Beaver

The main thing that's different about Timberborn is water mechanics.

Periodically, you get droughts or "badtides," where the clean-water sources churn out polluted water temporarily. Both will kill your crops, either through water shortages or corruption. You need to build dams so you can store water, and in the case of baddtides, you need a way of diverting poisoned water away from your colony and off the map.

That's the main challenge of the game. Once you've stabilized your water situation, it's just a matter of steady expansion. Different maps will make it easier or harder to achieve water stability. If you're playing on a harder difficulty, it will take some time before you can engineer a water reservoir that can last through 30 day droughts.

You do a fair amount of fiddling with the map in this game. Initially it's just by building wooden walls to contain water, but eventually you unlock explosives to cut channels and tunnels, and dirt construction so you can build out farmland.

The game has an interesting morale system, where the happier your beavers are, the faster they work, the faster they move, and the longer they live. This gets *really* substantial, to the point where your beavers get +200% production bonuses when their standard of living gets above +50. There's a strong incentive to provide your beavers a variety of food, decorations, and recreation, since all of those things give happiness boosts.

There are two factions, the farming-oriented Forktails, and the tech-oriented Iron Teeth. Both factions have unique buildings, and different food types. While some food is simple (plant it, harvest it, eat it), some foods require substantial processing.

My main complaint about the game is that there tend to be substantial downtimes when all you can reasonably do is wait. Partly this is because most of the game's economy centers around wood, and even with sizable tree farms, it takes time for trees to grow. Another factor is that you win the game by completing a faction's Wonder, and it takes a *lot* of time and materials to build those. There's a significant period where you're just running the game at max speed, waiting for the wonder to finish.

The game also tends to wear out it replayability once you've completed games with both factions at harder difficulties. The main thing driving variety then is the map.

Overall, though, it's a notable entry in the city-building genre.

beabbers