Timberborn News

Hi everyone!

Tomorrow is the B-day – Timberborn Early Access launches at 5 PM CEST and we can’t wait to hear what you think. In our final preview, we’re taking a brief look at the aspects of running your beaver settlement we haven’t touched before. But first, the surprise.


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
For Timberborn Early Access, we have teamed up with a very talented Polish composer Zofia Domaradzka. You could already hear some of her new tracks in the demo, but for launch, we’ve got a full soundtrack comprising 11 beautiful songs. The tracks you already knew have been properly mastered and in some cases partially re-recorded with live instruments. The main menu theme is a perfect example of that. Play the video above and you will hear the difference.

You have been asking us if we were going to make the soundtrack available outside the game. We’re happy to announce that you can now find Timberborn Official Soundtrack on Zofia’s artist pages on Spotify and Apple Music!

Here's the tracklist:

1. We Are Timberborn
   
2. Water That Gives Life
   
3. Fruitful Hardship
   
4. Thirsty Lands
   
5. The Cycle of Nature
   
6. Hopeful Calmness
   
7. Strong Together
   
8. Mystery of the New Day
   
9. Seasons Change
   
10. When All Life Goes to Sleep
    
11. Harvest Time
    

Listen to Timberborn OST on Spotify and Apple Music

We will also make the soundtrack available for purchase in a bundle or separately as a DLC here on Steam. It will cost USD 6.99 (before regional pricing and launch week discount of 10%).


Whether your beavers live at all is mostly dependent on droughts and your successes with water engineering and growing the colony. But there’s more to that.

[h3]Districts[/h3]


We have talked about that in greater detail in our second devlog, but here’s an abridged version. As your settlements grow in size, you need to add additional districts to the starter one. Districts are where your assigned beavers live, work and play – and to set up one you build a district center as well as city gates.

Usually, you will also want to transfer goods – and denizens – between districts. Maintaining a balance between districts is crucial to the success of your population, and there are many approaches to using this system. For example, you may try to make each of them a self-sufficient village, or opt for specialization, where each district handles a specific branch of production. Just remember to choose a suitable name for each of them!

[h3]Wellbeing[/h3]


Just as is the case with districts, you can rename your beavers. And once you have that little Justin prancing around, take good care of him. That means ensuring all his needs are met. At the moment, each beaver has a set of needs such as Comfort or Spirituality that yield benefits such as faster movement or longer life expectancy. To satisfy those, you can’t just rely on industrial buildings – a temple or a press that prints good books help with other elements of a beaver's life.

Each beaver is individually simulated and you need to find a proper balance to satisfy as many needs as you can (or want). Feeding and keeping the colony hydrated is crucial, but we’re talking highly advanced beaver society so don’t miss out on other aspects of their life.

[h3]Day and night[/h3]


You may be doing your best to keep beavers happy, but the dry seasons inevitably come and become deadlier and deadlier. To prepare for the drought, you may need to change the working hours – and Justin will no longer enjoy the short, sixteen-hour shifts. That way, you will increase your productivity but in the long run, this exhausts your beavers. Also, remember that not everything happens instantly. If you want to send an emergency caravan to another district, do it before the night falls.

In Timberborn, beavers operate on a day and night cycle, and you will see them engage in beaverish activities such as camping after work. Later at night, when they’re hidden in their lodges, they will also make an effort to increase the colony’s population… if they’re in a proper mood (and if they’re Folktails). Iron Teeth, on the other hand, maintain their Breeding Pods before a good night’s sleep. Each colony works differently and it is your job to make sure it operates smoothly.

[h3]Customizing your settlements[/h3]


Even though we’ve been focused on the more utilitarian buildings and the “survival” affairs, you are already able to customize your settlements. The ability to stack buildings atop one another, the modular platforms, dams, and power shafts give you large freedom of managing space.

You are also free to create fields and orchards of any shapes you want, and the dynamite allows you to terraform the land to match your vision. Finally, there are decorative objects you can use - we have roofs in a few shapes, benches, shrubs, as well as some other gadgets, including some fresh ones.

How will YOUR beavers feel in their post-apocalyptic home when the floodgates open TOMORROW?

Oh my, oh my, oh my! Join the hype on Discord.

