Timberborn review: Surviving a destroyed Earth

Timberborn is an interesting concept for city builder colony games. While we’ve had colony management builders like Banished, Dawn of Man, and Endzone, it is surprising how no one came up with the idea of creating a colony sim city builder where cute Beavers work together to survive.

Timberborn is a new colony manager and city builder made by Polish independent development studio Mechanistry. The game is set in a world where humanity has perished and the Earth has turned into a dry wasteland. To survive, certain species have evolved and adapted.

Expand Tweet

The player controls a Beaver colony and it is up to them to make sure the small colony becomes a thriving town of hardworking Beavers, all the while making sure the community survives in the harsh environment.

Looking for Crossword hints & solutions? Check out latest NYT Mini Crossword Answers, LA Times Crossword Answers, and Atlantic Crossword Answers

Timberborn offers many customization options to make sure players tweak their gameplay based on their playstyle. A handy map creator, two Beaver factions with their own quirks and playstyle, and some not-so-friendly features make this game a promising city-building colony sim for years to come.

Two factions work it out to survive in Timberborn

Timberborn features two different Beaver factions players can choose and play with: Folktails and Ironteeth. New players can only start playing with the Folktails faction at the beginning since Ironteeth is unlocked only after a player meets certain conditions.

The general gameplay with both factions is the same; players build a colony and ensure the factions survive. However, the way of doing things is a bit different from Folktails and Ironteeth.

Folktails are farmers with attachments towards nature and make sure that it is taken care of. All machinery, gears, and farming involves natural elements like wood and planks, beehives to grow crops faster, and much more.

One of the many Megastructure players can build as a Folktail (Image via Mechanistry)

Folktail gameplay feels like living in a small town, building and farming things in the middle of a jungle.

Once a player fulfills certain goals in the game, the Ironteeth faction unlocks. Ironteeth are the advanced races that rely a lot more on science and technology to survive the harsh conditions of the Earth. The Ironteeth clan in Timberborn have mastered the knowledge of using Iron and Science to build advanced machinery. They can build gear, engines, upgrade buildings and rely on Breeding Pods to reproduce.

Ironteeth Breeding Pod farm (Image via Mechanistry)

Ironteeth gameplay is the typical humanity surviving the harsh conditions of a planet. Except, humans are swapped with cute beavers.

Surviving the first days on dry Earth

Once they decide which faction they want to work with, players need to select the map where they want to build their Beaver utopia. Timberborn comes with nine different maps, each with its own theme, playstyle, and size.

Players can select a total of nine pre-made maps

Once decided on the map, the player can then select a game mode. Game modes decide on how easy or hard the game will be and also decide the starting resources. There are four modes in the game.

1 ) Easy: Easy mode is geared towards a more relaxed experience. Players can focus on building things, while not worrying too much about surviving. Resources are plenty and droughts happen with shorter frequency.

2 ) Medium: The optimal Timberborn difficulty. Neither too easy, nor too hard, medium gives a balanced experience to the players. Resources are optimum at the beginning, survival is challenging but not soul-crushing, and drought frequency starts off slow, increasing gradually and becoming longer over time.

3 ) Hard: A proper challenging experience. Starting resources are small, and it takes a lot of work to sustain the colony. Drought frequency in this level is much higher and longer to the point where it will dry up more often than not.

Additionally, Timberborn features a custom game mode that gives the players a choice in how they want to play the game. Players can customize how many resources they start with, the age group of the Beavers, drought duration, and even temperature. Custom game modes add a lot of replayability to gamers and content creators who like to experiment with the game modes.

Once everything has been selected and decided upon, the game begins and players can see cute Beavers coming out of the town center hut. In terms of building the town, there are a lot of options at the beginning which are essential for the first few cycles of survival.

Players can make the community farm wood from the map, which can be used to build a water pumping station and housing. Building a water pump will ensure the Beavers stay hydrated. Players can also build a farmhouse which allows the Beavers to farm for resources. However, places where there is no source of water are dry, and trees or farms cannot be grown around those parts unless there is a water source nearby.

