Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

Post by jztemple2 »

Since we are prioritizing specific game threads, I thought I'd make a new one for an upcoming game, going into Early Access on September 15th. It would seem to be in the vein of Banished or Patron, only it's populated with beavers. Steam Link



Article from PC Gamer, Build a beaver empire in Timberborn next month
Timberborn ticks all of my boxes. Humans have been wiped out, the animals are now in charge, and beavers can build cities. Smart critters and no humans? Sign me up. Yes, my boxes are very specific. And you won't have long to wait if you feel the same way, as an Early Access release date was announced during the Future Games Show.

The wood-obsessed beavers have swapped dams for civilisation, and they've learned a few new tricks, not least of which is using dynamite and constructing big ol' machines. Wood seems to remain the primary building material, though, because these beavers haven't forgotten where they came from.

Developer Mechanistry has hosted lots of playtests and demos, so hopefully it's entering Early Access in a pretty decent state. This phase is expected to last a year, and during that time the team will be putting together more maps and designing at least one new beaver faction.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Here's a video posted by the developers last November which gives a look at a number of features of the game, from early development then later on with dams (natch!), power sources, levees, multi-level buildings and other stuff.

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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Timberborn releases into Early Access next week so the devs are releasing a series of announcements detailing various features of the game. Today's is Droughts & difficulty modes preview.
Today, let’s look at Timberborn’s core feature, droughts, and how they affect the game’s flow and difficulty. Because you know, we’ll have different difficulty modes at launch. We were planning to add that later, but since it was often requested, we moved it up on our priority list.
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Since the Surviving Mars: Below & Beyond DLC was such a buggy mess I've abandoned it and I'll be getting Timberborn at EA release next week. I'm planning on posting impressions as I'm able to.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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So this game releases in about twelve hours and I'm planning on posting some impressions tomorrow. If anyone has questions about the game prior to release, post them and I'll try to answer. I've been following the dev posts and videos and so far, fingers crossed, it looks to be a fun city builder, but with beavers.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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I watched a playthru of this a few months back. Looked pretty good. I'm keeping an eye on it.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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I've put in just over two hours, so no return for me :wink:. I'm playing as the Folktails, one of the two factions. They are more agrarian oriented but still need power for saw mills and other stuff. Below is my little community. The little red circles are that I've filled my water barrels, not actually anything wrong, but it means that my water pump (bottom center) isn't doing any work since it has nowhere to send the water. At lower left is my carrot farm, at center right is my managed forest of pine trees.
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This is a close up of the dam I'm currently building. The idea is that the dam will raise the level of the water to give me a reservoir for the dry season.
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This is a closeup of the village center. The two red warning symbols on the left are indicating that while I've properly built two residences on top of two others (which is a feature of the game, verticality), I've neglected to provide a pathway from the top of the stairs to their doors. I fixed that after taking this screenshot.
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I'm playing on Easy so I don't get that kind of crisis you get in Banished on the first winter. There will be a drought at some point, but not too bad and I'm trying to get ready for it by finishing the dam so I have stored water. Right now my pacing items are logs and science. You go through a lot of logs as you progress. And science is generated by those little buildings that look like they have a Di Vinci propeller on top. You use science points to unlock buildings and other advances. Neither are really hard to get consumables, it just takes time.

Overall I'm enjoying the game. It moves slowly, it's not a "plate spinner" where you have to deal with crisis after crisis. This map is pretty large. The game comes with seven (or nine?) pre-made maps and there is a map editor so you can make your own or download from the net. Controls are simple, I haven't seen a glitch and it looks nice. More reports later.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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By the way, Timberborn had a good launch, number two sales behind only Deathloop.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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I'm still having a good time, almost six hours in. I've gotten to some of the nitty-gritty aspects, such as setting up water wheels to power my sawmills and gear makers:
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Also I've added my first dam and flood gates. The game is built around very dynamic water mechanics, so just opening a couple of floodgates out of six will have an impact on the downstream water level.
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And if you get a bit too carried away, you can get flooding
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You can built water level towers that give the current depth of the water. It also has a "spy" that records the maximum level seen; that "spy" can be reset. The tower is the red capped pylon.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

Post by Carpet_pissr »

So is it a water management game? Serious q.

Looks to be right in my wheelhouse, beaver-centricity be damned.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

Post by TheMix »

Looks very pretty. Not my type of game, but makes me kind of wish it was. :D

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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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I have so many of this type of game that I want to love that I purchase in early access and they just don't quite scratch the itch. Do you have any of the games it looks like it's built off of? What sets it apart from the field? Is there any reason to think this Early Access will be worth jumping on.