This is getting too real – in just two days, players of the world will set up their post-apocalyptic beaver colonies. There are many changes but some will be visible right away as soon as you start a new game. First of all, the game is now available in all 11 planned languages, including the Asian languages we didn’t have in the demo. Second – we now have a brand new UI.







Here are two samples of the new UI. The first one is taken in Global view at 120% UI scale, the second one is a District view at 100% UI scale. You can scale Timberborn's UI at will and you will read about views in a moment.

While we have no doubts this one is much prettier than what we had before, this is a huge change and it may take a moment to adjust. Also, we've heard some early comments about the new UI's accessibility to colorblind and visually impaired players. Let us know if the current iteration is problematic for you and we'll try to make adjustments as quickly as possible.

Now, let’s break down the most important elements of the new UI.

[h3]New bottom panel[/h3]
We have replaced the miniature 3D renders with hand-drawn icons and added new, more visual tooltips. The sheer amount of new buildings meant we also needed to rearrange the toolbar. While the categories stayed the same, some feature many more objects and might require a little rearranging in the future.

[h3]New right panel and flavor texts[/h3]
After you select a building or a resource, you will see a new, easier-to-read panel that features a toggleable element – the description and flavor text frame. Most clickable elements on the map now come with a little bit of text – a quote, a lore tidbit etc. If you want to read a building’s flavor, you need to build it first.

[h3]New clock and “season” panels[/h3]
We have updated the way in-game time, beavers’ work time as well as weather (previously: seasons) are displayed. We now have a forecast bar that helps you notice that the drought is coming and will tell you much more you need to endure to survive. It is also easier to change how much your beavers work.

[h3]New upper and left panels[/h3]
The upper panel displays the number of available resources. On the left, you can monitor basic stats for your population. Remember that what you see here depends on whether you have chosen the global or district view. We have updated these panels to include icons instead of pure text, and you are now able to expand and collapse the lists.

[h3]Map Editor[/h3]

You can read more about the editor here, but our easy-to-use map-building tool has also received a UI overhaul to match the current in-game UI.

[h3]Crash screen[/h3]

To round things up, we also have this particular screen. Of course, we hope you'll never get to see it in-game but... things happen.



To make it easier to navigate your settlements, we now have a few tools that help you see what’s going on. Because we now have districts (more on that here), you’re able to switch between the Global and District-specific Views. When in the district view, you only see numbers related to that particular district. Switching to the district view is a matter of choosing a district from a dropdown list or clicking a building belonging to that district.

You are also able to toggle the view between vertical layers, making it easier to maintain stacks of buildings, check the situation in tunnels etc.

Finally, because beavers will now continue to use underwater paths, build, and gather resources, you can toggle water transparency at will, not just when building.




With the annoying Unity bug squashed, we were able to add the three missing Asian languages to the game. This means that the whole game is now available in all planned languages:

• English
  
• Polish
  
• French
  
• German
  
• Spanish
  
• Brazilian Portuguese
  
• Russian
  
• Simplified Chinese
  
• Italian
  
• Japanese
  
• Korean
  

Additional languages may become available at some point of Early Access either due to huge demand or as a community project. We should have more details about that in the future.

Which language are you going to play in? Let us know, and if you're on our Discord, you can do that in Polish as well! Siema!

Hey everyone!

One of the reasons Timberborn encourages vertical architecture – which we previewed yesterday – is the need for efficient space management. We kept that in mind while designing the Early Access maps. But what if you'd rather play on a map that’s as flat as a pancake? Or on an area completely covered with jagged cliffs? Well, fire up the map editor and find that out.



The in-game map editor is the same tool we use to create Timberborn maps. Over the course of the game’s development, we have prepared – and scrapped – many levels, and now so can you. The best thing is that once you’re done, sharing the map with others is a matter of copying a file.

The map editor is accessed via the main menu. You can create a new map – just pick a custom map size and you’ll be thrown onto an empty, rather depressing wasteland that needs your creative touch. Thanks to the magic of the terrain-altering brushes you will be able to shape it down to a voxel. Changing the map’s heights is the main job here but keep the future waterways in the back of your mind.

