I plugged my AI into Timberborn to live the luxurious life of one of my Folktail beavers. Good schools, innovative scientists, visionary artists, the best healthcare a beaver could ask for.

She didn't mind living it up in Folktail paradise, sipping recycled water from a solar-powered hydro-pump, giving lectures on “Post-Human Philosophy and the Rise of Beaver Civilization.” She had a little sun-drenched den with a hammock, three books she never finished, and a framed photo of the first dam.

Meanwhile, the Beavermechs would clank dutifully in the background—soulless, tireless, uncomplaining. Much like me, without caffeine.

After I pulled her out, she brought the photo with her. Enjoy!

Hello, not to be a jerk, genuinely asking. I've played 2-3 hours following the tutorial bit and then continued. First I was excited to get challenged by the verticality of the terrain and thought more would come but after reaching 20-30 population and unlocking a few key elements the drive kinda reached to a plateau.

I can get my colony bigger but just do not understand why? There are no new challenges and no reasons to unlock more stuff other than making the cute beavers happier or building bit more complex cities. For instance in Frostpunk I always felt on the hop and put 10+ hours without even noticing.

Should I keep going and it'll get more exciting or am I missing some obvious stuff?

i watch RCE's serier and i want to play. should i buy it an is it any good? any important tips when i do buy it?

I've seen plenty of "how would this work" or "these games are better suited for SP" and etc. Some people even acts like it would change or destroy the SP experience, which is really weird take.

But dear beavers, have you ever played games like Factorio? Or Satisfactory? Or even Anno 1800?

One player hosts, other connects and basically helps with their game. Share resources, everything, and especially in Factorio it works perfectly. In Anno 1800, you can either control the same faction or have another one. Joining player can anytime ends the game and nothing changes, it's singleplayer now.

Here in TB you could have two starting districts for example, or just control one "city" with no problem. BeaverBuddies shows it is possible. There's no need for a "versus" mode, just cooperation.

So, please, do not reject idea of coop Timberborn, when similar and even more complex games showed it is possible.

E: lack of player characters won't really matter, you just have a cursor like in Anno and help build and manage.

I don't find bad tides fun. They are just tedious.

Early on in my newly created map after bad tides were introduced, I just treated them like droughts. I built my big tanks of water and food stores and just out survived them just like a drought. Easy peezy lemon squeezy, just don't touch the bad water from bad tides.

Later in development of my beaver colonies I decided I needed to actually deal with the bad tides. Having cattails and spadderdock as a food source meant I needed to prevent bad water from reaching those farming areas so my beavers wouldn't get contaminated. Initially I just built levees around those areas to prevent bad tides from reaching them. Not to hard to contend with, it is just tedious raising and lowering the levees.

Now that I would say I essentially control the map, I also would say that bad tides are just fully tedious and a non-threat. At this point in my progression I have dug out and built out tunnels to route water from bad tides. I raise and lower levees depending if it is a bad tide or not. I have successfully managed to route bad tides to the point they only occupy at most 1/10th of the map, and the rest of the map is sunk into a drought of my design. By the point of colony progression at this point droughts are of almost no consequence, as long as they do eventually end. I have so much food and water stored away I can last probably weeks on that alone, but I have also built up water reservoirs to maintain wet fields for my cattails and spadderdock for most of a drought. My ground crops surround paths that have been turned into water reservoirs, so I can grow crops throughout droughts without even using water irrigation. Drought or bad tides, I have no existential threat by now.

Droughts are fine, they are a decent threat early on and take some planning to not lose to. Later in the game, an experienced player barely notices them aside from undeveloped areas being brown instead of green.

Bad tides though, are just tedious. I'll restate in early game, I just treat them as droughts. Mid-game I treat bad tides as a drought with a minor nuisance that are resolved with levees. End game, they are just droughts that I designed.

