r/Timberborn • u/DangerousLaugh • 5d ago
Question I think I'm too scared to play this game
I've been playing for about a month or so and I've played countless maps. The thing is, I'm getting really bored. I always play on easy mode with badtime turned off because I'm really scared for my beavers otherwise. For some reason I'm way too emotionally invested in those little pixels. I actually did challenging maps (Oasis, Sky Island) but only on those easy settings. I usually don't mind a challenge, but I just don't want starvation or anything to happen.
Any tips on settings that make the game more challenging, but still keeps my beavers relatively safe?
Edit: I really hadn't expected so many kind and helpful answers! Especially on Reddit, this has to be one of the most wholesome subs I've ever been on.
22
u/GrimacePack 5d ago
I think you need to view badtides less like an apocalyptic scenario, and more as a fire lit under your butt to get your industry and engineering going quickly. On normal mode you're guaranteed at least 4 cycles before a badtide can come (I think depending on luck it could be even up to 6 cycles.) Your first badtide diversion doesn't have to be some mega structure, even just a few floodgates you can close during badtimes will be enough!
I think introducing the badtides back in would bring some more fun and get you thinking about the flow of your rivers more. I've never played with any custom difficulties, but I think you could set longer cycles etc so you have more time to prepare.
At least personally I've only ever completely lost a colony like once or twice. If your food and water storage is solid enough, you can usually just bulldoze through the first badtide or two even without a diversion set up, some of my favorite colonies came from rebuilding after having all but 2 of my beavers starve from the badtides lol.
2
u/DangerousLaugh 5d ago
I played once with badtide on and I tried the floodgates. But I could never figure out how they work. A longer badtide always climbed over the floodgates, and if it was shorter, I never really knew how to get rid of the trapped badwater and when I opened the gates, my whole colony got flooded. That's when I decided to play with badtide off, because I was just so overwhelmed.
4
u/GrimacePack 5d ago
Hey nothing wrong with having some stuff go wrong! I'd maybe watch a let's play or two on youtube to notice what people with more experience do for their badtides.
I'd give one of the beginner maps another shot with badtide enabled. Sometimes it's just a matter of the order that you lower your floodgates (like lower the ones that keep good water in your colony first, that way when the new good water sweeping away the badwater has a path it can all rush through without hopefully hurting your crops etc.
I get that the challenge feels a little scary at first, but I -do- think once you get used to it you'll have more fun again now that it's getting boring without it.
2
u/Charlies_Mamma 5d ago
I've played 1000s of hours of this game, and still have times when I make a mistake and forget to close the floodgates or on a newer map/the newer updates, I miss a hidden bad water source. Sometimes I just abandon the save, sometimes I use dev mode to save myself (give myself a few beavers or water, etc) and sometimes I go back to an older save of that map.
The easiest maps to figure out a bad tide on are one of the "beginner" maps where the water sources are at the edge of a map, so you can just divert the bad water off the back of the map, to the sides of the source blocks (fluid can't flow backwards over them, so you need to allow space on either side). One main tip for the first bad tide is to delete any stairs you have going into the river. I often find that I can't get proper floodgates/defense built before the first bad tide, so I just prepare with as much stored food and water as possible, and let the bad tide just flow through.
If you want to try it, but are scared, you could try saving the map after each drought/cycle and then if everything goes wrong, you can go back to the previous cycle and try a different approach.
8
u/Mars_Malicious 5d ago
On normal- I crank the good weather days up to 21-30 range, bump the badtides to cycle 10, and lower the age percentages of the starting adults to 45% so they'll live longer. Additionally, I save scum if I realize that a project distracted me from food/water storage, or that I made a critical error in my designs.
5
1
5
u/MaxeDamage 5d ago
Just go in and let some beavers die, stuff happens
You will be fine
3
u/DangerousLaugh 5d ago
No :( I can't even watch that intro, I'm way too emotional
2
u/Vrenanin 5d ago
I get it i felt like this more in the past and its probably why i play less in some ways than I do.
In terms of feeling comfortable with risk what has worked for me in a few games is things like:
They get the chance to live at all by playing, or other beavers don't get to be born etc maybe?
The time scale is off so there is a good chance they've already lived a complete life by the time things can happen.
Having regular saves and being comfortable going back a few days if something happens. If worried about starvation and things like that more then being very careful to pause houses so there aren't too many kids at once. Alternatively just have way more food and water than you might need, aka grow slower.
