Wednesday, May 15, 2024
If you're a fan of resource games and city-builder games, you'll love Timberborn. Sentient beavers are trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. It's a mostly peaceful existence, but there are droughts that can last several days, so it's important for the beavers to have plenty of water to drink and food to eat while the drought continues.
Of course, they're building dams, that's what beavers do, but they're also chopping down trees, harvesting food, and farming. They're building water pumps, farms, lodges, and more. Wood makes their world go round, so they need plenty of it.
The first goal is to provide the beavers with water and then start harvesting available foods. They'll need lumberjack stands to chop down wood and gatherer huts to gather berries. They need a farmer to grow food and a forester to plant more trees. They don't need an axe, but they will need a grinding wheel in case a tooth gets broken.
The hardest part for me in any resource city-builder game is not to build too quickly, and Timberborn is no exception. You can easily forget about making sure your beavers have plenty of water and food when you're trying to get them to build a printing press.
Beavers need about two units of water and from two to three units of food per day. Make sure you have plenty of stored water and food for every beaver to make it through the droughts. Build plenty of lodges for those beavers, and they'll get busy and make more beavers for you to feed and water.
Once you have your beavers stabilized and producing plenty of food, you can begin exploring other things the beavers can make. The maps are dotted with ruins of ancient cities, which provide metal as a resource. Metal gives you more things you can build, like a printing press, or a windmill to get power from the wind. There are crops that require cooking (and make the beavers much happier, because they're probably sick of carrots) like potatoes and wheat.
That's just the beginning of the game. I've looked at what other players have done, and they're damming rivers to make giant lakes that can last through a seven-day drought or building aqueducts to get water to various communities. If you like planning water systems and hydraulics, this is a great game for that.
You can also create your own maps for your beavers and download maps made by other players. The map creator is easy to use and pretty intuitive.
Even though the rest of the game uses nicely rendered 3-D objects, the land itself is composed of cubes. I thought this was odd at first, but after thinking about it, it makes sense. What the cubes represent is a unit. Each cube is a piece of land that is either touching water, in shallow water, in deep water, or completely dry. Just like the beavers, the cube has the amount of water it requires to keep the plants alive. If there's too much water, only aquatic plants will grow. Essentially, this is how the game computes the drought/hydration cycle.
This game is in early development, and they're still getting input from gamers to make it better. This is a great example of why you should release games in early development. Essentially, players are play testers, testing the game to its limits.
"Beaver city-builders aren’t exactly an established genre, and your voice helps us decide what works and what doesn’t. Thanks to that feedback, the core of the game is here, it’s fun to play, and we want to make it available for everyone."
Timberborn (2021 from Mechanistry) is available on the SteamOS platform for Windows and Macintosh.
