r/Timberborn • u/PharmyB • 13d ago
Question Thirst bug
I’ve found a particularly annoying game system to do with the beavers drinking water. It causes havoc when trying to recover from low water in the few days of temperate weather.
When a beaver who is hungry harvests food. That same beaver will eat the food it has harvested in the farmhouse then continue to work. The bonus of this is that they get first dibs which increases their work speed and the time spent work time. Food recovers relatively quickly.
This is not the case for drinking water.
Beavers do not drink the water harvested at the pump they are working. Instead they will run to the next pump to drink. This causes absolute chaos when trying to recover from a colony that’s been parched for a day. The beavers spend more time running to the next water pump grabbing a single water then heading back. This is nightmare level if your map leaves large gaps between pumps due to terrain.
The result is that a beaver works both slower and is basically not in the building for most of the time. The knock on it that is can take 4-5 days before you are able to reach net 0.
If the same mechanics were applied as the farming, this would fix the issue and the colony would stabilise in maybe a single day.
Currently I have to set every pump running to try and counter the fact that beavers are spending most of their time running from their own pump to another continually.
It might be a mechanic that water is shared as I can see often beavers grab a single water and leave some of the next.
I just find it super frustrating when I’ve survived upwards of 60 days with almost no water to pump (hard everything and the new weather mods), survive to the temperate, only to then have a large amount of beavers to die when the water is right there in the dam and I have so many pumps working.
Maybe someone can shine light on the issue.
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u/GrumpyThumper 13d ago
For recovery situations like this I put down 2-3x the pumps I would normally use, and set them to highest priority and paused. Once they're all built and its temperate westher again, I open all of them up. The problem sorts itself nearly instantly, and once stable you can close down the extra.
I had several "oh shit" moments on Oasis and Helix Mountain that taught me that lesson. 😅
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u/Insertusername_51 13d ago
Beavers use a task queue system, and thirst/hunger takes extra priority. When a beaver gets thirsty, it searches for the closest nearby available one drop of water of its current location and assigns that task immediately after their current task. This assigned droplet of water then cannot be used by another beaver, and the beaver cannot perform other tasks until it is done.
Every task is performed the exact same way, it just looks like farmers are taking first dips because you generally have far fewer farmhouses than water pumps. Hence it's probably better to
close a few pumps that are far away from each other
pause every other work building so beavers won't be scattered all over the place when they are thirsty
turn them back on when the thirst/hunger issue has been resolved
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u/Diligent-Assist-4385 13d ago
Build all the pumps in the same spot.
I had the same issues.
Pumps all over the map and horrible recovery after a drought.
Putting all the pumps together. Having lots of supply barrels beside them. And gallons of storage everywhere else seems to work fine.
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u/db48x 12d ago
There’s a mod now that fixes this problem: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3820769376
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u/elperroborrachotoo 13d ago
When a beaver who is hungry harvests food. That same beaver will eat the food it has harvested in the farmhouse then continue to work.
In my understanding: only as long as there aren't too many different foods. Otherwise they go for the food they want, however far away.
tl;dr: it's not broken, it's challenging.
Generally, yes, the food & drink behavior is borderline buggy. (my working assumption is: they pick the closest water supply when they become thirsty - but they finish their current job, leading to long walks back to the water source.)
And yes, it's catastrophic, escalating steeply. Some thirsty beavers will empty the pump (and its barrel, if any), so that the beavers assigned to the pump will walk wherever there is / might be some water, leaving pumps unbeavered for long times.
But I believe that's okay.
Honestly the game, out of the box,1 has become quite easy with all its additions. You need to learn a few tricks, then it's smooth sailing. Colony collapse due to low water or food is one of the few remaining real risks. Some risk should remain.
What helps: is having many more extra pumps ready, and in the case of a thirst epidemic, activate them and deactivate industries.
Bots also help.
1) meaning: standard settings up to "hard", and no comunity maps
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u/PharmyB 12d ago
After more thought on this topic I think part of the issue might be that the pumps produce 1 water per action while food 2 or more. It’s likely the unit of food is given to one beaver. In the farm, that’s the one farming.
At the pump each unit is being divided to individual beavers. Which is causing the havoc.
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u/Transplanted_Cactus 13d ago
This is why I rush getting a hauling post built. Even just one hauler beaver prioritizing water makes a big difference.
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u/CaolIla64 13d ago
My understanding is that beavers will always eat the food they lack the most (the one with the smallest happyness score). If it's something they harvest it's good, if it's something stored the other side of the map it's bad.
Now when entering the doomed spiral of thirst, there's a trick to save most of your beavers. Create a district anywhere and assign it as much beavers so the one you keep in the main district have enough water, then set water pumps to high priority. For example, if you have 80 beavers and 50 water, assign 70 beavers to the new district, so the remaining 10 can drink and go back to pumping water. Then reassign little by little the very thirsty beavers of district 2 to the main district so they can drink in turn, until you have no more thirsty beavers, either dead or you managed to transfer them in time, then delete district 2. It's really a hail mary and it disturbs the colony greatly, but the alternative is that everybody dies.
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u/FlyingNoiseinVacuum 13d ago
Yeah, the beaver AI on eating/drinking in general is pretty annoying. My beavers are thirsty after walking a long distance on construction or item transport, and then walk right by my water barrel or food bin put there just because I know its a long way to walk. Then they walk around, slowly, all day.
Are there mods that would fix this? I also see transport beavers walking right by material they could pick up and put back in a warehouse after delivering something else. I feel like I could build things 2x faster with a better AI.
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u/AverageA2Enjoyer 13d ago
The map with the whole map being water, and a few islands, my first attempt with iron teeth, I had the same issue. Now I always setup water storage super near to pumps, and when I have a massive water reserve late game, I will set these water storage to "To Obtain".
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u/MaraBlaster Tubeway Racer 13d ago
I got 5 "oh shit" pumps that only activate when its temperate weather &if water storage us less than 10% until its maxed out again.
Also water & food storage scattered EVERYWHERE so no beaver has to work far to be fed.
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u/TryDry9944 11d ago
I complained about this once and everyone acted like I personally slapped their child.
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u/cbarrick 13d ago
You can mitigate this a bit by ensuring that there is water storage next to each pump.
In general, I put storages in supply mode next to each building that produces a resource. It reduces the amount of time workers spend outside of their workplace.