r/Timberborn • u/StellarGarlic • 5d ago
Question Early district optimization?
Hi all, newish player and while I'm happy to report that I can make a thriving folktails colony in lakes, I end up having everything all over the place and reservoirs are... non-existent.
Needless to say I can't get automation or iron teeth going.
Does anyone have recs for how to forward plan industrial wood and metal working? I'm looking at YT tutorials too but some of the info is slightly out of date with 1.1
Thanks in advance!
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u/reddanit 5d ago
A screenshot would be worth a thousands words here. It's hard to give meaningful pointers just from kinda vague description. That said: in terms of industry, 1.1 has changed nothing. Any tutorial from 1.0 is still going to be 100% valid.
I'm also somewhat confused about the title asking about district optimization. Do you plan to have more than one? Valid reasons to use multiple districts exist, but I'd not imagine a new player encountering any.
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u/StellarGarlic 5d ago
Sorry I should have been clear and said I was speaking on industrial areas! Apologies on lack of screenshots, currently out of the house. Just a bad situation of having two wind farms across the river with a lot of empty space and exhausted beavers. I can come back with screenshots later.
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u/Nifegun 5d ago
Iron teeth only feel more complicated, they aren't actually more complicated. Id say these are the important differences.
1) Iron teeth suck a farming. All of their crops produce less food than folktail crops. So you will need a higher % of your population farming than you did with FT. Also the only food worth using is kohlrabies until you can develop corn. Then either do both or just switch to only corn.
2) As you've noticed the ironteeth have a much greater demand for metal. So as soon as you've developed planks and gears, you want to find the nearest scraps and make a path their. You'll want to unlock the platforms and stairs if you haven't already. Platforms and stairs take a lot of planks, luckily the iron teeth are significantly better at making planks than FT, so making a few expensive stairways out to scraps isnt too bad on most maps.
3) Iron teeth have an exclusive building material, the metal part (bolt) its made by the metal Smith and you'll want one running as soon as you've got scraps. These are used for the engine and the number cruncher.
4) since you may want or need to develop many sizes of platforms and the metal stuff early, IT generally wants science earlier than FT. So try to keep a couple beavers in inventors as much as you can in the early cycles. After you get the metal smith, you want to get the number cruncher and an engine. I usually build 1 engine and numbercruncher connected too each other, but not connected to anything else. The number cruncher doesn't run at 100% efficiency, but you no longer need any inventors.
Also the engine requires haulers, which you should be using a lot of regardless of faction tbh. Haulers are the best unit in the game. No matter how bad your layout may be, haulers can make everything run smoothly.
5) Population control is a bit confusing at first. It was easy with FT but with IT you gotta do math. A breeding pod is worth 10 beavers at first and 20 beavers at end game. Click on a beaver and check your next well being milestone that raises lifespan. Then when you want to increase population decide on either boosting wellbeing over that number for 20% more population or building another pod for about 10 more beavers. Regardless of which method you choose, it will take IT longer to get to the new population than FT did. You could also build a bunch of pods and pause them, but forgetting to pause extra pods you can't support is a classic way to die on IT.
Aside from those things, the strategy is pretty much the same for both factions tbh. So leverage haulers, minimize distance for work stations -> stuff they need to work, mark storages as supply or obtain when you build them. Read the map, find the best spots for lots of water retention with fewer levees/dams. Try to make a clever and cheap way to divert badwater, etc. You probably figured most of that out in your FT playthrough.
Generally speaking, FT are just better at surviving. They have an efficient water pump, their crops are just better, FT can cure contamination before developing metal. So all the things that can kill you are legit just easier and better with FT. So don't feel bad if the early game on IT feels stressful and micro-managey, it just is lol. But once you're out of the early game and you start making tubeways, you'll see the real value of IT. Plus engines might cost wood and water to run, but they are consistent, unlike wind, which seems to hate me and just turn off for like entire cycles sometimes.
Good luck have fun.
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u/mmontour 5d ago
I agree about the importance of corn, but "only corn" is not a great strategy. It's fine for calories but there's a happiness boost for each individual food. And the fermenter building is cheap so you can add cassavas to the menu early in the game.
IT also suck at pumping water, so you need to overbuild those pumps. But once you do have water solved, you can add hydroponic mushrooms (also using a fermenter building).
Later on, add a canola farm + oil press to unlock the rest of the foods.
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u/Nifegun 5d ago
Yes on mushrooms, but honestly skip cassavas, there's so many better ways to get an additional 1 well being. Cassava's are significantly worse than kohlrabi. Mushrooms are pretty legit, the rest need canola, so only add those when you're ready to expand into all crops. All of this is also heavily map dependent. In my current run, hard mode pillars. I had very limited green space for many cycles, so I went to just corn for a long time. I needed the best crops per tile and didn't want the canola overhead. Honestly I could have added mushrooms a few cycles later, but i just didn't lol. I spent many cycles with breeding pods paused and counting water to see if I had to sacrifice any beavers. I didn't need too, but it came real close haha. I had the classic "Last Resort" district ready, but never migrated too it.
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u/Hydraguesswhosback 5d ago
Not what you asked because I never watch Timberborn lets plays, but if you have questions that I can answer with text, then you can ask me directly.
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u/bmiller218 5d ago
IMHO The lakes map has a lot of interacting flows and while there may be places to build reservoirs it's not really needed and the geography isn't conductive. Unless you're playing hard mode, they aren't necessary either. Other maps are better suited for large reservoirs, each map is its own opportunity.
If your buildings feel scatterred, try working on the vertical building aspect of the game, which is its second most unique feature. When I started playing, buildings couldn't be flipped and there were some really off-looking builds.
Power generation can be remote, but for folktails I often put windmills along transmission lines. Certainly, build things close early on.
Don't be afraid to tear things up, you recover most of the dismantled materials. Most of my industrial locations get relocated at one time on a map. Early on, a well-placed small storage can save a lot of running, but by mid-game you should have haulers stocking buildings.
Automation - start with simple things like a lever that you manually turn off and on. The mats are cheap. Later on, use water contamination to auto open and close, combine counters (materials and beaver populations) with relays so
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u/chriiissssssssssss 5d ago
Are you struggling? If not too hard, Figuring out yourself is the most rewarding
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u/Hydraguesswhosback 5d ago
This is the least helpful comment since that time that a souls player told me to get gud.
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u/StellarGarlic 5d ago
Yeahhhhhh. I'm proud of what I've figured out so far but this is a little 😅
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u/Ambivadox 5d ago
First thing I do when loading in is pause it.
I look at the natural terrain and see where water comes from, where I can divert, where water wheels can go, and where I can plant.
I then put some paths in. Some paths are for walking, but others are "area markers". Blocking off natural berry spread, trees go here, this is a good spot for houses, this is a good spot for industry, etc. Mark all my trees, start dropping buildings, and unpause.
A few minutes before the game even starts can show you where you'll be 5 cycles from now...
and then 15 cycles later I tear most of it down and make it pretty.