Available from September 15 in early access, the management and construction game timberborn (first game from the Polish publisher Mechanistry) offers you to guide your beaver community towards its survival in a world of parched lands after humanity has become extinct.
Timberborn offers you to take in hand the destiny of two factions of beavers (the second is unlocked only after evolving the first) who will have to build real cities as well as ingenious dams to survive waves of increasing droughts. intense.
Each faction has its own unique playstyle and advantages:
- The Rustiqueues, very good farmers with advanced agricultural techniques (beehives to pollinate crops faster) and with underground warehouses, but needing a high level of comfort to feel good.
- The Iron Teeth, outstanding metallurgists allowing them to create machines to assist them as well as scientists mastering reproduction in incubation boxes. The industrial faction par excellence but often in contempt of the surrounding nature.
Water is life
The game differs from other construction games by very fine management of water and by extension of the means to control its flow and storage. Indeed, depending on your level of difficulty, you will be regularly confronted with periods of intense droughts where the water of rivers and streams will no longer flow naturally. Needless to say, without water your crops and trees will not grow and your beavers will die of thirst if you do not have enough cisterns to store water. You will therefore need to judiciously establish dams along the watercourses to retain the water at the desired level, the height being obviously managed (be careful not to flood your own village by building a dam too high).
To help you visualize the influence of water, lands will be displayed in green when within range of a water source and gray when not irrigated.
As you progress, you will be able to unlock, using science points, new buildings such as irrigation towers, dynamite factories (to dig canals to bring water to places required), paddlewheels to supply power.
Multi-storey buildings
Another special feature of the game is that you can build buildings on top of others (as long as they have the “solid” attribute) to gain floor space. Very practical for optimizing the distance to be covered by your beavers and thus increasing their productivity.
Animal welfare taken to the extreme
To develop your colony you will need happy beavers (they will live longer and have more offspring) by meeting their demands for comfort, leisure, spirituality and social life. Your progress score will be permanently calculated according to several criteria that you can meet with the help of buildings or even with the help of decrees (you can choose how many hours a day the beavers must work for example).
Precise management of logistics and jobs
To operate your buildings, you will need manpower. You can decide to temporarily suspend their activity to assign the workforce to another location or more simply to adapt the quantity of positions available in the building. You will also need to take into account the distance from warehouses and homes to maximize the productivity of your charming beavers.
Even if the seasons are not yet established, the game offers a day / night cycle as well as alternations between good weather and drought.
En conclusion
Even if the game is still in early access for the moment, it is already rich enough in content with its two playable factions and its fifteen different maps to occupy you for many hours. It also brings a real novelty with its strategic water management depending on the terrain.
