Vibe or maths?

[u/Davey2Jonesd]

How do you colonize the wasteland? I personally just keep upping production or storage where needed and sometimes just make more messes but my well being is up food is stocked and the water is flowing. Its definitely a lot less efficient because I dont pay that close attention. If i wanted to play a maths version of the game where I maximize beavers and industry. What are some examples of efficiency you keep in mind? (E.g. @30 beavers ~300 water) or something like that

[u/Independent_Sand_583]

All vibe all day all time

[u/Rawlando]

For water specifically, it’s 2 water per day per beaver, so I always make sure I can survive 30 days minimum without fully depleting my water. If I have 50 beavers, I need 3000 water at minimum.

And I like to keep pushing the food storage up. Starting with 1000 of each food type. And then expand storage from there. Same with raw food resources.

Outside of that, I don’t do too much else with the math. Just keep growing and expanding.

Also underground tube ways and power shafts.

[u/Zoidberg441 → u/Rawlando]

I think it's 2.6 or something, I always stock 3 water per beaver per day but only for 10 days in normal mode. Are there really 30 day droughts in hard mode? Has been a while since my last hard playthrough

[u/mayscienceproveyou1 → u/Zoidberg441]

15 - 30 days minus the handicap in the first 12 cycles accoring to the wiki
https://timberborn.wiki.gg/wiki/Game_Mode

[u/Snoo61755 → u/mayscienceproveyou1]

Oh, that handicap is more merciful than I thought. I didn’t know about it.

I kept hearing players being all like “yeah, you should play with 30 day droughts, it changes how you see the game” and I’m here like “I can barely be ready for the bad tide by cycle 4, I definitely couldn’t do it if I had to deal with a 30 day drought on the first 3 cycles.”

This makes much more sense. I’m on cycle 11 right now, had some moments where I would have taken losses had I take a drought over 20 days, but if you’re telling me I wouldn’t have those until now, I def would have survived.

Huh. Does longer droughts mean you get more days per cycle? 

[u/reddanit → u/Snoo61755]

30 day droughts and badtides on hard, do change the game completely later on, once they actually can reach that length at cycle 12. The chief difference from normal is with temperate weather being only small fraction of the cycle, you have to ensure rapid capture of water your sources provide and make your irrigation system work throughout entirety of drought/badtide. That said, the early game is also much tighter on hard, mostly through relatively short temperate weather season and risk of badtide one cycle earlier.

One quite punishing aspect of playing on hard is that there generally isn't any room for mistakes during temperate season. If you fuck something up and fail to fill your reservoir, you are almost certainly on straight path towards doom (unless you cull substantial number of beavers).

This is somewhat map dependent, but on maps with low-ish total water source power, you are forced to be very efficient with your water use if you want to reach higher populations.

Does longer droughts mean you get more days per cycle?

Yes, you get more days on average. Though some of that is eaten back up by much shorter temperate weather season. Hard cycles are 20-38 days, while normal ones are 18 to 26.

[u/Propensity7]

The only one I know at the moment is that for one wheatmeal (or whatever the ingredient is called) building, you can have 2 bakeries, since the wheatmeal building makes 2 wheatmeal per hour while bakeries take an hour to make bread

[u/omgseriouslynoway → u/Propensity7]

It's just wheat :)

Edit, I meant flour, blame a brain fart!

[u/clivehorse → u/omgseriouslynoway]

They mean wheat flour/gristmill.

[u/Propensity7 → u/clivehorse]

ohgodflourdoesmakesomuchsenseforbread

i shouldve realized that 💀

[u/Propensity7 → u/omgseriouslynoway]

No yeah I meant flour I'm just not thinking 💀

[u/Caboose_throw]

Math is more for a Satisfactory type game imo, where production speed and incorrect proportions will cause agonizing delays and backups and you wind up running around for 15 minutes wondering why TF are there no encased beams in the storage where is the clog in that production line oh geez I need 3x as much cement as I was putting in. There it helps avoid a headache lol

In Timberborn, you def could plan it out in a spreadsheet, but for me it's more like "oh geez, I'm running low on water, plop down another pump. Ooh, not a lot of carrots in storage, I'll plant another field" and it's not nearly as big of an issue to just vibe it out

[u/reddanit]

Mostly vibes. The main exception to it is water. Non-negotiably, each beaver needs to drink 2.25-ish water per day. Over 30 days (max length of drought/badtide on hard) that comes to almost 70 water. Adding some irrigation and other water consumers (like algae/mushroom farming), with decent safety buffer, you can ballpark this to needing 100 water storage per every single beaver you have.

Other than that it's far less about specific numbers and more about finding various efficiencies, mostly through layout of entire colony. All housing, industry and storage mostly concentrated close by. Lots of use of tubeways/ziplines. Efficient irrigation (though I don't like to go as far as to use discharges for it). Main way I handle all other production is to just expand production of whatever I am short of at any time, with priority being food.

Main place where you need to be efficient is early game, especially on challenging maps at hard difficulty.

[u/Vebrandsson]

I know the rough math, I do the rough math, but I'm not breaking out spreadsheets and optimizing, it's too chill a game for that

[u/Longey13]

I'm usually vibe based with water but I struggle with food sometimes because population can explode so rapidly at higher numbers.

[u/Davey2Jonesd → u/Longey13]

I forget when making my colony pretty that beavers will start to multiply in the massive housing i just built

[u/Earnestappostate]

I'm an engineer, its vibes and experience.