Game Review: Timberborn (Early Access)
2024-Nov-30, Saturday 17:07![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
A lot of the time with these reviews, I have some story about how I learned about the game. Maybe I played it when I was younger, spending hours with my sister together trying to conquer the game, or I read about it in Rock Paper Shotgun, or one of my friends told me about it and said I had to play it, but Timberborn wasn't like that. I saw it in the list of Steam sale games, thought it looked interesting, and bought it. City-builders used to be huge--I spent hours as a child playing Caesar III and trying to convince the patricians to build villas so I could get that sweet tax revenue, or playing SimCity 2000 (released 1993) with disasters off and marveling at the 3D terrain--but nowadays they're incredibly niche. We need to treasure the ones we have, especially if they have such an interesting hook.
You see, Timberborn is about a city built by intelligent beavers in a post-apocalyptic world.
Humble Beginnings.
The fact that you have beavers instead of humans changes the gameplay quite a bit from a typical city-builder. Obviously, water is important for a city of any size--there's a reason that towns are almost always built on rivers--but beavers are famous for both living near water and building dams to control the water flow. In Timberborn, a big chunk of the tools you have relate to water. You can build dams to wall off low-lying fields, you can build pumps to raise water to higher places and store it in reservoirs, you can pull water up and store it for later in barrels, you can build waterwheels to power your machinery, you can build aqueducts and transport water over your town (new in the latest patch!), and you can built floodgates, automated sluices, spillways, and other methods to further manipulate the water during special events.
All of this is important because Timberborn is built around its fluid physics. Water flows appropriately based on gravity and the space it's in, winding around the hills and valleys, gathering in pools before flowing off the map. If you place dams in the appropriate areas you can easily make massive lakes, and you'll have to if you want to prepare you for the inevitable drought that comes every couple of in-game weeks.
The main challenge in Timberborn is these droughts. Every couple of weeks, the flow of water just stops. Your crops (and the trees and bushes) will start dying, you'll have no more water to pump into your reserves, and you have to make sure you survive until the drought ends. In the beginning this is just a day or two, but as you play they get longer and longer until you need a week's supplies or a large reservoir of water to handle the droughts. And after a few droughts, you get a Badtide instead that will poison the land, kill off the plants, and sicken your beavers, and you have to deal with that by making a system of channels and sluices to keep your reservoirs from becoming contaminated and letting you wash the badwater out.
Going to have to do something about that.
As with most city-builders, you can't control your beavers directly. You can order buildings to be built, and then beavers will work on them when they're on the job. Each building needs resources, so the early-game is a scramble to get your initial food and lumber supplies going with harvesters picking berries and lumberbeavers cutting down trees--with their teeth, of course. Those logs let you build more buildings like farms to plant actual crops like potatoes or wheat, foresters to replant trees so you don't run out of wood, bakeries to turn wheat into bread, waterwheels to provide power to buildings like the lumber mill that turns logs into planks, platforms so you can build on docks over the water or across chasms, and all the various dikes, sluices, and dams that allow you to manipulate the water. Beavers are famous for manipulating their environment and by the time you get your city established, there will be dams and paths and channels all around the map.
Once you get the basics established and you have food and water coming in, you have to worry about your beavers' mood. A happy beaver is a hard-working beaver, so showers, teeth-sharpeners, and beds will keep their health up and dance halls, rooftop terraces, and swimming areas will keep their spirits up. You can also add roofs, statues, plants, and other aesthetic improvements to make their town a happy place to live. Do this enough and you can unlock the Iron Teeth tribe. The default tribe are the Folktails, who live in harmony with nature, and the Iron Teeth are based on science and pre-apocalypse technology. Each tribe has their own unique buildings: the Folk Tails have buildings like the Beehive, the Windmill, or the Scarecrow, and the Iron Teeth have buildings like the Large Barrack, the Engine, or the Breeding Pod. You can accomplish all the same things as each tribe, you just go around them differently. As the Folktails you're paint the land green and build rolling fields of crops, and as the Iron Teeth the skies will turn dark with smoke as your robots dig into the hills.
Plant, and build, and dig. Otherwise, your city will suffer.
The dying time.
Timberborn is cute, but the droughts are brutal. Your first city will probably become a tomb, your beavers all gasping and dying of dehydration, because you failed to anticipate how much water you would need.
