Hello everyone!

The work on Timberborn is progressing well, and we wanted to share a bit of that by updating Timberborn Demo! So, we’re changing visuals for ALL the buildings. We have also added the build priority system, a.k.a. the beaver dancefloor. In other news, one of the woes that our beta testers are familiar with is gone – it is now easier to control the population.

Different playable factions of Timberborn will each have a unique architecture. Today’s update changes textures, colors and models of buildings to showcase the style of one of the factions arriving with the Early Access launch. We have also added lights to the operating buildings. We may still be tweaking the visuals so let us know if you like what you see!

• Changed textures, colors, and/or models for ALL buildings present in the demo.
  
• Windows of occupied buildings will now light up. That includes lodges at night – it’s quite a sight and a signal of the upcoming baby boom.

We’re keeping track of all the feedback you send us, and a better building priority system was so often requested we decided to deploy it ahead of launch. Oh, you guys.

• There are now five levels of building and demolishing priority: from very low (1) to very high (5). The default priority is normal (3).
  
• Added Assign priorities tool to the bottom panel. Use it to select a priority and mark (or paint over) objects scheduled for building or demolishing. Each priority has a color, and after clicking the tool’s button, a colored preview will be displayed for all projects.
  
• Added corresponding priority buttons to the menu of each object scheduled for building or demolishing.

The change below lets you choose when to grow your colony – which is important, especially when your population hits higher numbers. Need more happy little beavers? Build more lodges.

• Kits no longer move out of their parents’ lodges once grown-up unless there are unclaimed lodges in range.

The changes below helped us create some fancy new GIFs to showcase new and refreshed buildings. Check our social media channels for those – starting tomorrow!

• It is now possible to Shift-click the “Follow” (eye) icon so that the camera follows the object without highlighting it with a green tint.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused “Follow” not to focus on the building’s centre.

• Added a counter in the upper left corner that displays a number of homeless beavers.
  
• Updated the “Nothing to do” icon.
  
• Shafts have been renamed Power Shafts.
  
• Replaced “Fuel cycles” with a percentage of “Fuel depletion” in log-consuming buildings.
  
• Replaced “Jobless” with “Unemployed” in descriptions of beavers and buildings.
  
• Made minor changes to other descriptions, including the way we display what needs are satisfied by particular buildings or goods.
  
• From now on, we will be naming Timberborn builds using the pattern you see in the patch notes' title. In-game version names will reflect that, making it easier to keep track of game versions.

• Fixed a memory leak.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused backpacks not to be taken off after beavers carrying them entered the lodge. That’s work-life balance 101.

We would love to hear what you think about the new changes, especially the new visuals! You can use our forums, or if you want to talk to us directly, hop on our official Discord. We’ve just kicked off a new #BeaverBrainstorm to discuss present and future “Fancy towns”!

We hope your experience with the Timberborn demo will now be smoother than ever!

• Fixed two most commonly reported crashes.

Hi, everyone.

When we decided to join Steam Game Festival, we wanted to give more people a chance to try Timberborn ahead of the upcoming Early Access launch.

What happened over the last three weeks blew us out of the water.

Close to a hundred thousand people downloaded the demo. The beavers were catapulted to the front page of the Festival and, according to our knowledge, Timberborn’s demo remained one of the three Festival demos with the highest concurrent player numbers. At some point, over 28 thousand people were watching Timberborn live on Twitch.

Our Discord and forums exploded, and the feedback started flooding from all directions. We want to thank you for all the kind words, valuable suggestions, and valid criticisms.

We’re still chewing through it but since today was going to be the last day of the demo’s availability, we would like to let you know what’s going to happen in light of these events.

We decided to postpone the Early Access launch to later this year but we’re keeping the demo up.



Our plan was to release Timberborn in Early Access by the end of March, but after discussions with the team last week, we decided to push it back. We want to incorporate as much of the demo feedback as possible, but there’s just seven of us at Mechanistry and we do not want to crunch. Your response to the demo was a huge vote of confidence but it also made us realize that the game can and should become something bigger than we previously thought.

We know some of you might be disappointed, especially if you’ve been following us for a while, perhaps even since alpha. We believe, however, that this is better both for the game and the team. We love Timberborn. We want to enjoy the Early Access with you instead of pushing for a release now and then falling flat on our snouts, exhausted and burnt out, with a game that doesn’t meet your expectations.

Because of that, we are changing the Early Access launch date to “2021”. Please note that while this might sound like “Holidays 2021”, we hope to get Timberborn out much sooner.



