Timberborn is one of the most creative city-building games out there. You’re running a colony of beavers in a post-apocalyptic world where humanity is long gone and the furry engineers have taken over.
It sounds adorable, and it is. But this game will absolutely wreck your colony if you don’t plan ahead.
Droughts will dry up your rivers, your crops will wither, and your beavers will start dropping if you’re not prepared.
The in-game tutorial covers the bare minimum, so these beginner tips for Timberborn will give you a serious head start and help you avoid the most common mistakes new players make.
Pause the Game and Survey Your Map First
The very first thing you should do when starting a new game is pause immediately.
Timberborn isn’t a race, and there’s no penalty for taking your time at the start.
Zoom out and get a good look at the entire map. Find your water source first. Where does the river flow? This is the lifeblood of your colony and everything revolves around it.
Next, look for green fertile land. Crops can only grow on irrigated soil, so that green land near the water is prime real estate. Don’t waste it on housing or storage buildings.
Keep your housing, warehouses, and industrial buildings on the brown barren land instead. Save every bit of green space for agriculture.
Prioritize Water and Food Production Right Away
Your first few buildings should always focus on water and food. Nothing else matters if your beavers are thirsty and starving.
Build a water pump right on the bank of your river.
Then set up a warehouse nearby and configure it to store food. Place a gatherer flag near any blueberry bushes on the map for an immediate food source.
Berries will keep your beavers alive in the early game, but they’re not a long-term solution.
You need to get a farmhouse up and running as soon as possible.
If you’re playing as Folktails, start with carrots.
They grow in just four days and can be eaten raw without any processing. That makes them the perfect early-game crop.
As your colony grows, start diversifying into potatoes, wheat, and sunflowers.
Each food type satisfies a different nutritional need, and your beavers’ happiness will plateau if you only feed them one thing. A varied diet is essential for boosting well-being in the long run.
Build Dams Early to Prepare for Drought
Droughts are the biggest threat in Timberborn. The game cycles between temperate seasons (when water flows normally) and drought seasons (when the river completely dries up).
When a drought hits, water sources stop producing entirely. Any water on the map will slowly evaporate, and your crops will die without irrigation.
Droughts also get longer as your game progresses, so you need to keep scaling your water reserves.
Dams need to be one of your earliest priorities.
Build them across your river to hold back water and create a reservoir that will last through dry seasons.
A basic dam blocks water up to a certain height and lets excess spill over the top.
This is perfect for the early game because it creates a water reserve without flooding your settlement.
Each beaver drinks roughly 2 to 3 units of water per day.
Do the math based on your population and expected drought length to figure out how much storage you need. It’s always better to have too much than too little.
Don’t Neglect Your Wood Supply
Wood is everything in Timberborn. Almost every building and production chain requires logs or planks, so without a sustainable supply your colony grinds to a halt.
Wild trees regrow extremely slowly on their own. Build an Inventor hut early and use the science points it generates to unlock the Forester building.
This is one of the most important early-game unlocks because it lets you plant trees in designated areas.
Mark out plots for tree planting and keep your lumberjacks working alongside your foresters.
You want a sustainable cycle where trees are being planted and harvested continuously.
Different trees serve different purposes too.
Maple trees produce maple syrup, chestnut trees give you chestnuts for food, and other varieties provide raw logs. Plan your tree farms based on what your colony needs most.
Manage Your Beavers’ Schedule and Happiness
Timberborn lets you customize your beavers’ daily schedule, and getting this right makes a huge difference.
The default setting is 16 hours of work and 8 hours of sleep, but that leaves zero time for leisure.
Your beavers need downtime to stay happy. Reduce work hours slightly and add some leisure time into the schedule. Happy beavers are productive beavers, and unhappy ones will eventually cause problems.
Build leisure and social buildings as your colony stabilizes.
Things like campfires, shrines, and other entertainment structures boost different aspects of well-being like spirituality, fun, and social life.
Happiness isn’t just a nice bonus either.
Your average happiness rating determines whether your population grows and eventually unlocks access to the second faction. Ignoring well-being will stall your progress hard.
Expand Carefully With Districts
Once your first settlement is running smoothly, you’ll want to expand by creating new districts. But don’t rush this.
Each district operates somewhat independently, and you’ll need to manually configure resource sharing between them.
Expand too fast and your new district can collapse from lack of supplies.
Make sure your main district is completely self-sufficient before branching out. You want stable food, solid water reserves, and enough wood income to sustain expansion.
Use distribution posts and drop-off points to move goods between settlements. A well-run single district is far better than two struggling ones, so take it slow.
Spend Your Science Points Wisely
Science points are generated by Inventor huts and are used to unlock new buildings and technologies. They’re a limited resource in the early game, so you need to be strategic about what you research first.
Your top early-game research priorities should be the Forester (for sustainable wood production), stairs and platforms (for vertical building), and levees or floodgates (for advanced water control).
Levees are especially powerful because unlike basic dams, they can fully block water flow. Floodgates give you even more control by letting you adjust water levels on the fly.
Don’t waste your early science on decorations, monuments, or well-being structures that you don’t immediately need.
Those are luxuries for later when you have a stable colony.
One more tip: build your Inventor huts on barren land.
They don’t need irrigation to function, so placing them on fertile green soil is a waste of valuable farming space.
Start With the Folktails Faction
Timberborn has two beaver factions that play very differently. If this is your first time, start with the Folktails.
The Folktails are the nature-oriented, beginner-friendly faction.
They reproduce naturally through housing, generate power with windmills that don’t need fuel, and have access to irrigation towers that permanently water the surrounding area.
The Iron Teeth are the industrial alternative.
They use breeding pods, burn logs in engines for power, and require metal for many buildings.
They’re a lot more complex and not ideal for learning the game.
You’ll need to reach a happiness level of 15 with the Folktails before the Iron Teeth become available anyway.
Learn the core mechanics first before taking on the harder faction.
Harvest Everything Before a Drought Hits
The game gives you a warning notification before each drought starts, showing roughly how many days you have left. Use this time wisely.
Switch your farmhouse priority to harvesting mode immediately. You want every crop out of the ground before the water dries up.
Wheat and aquatic crops die almost immediately when a drought begins. Carrots and potatoes can survive a few extra days, but don’t count on it.
It’s also smart to extend work hours right before the drought.
A temporary push to 18 or 20 hour days gives your colony extra time to stockpile water and food.
A beaver can survive roughly 2 days without food or water before dying. That’s not much wiggle room, so always overprepare.
Save Often and Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment
This might be the most important Timberborn tip of all: save your game frequently. Keep multiple save files if you can.
Timberborn rewards experimentation. Want to try a massive dam project or redirect an entire river? Go for it. But save first so you can reload if everything floods.
Every map has unique terrain, water flow, and resource distribution.
What works perfectly on one map might be a disaster on another. The best way to learn is by trying things, failing, and adjusting your approach.
Don’t get discouraged if your first colony collapses during a drought. It happens to everyone.
Learn from each failure and come back with a better plan next time.
Once you get the hang of water management and resource planning, there’s nothing quite like watching your beaver civilization thrive.
Take it slow, plan ahead, and enjoy building something special in this post-apocalyptic world.
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Images in this article are from the Timberborn page on Steam and used under Fair Use.