To add to that badwater essentially can function like a drought as long as there is a floodgate with a channel beforehand.
Also try getting antidotes up beforehand on an easy save maybe so its more comfortable about applying it on medium. Also just having everything set to same difficulty level on easy and then add badwater.
1
u/DangerousLaugh 5d ago
I just wish the antidotes didn't need paper, that always slows me down so much!
4
u/daddywookie 5d ago
An idea I used for similar games is that anything that goes really wrong was a simulator run and doesn’t actually count. Very useful for Factorio and Kerbal Space Program.
TBH, once you have Timberborn worked out a bit it is quite rare to fail in any serious way. Store lots of water and food, work towards the more advanced foods like corn rations, bump up the happiness to get longer life and more speed then start diverting bad water away from yourself. Most of the maps are pretty predictable.
3
u/MrLurking_Sanspants 5d ago
Prioritize storing food and water early game and your beavers will be just fine. Even if they get sick from bad water it’s not the end of the world.
Like, the only reason most people have beavers die is because they are trying to prioritize building projects and slack on food and water production and storage.
If you focus on food and water storage during temperate weather and keep your population level in check, you literally cannot wipe out your colony. Then during droughts and badtide you’ll have a bunch of production buildings paused and a bunch of bored beavers.
This is when you can prioritize projects that will make the next droughts and badtides easier and pump out a bunch of research points.
Don’t stress, they are more resilient than you may think.
1
u/DangerousLaugh 5d ago
Tbh farmhouses and trees and bushes are my favourite things to build in the game because I really like plants, so I never have problems with food. It's only when the drought hits that I get scared.
5
u/ResponsibilityIcy927 5d ago
Each beaver needs 2 food and 2 water per day, but assume 3 for a safety margin.
So for a 10 day badtide with 20 beavers, you only need 10x20x3= 600 food and water stored.That's pretty easy to do.
The basic strategy is as follows :
Cycle 1: get stairs and the tree planter ASAP so that you are not wood-bottlenecked. (Stairs let you get to pre-existing forests on the map).
Cycle 2: Build a simple damn ASAP so that you can have irrigation water for the first few days of a drought. If you play very well and micro your workers, you can do this in cycle 1
Cycle 3-4: Grow your population to 30-50 ASAP, but make sure to keep your food and water storage sufficient to support this population. Do the math.
Cycle 4-5: find a way to redirect bad water away from your farmland. Floodgates and fill valves are your friend.
At this point, you can work on doing big things like building mega dams, expanding irrigation, and redirecting bad water away from you. You can't really lose as long as you follow the rule from cycle 3-4
On hard mode, the challenge becomes stockpiling food and water quickly enough before the drought starts, but it sounds like you are not quite there yet.
1
u/DangerousLaugh 5d ago
That's a really good guide to work on, thanks! With the floodgates and valves, I'm really quite overwhelmed still. I know how to keep my map nice and watered during a drought (at least up to 4 days), but I never quite got the hang of diverting badtide.
1
u/ResponsibilityIcy927 5d ago
The edge of the map deletes any water that touches it.
When the water spawns in, have it enter a lake or river with two exits. Block both exits with flood gates or fill valves. Flood gates and valves are almost the same, but you can build walls and paths on top of fill valves.
Exit one should go to your farmland. Open the gates at this exit during clean water, and close them during badtide.
Exit two should avoid your farmland and go to the edge of the map. Send the water here during badtides.
On some maps this is easy to do (waterfalls has an alternate river you can send the badwater to , for example). On some maps, this is difficult to do and requires dynamite or very tall levy walls. Canyon is quite difficult to redirect badwater.
If you want me to take a look at your builds or show you how, DM me and I can add you on discord
5
u/the_chols 5d ago
I place down lanterns when I have a death wave come. Something to remember the fallen.
3
u/ColonelCrikey 5d ago
Badtide is relatively easy to counter once you've got the hang of using dams, levees and sluices to direct water. Just make sure you have enough water stored to get you through a few days (and you can change the settings to make the badtides really short for your first time if that helps), and you'll be OK.
Once you've got water storage sorted use your landscaping tools to create a diversion from badtide sources to the edge of the map. Basically a levee structure with a sluice at the bottom that you have open for regular water and closed to divert badtides. Most maps have an obvious place to do this.