Here’s a non-exhaustive list of what we’re planning to do before we deem Timberborn ready for Early Access launch.

• We’ll have at least two different factions with different style, unique buildings, and gameplay traits. You already heard the rumours about the Iron Teeth, right?
  
• We’ll expand the water-related gameplay. It's clear you enjoy dams and water physics, and we want to build on that.
  
• We’ll improve the game’s performance. We want to see hundreds of beavers running their errands without the game having a hiccup, and it’s a huge undertaking.
  
• We’ll fix the overpopulation problem. There are ways to control the colony's numbers better than forcing your beavers to sleep on the ground.
  
• We’ll add better work prioritization – it’s by far the most requested feature.
  
• We’ll improve the in-game UI.
  
• We’ll translate the game into 10 languages besides English.

The demo is staying on Steam for the time being. Even though the Early Access is our focus now, we will occasionally update the demo, so please keep your suggestions and bug reports coming.



Once again, big “thank you” for all the feedback we’ve got from you – we can't wait until we share the results with you. It wasn't easy to postpone the launch, but we are hoping that you’ll understand our decision. Your support is what keeps us going.

~Team Timberborn, a.k.a. Mechanistry

PS If you would like to talk to us directly, hop on our Discord channel and/or join us for one of the live streams we have scheduled for this month. You'll find these on the Steam page, but also on our Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook.

• February 19th, 2 PM GMT – per your request, Michal and Jon will return with the internal Timberborn build to answer your questions and play with a non-demo beaver settlement.
  
• February 24th, 2 PM GMT – you wanted to see more behind-the-scenes content, so we'll have a stream focused on the map editor, with Jon designing a map live, taking suggestions from the chat.
  
• February 26th, 1 PM GMT – after their successful "no carrots, the monument at the peak of the map" run, Jon will take up a different challenge in the demo.

We have released a hotfix patch. Here are the changes:

• Restored last week’s two fixes: the game should no longer crash when hitting CTRL+H in the main menu or when opening Settings on machines with more exotic GPUs.
  
• “Fuel cycles left” in building descriptions has been replaced with a simpler “Fuel remaining: X%“.
  
• Other minor changes in building descriptions.

We had to temporarily revert yesterday’s hotfix patch because the patch introduced a bug which caused hitting Enter to restart the game.

We have just released a hotfix patch to Timberborn Demo:

• The game no longer crashes when hitting CTRL-H in main menu.
  
• The game no longer crashes when opening Settings on computers with certain more exotic GPUs.

• Fixed campfires not burning. 🤦‍♂️

As a reminder: if you experience a crash, please send us a report via the post-crash screen. We read them all! If there's no post-crash screen or there are other bugs to report, please use the Bugs & Fixes section of our Steam forums. You may also attach the logs as described here: http://mechanistry.com/bug, it makes finding the culprit much easier. Thanks for the help!

We continue updating the game with the music composed for us by talented Zofia Domaradzka!

• Added a new music track to the game.

To celebrate the release of Timberborn's first demo and the long-awaited Steam Game Festival, we're hosting a few live streams!

• On Thursday, February 4th, 8 AM GMT – we’ll kick things off with a four-hour-long event. You will be able to watch our game designer Jon tackle the entire demo live! If you have tried the demo already but your beavers are dying left and right, this is a perfect opportunity to ask for a hint! Unless, of course, Jon's colony is also starved and thirsty.
  
• On Friday, February 5th, 2 PM GMT, Jon will be joined by our comms guy Michal for the main live stream. We will show you what Timberborn is about – and we won't limit ourselves to the constraints of the demo. We'll take you to the paradise city where the grass is green and all buildings are unlocked, beavers are many, and the map editor works.
  
• On Monday, February 8th, 2 PM GMT, we’ll play the demo again, but we'll spice it up with a challenge. We still need to decide what it’s going to be. Can the demo be beaten without growing a single carrot? Is it possible to build a monument that will be more than a tombstone for dead beavers? If you want to see Jon struggle a bit, feel free to give us an idea for a challenge you want to see! Make your suggestions during streams on February 4th and 5th, below, or on our Discord!

Speaking of which – make sure you join our Discord beaver community to discuss the demo – and more!



All three live streams will be available here on Steam but also on our Twitch.

The Friday/Monday streams will also go live on our YouTube channel and Timberborn's fan page on Facebook.

Choose your platform, set a reminder, and join us!

Today’s minor balancing patch makes it easier to blow things up and experiment with terraforming in the demo.

• Reduced the science cost of Dynamite from 150 to 20.
  
• You now start the game with 15 Explosives in your Small Warehouse.