged)
Attack range: 4 (6 when enraged)
Walking speed: 5 (7 when enraged)
Insanity Aura: -400/min
Special Ability: Spits larva, can be enraged which significantly raises damage and speed
How to find the Dragonfly
Unlike in the normal Don’t Starve game where the Dragonfly spawns in summer, in the Don’t Starve Together Edition, it will always be in a special tile somewhere in the Desert biome.
For reference, there are two types of Desert biomes in Don’t Starve Together. One has an oasis, Volt Goats (the lightning goats), and the Antlion, while the other is the “classic” Desert with Tumbleweeds, Hound Mounds, and a specific desert tile with the Dragonfly on it.
You can usually find this type of Desert at the edge of the map, but if you keep exploring it shouldn’t be hard to find. Once you are there, you have to look out for multiple Magma Pools as these indicate the “arena” or home of the Dragonfly. Additionally, there will be multiple burn marks and charred trees around the area. If you are having trouble, you can also look out for Grass Gekkos as these can usually be found around the biome.
Dragonfly Behavior
If you found the special area in the desert where the Dragonfly resides (referred to as arena), you will see, that the Dragonfly is not particularly aggressive and will simply reside inside her arena unless bothered. Bothering means in this case either attacking her or being too near to her. If provoked, she will follow you beyond her arena and will most likely kill you due to the fact that she is faster than the player at normal speed (e.g. without any movement-accessories). However, running far away from the arena will eventually make her respawn (with full hp).
Additionally, the Dragonfly can enter an enraged status where her damage will double, her movement speed and attack speed increases and she will also engulf herself in fire, setting everything ablaze that gets too close.
The Enrage-Status can be triggered in multiple ways and makes her particularly dangerous. She will calm down after one minute, or if you bring her wetness up to 90%. This can be done in various ways, such as with water balloons or by fighting her in the rain (particularly in the spring). Another way is to use a Pan Flute to bring her to sleep.
Dealing more than 1250 damage in 5 seconds to the Dragonfly will stun her for a total of 10 seconds. Dealing another 2500 damage in this stun period will make her drop Scales. This only works every 60 seconds, while you also need to deal 250 damage more than before, every time she gets stunned. However, scales drop only the first time she is stunned.
The Dragonfly increases her freezing threshold by 2 each time she is frozen. When enraged, this threshold is raised by another 4.
Lavae spawn
Health: 500
Damage: 50 (fire damage)
Attack delay: 4 seconds
Attack range: 6
Walking speed: 5.5
Special ability: Sets anything near it on fire
Whenever the Dragonfly reaches 80%, 50%, and 20% of her maximum HP, she will spawn Lavae from the Magma pools. When she reaches the threshold, she will temporarily ignore the player and walk towards each of the pools to spawn her minions. She will only do this if no Lavae is currently alive. Initially, 5 Lavae are spawned, but with each threshold, the amount increases by 1. Additionally, the speed at which they spawn also increases, eventually making her spawn two Lavae at once.
Lavae will head for the player and attack them, dealing fire damage and also setting the player on fire due to their proximity. They immediately die upon being frozen, making freezing them an effective way to fight them. Lavae die 30 seconds after being spawned by the Dragonfly. However, killing all Lavae will enrage the Dragonfly.
How to prepare for a fight against the Dragonfly
The Dragonfly is one of the bosses with the highest amount of HP in the game, making proper preparations absolutely necessary. The number of resources you will need will vary based on the strategy you want to choose (see below), but you will most likely need a lot of combat items to sustain the huge amount of damage she dishes out.
The fact that each fight takes a long time means that you will need a bunch of log suits and football helmets. The exact amount depends on the weapon that you have and the time it will take you to kill it. You can however bring the materials to craft more armor with you as there will be downtimes in your fight that can be used for crafting.
Like many bosses, the Dragonfly will have a sanity degeneration aura that can cause some issues after a while, so having some type of food like Dried Jerky can be very useful.
