The first settlement that I'd consider a success was on easy difficulty. These cycles are random, with the chosen difficulty determining how frequently and long-lasting the droughts will be.

Timberborn is broken up into cycles, with each drought marking the end of a cycle before starting afresh with a new one. As mentioned, the ever-imposing threat of an oncoming drought is what sets apart Timberborn, and it's the reason I've been so inclined to play it over other games in the genre. This cyclical maintenance between stockpiling, expansion, and birth are the gears that keep me engaged in every city-builder. That farm will need workers, and more workers mean even more mouths to feed and quench. How do I feed this newborn baby beaver? I can barely keep the first six alive, and now I have another! Time to build a farm. Little did I know that they would wink nudge, sleep together because the population of 'New Damver Springs'' increased to seven. It's tough to watch those little critters crash in the open like that, so I decided to build a little home for them to sleep together in. After a long day of work, the poor beavers will be ready for a good night's rest, but alas, they won't have a home to sleep. Some should be tasked with gathering berries from nearby bushes, while the others can build a water pump at the nearby riverbank. You need to put the remaining beavers to work. It's critical to ensure that every beaver is working toward some sort of mission, lest you run the risk of another beaver annihilation via thirst or starvation. While two of the beavers accrue wood for buildings, the others sit idly by twiddling their thumbs, and that just doesn't cut it if you want to survive your first drought. Once you do that, those beavers will happily work away at their job.

You must assign workers to those newly created stations. Those trees aren't going to cut themselves, though. To do this, you must create a couple of lumberjack stations and mark which trees you'd like to cut down. With a district center and a handful of beavers to get you started, your first goal is to start gathering the three critical, early-game resources: wood, food, and water. Like most games in the genre, Timberborn starts slowly with the same formulaic steps. As my beaver knowledge grew, I quickly learned that this constant balancing act between expansion and stockpiling is what makes Timberborn evolve from a depressing opening 30 minutes to an addictively joyous 10 hours of gaming over a span of just a couple of days.ĭeveloped by Mechanistry, Timberborn is a city-building survival game with a spin that sets itself apart from other city-builders by focusing on beavers. The thirst built up from a draining 16-hour workday must be carefully balanced against the rationing of water in preparation for the ever-impending drought. Such is the way of the eager beaver life. It was a depressing drought - so much so that I contemplated closing the game and never playing again. I looked down on my obliterated settlement with red skull icons over every beaver.

Timberborn reviews