Timberborn is a city builder starring super smart beavers

Beavers are the builders of nature, and in Timberborn, released for PC in Early access to Steam On Wednesday, players manage a colony of these industrious creatures in a post-human world. The city building simulator has a cute exterior, but don’t let that fool you, it’s legitimately challenging. As the game developer Mechanistry described in his Twitch channel, on Timberborn Beavers work or die.

Timberborn takes place in a future version of our world where humanity has exhausted planet Earth of its precious resources. Superintelligent beavers have evolved into “lumberpunk” societies, where wood is a critical resource that fuels agriculture, river control, and the growth of society. Instead of building a city alone, TimberbornThe colony management elements are based on the survival simulator, requiring players to tend to food and water by farming and building water wheels, all while the river level changes with the seasons. And then, of course, the resources need warehouses for storage, or they are turned into raw ingredients to build or maintain other processes.

It’s a satisfying balancing act, sometimes punishing. Within the hour of my first game, I accidentally solved my beaver unemployment problem by having a mass extinction due to starvation. I didn’t realize it until there were only three beavers left, two of which died on their way to picking blueberry bushes, reducing my entire colony to a living beaver child. Of course, the carrot and potato farm I had meticulously designed turned out well just half a day later. I love this game.

Image: Timberborn

And although I usually waste a lot of time in colony management simulations building cozy lodgings, it depresses me to see someone sleeping on the floor. Timberborn is the only exception. Seeing beavers snuggle on the ground is so cute. That being said, these beavers have more advanced social needs, such as socialization and creature comforts (heh), which affect their “well-being” rating and thus their productivity. You can build lodgings for them, increasing their comfort, as well as adding design elements, such as monuments, to make your neighborhood more pleasant to live in.

But city building is where the game really shines, thanks to the committed realization of its “lumberpunk” concept. These are beavers, after all! They cut down trees with their chewers, seriously get up close and you can see it, and they have developed a technology and a supply chain around it. The wood is turned into sawmills that refine the wood, rinse and repeat. Buildings can often be built vertically on top of one another to save space as you expand your beaver society. Scrap, obtained from human ruins, can be converted into engines and additional technology. They are classic city building mechanics, but like Timberborn It is about beavers, everything is built on the basis of water and wood management, and it is much more beautiful. And naturally, their hard work culminates in the creation and maintenance of a beautiful dam that allows the colony to manage the river’s flow through floods, fallows, and droughts.

This fluctuating environmental design takes advantage of a little Frostpunkethos, with no explicit timed challenges or a nearly difficult difficulty curve that exhausting. It is also similar to Don’t starve togetherseasons, which require players to accumulate food to survive the winter. In the same way that these sims launch seasonal, sometimes cyclical challenges to keep players on their toes, TimberbornThe drying up of the river forces the player to constantly re-strategize and reevaluate. Water is essential for survival in Timberborn, as it is necessary to convert wasteland into arable agricultural land, among other tasks. A player can use explosives to dig canals in preparation for the rainy season and build huge grain stores to prepare for the drought. Forget hoarding and you will have a ton of dead beavers.

Image: Mechanism

All of this is wrapped in a package that is both nostalgic and new, with a visual style reminiscent of CD-ROM games of the early 2000s, such as Ubisoft’s Settlers franchise, but with path and location tools from buildings that are a bit older. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. That said, it does have that sleeker presentation that befits a modern release, including a map editor that lets players design their own environments.

Timberborn has quietly climbed its way up the Steam bestseller list, right behind giants like Deathloop. Since it is still in early access it does have a few drawbacks, but I hope they are fixed. Also, I might be reading too much about my own gamer bug … I’m not saying I killed my first colony because I spent too much time laughing and zooming in as they cut down trees and ran to do their chores. Then again I’m not no Saying that.