Since the fight will take quite some time, you should prepare a sufficient amount of food and healing items like Dragonfruit Pie.
Pretty much any strategy will require a substantial amount of Walls. Depending on whether you want to build a wall around yourself or around the Magma pools the exact number will vary, but make sure you have at least a couple of dozen. Stone Walls are perfect for this.
An Ice Box can a very useful storage device for food and other items, as it can not be burned.
A Pan Flute is absolutely necessary unless you plan to fight the Dragonfly in its enraged mode. The Pan Flute needs to be used to put it to sleep whenever it enters said mode.
Alternatives are Sleeping Darts or Freezing Staves as they do the trick as well, but are a little bit more dangerous.
For your weapon, the Ham Bat is the most efficient and best way to deal with the Dragonfly. The Ham Bat does not lose durability, but slowly spoils over time instead, making it the ideal weapon to dish out a large number of hits. Alternatively, you can craft a couple of Dark Swords to have some extra damage.
Gunpowder is not exactly viable, but a possible strategy. You could use it to dish out some initial damage and make your life easier or bring it one-hit-range. Bear in mind that you need 137 for that.
Here is how a preparation list could look like for reference:
- 1-2 Ice box
- 5-10 Log Suits (or materials to build some)
- 5-10 Football Helmets (or materials to build some)
- 1 Ham Bat
- 10 Dried Jerky
- 10 Dragonfruit Pie
- 1 Pan Flute
- 50 Stone Wall
Bear in mind that this is just a reference. You might need more armors or more healing items and food. Some of these also depend on the character that you are using.
How to kill the Dragonfly
Multiple strategies can be used to deal with the Dragonfly, but due to massive amount of HP this boss has, it is advised to be extremely well prepared depending on how you want to kill her.
For reference, here is a Damage table listing all the types of weapons you can use against her and also how many uses you would need to defeat her
| Weapon | Number of hits |
| Fire Staff, Fire Dart, Tooth Trap | Immune |
| Lucy the Axe | 2022 |
| Boomering, (Opulent) Pickaxe, (Luxury) Axe | 1011 |
| Pick/Axe | 899 |
| Spear | 809 |
| Bat Bat, Battle Spear | 647 |
| Ham Bat | 462-924 |
| Morning Star | 643 or 380 |
| Slurtle Slime | 550 |
| Tentacle Spike | 539 |
| Thulecite Club | 462 |
| Dark Sword, Glass Cutter | 404 |
| Blow Dart | 275 |
| Gunpowder | 138 |
As you can see and probably thought already, the Dragonfly is immune to fire. You need 4 Sleeping Darts to put her to sleep.
The Magma Pool Wall Method
While dealing with the Lavae does not mean that you have dealt with the Dragonfly herself, almost every strategy will require you to find some way to deal with the continuous Lavae spawn (as explained above). Unless you implement some sort of strategy where you put her to sleep whenever she wakes up, you should use the following trick.
Before engaging the Dragonfly, simply build a wall around each Magma pool. The Dragonfly will still fly towards the pool and will spawn the Lavae, but the Lavae will not be able to come out, making the fight significantly less troublesome.
This trick is not an absolute necessity, but it will cause significantly less headache in some types of fights.
It is possible to build a wall around yourself (e.g. the area you want to fight the Dragonfly) and then close it off whenever the Dragonfly goes to spawn the Lavae. Both ways are viable but the latter one leaves you with less mobility.
The Manfight Strategy
This one is one of the simplest ways to kill her and requires you to implement the wall trick mentioned above, as the additional Lavae would be too much trouble. In this strategy, you simply prepare for a complete fight against the Dragonfly by having enough weapons, armors, food, and healing items to kill her.
Ideally, you would use the second way of the wall-trick (build a wall around yourself) and also have an ice box prepared with food and healing items as well as a fire (or endothermic fire) nearby.
Refer to the damage table for the type of weapon you want to use. Mind the Ham Bat has no durability which makes it an excellent candidate. Other weapons might be more efficient, but the sheer amount of uses you need to kill this boss make them less useful.
