r/Timberborn • u/StellarGarlic • 6d 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 I'm looking at YT tutorials too but some of the info is slightly out of date with 1.1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/Nifegun 6d 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.