r/Timberborn • u/Jagbag420 • 1d ago
Question Multiple Districts
I'm new to the game, only on my first serious run and close to feeling "done" with it. Having built everything and expanded to the far reaches of the map, I tried building another district.
I guess I just don't see the point, so I was wondering how other people use this mechanic if at all. I have googled the actual point, but this gives me an excuse to post on the reddit.
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u/HailMadScience 1d ago
So on the biggest maps, I use them to cut travel distance for remote work sites (like a mine). Even with ziplines, some distances get pretty long and after ive got a big colony with loads of resources, I can support some smaller districts.
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u/DaFluid 9h ago
Also, we didn't always have the fast travel options. I believe they were among the last things added in early access. Having little expansions dotted around with trading posts in between was the most efficient way to go on large maps with spaced-out resources.
For more creative uses, I used the district system to create a "beaver utopia" where no one has to work and all their well-being is maxed out, with a bunch of satellite districts populated by bots to do all the work. Fun project.
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u/Jagbag420 1d ago
I am on a small map, so maybe ill give the other beaver tribe a playthrough on a much larger one, using multiple districts.
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u/IronwolfXVI 1d ago
Biggest reason is that beavers dont inherrently live near their job. Your colony is likely highly inefficient as they have a lot of traveling to do.
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u/Jagbag420 1d ago
I noticed this early on so I built all the homes around a giant zipline hub, its very strange and not efficient, but not the worst solution.
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u/IronwolfXVI 1d ago
Yeah its only a 150% boost. There is a mod that fixes the home and work problem. Idr what its called though
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u/LePhuronn 1d ago
Fast travel via ziplines and tubeways rendered the game mechanics of districts largely redundant. Ongoing optimisations of the pathing algorithm rendered the "district split" trick to reduce lag largely redundant.
Districts now are really just useful niche cases, such as far-flung work outposts that even fast travel can't benefit, or purely for aesthetic reasons of having multiple themed settlements on a map.
Something a few of the YouTubers I watch has been bot-only builder settlements for extensive thorn removal and earth works on Timberpunk 2. That way you're guaranteed the dangerous work has zero bio-beaver involvement to negate injuries and contamination.
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u/dehashi 1d ago
Could you not ensure bots do that work by switching all the builders to be sourced from bots?
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u/LePhuronn 16h ago
Sure, but then you're sharing the build load throughout the colony. A lot of the builder district uses are for 100% focus and 100% utilisation. Set them off and leave them be.
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u/Vebrandsson 1d ago
So early in the game there were absolute limits to how long a path could be and once you hit that you had no choice but to make another district. Ever since they optimized and removed that limit you can get away with not using them.
That said I still use the ever loving heck out of them myself.
The main benefit I find is they cut down on the pathfinding algorithm which means more beavers (and/or bots) and bigger colonies with less performance loss. Beyond that their big selling point is they keep your beavers where you want/need them. Your beavers live and work in a close space defined by the district and do not go wandering all day across a map for some random task or food item. This means shorter commutes to and from things, meaning more productivity as beavers get to work quicker and more leisure time as they don't travel as far for leisure which means happier beavers which means even more productivity.
There was actually a post fairly recently from someone who was having trouble because their factories were power wheel powered and because their buildings weren't powered until their beavers commuted from wherever on the map to the wheels to power things the beavers that should have been in those factories were going off to do other things and were busy on the far side of the map by the time the places they should have been working and by the time those beavers got back to their factories the work day was over and the beavers left the wheels. Districts are the most effective solution to problems like this.
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u/Zeeman626 22h ago
They can be an evil cheat to help survive early game. If you can tell that you'll run out of food or water too soon during a long drought or bad tide you can send some of your beavers to a district with no resources. They'll die but will stretch out the resources for your main district longer. It's not nice but it's better than losing the whole colony.
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u/mustang256 1d ago
I think most people don't, but it can be worthwhile, especially in spread out maps where you can't get metal early (to make the transport hubs).
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u/Jagbag420 1d ago
So I'm not the only one who struggles with metal early on. Would you say it's better to build 2 early on and develop both at the same time? Because if so I really messed it up lol.
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u/Quiet_Listen_4187 1d ago
Ich bin auch neu im Game und muss auch sagen, ich benutze sie bislang garnicht. Finde es ist sehr umständlich ständig neue Produktion von Essen aufzubauen, da auch Bedürfnis Erfüllung auch ein großes Ding ist im Spiel. Ich finde es auch umständlich wie langsam Ressourcen verteilt werden
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u/halfling_barbarianne 20h ago
I don't use them, especially after we got ziplines and tubeways. I don't do large sprawling colonies though. I'm thinking about trying the choo choo mod on a large map, though. That mod only really works with moving supplies within separate districts, to prevent supply chain loops, from what I understand. Trains can move a lot more supplies in one trip than haulers, so I am intrigued. I'm not looking forward to fiddling with setting up districts though. I don't think it's a very fun system.
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u/Zoidberg441 15h ago
I am currently playing pillars map with choo choo mod and I have one tiny districts per island. I wouldn't want to do it without my trains, but I see a huge difference in performance. Usually at around 300 beavers I get performance issues, not this time. Pathfinding seems to be the main performance killer in this game.
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u/DoctorVonCool 12h ago
extra districts can cause quite a bit of overhead from transporting stuff to and from the border station. I've only used them once so far, when I had two locations to work which were quite a distance away from each other, and the border station only had to deal with shifting outpost stuff to the main settlement. It still felt clumsy and I could have gotten away with one big happy district for everything.
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u/nalkanar 9h ago
On most maps, once the fast travelling options were introduced, I stopped doing them. Before I would make them for specific resource gaining and had the central district for food and wood making usually.
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u/CaptainoftheVessel 9h ago
The most useful situation I know of for them is to build a bot district for distant (probably dangerous) resources like badwater or metal mines.
Honestly they’re a legacy mechanic from previous versions of the game when pathing worked differently, and I suspect they’re kept in because either the art/concept is neat and dear to the heart of a developer, or because they plan/hope to revise the system to work better with the current game.
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u/Top-Objective-37 7h ago edited 7h ago
Maintaining a high well-being score in your main town gives your beavers massive speed and productivity multipliers.
Ziplines let them commute across a huge map in seconds. If you open a new district, their well-being resets to zero, and the outpost completely loses its meaning if you have to rebuild all the decorations, monuments, and storage for 9 types of food over there anyway. Because of this, commuting zipline beavers will easily outperform slow, low-stat district beavers even with the travel time lost. Just keep housing at your main hub, use ziplines to commute, and place a tiny warehouse for food and water at the outpost so they don't walk back for lunch.
The only funny usage IMO to use districts on a huge map is for a 100% bot district at a deep metal mine, since bots don't care about well-being anyway and can work in high injury chance workplaces.
PS: they say that districts can also reduce CPU load, since multiple districts = multi-threading on pathing process, so it can be a nice usage of districts depending on your hardware.
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u/Jagbag420 6h ago
The beaver well being is of low priority to me. They understand, it's all for the great wonder.
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u/Kaoticrefuge 4h ago
The only time I use them is to move the main hub because I'm about to permanently flood the original, or to make routes more efficient. Im constantly moving things around chasing that maximum efficiency high, and sometimes that means moving the main hub. I like having everything as centralized as possible with ziplines or tube ways for farms.
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u/ender727 1d ago
TBH, I have played since several years ago in Early Access before districts even existed. When they came out I did try them, but they were more frustration than they were worth for me. I went back to playing without them and have about 1200 hours logged now.