Water plays a key part in Timberborn (Image via Mechanistry)

Buildings cannot be built anywhere, so players have to connect them with roads. District center and roads expand a colony, and every building needs to be connected to a road to expand.

By default, the essential tools required are unlocked in Timberborn, which will help one to survive the first few drought seasons. However, future expansion of the colony and advanced tools to survive are locked out. In such cases, players can build a research hut, which will generate research points. Research points are used to unlock advanced buildings, like Forrestor hut, which allows players to plant trees or berries, ensuring resources to build and survive.

Timberborn also allows the vertical placement of buildings. What it means is that players can stack one building over another if they wish to. The conditions for that are pretty simple, as buildings need to have a flat-top to do that.

The tools provided can help players to build a very pretty looking colony (Image via Mechanistry)

Alternatively, players can unlock and use stairs and wooden platforms to have more vertical building options. The tools certainly look impressive and allow for a lot of variety when it comes to building a colony.

Water, water everywhere, and drought comes in to take it all

Water is an essential component of Timberborn. It is used to power buildings, keep the thirst of Beavers at bay, used for farming and making drylands fertile. The more water there is around an island, the better the land is for farming.

One of the water reserviors players can build (Image via Mechanistry)

Late game items like Dynamite can be used to create a canal, which can help in transporting water to drier areas, allowing for more building and expansion spaces.

Irontails using Dynamite (Image via Mechanistry)

But to add to the challenge in the game, Timberborn has a drought system. Every 10 days, the drought dries up the water from the lakes, making the surrounding lands infertile and killing all the plants and trees.

To survive a drought, players can build buildings like dams, floodgates, and others, which allows them to store water during the drought season for survival and also control the flow of water. The game is all about efficiently utilizing the resources to survive droughts while ensuring that the Beaver colony expands and survives. It's simple, yet a lot of thought and love has been put into the tools.

Beavers work together, but can't be assigned

Timberborn, however, is not without its own flaws, which is expected since the game is currently in early access and a lot of things are work-in-progress.

Timberborn has a tutorial mode in the in-game options. The tutorial covers the basics of the game, hand-holding players into learning what they need to know to essentially survive the first few days.

The tutorial option is in the main game options

However, the tutorial happens during the actual main game, so any mistakes made during the tutorial might become a roadblock for the main game, since the drought season will still come and go and punish players. A more in-depth tutorial mode covering the sections of the game might be very welcome in the upcoming updates for the game.

Another thing which I particularly disliked is the inability of managing the distribution of jobs. What Timberborn has is the ability to pause jobs in a building, which is a good way to manage the Beavers working.

For example, after carrots are planted, players can pause the Farmhouse so that the Beavers can go and work somewhere else. However, this can get confusing when things grow big.

A dedicated option to manage jobs for Beavers can help a lot. That way, players can see where a Beaver is working and can mix and match based on it. Though this might sound silly nitpicking, it certainly can help a lot with micromanaging during mid and late games.

The Map Editor

One of the best elements Mechanistry has added to Timberborn is a map editor. It allows players to build custom maps that can be played and shared amidst the community. The maps add a lot of replayability to the game as players can build their own maps or equip user-created maps with custom land conditions added to them.

"The Cascade" map, created by user Archinist Enter caption

Currently, the game does not have the Steam Workshop integration, so Timberborn players have to visit the game forums to get custom maps. It’s a great feature if one gets bored of playing the base game maps. "The Cascade" by the user Archinist is one of my favorites and can be checked here.

In Conclusion

Timberborn is a fresh take on the Colony Sim City Builder genre. Amidst all the kinds of themes we’ve got in this genre, Timberborn and its Beavers certainly have their own distinct identity and add another new theme to the genre.

While development is still going on and certain features added in the future can make this game even more fun to play, the current offerings are certainly worth looking at. Mechanistry has certainly made me appreciate Beavers!

These scores are subject to change when the game exits early-access. For now, Timberborn is a big recommendation to colony sim, city builder lovers who want to sink their teeth into a new one.