When the topic of city builders comes up – and with me, it comes up a lot – I often point to Timberborn as the very best of the survival sub-genre.

That’s it. That’s the review.

Timberborn has finally launched clear of Early Access and into its 1.0 release. I bought it very early in 2022, a few months after its September 2021 EA launch, and, at that point, it was already pretty great. It grew from there in some pretty unexpected directions. But a little over four years later, even with all the pretenders to its throne, it’s still the best.

WYNONA’S GOT HERSELF A BIG BROWN BEAVER

Timberborn is a game about beavers trying to survive in the human-devastated environments of the world. They’re exactly like we are – industrious, innovative, contemplative – but, unlike us, they don’t suck. They know how to harness nature rather than destroy it, because they know that their survival depends on it.

You start off with a single building and a crowd of beavers, and you immediately need to get to work. You have to find a source of food, gather resources, build pumps for your water. Food and water is what’s the most important, but you won’t be able to store any if you don’t fell some trees to make water tanks and warehouses. Sure, you’ll want to build houses eventually, but it’s not as much a priority as you might think.

What is a priority is succumbing to your beaver-y instincts and building a dam. That’s because drought season is inevitable, and if you don’t have water to irrigate the land, it dries up. Crops die, sometimes trees. If you didn’t stockpile enough food and water, your beavers might learn about mortality early.

Then, you build from there. Planks, iron, ziplines, tubes; the engineering possibilities are endless.

THAT BEAVER EAT’S TACO BELL

I have some vague recollection of having a smidgen of difficulty with Timberborn, but those days are long past. Now, the biggest risk to my Beavers is if I forget to turn the water pumps back on after a drought.

Those are generally the biggest threats to beavers: droughts and momentary incompetence. However, there’s one more: badwater. Badwater was implemented back in 2024, and, at first, it sounded terrible. It’s essentially poisonous water that seeps into the ground and kills plants and beavers much more efficiently than a drought ever could.

Most (if not all) maps have a source of badwater right from the start; distant poisonous rivers that flow the same as normal water. But you can’t just avoid these rivers and not deal with badwater at all. Every so often, a drought will be replaced by a badtide, where sources of fresh water start spewing badwater. At that point, you really have to make sure you’re stockpiled, because there’s probably going to be a recovery period, even after it passes. Trees and crops only grow where the water touches, and anywhere the water touches can be touched by badwater.

Once the badwater passes, your beavers then have to replant dead trees and crops, which can really set you back.

CASTOREUM

Which is where Timberborn’s most important feature comes in: engineering. If you can think of a solution, you most likely can build it. So, if you want to create a massive reservoir of water so that it never stops flowing, even when there’s a drought, you can absolutely do that. You can even create valves to adjust flow so it doesn’t just flood your settlements when you need to release it. If you want to create viaducts that switch on when the badtide hits and carry all the badwater away where it can’t do any damage, then you’ve got options.

And that’s where Timberborn really succeeds. Once the survival aspect is under control, a lot of survival city-builders begin to lose their momentum, but that’s when things really start to pick up for Timberborn.

Once you unlock all the terraforming, industry, and construction research (there is no tech tree in Timberborn, you unlock everything whenever you want by spending science points), everything starts opening up. Suddenly you’re flattening mountains and cutting irrigation ditches to create vast farmlands. You might construct huge towers and place gravity batteries atop them so that your industry doesn’t slow down when the rivers dry up (all beaver industry is run using kinetic energy.)

The only limit to solving problems and maximizing efficiency is your own creativity and willpower.

BET THOSE MAPLE PASTRIES TASTE AMAZING

It’s the massive engineering projects that carry Timberborn’s latter half. Which is good, because there’s no set endpoint. The only goal to reach is building each clan’s Wonder. But that doesn’t really lead to much celebration.

Not that it’s unusual for a city-builder of any type to not have an end point. I guess what I’m saying is that being able to build a giant wooden dick at the fresh water source so it pisses water into the river is great, but I really need that pat on the head.

On the other hand, I keep coming back to Timberborn. The variety of maps (and ability to get user-made creations), means there’s always different challenges to tackle. Like, for example, some of the maps are extremely small, which means you’re constantly trying to build upward to minimize your footprint.

There’s also two different clans to choose from: the Folktails and the Iron Teeth. They’re similar enough that it doesn’t feel like you need an entirely separate tutorial for each, but they’re very different in terms of how they play. The Iron Teeth are more technology focused, whereas the Folktail are a little more vanilla. Most of their buildings are unique to their clan, so you have to adapt.

TYOOBS

I don’t have many complaints, but since complaining is what I do naturally, here we go. As a warning, this is really specific:

First, I don’t really like the robots. Both factions can build mechanized beaverbots. The bots don’t need to rest, they won’t become injured, and they don’t need to eat (though they do consume other resources). That kind of sucks. I’m building a utopia for beavers, I don’t care about robots. Of course, they are optional. You don’t need to build or use them. However, some industry carries a high risk of injuring your beavers, so it makes sense to replace them with automation. But at that point, where do you draw the line?

Similarly, both factions have their own style of rapid transit. The Folktails have ziplines, while the Iron Teeth have “tubeways.” Both of them allow the beavers to cross vast distances really quickly, and their only real downside is that you need to place stations around your settlement for them to embark and disembark. However, once your network is set up, it can feel overpowered, as suddenly the margins of the map are accessible.

Unlike the robots, I like rapid transit, regardless of how overpowered it might be. But, this leads to my biggest complaint: the district system sucks.

Your settlement is technically divided into districts, even if you don’t realize it initially. Generally, your district centre has a range that suggests that, at a certain point, your beavers might be travelling too far. In early builds, this was a hard limit. If you wanted to travel outside the limit, you had to build another district.

What makes districts terrible is that beavers don’t cross districts. So, each district has to have its own supply of resources. You had to assign beavers to trade resources from one district to the other. Thankfully, the district system was relaxed during Early Access, but it’s to the point where I don’t know why districts were left in at all. I see no benefit to using them. But it also obscures whether or not beavers are making good decisions when it comes to travel. Do they go to the warehouses closest to their homes, or are all their decisions based on the district centre? It feels sloppy.

VERTICAL ENGINEERING

Those complaints aside, I still confidently believe that there’s no better than Timberborn when it comes to survival city-builders. And you don’t have to just take my word for it (though, you should). Over the years, I talked to at least three city-builder developers, and they’ve all spoken of Timberborn with reverence.

It anchors itself to the core philosophy of the genre, that it’s all about creation and efficiency. It knows how to constantly throw problems at you that you might survive at first and then harness later. I frequently became absorbed in really big engineering projects that would eat into my nights. Water harnessed by systems of gates, energy driven by complex infrastructure, fields of crops irrigated with channels carved from the Earth, and it all begins with a single dam. I’ve searched high and low, and there are few experiences in this genre that are anywhere close to that satisfying.

9/10

This review was conducted using a pre-release digital Steam version of the game. It was paid for by the author.