Hi everyone!

Time to announce the next big thing coming with the early access launch of Timberborn: the district system. Districts make growing your settlements easier to understand at the beginning and more fun later. They also improve the game’s performance. Oh, and they give your beavers a chance to swim. What is this sorcery, you ask? Keep on reading because there's a lot to unpack.

With districts, the previous range system is going away. There are multiple reasons for that, but here’s a sample from Jon Biegalski, one of our game designers:

The old system was quite simple but often left players confused. For example, if you wanted to build something with logs, the construction site needed to be in the range of both Builder's Hut and Log Pile. Also, some beavers would remain unemployed even though there were jobs available, as they lived too far away. These issues made the beavers less productive in the long run, and the districts fix that.

Add in some awkward situations where beavers starve with a full warehouse nearby or work in areas too far from their favourite carousel, and you get a picture. But that's in the past now!



In Early Access, you begin with a single, new building: District Center. It replaces the batch of starting buildings you know from the demo. All future buildings that have entrances need to be connected to a Center via paths – or just won’t work. That also means that you now need paths on roofs, dams, or platforms. Because of that, placing paths is now instant and no longer needs workers. Also, paths now work underwater. What?! Okay, okay, we’re getting there.



Under the new system, beavers diligently follow the paths you’ve built, moving between their homes, workplaces, attractions etc. but there are exceptions. Beavers who enjoy fieldwork such as cutting trees or working in ruins continue to do that within range of their workplaces. Builders construct buildings within the district. The district expands as you add paths.

Each District Center has a limited range (measured in the length of outgoing paths). After you select a building, coloured lines appear, making it easy to identify. Lines turning red and disappearing are a sign that the area is too far from the Center. In other words, you’ve expanded far enough to consider setting up another district. If a building is not connected to a Center, the game will remind you about that.



To set up a new district, you put a (free) micro building called Gate anywhere on a path, effectively setting up a district’s border. Then, you put a new (also free) District Center somewhere behind that gate.



Your initial District Center comes prefilled with starting resources and all District Centers also employ a few builders. As there's no starting warehouse now, we’ve made adjustments to some other buildings such as Lumberjack Flag or Gatherer Flag that now have some storage capacity.

Each additional district starts empty so it’s a good idea to send some of your beavers and goods there. Transferring colonists is easy. You select an origin District Center, pick a destination counterpart and choose how many adults and kits should be relocated – and off they go. You can rename your districts, just like you do with the beavers, so they’re easier to keep track of.

A new district could also use some resources, and that's where trading routes come in. You establish them using two new types of buildings: Distribution Centers and Drop-off Points. Distribution Center in District A allows you to choose a Drop-off Point in District B and which goods (e.g. Carrots or Flour) to ship there. Beavers from the Center will then pick up the selected goods from a warehouse and start moving them. You can set per-district minimums and maximums to control import and export.



On that note, you can now switch between Global and District views. In the Global view, you see total numbers for your population, goods, wellbeing etc. The District view – opened via a list or by selecting a building – displays values for the district only. This allows you to create specialized districts, helps running large cities, and adds another layer to the game in the form of transporting goods.

You keep reminding us that beavers can swim. We know, we even had swimming pools back in alpha! And now that the world alternates between wet and dry seasons, and you manipulate water levels with dams and floodgates, we're revisiting that. Sooner or later, some of your paths disappear underwater or you need a road in an area that hasn't dried up yet. You could use platforms but hey, beavers can swim!



In Early Access, when you place a path (on the ground or, as described above, on platforms, rooftops etc.) and it ends up underwater, it remains usable. In shallow waters, beavers are swimming on the surface. If the water is deeper, they dive. Flooding a building disables it and swimming is rather slow, so you will generally still want to build above water. But beavers are no longer afraid to get wet and they go about their day (carrying goods etc.) even when it involves swimming.

And YES, you can build underwater if you wish. There’s now even an additional toggle that makes the water transparent so you can see what your rodents are up to in the depths.



Districts solve problems often expressed by the newcomers but there’s more to that. The old range system made running large colonies calculation-heavy, resulting in bad framerates, especially after increasing the in-game speed. Districts helped us solve a lot of issues on the performance front. Let’s hear from Kamil Dawidow, one of Timberborn’s programmers:

With districts, obligatory paths and swimming, beavers have a much easier time navigating the settlement. They do not need to recalculate their routes all the time as water levels change or you put new buildings in their way. And since they now operate within districts and only follow paths (not all the terrain), less data is stored and processed. For example, a hungry beaver’s algorithm works faster when it simply needs to check if there’s food in the district’s warehouses or not – and then has less ground to cover, establishing an optimal, non-exhausting way there.

Finally, to help you use districts and the now-omnipresent paths, we’re adding a feature desired by all vertical architecture enthusiasts. You will be able to view your settlements layer by layer. This helps you create complicated multi-level megastructures, maintain hidden buildings, or check for missed unconnected paths. It works great paired with the water transparency toggle.