If you want your map’s denizens to survive, you will need to set up water source blocks and choose appropriate water strength. Then you can just run the simulation to see how water behaves, where it spills uncontrollably, etc. You can pick spots for natural barriers and think of possible ways the player will play with water during both wet and dry seasons.

Or you can go crazy and build a madman’s test scene that makes it barely possible for the beavers to survive. Your call.



Either way, your finishing touches involve sprinkling trees and berries around the map as well as placing the clusters of human ruins. You have complete control over what you put on the map but you don’t need to place each pine sapling by hand – simply increase the brush size and choose a mixture of resources. Then, you just place the starting location – and that’s it!

An alternative to creating a brand new map is to pick any of the existing maps included by us or a community creation. You can then edit it in a similar fashion.



Regarding the maps we have included in the game: when you download Timberborn’s early access version, it will come with 9 maps created by us. Each of them is designed to be a different challenge.

We want you to have an element of surprise when Early Access hits on the 15th, so we won’t show them all. But here’s a recap:

• Plains is the classic map some of you might already know, with a lot of flat spaces and a big river going into a lake.
  
• Thousand Islands is filled with water and the challenge comes with going through it or blocking it to acquire more farmland.
  
• Likewise, Lakes gives you a lot of small spaces to put water through, irrigating a lot of land.
  
• Terraces is a very vertical map that starts you on a plateau with a small stream nearby and makes you go down, instead of up.
  
• Mountain Range is the newest map and slightly smaller than Terraces, but is somewhat similar — the water going out of the mountain you start on quickly falls into a ravine and doesn't irrigate that much land.
  
• Even smaller than that is Meander which features a single twisted river going around an elevated terrain the beavers start on.
  
• Waterfalls is another older map with a few waterfalls and a fairly flat terrain near the river after the falls.
  
• Canyon is the same valley with a small river that you've seen in the demo, with some small tweaks to make it easier to place bridges here and there.
  
• And Diorama is a tiny challenge map that makes your settlement look like a model village.
  

What kind of map would YOU like to grow your colony on when Early Access begins?

Remember that our Discord has a section where Timberborn players share all their creations. We have art, music, even puzzles — and starting with the 15th, custom maps will be there too!

Heya, beaver engineers!

Yesterday’s countdown post was 90% playing with water and 10% blowing stuff up. Let’s get even more technical today and talk about timbertech. It’s a term we coined to describe technology that connects wood and metal as much as the beaver and human ideas.

Considering the vertical structures it allows you to build, it’s a perfect example of hi-tech.



When there’s no limit to your creativity and the length of play – and there are none in the early access’ endless mode – you will realize you need to consider efficient space management. It may be a tall order, and that’s where the vertical architecture of Timberborn comes into play.

As long as a building has a Solid keyword, you may place other buildings on its roof. Some buildings such as Campfire still need to be placed on the ground, but many don’t – and that allows you to construct multi-level structures. You can also use stairs and platforms of different heights to organize your multi-level settlements while beavers walk on them or underneath.



There are smaller, ordinary wooden platforms of three heights you already know. But we've also added metal platforms, perfect for building a city on top of another city. They’re expensive to build, sure, but consider the fact you can build BELOW them, and they’re much more attractive. Also, remember that another unique building Iron Teeth were supposed to have? Well, guess what – only they can construct the higher and larger variant of the metal platform.

We’re also introducing our first “Above-ground” buildings. If a structure has this tag, it means you can’t place it on the ground. For starters, we’ve got Rooftop Terrace, which is an above-ground variant of the Campfire, intended to showcase the verticality.



The sky (and the number of ruins on the map) are the limit here.



We know you enjoy playing with verticality, so that’s why we’re also adding suspension bridges to Early Access, with the most advanced ones using metal. You can build these bridges to span gaps and crevasses without reaching the bottom with platforms… but most importantly, to establish walking routes OVER other buildings. Correct, you can build over and below these bridges as long as there’s enough free space. To build a bridge, you only need access to one “attaching point” – and if that’s not enough to cross the gap, build another one on the other side.



Every beaver is a lumberjack at heart, allowing them to cut trees without tools, but processing timber is a different story. Logs need to be properly stored, then you can turn them into planks, which in turn become gears. You may also produce paper used to print books and craft dynamite. The production chains require you to set up sawmills and specialized workshops. As wood is used in all Timberborn buildings in one form or another, you need a lot of it. That’s where foresters come in. Currently, they can grow three types of trees.