I should almost wait for Lorini to get it. She seems to get all of these games like I do and even though we walk away with different impressions, she can give me a good feel if the game is for me based on what she like to pull and what she doesn't care for.

This particular one looks a lot like one she loved but didn't hook me at all at the time... OO search say!!! Factory Town...

http://octopusoverlords.com/forum/viewt ... r#p2703262

I didn't consider Factory Town a failure because I only paid $15 for it and did some things fairly well. Well enough to get me enough hours of playing around with it before setting it aside for more cooking.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Carpet_pissr wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 7:29 am So is it a water management game? Serious q.

Looks to be right in my wheelhouse, beaver-centricity be damned.
It could be any other animal besides beavers that's just what they happened to pick. The Water Management aspects were really interesting.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Patch notes from today's update:
Patch notes 2021-09-16
Most crashes reported on launch day are now fixed
Big thank you to everyone who submitted crash reports! We were able to resolve the most common bugs, complete list below.

Crash fixes:
• Linux users should now be able to load their savegames.
• Unselecting a Distribution Post cancels route creation instead of crashing the game.
• Using an illegal character in the save name no longer results in a crash.
• A rare crash caused by selecting a building is now fixed.
• Some previously missing redistributables are now automatically installed by Steam.

Minor:
• Resources required to complete the construction of a Distribution Post are now visible.
• Fixed a minor terrain rendering bug.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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One of the most critical components of a successful colony is access to water. Basically, as shown in the image below, if the land is green, you can grow stuff, if it isn't, then nothing grows. Moisture will be in the soil if water is both nearby and not too many levels below the soil in question.
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Below is another example. Raising the water level in the river at the bottom of the picture will cause the green soil to extend further towards the top.
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One final example. That one green square is two "cubes" (heights) above the water. The rest of the land is three "cubes" high. Want to make all that land green? Raise the water one "cube" in height.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Any indication how far away from full release this is? I love the look of it but I refuse to buy early access these days.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Lordnine wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:53 pm Any indication how far away from full release this is? I love the look of it but I refuse to buy early access these days.
The devs say a year. I'm normally with you, staying away from Early Release, but I put this in the same category as Prison Architect or Kerbal Space Program. The game is a very functional sandbox right now and there are no "spoilers" since there is no campaign. It is more relaxing than Banished but still a challenge, since the water control and usage features really appeal to me. The game has been in development since 2018 and shows a lot of polish, like PA or KSP at this stage. I'll keep posting about it and folks can decide if even in EA there is enough of a game there for them.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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I'm posting all the images using bigimg tags so folks can click and expand them to see the details.

I'm less than a day away from another drought. Since I'm playing on Easy I know a drought won't be a big deal for me, but I can use the opportunity to learn and practice water control techniques. In the image below, if you expand it, you can see the countdown timer in the top right, right underneath the "Cycle 4, day 19". By the way, "Cycle" approximates to a month, and time is in fractions of a day, to the nearest tenth.
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On the depth marker below, you can see that the water is 0.67 units deep at the water wheels. The bottom of the river at the marker is only one unit deep.
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Below is the depth marker just upstream of my upper floodgates. As you can see, the water is 0.65 deep.
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I've adjusted the floodgates to raise the water level upstream of the floodgates. What I want to do is trap as much water upstream so that when the water source dries up, I'll have more water to let flow through my water wheels to keep them turning.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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To continue from above. The water is now at 1.01 and is starting to flood some of the adjective land. Since I'll only be doing this for less than a day it won't hurt anything.
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This is the source of the water, those rocks on the edge of the map. I haven't fooled around with the editor yet to see what the parameters are, but I'll check that out in time.
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Here is something important I've learned by watching the river. With five floodgates fully up and two halfway up, the upstream river peaked at 1.01, but then dropped slightly to 0.97, just below flooding its banks. I now have the maximum amount of water held back by the floodgates without flooding the land around it.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Here's that drought in action, the water source has dried up.
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The drought will last two days. Here's a look at my downstream flood gate. I'll be adjusting both the upstream and downstream gates to try to maintain a flow to spin the water wheels.
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The water level at the upstream floodgates has fallen so low that there is now no longer any flow. Right now they are at 0.5 open, I'll have to open them completely.
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But opening the upstream floodgates doesn't help very much, I've barely got any flow. The river upstream of my village is pretty shallow, with not much capacity. One of my later goals will be to make major dams to trap a lot more water.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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I've learned something else important. When the water level dropped to 0.45 the wheels stopped turning. But it slowly climbed back to just over 0.5 and as it did the wheels started turning. So the wheels need at least a half unit of water level to work! Maybe... nope. It's the flow that is important.
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I've got all but one of the downstream floodgates closed, with one open to 0.5 height. With the water flow pretty low, having just one gate open should keep the water flowing, which will keep the water wheels turning
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Uh oh, now there is no water left upstream of my upper flood gates. My water wheels stopped turning because there is no flow.
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I've fully opened one of the downstream floodgates to get some flow. You can't see it in a screenshot, but the wheels are now turning again.
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Finally the water was too low and the wheels stopped again. I closed the downstream floodgates to keep water in the river adjacent to my fields and managed forests so I don't lose any crops or trees to the drought.
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Last edited by jztemple2 on Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Do you use dynamite a lot to terraform the land or do you work mainly with the map as is?