As you can see, districts are quite a chunky feature. They make running beaver colonies swimmingly fun – and dam, we can’t wait to see you go crazy with them in Early Access!

To make the wait easier, here's the final treat for today. Two talented members of our Discord community, Synthron and DerHouy, have written and recorded an awesome Timberborn song. We thought it deserved a proper BMV (beaver music video). Enjoy!

Hello!

If you played the beta of Timberborn, you might remember the three makeshift “races”. The beaver factions in Early Access and beyond are much more distinguishable – each will have unique looks and play differently. For launch, we’ll have two factions. Today, you get to meet Folktails.

Let’s begin with a preview video offering some interesting life advice.

Before we dig into the gameplay side of things, let's talk about our design choices.

While still putting progress over “primal” beaver ways, Folktails respect Mother Nature. They work to live and in doing so they try to make the post-apocalyptic world a better (read: greener) place. They enjoy working in the field and consuming the fruit of their labour. For them, water means life, and they grow their settlements in balanced, nature-friendly ways. There’s one exception: even they can't say no to the canal-digging power of dynamite.

Gameplay-wise, we envision the settlements of Folktails as sprawling villages with vast areas covered with fields and orchards needed to satisfy their huge appetites. That also means you need a proper way of stockpiling food and preparing for droughts. You get to customize their settlements with lodges of different types. Folktails are also the only faction that knows how to produce energy with no fuel and no access to rivers – they have harnessed the power of the wind.



We wanted Folktails to focus on the food, but not to the point where it'd be the only distinguishable feature. They use the resources that the earth gives them such as food or water and use them to their fullest, making sure that every beaver is cared for and has a place to sleep, with different sized lodges to create unique constructions. We also wanted to put windmills in the game for a while now, and this faction seemed like a perfect fit. Originally, we thought to keep Folktails even closer to the ground, but we decided against it in the end, as the vertical architecture is an important part of the experience. – says Jon Biegalski, a game designer at Mechanistry.

Folktails use thatchings and build their structures with light wood. White plaster covers the boards and there are bits of moss here and there but that’s okay! We wanted the faction’s towns to feel like havens in the middle of a harsh wasteland. At the same time, the faction was to become a refined variant of what players recognize from the earlier versions of the game. We had some thatchings in the alpha, for example. We’ve given Folktails’ architecture to the demo’s Beavers of Demoria so you should have a good idea of what to expect.

Before we sat down to create Folktails a few months ago, our environment received a visual pass – and the new faction had to work well with the new color palette. Right from the start, we knew we would go for a nature-friendly, “cozy village” feel – as much as you can get that in a post-apocalyptic setting. We’ve gone through concepts based on American, Italian and Greek villages. We’ve had these hobbitish cottages with entrances going underground. We even tried using wall ornaments and mosaics before deciding to go with something simpler – says Jakub Mathia, Timberborn’s Art Director.

We love experimenting with curious shapes but the game is a tile-based city-builder after all. You can stack buildings one atop another, which calls for flat roofs and floors. We have a power grid system that uses power shafts attached to different wall slots, and the buildings can themselves transfer the power when put next to each other. When that’s less prominent, for example in the case of farms, grills or the temple, we can go wild, but often it’s the “gameplay and clarity first” philosophy that applies – explains Michal Zomerski, Mechanistry’s 3D Artist.





Folktails are also a good example of trying to balance “beaverish” designs (and materials such as wood, clay, moss, thatches) and buildings that recognizable for human eyes. Speaking of which: let’s see what Folktails can build.

Please note that what we're showing below is still a work in progress.

Faction trait

Folktails enjoy good cuisine. Bon appétit!

• Because of their more relaxed, farming-oriented lifestyle, Folktails’ consumption is 20% higher.

The above has been removed with the addition of Difficulty Modes where you can customize the consumption rates regardless of faction.


Folktails allow their members to live however they want. No wonder there are many unique lodge variants available only to them! Four types, to be exact.

• Mini Lodge - housing a single beaver
  
• Lodge - for three beavers (yup, it is now a faction-exclusive building!)
  
• Double Lodge - for six beavers
  
• Triple Lodge - for nine beavers

(Remember that beaver slots in lodges are no longer split into “adult” and “kit” slots. In most situations the original 2:1 ratio will still occur, though.)

Folktails favor progress but stick to the more eco-friendly branch of timbertech.

• Windmills. All beavers need power to operate their factories, and Folktails have learned how to harness the power of the wind. Windmills come in two sizes, with the larger one providing you with higher power output. Just remember that the wind’s strength and direction change easily!

• Underground Warehouse. Increased production requires a place to store the goods, and that’s the solution! Underground warehouses beat even Large Warehouses in terms of capacity.

• Irrigation Tower. You already know this building, and it’s going to be exclusive to Folktails. Towers let the beavers water otherwise dry areas and turn them into future fields and forests. While an irrigation tower requires a continuous supply of water and a dedicated worker, it is a much easier and faster method than digging canals, especially in remote areas.