The hard part is the forward planning. Though you can force them into round-the-clock shifts if you have to, beavers need to sleep, eat, and have a bit of fun as well as work, and while there is a system of priorities for which buildings get built first, the beavers have a bit of their own mind about it. Following the supply chains can be complicated to--a new water storage facility might be sitting at 90% built and you'll have to see that the lumberbeavers are doing fine but their stocks are all full of logs, and the logs are getting to the storage, but no planks are being made because the windmill you built isn't providing enough power to the lumber mill so maybe you need a waterwheel, but the waterwheel will also take planks to build so maybe in the meanwhile you just need some beaver muscle-power to keep your lumber mill running but that will take away one of your beaver workers and
This is where the actual difficult gameplay is. Every single time I let my beavers die, it was because I failed to keep track of changing conditions. I had plenty of water and didn't properly prepare for future population growth, so when I hit a drought I ran totally out of water with 2 days to go. By the time the drought was over, my vibrant city of 70 beavers had been reduced to 3. There are no Dwarf Fortress-style waves of immigrants, so I had to reload and try to figure out hot to survive the utter decimation of my population...and in the end, to roll back to a save an in-game week before so I would have more time to prepare for the upcoming drought. Even then, I still ran out of water right at the end and lost 10 beavers. The gameplay is forward planning--like a real-life city planner, you need to account for the weeks and months ahead, staying in front of growing population by building new farms and buildings to store food and water, keeping your beavers healthy and happy so they work faster (and thus can save you from impending disaster in a shorter time frame), making sure that water isn't going to overflow the banks thanks to any new walls you built and that your reservoirs have enough water to last through a drought, checking your defenses against Badtide to make sure that contaminated water does not kill all your crops...the list is endless. That will keep your busy for hours, planning in a frenzy for each upcoming drought and then using the time afterwards to recover and plan for the next drought.
And then when you've done that, when your food stores are full and your reservoirs brim with water, when your beavers keep their teeth sharp and their fur wet between jobs, when automatic walls and gates keep the badwater away...what do you do?
Well, you decide.
Filling another reservoir.
Unlike the aforementioned Caesar III, Timberborn doesn't have any win conditions. Once you can rely on your infrastructure, you're free to set your own goals. Timberborn does not currently have any way to win beyond when you decide that you've accomplished your goals, so after base survival is done you're free to do as you please. In my most recent game, I took on the task of clearing the map of badwater. Badwater doesn't just come in with Badtides, it's a remnant of the old "hooman" industries from before whatever apocalypse allowed the beavers to arise, so it often wells up near old ruins. Those ruins contain scrap metal but to access them requires a Badwater-free environment, so I built walkways out over the badwater and capped the wells, then I built pumps to drain the Badwater and store it for later. I dammed off the area with the badwater wells, and released it occasionally to use the badwater to manufacture explosives. With the explosives, I blasted a hole through the hills around the other badwater wells in the south, allowing the badwater to drain off the map, and then dammed off that area to prevent the badwater from running into the lake. I dammed the exits to the lake and greatly increased its size, providing a massive reservoir of water, and then pumped some of that water into a giant reservoir in the mountains near the headwaters of the river that fed into my town, so that during droughts there would always be a constant flow of water. And as the very last thing I did, once I finally noticed there was another water source in the southeast of the map, I dammed that too to fill the entire bowl with pure, fresh water.
There are other things I could have done. I could have used aqueducts to transport the water above my town (new in the latest patch from October), I could have put towns and cities all over the map. I could have tried to build extra town centers--there's a whole mechanic of building extra town centers and splitting your population to prevent any beavers from having to travel too far during their work, but since this isn't necessary for survival and the only thing it costs is time, I never bothered with it.
And now I never have to worry about droughts again.
That actually gets into what I think the biggest problem with Timberborn--the Tower Defense problem.
If you've never played a tower defense game, in their simplest form they send waves of enemies from one side of the screen to the other and you have to build "towers" that will attack the enemies to stop them, like the eternal classic Desktop Tower Defense. In between, you have breather phases that let you build more towers and plan your defenses. Timberborn has no enemies, but the cycle of droughts/Badtides and the need to plan several steps ahead is exactly the same as the gameplay of a tower defense game. And one of the biggest triumph points, and also the most annoying parts, of a tower defense game is when you build the perfect defense and you no longer need to scramble because that's when the gameplay ends.