This looks like fun thanks to your play through, you do a really good job detailing the game.

LordMortis mentioned Factory Town which also didn’t grab me and this looks similar but I may grab it since I was a fan of Banished and I see that game is referenced a few times.

Keep posting… I continue to peek in here to see how you’re doing and if you’re having fun.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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I'll keep posting, I enjoy it and it's like taking notes in college, you learn more when you write about it.

I haven't gotten to making and using dynamite yet, but I'm sure I'll be using it. This is one of the features of Timberborn, that since your pops are a bunch of beavers they don't have access to front end loaders and bulldozers :wink:. You can build wooden levees to fill up a cube of space, but the only way to dig out a cube of dirt is to use dynamite.

Right now I'm playing the Folktails faction who are more agrarian. They have access to unique buildings like irrigation towers and windmills. The other faction, which I haven't played yet, are the Ironteeth who have a more industrial focus.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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For those interested, there is a Steam Community Guide for Timberborn called Beaver Basics and Other Information that has some really nice information on the aspects of the game.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

Post by Victoria Raverna »

This game is still in early access? Is it complete and now they're fixing bugs?
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Victoria Raverna wrote: Fri Sep 17, 2021 7:06 am This game is still in early access? Is it complete and now they're fixing bugs?
It is still in early access, but the buzz is that it is more solid than Banished (a comparable experience) when Banished released. They are adding more tech tree and factions, IIRC.
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baelthazar wrote: Fri Sep 17, 2021 8:23 am
Victoria Raverna wrote: Fri Sep 17, 2021 7:06 am This game is still in early access? Is it complete and now they're fixing bugs?
It is still in early access, but the buzz is that it is more solid than Banished (a comparable experience) when Banished released. They are adding more tech tree and factions, IIRC.
This quote from the Steam store page is pretty accurate from my playing:
Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
“We expect the Early Access to last at least a year. While we have ideas for what needs to be done before the full release (see below), players’ feedback affects that and we’re ready to put in additional time.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“Timberborn has been evolving based on what players want and that remains the plan for Early Access development. The players’ suggestions dictate the specifics of what we add next.

Whether that means additional beaver factions, more water-related gameplay, an expanded science system, new resources or fresh food chains – or something entirely different such as a trading system – depends on the feedback we receive.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“You may pick from two playable beaver factions and there’s a total of 50+ buildings, some of them faction-exclusive. There are 7 maps included in the game, and you can create your own map using the built-in editor or download one of the maps shared by other players. You’ll be playing an endless survival mode where you expand your beaver colony while the world alternates between wet and ever deadlier dry seasons.

All core mechanics are here but may require further iterations. That includes vertical architecture, terraforming, dams with water physics, irrigation, food chains, power grids, district system, wellbeing system, day and night cycles.”
There have been a couple of updates but they have been pretty minor stuff, a couple of glitches and a rare crash situation. I'm finding a lot of gameplay features right now that are keeping me busy and the game mechanics work just fine, no oddball calculations or what-not.

The devs have been pretty active on Discord and also this site where they are taking and monitoring suggestions.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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And some more from my current game. I have decided to rename my original starting district McBeaver, after the Great Beaver who first arose from the post-apocalyptic ashes... well, I'll keep that for another time :wink:

This is South McBeaver, my first expansion district. The camera is looking south. You can see the two gates on the two bridges on the bottom of the pictures, those gates separate the districts. It makes each district a self-contained community so you don't have beavers running all over the map. You set up resource routes that bring resources from one community to another.
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And this is the reason for South McBeaver, that big expanse of flat plain to the south. The camera is looking north, South McBeaver is at the top of the picture. Right now I'm using an irrigation tower to make land arable for growing carrots, since I'm shutting down my carrot farm in central McBeaver as I need that land for more water wheel driven industries. Eventually this empty plain will be irrigated by aqueduct and be growing wheat.
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And finally a nice aerial look at my whole colony (note, must make name for colony) looking north. Those farms and managed forests to the east (right) of the picture are part of McBeaver, but I'll probably reassign them to a new district in the future.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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I'm so sorry I couldn't resist.