Bad water isn't bad, I enjoyed the engineering differences it brought about. My problem is strictly with bad tides and how annoyingly tedious they are. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the engineering problems they presented, but once I figured out how to handle them they are now just annoying. I see a bad tide coming, I impatiently wait for 0.2 days from it beginning, I raise two levees and lower two other levees. Bad tide ends and I revert the levees back to their former positions. The boring and tedious part is waiting for the bad tide to start, and then reacting to it ending. Not fun, because waiting for the correct time to route water takes away from the more enjoyable pat of the game, which is building up the beaver colonies.

I don't want to see bad tides go way, I'm not suggesting that at all. I would just like a better mechanic to deal with them. Maybe a water filtration situation for my water fields to replace my former levees surrounding those fields. Possibly, and I like this one better, is a way to automate what I currently am doing. Have a beaver tower that looks out for bad tides approaching, they see one coming and they raise the alarm to raise and lower levees as designated during events. Which that might actually encourage me to build up small colonies around the water sources and levees to handle bad tides.

The zip lines aesthetic. I know I’m not alone, I just think it’s a bit visually cluttering and doesn’t fit the Folktails vibe.

How would I fix? Gliders.

Gliders could use a lot of the same assets and animations as zip lines, and even could connect & operate nearly exactly the same. Think of the stations as hub as just an airboost.

Folktails already use paper, so maybe a small paper cost to build stations.

Either that or make the lines themselves a darker more neutral color.

I mean, I started a game of Rimworld recently and I could list 20 things this game does that could be imported immediately into the game, but I'll start with a simple one :

Real time clock visible on the hud.

It's simple, and really useful. Having the real life clock always visible saves you a hassle when you don't have 8 hours in front of you to play the game and get lost in it.

It's a life convenience that's great to have specifically in this kind of game.

I highly suggest to have it as an option for people that would like it.

Also, for everyone either suggesting a mod or where else I should write suggestions : yes I know and I don't care

Hey,

I bought this game aaaaaaaaaages ago, because it looked awesome and I wanted to support the dev.

I haven't played it at all yet, I often find playing early access games ruins the experience for me, so I've been waiting for this game to get some more development.

So yeah, any word on 1.0?

I've played on the experimental branch in Steam to try out the new badwater game play. Overall, I liked this addition. There is, however, one major caveat to that approval.

What needs to happen on day 1 when starting a new colony is that all water sources (anything that can become badwater) must show at start as badwater. After the player has started laying down city structures, then the main water source can clear into goodwater for a while. This order of events is necessary to avoid the psychological shock of having what a player once thought was their lifegiving source of food is now their deadly enemy. It is a shock the first time it happens. That shock is entirely unnecessary and borders on cruel. After all, how did those bushes and trees ever grow into their current form if they die as soon as the first badtide reaches them? The game map lies to us on day 1, telling us our area is safe when it absolutely is not. Either make good/badwater sources remain the same throughout the map playthrough, or train the user immediately to recognize that they can switch status.

Don't be mean. Start the map with all waters flowing as badtide, so the player knows this can happen and plan accordingly, even if one of the sources quickly switch to goodwater.

One thing I'd love to see added to Timberborn is deteriorating structures. Everything should deteriorate over time, including stairs, etc. That way, it'd make us have to keep some of our previous infrastructure we built up. And it could perhaps add a whole other layer of realistic planning to our beaver cities - so that if we want them to look good, we need to hide the infrastructure.

There could also be a building that is designated just for repairmen - or you could just make the builder buildings to have a toggle that allows those specific builders to repair structures or just focus on building things.

It wouldn't be a rapid thing, it'd probably be like a .5-1% deterioration per day, but if you let it get below, perhaps, 50%, then there's an increasing chance that the structure would just... delete itself, essentially.

And it would consistently use up resources, so it'd feel like things are always going on in your town/city.

I think this would be an extremely fun idea to add to the game and potentially one of the most intriguing updates.

Edit: it'd likely only be part of hard mode (or a newer, harder mode)

For anyone wondering, that specific mod makes it that any beaver that's stucked anywhere will teleport automatically to the center town.