I've played a lot of tower defense games and they all deal with this in different ways, but none of them avoid it. If you play well, you'll eventually reach the point where every remaining wave will smash itself on your defenses and you don't actually need to build any more tower. You can upgrade your towers, sure, but the game becomes a passive experience as you click the "super fast-forward" button and occasionally hit upgrade on a tower, but otherwise just watch the enemies hurl themselves at your towers and explode.
Timberborn after the rush to survival is basically the same. Once you have your automated sluices set up to channel the badwater away and release water from your reservoir when the rivers get low, then the vast majority of your time is spent just watching the screen waiting for your beavers to build things. Even on the fastest forward a day still takes a few minutes, so if you're trying a major project like building a path across the map and up a mountain to get to a set of ruins or creating an aqueduct to channel water into a basin and create a new breadbasket, it's going to be a long time where you just wait for your beavers to do their jobs. That was probably over 50% of my latest playthrough, so you're going to need a lot of motivation to get all of your massive projects completed.
There are some clever community maps that can alleviate this. There's one I saw that starts you at the bottom of a massive basin and requires you to continually build up to higher and higher platforms to escape the rising waters as your previous towns are flooded. This is a fantastic change of pace--all of a sudden, droughts are a welcome respite from the pressure of the waves. But there's nothing like this by default. Just hit >>> and wait.
Go forth, seeds, and repopulate the earth..
Like a lot of the games I play nowadays--Project Zomboid, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Crusader Kings II--Timberborn is mostly self-directed. If you're not the kind of person who can take the tools the game gives you and use them as an engine for telling stories, you'll probably stall out once you survive the initial rush. I don't want to downplay how difficult that is, since my first city failed probably a dozen times in various ways that I could recover from using an older save before I finally hit a problem that I just could not manage to build my way out of even with three weeks worth of planning ahead time. If thinking ahead and solving problems is what you enjoy from city builders, Timberborn offers that in spades.
But if you're someone who does like doing things in games just because you can, Timberborn is amazing. The last patch is what allowed aqueducts to exist--before then, it wasn't possible for water to travel over something--so they're committed to allowing new ways to change your environment in the future, and mods add even more than that. You cannot yet carve an entire mountain into a giant beaver as an eternal monument to your glory, but given a year or two, who knows?
Maybe the community will get to it. They've already made mods like Bulwark that add floods you have to survive. Maybe someone is working on giant beaver-mountains right now.
You see, Timberborn is about a city built by intelligent beavers in a post-apocalyptic world.
Humble Beginnings.
The fact that you have beavers instead of humans changes the gameplay quite a bit from a typical city-builder. Obviously, water is important for a city of any size--there's a reason that towns are almost always built on rivers--but beavers are famous for both living near water and building dams to control the water flow. In Timberborn, a big chunk of the tools you have relate to water. You can build dams to wall off low-lying fields, you can build pumps to raise water to higher places and store it in reservoirs, you can pull water up and store it for later in barrels, you can build waterwheels to power your machinery, you can build aqueducts and transport water over your town (new in the latest patch!), and you can built floodgates, automated sluices, spillways, and other methods to further manipulate the water during special events.
All of this is important because Timberborn is built around its fluid physics. Water flows appropriately based on gravity and the space it's in, winding around the hills and valleys, gathering in pools before flowing off the map. If you place dams in the appropriate areas you can easily make massive lakes, and you'll have to if you want to prepare you for the inevitable drought that comes every couple of in-game weeks.
The main challenge in Timberborn is these droughts. Every couple of weeks, the flow of water just stops. Your crops (and the trees and bushes) will start dying, you'll have no more water to pump into your reserves, and you have to make sure you survive until the drought ends. In the beginning this is just a day or two, but as you play they get longer and longer until you need a week's supplies or a large reservoir of water to handle the droughts. And after a few droughts, you get a Badtide instead that will poison the land, kill off the plants, and sicken your beavers, and you have to deal with that by making a system of channels and sluices to keep your reservoirs from becoming contaminated and letting you wash the badwater out.
Going to have to do something about that.