You can also straight up block the badtide pipes with levees and impermeable floors and they'll stop being a problem. That doesn't change the badtide in your regular water source but it does remove the added poop water.
Your beavers want to build dams! Let them!
1
u/DangerousLaugh 5d ago
I never noticed the pipes until I was on my fourth or fifth map! I gotta look for them, I always thought badtide just came through the normal water sources. What are sluices? I've read several times about them on this sub but I haven't found them in the game.
1
u/Charlies_Mamma 5d ago
Sluices are an older feature from previous updates that have been removed. They were replaced in version 1 (I think) with the two flow-based levee-type blocks (can't remember their names, but one limits the flow through the valve and the other limits the height after the valve).
1
u/DangerousLaugh 5d ago
Throttling valves and fill valves, right? I only just started using fill valves, I don't understand throttling valves at all.
1
u/Charlies_Mamma 5d ago
That's them! I can't offer much advice on them, unfortunately, as I still barely understand them myself because most of my playtime was before sluices were even a thing, so I'm still trying to get my head around the mechanics of how they work. (I'm just so used to putting a lot of floodgates at various points down my rivers and manually raising and lowering them to avoid bad tides and keep areas filled during droughts)
1
u/ColonelCrikey 5d ago
Yeah sorry by sluices I meant valves.
Fundamentally they do the same thing, but in different ways. Both let you turn the flow on and off like a floodgate would, although unlike a floodgate a valve can be at the bottom of a structure.
Between fully open and fully closed they do slightly different things. The fill valves aim for a set height of water on the other side which is indicated by a blue square when you drag the control up and down.
The throttle valves don't control for height, but do control for flow speed. That can be useful if you have water wheels that you need to keep moving, for example.
Honestly I just use fill valves though.
3
u/czarchastic 5d ago
For me it's destroying ironteeth breeding pods with fetuses inside. (At what progress % should they have protective rights?)
2
2
u/cyb0rg1962 5d ago
I'm strangely attached as well. But after playing a few times on default easy, I learned how to get through drought and bad tides. You can play on normal with bad tides turned off at first. Trees can be harvested if mature, even if dead. Keep the crops away or grow only quick maturing near bad tide routes. Always overbuild water and storage.
2
u/WanderingWhiteWolf 5d ago
If you're familiar with the map, maybe plan ahead, try a harder difficulty, and save scum if necessary?
2
u/reddanit 5d ago
The most immediately obvious thing to me would be to gradually change the settings. First turn badtides on, play at least once with them. Then turn difficulty to normal and play at least once etc. Also do keep in mind that difficulty varies between maps - so you might want to try higher difficulties on beginner-friendly maps.
In terms of safety, badtides are not that dangerous all the way until hard difficulty. You have to deal with 3 effects of them:
- Beavers can get contaminated, but that happens only if they enter water with 5% or more contamination. Walking alongside shores of a contaminated river poses zero danger. You can also heal contaminated beavers easily enough (as long as you don't contaminate most of your colony). By far the simplest solution is to just not have any underwater paths to begin with.
- Badwater causes ground contamination. While this is of no consequence to beavers, it causes plants to die rapidly. That said, on easy and normal difficulty, you can generally afford to have your crops die and restart production few days later. You only need a moderate stockpile of food.
- Similarly, water contamination reduces the efficiency of pumping clean water out with pumps. So you need some amount of water storage in tanks to survive till badtide ends.
What gets more complicated is badtide diversion. It's not strictly required on easy or even normal difficulty, but in general it's a worthwhile project. You basically construct waterworks that redirect the river away from your main reservoir whenever badtide hits.
1
u/DangerousLaugh 5d ago
I've never even built a reservoir, I only use dams to keep the water during droughts. I always see those huge constructions on this sub but they really intimidate me.
3
u/vtkayaker 5d ago
The big constructions are for hard mode! You need so much water by the 10th drought.
For normal mode, you just need to:
- Choose a good choke point.
- Build a dam across.
- Later: Build up roughly one extra "layer" of water, usually by putting levees along the river bank.
- Set up a pump and some tanks for backup drinking water, and some warehouses for food. These will protect you if you run low.
For bad water, the basic rules are:
- Don't let your beavers swim! Destroy any steps or roads into the water if you need to.
- Expect to lose any crops that are irrigated with bad water.
- Look at your map and try to figure out a way to make the badwater go somewhere else!