The berries gathered at the beginning of the game satisfy beaver hunger only for so long – soon, your beavers will need something more nutritious. (Unless we're talking Iron Teeth, who use them to grow kits in breeding pods). Once you employ farmers, you will be able to plant carrots. Another step would be growing potatoes but that adds a need for a grill. In the early access version of Timberborn, we also have bread – there are even more steps between planting wheat and the end-product created by bakeries. Remember that Folktails are our expert farmers, and they can speed up crop growth with their unique beehives.



Numerous buildings require power to operate and your colony can generate energy in different ways, some of them faction-exclusive. While Iron Teeth do not mind using an engine, Folktails would rather use the whimsical force of the wind. Both factions can use water wheels, powered by river currents, and the (slightly reworked and smaller) power wheels, where it’s up to an employed beaver to generate power.

Connecting the power source to buildings can be done in two ways. You can either create clusters of buildings that transform energy when attached wall to wall or use modular power shafts. You may shape the latter to your needs, using intersections, placing them on platforms, or even connecting levels of different heights.



Human ruins scattered on Timberborn maps serve as a grim reminder of a long-gone civilization and a finite source of metal. Scrap metal is gathered by beavers employed at scavenger flags – which replaced scavenger huts. To use it in buildings, you need to turn the scrap into metal blocks. That’s where the shredder comes in – it’s a new, power-hungry building. Metal blocks it produces can then be used in advanced structures such as the longest bridges or the carousel.

The metal usage is still in the early stage of development, but you should plan around the fact that once all ruins on the map are depleted, you will no longer have access to it and the related structures.

So, what will YOU do with the timber-tech and vertical architecture when Timberborn launches in Early Access in just four days?

Let's hear in the comments or on our Discord!

BOOM, what’s up!

As we count days to Timberborn’s early access launch, we’re going over different aspects of the world’s one and only beaver city-builder. And what are beavers best known for? They transform the world as we know it with their water engineering skills.



Adding water physics to Timberborn was a major breakthrough and seeing how much the players enjoy it, we knew it would be the game’s defining feature. After all, the beaver master-race is known for its dam-building skills. And how do we approach that?

At launch, you will be able to construct modular dams using the following blocks: levees, dams, and floodgates. Levees block water completely and allow you to place other buildings on them. Dams allow some water to pass through at the top. Floodgates come in three heights and let you change how much (if anything) passes through – you can adjust each module if you wish.


Water that stays at a certain level and maintains a strong current will keep the water wheels operating – and that’s a good thing because they’re a very efficient source of energy for both beavers factions. To let you make better use of them, it will be possible to daisy-chain water wheels in Early Access.

Sufficient water levels also allow pumps to work, and the water you get from the pumps can be stored, used to quench the beavers’ thirst or to keep the Folktails’ irrigation towers running. We know that the pumps only operating on water one-tile deep could be frustrating at times, and that’s why we’ve increased their operating depth – with Iron Teeth pumps working deeper.


In early access, there will also be a new way to utilize water – beavers working at the Water Dump will grab buckets of water and carry them to spill it to the designated area. Not the most efficient way to transport water, yes, but it allows you to move water to higher levels.

Finally, by popular request, we’re adding the Water Marker. This little thing helps you monitor the water levels – both current and the (resettable) maximums.



The most explosive ways of having fun with water physics come with the use of dynamite. Produced in an Explosives Factory (that now has a new model by the way), dynamite allows you to blow up selected blocks of terrain. You manually choose when to detonate a stick of dynamite, just remember that chain reaction (and deaths) may occur.

With dynamite, you can level the terrain so that setting up the settlement is easier. Even more important use involves digging canals and reservoirs. Canals are a good way of redirecting water into otherwise dry areas – and a sufficiently deep and wide reservoir might help your colony survive the drought. With the Water Dump mentioned above, you can easily fill such an artificial basin during a wet season so that it’s easier to survive the upcoming drought.

How will YOU play with water when Timberborn launches on September 15?

Let us know and see you tomorrow with another preview!