As with most city-builders, you can't control your beavers directly. You can order buildings to be built, and then beavers will work on them when they're on the job. Each building needs resources, so the early-game is a scramble to get your initial food and lumber supplies going with harvesters picking berries and lumberbeavers cutting down trees--with their teeth, of course. Those logs let you build more buildings like farms to plant actual crops like potatoes or wheat, foresters to replant trees so you don't run out of wood, bakeries to turn wheat into bread, waterwheels to provide power to buildings like the lumber mill that turns logs into planks, platforms so you can build on docks over the water or across chasms, and all the various dikes, sluices, and dams that allow you to manipulate the water. Beavers are famous for manipulating their environment and by the time you get your city established, there will be dams and paths and channels all around the map.
Once you get the basics established and you have food and water coming in, you have to worry about your beavers' mood. A happy beaver is a hard-working beaver, so showers, teeth-sharpeners, and beds will keep their health up and dance halls, rooftop terraces, and swimming areas will keep their spirits up. You can also add roofs, statues, plants, and other aesthetic improvements to make their town a happy place to live. Do this enough and you can unlock the Iron Teeth tribe. The default tribe are the Folktails, who live in harmony with nature, and the Iron Teeth are based on science and pre-apocalypse technology. Each tribe has their own unique buildings: the Folk Tails have buildings like the Beehive, the Windmill, or the Scarecrow, and the Iron Teeth have buildings like the Large Barrack, the Engine, or the Breeding Pod. You can accomplish all the same things as each tribe, you just go around them differently. As the Folktails you're paint the land green and build rolling fields of crops, and as the Iron Teeth the skies will turn dark with smoke as your robots dig into the hills.
Plant, and build, and dig. Otherwise, your city will suffer.
The dying time.
Timberborn is cute, but the droughts are brutal. Your first city will probably become a tomb, your beavers all gasping and dying of dehydration, because you failed to anticipate how much water you would need.
The hard part is the forward planning. Though you can force them into round-the-clock shifts if you have to, beavers need to sleep, eat, and have a bit of fun as well as work, and while there is a system of priorities for which buildings get built first, the beavers have a bit of their own mind about it. Following the supply chains can be complicated to--a new water storage facility might be sitting at 90% built and you'll have to see that the lumberbeavers are doing fine but their stocks are all full of logs, and the logs are getting to the storage, but no planks are being made because the windmill you built isn't providing enough power to the lumber mill so maybe you need a waterwheel, but the waterwheel will also take planks to build so maybe in the meanwhile you just need some beaver muscle-power to keep your lumber mill running but that will take away one of your beaver workers and
This is where the actual difficult gameplay is. Every single time I let my beavers die, it was because I failed to keep track of changing conditions. I had plenty of water and didn't properly prepare for future population growth, so when I hit a drought I ran totally out of water with 2 days to go. By the time the drought was over, my vibrant city of 70 beavers had been reduced to 3. There are no Dwarf Fortress-style waves of immigrants, so I had to reload and try to figure out hot to survive the utter decimation of my population...and in the end, to roll back to a save an in-game week before so I would have more time to prepare for the upcoming drought. Even then, I still ran out of water right at the end and lost 10 beavers. The gameplay is forward planning--like a real-life city planner, you need to account for the weeks and months ahead, staying in front of growing population by building new farms and buildings to store food and water, keeping your beavers healthy and happy so they work faster (and thus can save you from impending disaster in a shorter time frame), making sure that water isn't going to overflow the banks thanks to any new walls you built and that your reservoirs have enough water to last through a drought, checking your defenses against Badtide to make sure that contaminated water does not kill all your crops...the list is endless. That will keep your busy for hours, planning in a frenzy for each upcoming drought and then using the time afterwards to recover and plan for the next drought.
And then when you've done that, when your food stores are full and your reservoirs brim with water, when your beavers keep their teeth sharp and their fur wet between jobs, when automatic walls and gates keep the badwater away...what do you do?
Well, you decide.
Filling another reservoir.