Having sleeping darts, or better a Pan Flute available is also required for this strategy. Use the Pan Flute whenever the Dragonfly enters her enraged status, as she is far too deadly to deal with her in that state.
The Dragonfly will still walk towards the pools to spawn the Lavae even if you have built the walls. This will give you valuable time to heal up and build some armor and weapons if needed.
If you have built the walls around the pools and not yourself, you can also use the time in which she flies towards the pools to follow her and dish out additional (free) damage.
The Boss Lure Strategy
The fact that the Dragonfly is so static and always confined within her arena makes it incredibly easy to plan a fight between this boss and other bosses. While her absolutely insane amount of HP and high DPS capabilities will ensure that she will win almost any fight, it can still do significant damage and weaken her.
One idea for example is to lure the Deerclops towards the area and make it attack the Dragonfly. The Deerclops is weaker than the Dragonfly but does lots of damage and also has the ability to freeze it which is particularly useful against this boss.
Another boss that can be pulled is Bearger, which has 6000 HP and can definitely do some damage before losing against the Dragonfly.
Multiple Treeguards can theoretically be useful, but the fire damage that the Dragonfly dishes out makes it a little bit difficult for them to actually do enough damage.
Using Gunpowder
While Gunpowder is incredibly effective and efficient against many bosses, but the Dragonfly is due to her huge amount of HP not one of them. You can only deal 8000 damage with Gunpowder before the resistance that a boss gains from it reaches 100%, meaning additional stacks of Gunpowder will do 0 damage. This resistance holds on for 10 seconds.
If you were to use Gunpowder against the Dragonfly you would need to deal 8000 damage, put her to sleep or kite her until the resistance drops back to 0, then put her to sleep again to place more Gunpowder. While this is possible, the fact that you also need an absurd amount of Gunpowder (138) along with multiple uses of the Pan Flute makes Gunpowder a subpar strategy.
That being said, it would still work and this is the method you would need to use.
Dragonfly Loot
Since the Dragonfly does not really move away of her arena and does not bother you, the loot is pretty much the only reason for you to bother her. Luckily, the loot that she drops is pretty insane and useful in many ways.
- Scales
- Blueprint for Scaled Furnace
- 0-1x Lavae Egg
- 6x Meat
- 4-8x Gold Nugget
- 2x Red Gem
- 2x Blue Gem
- 1-2x Purple Gem
- 1-2x Orange Gem
- 1-2x Green Gem
- 1-2x Yellow Gem
- 1x Sketch for Chess Piece Dragonfly Figure
Particularly the gems are very useful for multiple items that are considered very high-end or useful. For example, many items in the Ancient Pseudoscience Station require some type of gem as a crafting material.
Some of the gems that are required for some items, like the Orange Gem, are for example best farmed from killing the Dragonfly repeatedly, as other methods of getting them require lots of grinding or luck.
The Scaled Furnace on the other hand is one of the most reliable heat sources in the game and should not be underestimated.
Dragonfly Spawning
The Dragonfly respawns in two ways depending on what is happening to it.
If you leave the arena while the Dragonfly is following you, it will eventually simply fly away and respawn 16 seconds later back in the middle of her arena.
If she is killed, she will respawn 20 days later. This timer is entirely dependant on the world generation settings for the Dragonfly which has the following cooldowns:
- Standard: 20 Days
- Less: 40 Days
- More: 10 Days
- Lots: 5 Days
The fact that the Dragonfly respawns after a set time makes her an ideal target for farming rare gems which would otherwise be bottlenecked.
Conclusion
The Dragonfly is a challenging boss fight with her high amount of HP and requires some solid preparation. That being said, it is also one of the most rewarding ones, opening the doors to special crafting recipes that would otherwise be impossible to do or repeat with their rare gem cost.
The fact that the Dragonfly just chills in her arena makes her less scary, however, giving you the time and space to properly plan your encounter ahead.