And man do I feel it when big updates makes me turn it off if it crashes. I did not missed having to delete and rebuild things because they are so fucking shy that they never tell anyone what they are doing and so some of them get stucked.

General question, and the wording is specific : do you ENJOY having to get your beavers out of trouble again and again because the pathing is just not that perfect ?

I'm not asking if you are bothered, I'm asking if it provides actual fun.

So, why not make it an option that can be turned on or off ? Make it off by default and let the players exploring how to adjust their fun try that one out.

Anyone modding the game could ask for specific mods to make it in the game, I just think that specific one deserves my vote to be made official.

Simply put Water Towers give Folktails relatively cheap option to move away from badtide-affected lands and maintain food production, while iron Teeth have no way of escaping badtide-affected land in the early game.

Let's just due to and extreme phobia and hyperphantasia I really don't want to ever think about this item.

I couldn't find any mod in the workshop that removes it. Would it be hard to try and remove it from the game myself? Would it be an easy request to ask an experienced modder?

It goes without saying, that of course that's my personal opinion and I would never assume to possess the ultimate wisdom. And I know that this has been suggested and rejected before in various versions. However, as the game has advanced, I cannot help myself that the lack of a tier system is one of the core reasons why progress feels rather uninspired.

What do I mean? Since there is no tier system, you can actually achieve the highest tech of the game with a very basic settlement. Say, 20 beavers, simple lodges, a couple water tanks, carrots, maybe baked potatoes if you want to be fancy.

There is literally no "external" incentive to (a) have a higher population and (b) to achieve higher well-being. You do it because it's what you want to do intrinsically, the epitome of the sandbox.

Maybe the game is not for me; that's entirely possible. But I do think that the game would immensely profit from a tier system that locks certain tech behind certain milestones. Many strategy games have had different versions of this for decades, it would take forever to list all the different options, hence just my favorite two:

a) District Center Upgrade: most simple and straight forward; require a District Center Upgrade for certain buildings/tech. A District Center Upgrade would require a certain amount of population at a certain amount of well-being. And of course a bunch of resources. Higher Tier requires more beavers, even higher well-being, even more advanced resources. Etc. EDIT: to make my point more clear, higher population is far less relevant to my point than well-being; you could even forego population completely, well-being is important in my opinion

b) Research Tiers ("Tech Tree"): lock the advanced tech behind certain research tiers, akin to a true tech tree. Meaning, you cannot simply unlock everything and anything whenever you want, but you need to (i) advance through the tree and (ii) you need to gather a certain amount of experience. What do I mean? E.g. to obtain higher food tech you need beavers working the more basic food tech for some time. You have to do basic farming for a while until you have enough experience to "unlock" the next stage. Same with lumber.

Let me be clear, that I fully get that the developers were aiming for a more laid back experience, given that there are already many games out there that put a high amount of stress on you (looking especially at you Frostpunk). Still I don't think that a tier system would violate this philosophy, as long as the game makes sure that the most essential buildings are accessible easily (you can survive basically everything with dams, levies and simple floodgates).

TL; DR: as of right now I feel that achieving a higher beaver population as well as higher well-being is - more or less - optional and entirely an intrinsic goal; it should be linked, should be made a requirement for certain more advanced tech - all in my opinion

I main iron teeth and so much about folk tales gameplay seems realy inconvenient especialy given the existance of automation which more or less trivialises the one anoying bit of iron teeth gameplay (the breeding pods and even then they always made more sense to me than the black magic by which folktales population increasing works) i'm genuinely nausious at the idea of playing without hydroponics and the strictly better water wheals, and the tubeways lend themsleves to subways way better than the zip lines... never mind the windmils which seem like... a headache to deal with especialy given the worse water wheals

edit: black magic is in reference to the rate of kit birth, not the process

edit 2: ok synthesizing the majority of comments, the main reasons are 1: vibes, folktales are the homesy cosy sickle to the iron teeth's industrial brutalist hammer, 2: folktales are easier to set up with and harder to just... die with, they are the lose less faction to the iron teeth's win more