Unlike the aforementioned Caesar III, Timberborn doesn't have any win conditions. Once you can rely on your infrastructure, you're free to set your own goals. Timberborn does not currently have any way to win beyond when you decide that you've accomplished your goals, so after base survival is done you're free to do as you please. In my most recent game, I took on the task of clearing the map of badwater. Badwater doesn't just come in with Badtides, it's a remnant of the old "hooman" industries from before whatever apocalypse allowed the beavers to arise, so it often wells up near old ruins. Those ruins contain scrap metal but to access them requires a Badwater-free environment, so I built walkways out over the badwater and capped the wells, then I built pumps to drain the Badwater and store it for later. I dammed off the area with the badwater wells, and released it occasionally to use the badwater to manufacture explosives. With the explosives, I blasted a hole through the hills around the other badwater wells in the south, allowing the badwater to drain off the map, and then dammed off that area to prevent the badwater from running into the lake. I dammed the exits to the lake and greatly increased its size, providing a massive reservoir of water, and then pumped some of that water into a giant reservoir in the mountains near the headwaters of the river that fed into my town, so that during droughts there would always be a constant flow of water. And as the very last thing I did, once I finally noticed there was another water source in the southeast of the map, I dammed that too to fill the entire bowl with pure, fresh water.
There are other things I could have done. I could have used aqueducts to transport the water above my town (new in the latest patch from October), I could have put towns and cities all over the map. I could have tried to build extra town centers--there's a whole mechanic of building extra town centers and splitting your population to prevent any beavers from having to travel too far during their work, but since this isn't necessary for survival and the only thing it costs is time, I never bothered with it.
And now I never have to worry about droughts again.
That actually gets into what I think the biggest problem with Timberborn--the Tower Defense problem.
If you've never played a tower defense game, in their simplest form they send waves of enemies from one side of the screen to the other and you have to build "towers" that will attack the enemies to stop them, like the eternal classic Desktop Tower Defense. In between, you have breather phases that let you build more towers and plan your defenses. Timberborn has no enemies, but the cycle of droughts/Badtides and the need to plan several steps ahead is exactly the same as the gameplay of a tower defense game. And one of the biggest triumph points, and also the most annoying parts, of a tower defense game is when you build the perfect defense and you no longer need to scramble because that's when the gameplay ends.
I've played a lot of tower defense games and they all deal with this in different ways, but none of them avoid it. If you play well, you'll eventually reach the point where every remaining wave will smash itself on your defenses and you don't actually need to build any more tower. You can upgrade your towers, sure, but the game becomes a passive experience as you click the "super fast-forward" button and occasionally hit upgrade on a tower, but otherwise just watch the enemies hurl themselves at your towers and explode.
Timberborn after the rush to survival is basically the same. Once you have your automated sluices set up to channel the badwater away and release water from your reservoir when the rivers get low, then the vast majority of your time is spent just watching the screen waiting for your beavers to build things. Even on the fastest forward a day still takes a few minutes, so if you're trying a major project like building a path across the map and up a mountain to get to a set of ruins or creating an aqueduct to channel water into a basin and create a new breadbasket, it's going to be a long time where you just wait for your beavers to do their jobs. That was probably over 50% of my latest playthrough, so you're going to need a lot of motivation to get all of your massive projects completed.
There are some clever community maps that can alleviate this. There's one I saw that starts you at the bottom of a massive basin and requires you to continually build up to higher and higher platforms to escape the rising waters as your previous towns are flooded. This is a fantastic change of pace--all of a sudden, droughts are a welcome respite from the pressure of the waves. But there's nothing like this by default. Just hit >>> and wait.
Go forth, seeds, and repopulate the earth..
Like a lot of the games I play nowadays--Project Zomboid, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Crusader Kings II--Timberborn is mostly self-directed. If you're not the kind of person who can take the tools the game gives you and use them as an engine for telling stories, you'll probably stall out once you survive the initial rush. I don't want to downplay how difficult that is, since my first city failed probably a dozen times in various ways that I could recover from using an older save before I finally hit a problem that I just could not manage to build my way out of even with three weeks worth of planning ahead time. If thinking ahead and solving problems is what you enjoy from city builders, Timberborn offers that in spades.
But if you're someone who does like doing things in games just because you can, Timberborn is amazing. The last patch is what allowed aqueducts to exist--before then, it wasn't possible for water to travel over something--so they're committed to allowing new ways to change your environment in the future, and mods add even more than that. You cannot yet carve an entire mountain into a giant beaver as an eternal monument to your glory, but given a year or two, who knows?
Maybe the community will get to it. They've already made mods like Bulwark that add floods you have to survive. Maybe someone is working on giant beaver-mountains right now.