• Farmer's Special. We don’t want to spoil everything yet but Folktails will also have access to another special building suitable for a farming faction. You already know about the Farmhouse so that's going to be something different. Can you guess what?

Folktails are the first of the playable beaver factions we’re introducing to Timberborn. When the game launches in Early Access and you choose these gold-hearted farmers, your experience will be quite different from what Beavers of Demoria have taught you.

It will be even more unique compared to how Iron Teeth roll. Who exactly are the Iron Teeth? That, our friends, is another story… and a topic for another Developer’s Log!

Until next time!
Team Timberborn

PS Big thanks for the patience to everyone looking forward to the game's launch. We want to give you the Early Access release quickly – but not in a half-baked form. Folktails wouldn't approve it.

PSS This is our first-ever developer's log. Want to see more such behind-the-scenes content? Let us know in the comments or on our official Discord channel!

We've released another hotfix to Timberborn Demo.

• Fixed a bug that resulted in beavers not distributing goods across warehouses unless desired amounts were manually set to values > 0.

Please remember to report any bugs you encounter using our new bug tracker!

We've released a small hotfix to Timberborn Demo after yesterday's bigger update.

• Fixed texturing in Inventor’s Hut.

Please remember to report any bugs you encounter using our new bug tracker!

Hello! Cześć! Bonjour! Hallo! ¡Hola! Olá! Привет! Ciao!

Indie Celebration showcase comes to Steam on May 13th-14th, and we’re lucky to be its finalists. To celebrate and welcome new players, we have a fresh demo build. If you like what you see, please vote for Timberborn in the event’s Community Vote. It requires three clicks and no registration. To vote, go here.

Thanks!


(These beavers are casting their votes. Join them!)

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Now, for the update. It’s time to cross off another point on the list of things to be done before we can announce the Early Access launch date – the translations. We want to give you a taste of that ahead of the release, and today's update to Timberborn Demo is exactly that. Also, the game now looks better, loads faster, and there are multiple new music tracks to enjoy.

Please note that the update may be incompatible with older saves – it's better to start a new game.

If you’re new to the game: hail and well met! Please don’t starve your beavers.

And if you’re a veteran who wants to play Timberborn in another language – now it's the time. Be sure to let us know what you think about the localization. We want to make it right for launch.

Speaking of which: from now on, the best place to report any issues – both translation- and gameplay-related – is our public bug tracker. It doesn’t require registration and will help us prioritize the work for launch and beyond. Please check it whenever you encounter a problem with Timberborn!

(*) We wanted to say こんにちは！, 안녕하세요! , and 你好！here as well. Sadly, we encountered a nasty bug with the engine so even though the Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese localizations are ready to be implemented we had to hold that off. We’ll add them ASAP. Thank you for your patience.



We have added seven out of ten translations planned for the Early Access launch. The Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese versions will follow as soon as the Unity bug is fixed.

• Timberborn Demo is now available in English, Polish, French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Italian.
  
• If the language doesn't change automatically based on your Steam settings, check the in-game Settings to change it manually.

We’re following up on the new style update from the previous patch with an additional visual pass. We’re also trying out a brand new style of particle effects! BOOM!

• Made visual tweaks to building elements such as walls, roofs, paper, or thatchings.
  
• Replaced particle effects for fire, smoke and explosions.

We heard your concerns about the smoke coming out through Grill’s roof… so while changing the particles (see above) we changed Grill’s model entirely.

• Grill received a new model and is now a 2x2 building.

We’ve added more music composed for Timberborn by Zofia Domaradzka! You clearly like Zofia’s songs so it’s time for some major additions! We now have a new main menu theme and you will hear different in-game tracks depending on whether it’s a wet or a dry season.

• Added a new main menu track.
  
• Added two dry season-specific tracks.
  
• Added one wet season-specific track (on top of the three existing ones).

When you increase game speed, it will now increase slightly less if you’re playing on a map with a higher population. This helps reduce lag in later stages of the game.

• The game now uses dynamic speed adjustment. The speed increase remains at flat x3 and x7 at the beginning of the game.

We’ve made changes to the in-game UI and screens such as Settings. For Early Access launch, changes will be much more prominent – what you see now is an ongoing work in progress related to the implementation of UI Toolkit now available to Unity developers. (Yay, that’s us!)

We've made some adjustments to the behaviour of kits and adults claiming free spots in lodges.

Even though we’re still working on the performance, depending on the size of your settlement and population, the loading times should now be shorter, sometimes even halved.

Not really a part of the patch but we wanted to stress out the importance of this. While we will continue to check bug reports on the Steam forums and discuss them on our Discord, the best way to report problems with Timberborn is to use the dedicated tracker we now have.

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As a final note: there’s more happening behind the scenes. In the near future, we’ll tell you about a solution we came up with that makes running large settlements easier and more fun… while also improving the game’s performance. Stay tuned! And vote, please. <3

PS If you're part of our Polish-speaking community, join us for our very first stream in Polish on our Twitch – this Friday, 3 PM Warsaw time. Będzie bobrze!

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.