This research aims to describe students’ necessities, lacks, and wants about collaborative learning approach-based essay writing materials at Universitas Muhammadiyah Purworejo. This research was a case study. The research subjects were 20 third-semester students of the English education department at Universitas Muhammadiyah Purworejo. The instrument was a close-ended questionnaire consisting of 30 statements. The findings showed that students have 10 necessities, 10 lacks, and 10 wants in the essay writing course. For necessities, students state that they need to build the knowledge about the topic to write an essay, learn the organization of essay, have good grammar competence and a lot of vocabulary in writing an essay, and learn types of essays. They also need to improve the cohesion and coherence and practice writing different types of essays. For lacks, students still have difficulties writing the introductory, body, and concluding paragraphs. They also have some grammatical mistakes, inadequate vocabulary, and inability to write an essay using the problem-solving skills. They also have difficulties writing process, cause/effect, comparison/contrast, and argumentative essays. For wants, students want to write an essay based on the topic which needs problem-solving skills and collaborate in a group to write an essay. They want the lecturer to provide examples and assessments, provide and describe a problem, give questioning and probing, and brainstorming activity. They want to have many references to understand the problem and develop their essay, describe their ideas about the topic, discuss the references, and determine the problem-solving about the topic.