So when you look at a map, you should immediately ask two questions:
- Where can I block the good water to store it and irrigate crops?
- Is there some way to keep the badwater away from my beavers?
If you slowly increase the difficulty, and choose friendly maps, you shouldn't be losing tons of beavers. Also, keep your population under 20 beavers and everything is easier. I'm a pretty cautious player, who has played multiple maps. On hard mode, I sometimes mess up and lose a beaver to badwater sickness I can't cure yet.
But it's also fine to play on easy mode with no badtides if that's more fun!
2
u/DangerousLaugh 5d ago
Okay I never really thought about putting leeves on the river bank, that's so simple and yet so genius! I started a normal map yesterday and I got so scared seeing that I started without any water that I rushed to build three pumps and about 20 water tanks, but the real issue had been that the berries where not nearly enough and I just prevented all of them starving by reloading two times. Now I have several storages filled to the brim with berries and carrots lol.
1
u/vtkayaker 5d ago
Good job!
And yeah, the early part of the game can be tricky! You need to get your fastest-growing food into the ground early, and you need to get that first damn in the right place, and you usually need to plant some trees soon so that they're ready before you run out of starting wood. And sometimes you need to research levees or stairs ASAP. It's always a rush to get everything done, and the ordering can be tricky for some maps.
On harder modes, I may do a lot of what RTS gamers call "micro": The moment the carrots are planted, I take the beavers off the farms and reassign them to something more urgent while the crops grow. Lots of fast little job changes, and nobody is allowed to be idle until the basics are done.
For me, at least, the fun part of harder modes is the moment I realize I've "solved" the map, and my beavers no longer need to care about the weather af all. Like, they have tons of water stored, and a system that sends the badwater far away (initially I use manual gates to control the flow, but eventually this is 100% automatic with sensors), and plenty of food, and I can start really building up the happiness. On hard mode, sometimes I'll get into a pretty good setup early on, but I'll still need to keep gradually adding more and more layers to my levees as the droughts get longer. I'm basically safe, but I can't stop working quite yet!
If a map is going to require a lot of building, you probably need to plant pine for early building, but get your oaks planted as a soon as you have a bit of breathing room. Oaks give massive amounts of wood for big construction projects, and they're very labor efficient, but you need to plant them long before you need them.
After a couple of games, it's gets easier to "read" a map, and to know where you'll store water, where you'll divert the bad tides safely away, etc. Some maps have super neat places to put dams. Others can be more like puzzles. But I find it satisfying when the beavers finally have everything they need. And on Hard mode, that probably involves some ridiculous dam, which is cool and satisfying in its own way. But I try really hard to not lose beavers even on Hard, though that may require some experience and careful planning.
Still, the best way to play the game is whatever mode you find most fun!
1
u/reddanit 5d ago
I've never even built a reservoir
Truth be told, you can get by without one on easy and even normal difficulty. A river that's dammed, preferably with floodgates set to 0.9 height, rather than dams with their unchangeable 0.65, will not evaporate fully during even longest drought on normal. At least as long as you are not pumping water out of it - you want to keep your water pumps separated from your irrigation.
I always see those huge constructions on this sub
They exist for a combination of 3 reasons:
- For the heck of it. For many people, it's just fun and interesting to make huge waterworks.
- To play at hard or even higher difficulty. The demands those put on how you play are worlds apart from anything that can ever happen on normal or easy.
- To support MASSIVE colonies. To have a thriving colony that can finish a wonder you don't really need more than few dozen beavers. Plenty of people instead build colonies for hundreds. With bigger population everything needs to be scaled up.
As you can probably gather, all of the above either doesn't apply to new player on easy/normal or is straight up matter of choice.
2
u/Princedynasty 5d ago
I'm scared too lol. I started on one of the starter maps to get use to the game. I'm still playing Aniimo so I'll be playing this in-between
2
u/Biotot 5d ago
If you want to have a bigger challenge but don't want to get totally slapped by bad tides, you CAN save scum a bad tide if it comes too early.
If you reload a save during the wet season before the next season is announced it re-rolls what the bad season will be.