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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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rittchard wrote: Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:28 pm I'm so sorry I couldn't resist.
It had to happen :roll:
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Ok, just grabbed it. 500MB download, sweet. Quick startup, running on my Mac and graphics defaulted to Ultra and you can show an FPS counter from the settings menu. You can change the view angle with the right mouse button but snaps back to the default angle (this can be unlocked in settings).

When you click on a beaver, the gibberish pitch of their voice is based on age where the youngest sound like chipmunks... adorable. The oldest one starting out is 25 so maybe the voices get deeper the older they get. You can rename each beaver too.

The tutorial doesn't guide you to where things are so I'm just clicking and reading the tooltip popups. I'm sure the tutorial will improve over time, so thanks for the link to the Steam Community post... I'll check that out next.

I was going to try the other faction but that's locked until reaching an average well being of 8 playing Folktails. I'm such a slow player. It took less than 30 seconds to download and install but after an hour I'm still looking around, reading and getting the feel of the game paused on day 1. But I can tell this will be a lot of fun.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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My industrial center. All the buildings needing power are interconnected to all the water wheels and the hamster, ah, beaver wheels :wink:
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Had to kind of tilt the camera here, but I got in all my colony. That's Beavertown to the north, Castorville to the south (new names!)
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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See that canyon there? That's my next goal, to put floodgates at the downstream end of the canyon to try to trap more water there for droughts.
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This is how I'm starting, putting a District Center on the far side of the river (called, of course, Farside :D). I have just four beavers working there, just enough to build a road to the dam site and build the dam. It's actually going to be floodgates so I can regulate the flow.
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By the way, this is my dynamite factory. What could possibly go wrong?
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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Here's what the canyon looked like before:
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And now with the floodgates:
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Sadly, it hasn't helped much with the three day droughts I get. There's not enough water in the canyon to keep the water wheels turning for the three days, and when it starts to refill I drive myself crazy constantly adjusting those floodgates trying to avoid flooding my town or leaving it dry :roll:
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My current industrial complex. The explosives factory and its water wheel on the left are standalone, all other wheels are interconnected with lots of power shafts.
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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I made an aqueduct trench with explosives and have six water wheels working in it. The water flow is from left to right. I put levees on the first part because I had some flooding but by using floodgates properly they aren't necessary. Turns out that will only 0.1 height of water in the aqueduct the wheels work fine.
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A look at my whole colony. I'll probably stop playing on this colony now since I've unlocked everything and I'm just tinkering with the details. I'll take a break and then go start a game with the other faction.
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My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
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telcta
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

Post by telcta »

A one hour post-launch livestream with the developers which I think happened earlier this morning. They start a new game with the Iron Teeth faction showing tips and tricks and answer questions from the chat. They're going to continue work on the tutorial and the save game system for cloud saves.


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jztemple2
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

Post by jztemple2 »

Yup, their latest news feed posting mentioned those items plus adding new factions, buildings, more content in general. And they also mentioned that in the first seven days they had 130,00 sales. I'm not up on my Steam sales statistics, but for a early access city-building that has to be a pretty good number :D.
My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
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telcta
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

Post by telcta »

I'm happy for them... they seemed surprised at the response. I guess deciding to work 3 years to get a solid working early access together instead of just throwing a framework of a game and building on it was the right choice.

As for the game, I started an Iron Teeth game and watching their playthrough, I really am slow when it comes to progressing so I'm learning from them how to speed up things. I did get my first dam built and was proud that I continued to pump water and the plants did not die (there is no irrigation for Iron Teeth).

I only had one hard crash (actually caused the Mac to reboot) that I was not able to reproduce. Other than that, it's been a positive experience.
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telcta
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Re: Timberborn - A city-building game featuring ingenious animals

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A couple items of interest (for me) from that livestream.

1. The ability to move buildings... or at least recoup some of the resources when destroying one. This is something they are considering. I had made plenty of mistakes starting out not connecting the path correctly. Also, I like a tidy, organized town and want to relocate my buildings.

2. Clearing multiple paths or buildings. Holding down shift with the "Delete buildings" tool you can drag and area to clear. You do not get a warning after selecting the area like you do when just clicking on one tile (or building).
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