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Thoughts on the game Timberborn

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062090/Timberborn/

Humans are long gone. In a world struck by droughts and toxic waste, will your lumberpunk beavers do any better? A city-building game featuring ingenious animals, vertical architecture, water physics, and terraforming. Contains high amounts of wood.

Has anybody given this game a try? I've been considering it for a while, but money is tight. Curious if it was worth it.

Or conversely, other other new simulation games you would recommend?

23 comments

frank

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I have about a hundred hours in it. Here's some scattered thoughts:

–The devs clearly care a lot and it's a labor of love. They communicate well, provide updates, listen to feedback, engage with the community. They're lovely.

–the game has a fun series of mechanics, good visuals, good music, fun vibes. It's a bit.... Sandboxy, towards later in most runs. I don't know what to do with my settlement come cycle 12-15 (cycle is 12-20 days or so). I wish there was a little more of a goal for it, like scenarios

–good mod support and map making. People have made some dope maps for it

I'm gonna continue to revisit it as campaign/scenarios evolve, as mechanics are added, and as I want to get my beaver vibe on

thejml

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I’m cycle 23 right now and I’m basically just trying to conquer the entire map. I’ve got floodgates setup so droughts and bad water doesn’t make any impact (other than the droughts stopping my waterwheels). Working on making huge reservoirs and such.

It is more sandbox like past 15, but i still find the bad water and droughts to be a little challenge. I’ll be interested to see if the devs add another mechanic to challenge our settlements after that point.

Kata1yst

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My favorite city builder in decades. A few notes.

Pros:

Easy mode is relaxing and quite easy.
Medium mode is a fun challenge at first, eventually becoming fairly chill as you advance in skill and confidence.
Hard mode is always fairly hard, especially on harder maps.
There are many resources to manage, but none that feel burdensome.
The game is extremely thematic, it feels alive with charm.
Graphics are excellent, though sometimes graphical glitches can still be encountered.
The water. It's so hard to explain to someone who hasn't encountered this system before, but water is life in this game, and it's both beautiful graphically, and extremely well simulated by physics. Learning to control the water, and see the shortest paths to end water scarcity with beaver engineering is an amazingly fun and unique aspect of the game.
Mods are well supported and the community is vibrant.

Cons:

Not a ton of content. They've been very good about adding new mechanics (badwater, extract, etc) but there's still just 2 races of beaver and a dozen or so maps.
No directed experience. In similar games I've enjoyed a campaign, challenge maps/scenarios, weekly challenges, a deeper progression system, just... Something to optionally set your goals. There's nothing of the sort in the vanilla game. It's fully open ended and there's only one unlock outside of your progress though the resource tree in a map.

All in all, I highly recommend it, especially at the modest asking price. If you love city builders, charming and beautiful art, thematic settings, dynamic challenge, and solution engineering, this is a fantastic game for you.

Other games I've enjoyed that scratch similar itches:

KSP
Cities: Skylines (but Timberborn has been far more compelling)
Factorio
Mindustry
Planet Zoo (Timberborn has less of a directed experience, but is otherwise completely superior)
Gnomoria
Banished
Tropico series (though I view this as more casual)

Get it and have fun is my recommendation.

shrugal

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It's reeeaaally good imo, but also a freaking time machine. You start to play it, and 1 hour later you traveled like 10 hours into the future.

To be a bit more serious, the game has a very nice and cozy vibe, an interesting construction system with buildings on top of other buildings and intricate road and energy transmission planning, great water mechanics, and a good economy and survival loop. You can spend hours trying to figure out an optimal way to stack and connect certain buildings, and you have to be really careful about when to expand, cut back, or build more production and storage, because the next drought or bad water season could very well be your last!

One thing I really don't like is that you kinda have to play it with the time sped up, because many things just take a ridiculously long time to build. It also gets much easier once you manage to get your water supply under control, almost nullifying the survival mechanics.

snooggums

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It also gets much easier once you manage to get your water supply under control, almost nullifying the survival mechanics.

So, authentic beaver gameplay?

shrugal

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Definitely! I think my real criticism here is that there's no new survival mechanic to replace the challenge of supplying and storing enough water.

frank

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Yeah, a few "natural disasters" or random whatever's would add to the mid/late game. Once water is stable, it's easy to thrive anytime. Bad water is a nice mix up for that for sure.

And yeah, big time machine energy.

Grinning

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I really love it! It is one of the better city/worker management games out there with a neat unique twist. It has a variety of maps, a few difficulty levels or you can make your own.

Early on I would run into performance issues but the devs have really optimized it so now I can have several hundred beavers running around all with their own tasks and needs.

It will absolutlely allow you to fail and you will know it is your fault and not a roll of the dice. It does not hold your hand but it is fair, and the tech progression is good.

Norgur

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Welcome back to TIM BER BORNERS

MxM111

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This is not simulation game, it is city builder/survival game. And if you like the genre, yes, it is good. One of the best to be honest.

Cloaca

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I think it is a solid game. Sunk about 30 hours into it a few months ago, but life got busy and I what free time I've had I sunk into Pokemon infinite fusion.

If you want the gist of what it is like to play without sinking in the money "Real Civil Engineer" on YouTube has a Timberborn playlist with hours of content with him just fucking around. Unless you find your own way to build a narrative or make your own challenges you may find that you have done it all by around 60 to 80 hours of gameplay.

MaggiWuerze

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It's great fun but not a lot of endgame content. Once you have solve the water cycle you basically solved the map and there's not much happening after that

Catastrophic235

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Yeah the gameplay loop in that game is definitely an issue, IMO what they need is a 'optional' victory condition like in Anno 1800 or Factorio where you have the option to keep playing after winning.

MaggiWuerze

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They need difficulty that's not based on water

savvywolf

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Played it a while ago and had fun with it - would recommend if you like city/base building games.

Did fall off late game with the "factorio problem" of having huge bases that you need to micromanage and build manually (so called because Factorio is the only game which I think fixes this problem; a lot of games I keep wanting to blueprint things).

Also, it took me the longest time to realise that you were allowed to run paths underwater...

YtA4QCam2A9j7EfTgHrH

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The blueprints in Factorio took a good game I was enjoying to OMG this game is amazing. I remember the very first time I used blue prints. It was to lay a “big” field of solar (probably 10 panels because I was a n00b). Just magical.

TheBest

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Would love some Lemmy input on this as well

Plibbert

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I've been liking "going medieval"

HuntressHimbo

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Its a good time and seeing the beavers doing their cute little thing never gets old. That is sadly a double edged sword because if you're bad like me it is quite possible to have your beaver community fall to famine

bl4kers

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As far as the survival aspects go I prefer Frostpunk. Though that's not as replayable. Both are quite solid and come highly recommended

Dangdoggo

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I haven't played Timberborn but I almost did pick it up on the spring sale, decided to get dotAGE instead to see what all the fuss was about and damn I love it. It's a lot more of a worker placement game and is a roguelike so if that doesn't interest you it might not be for you but damn it's good so far.

rem26_art

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I haven't played it yet myself, but It's been on my wishlist for a while after I watched a vtuber play it and love it lol

amzd

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Pirate it, their money isn’t as tight as yours