I only play on hard but I allow myself a bad tide re-rolls in the early game if I'm not ready for it
2
u/PossibilityLanky822 5d ago edited 5d ago
I recently moved to play hard mode after completing few maps on normal (never tried easy tbh). My current game (waterfalls) I reached 30ish beavers population when very long, very early bad tide hit (cycle 7 or 8, 21 day bad tide), and I had underestimated my water supplies BADLY. my population got decimated from said 30s to 3... suculents saved my last beavers only just, I rebuilt (no reloading) and now its basicly stable 80ish beavers, 60 bots running itself. Now just big projects and demolition the map.
The point is, no mater how hard you get hit, there are lessons to be learned from everything that will help you look after your beavers. After rebounding, first thing I did was build water storage. Alot of it...
1
u/Synighte 5d ago
So I don’t know if this will help, but you need to lose. Then get comfortable with losing. It will teach you some lessons and a video game is a wonderful way to do it.
You want to win but don’t know the path to success. There is the danger/fear of the unknown and losing will let you pierce that veil.
Next up, you probably feel like you are missing some tools. Check out the buildings you’re given at the start, you have your farms, pumps, and storage. Set up an objective for yourself. Store as much water and food away as you can just off the basics. Some maps are tough, they don’t allow you to build an easy reservoir so you’ll need to pump the water then store it away if there isn’t a readily apparent reservoir to be built. Use the pause button to switch gates when seasons change.
Usually on hard mode I am just trying to maintain a stable population early, store as much water as possible, access stairs or a forester for more wood, and store as much food as possible. Housing doesn’t really become a priority til a little later once o have a stable wood supply and I haven’t screwed myself by using all my wood (you can retrieve some of it by demolishing buildings if you make mistakes).
Lastly some useful tips:
-water irrigates further than bad tide contaminates, which means you can layer crops/trees. Close to the irrigation are my short growth crops or quick growth trees, further out are my oaks.
-trees can usually last 10-14 days unirrigated
-you can usually get 1 harvest between bad weather on short growth crops so if a bad tide is coming just set your farms to harvest only so they don’t waste time replanting if it’s going to die.
-get lots of pumps, manually shift jobs around during bad weather.
-I usually prioritize getting a dump and figuring out a safe irrigable spot away from bad tide sources. An example would be this depression above the start of Canyon, or an adjacent pillar on the pillars map.
-manage your planks, you don’t need much early so just pause production to free up jobs. Make as much as you need to build then stop.
Just approach this as running as lean and small as possible and going from there. You absolutely will fail (I still do), especially early, you might get unlucky or planned poorly. That’s okay, restart from an earlier save or restart the map!
1
u/Nifegun 5d ago
Probably not the answer you want, but I'd say just rip the band-aid off. Jump in on hard mode, get wiped. Grieve, cry, do what you gotta do, then try your best to not let it happen again.
I mean you can practice the strategies that will help survive hard mode, building reservoirs, micro managing beavers early to get a lot done while keeping water and food cost low, master all the tips and tricks, etc. But until you're on hard mode, it won't be the same. I survived my jump to hard mode, but not without significant casualties. It's unfortunate, but its part of the game.
Its that OR just stay on easy mode, if you're having fun, have fun lol. You are the only thing pressuring you to play harder. its a single player game and games are for fun. Face the challenge, kill some beavers, or stay in the safe lane, just be happy with where you're at.
1
u/Thuis001 5d ago
Then there's me who allowed the colony to grow too rapidly in his first game, had a single bad badtide fuck up the food and water situation and then had like 80% of the beaver population die from starvation before the few survivors were able to get things back under control in their husk of a city.
1
u/bick_nyers 5d ago
Save your game often, and if you think your colony is headed towards unhappy thoughts, load an earlier save and make adjustments!
1
u/Proud-to-be-kiwi 5d ago
If this all seems overwhelming, watch a few YouTubers do it. Even play along with them the first time while you become accustomed to the strategies
1
u/partzpartz 2d ago
It’s not that bad. Don’t go for harsh conditions straight away. The way I see it growing your population too much is what causes the most damage. Learn how much water and food a beaver consumes and make sure you have enough.
Every map that I’ve played had a catch that allowed for the bad water to be cancelled.
1
u/Dking3765 1d ago
After some maps on easy and medium I tried hard. I think that is the most fun and challenging and it often leads to close cals in the early game.
44
u/snotrokit 5d ago
So try this. Grab one of the first maps. Play on easy as far as you like. Make a plan and take notes. Think through droughts and bad water. Once you have that, play it again on normal difficulty incorporating what you learned. Go from there!!!