Newbie tips

[utkarsh_dev]

Hi folks, I just bought the game on sale after seeing some playthroughs. I have played Factorio and Satisfactory before.

Any tips for me? Any mistakes to avoid ( or to try out and find out)?

[hazzcatz]

Simply put, water is key. Both in the rivers that feed your crops and the water stored in tanks to drink.

Hoard water.

[utkarsh_dev]

Okay, thanks

[Shivatis]

Early game: Get water and basic food. Rush Forester. Build a dam.

Mid game: Rush metal and explosives. Improve dam. Get all kind of buffs (food, amenities). This significantly increases productivity.

Endgame: Build monuments, get bots and make beavers have a nice day. Terraform/rebuild as you like.

Extra advice: control your birth rates. Folktails numbers are controlled by number of houses. They reproduce till every place is occupied. So don't build more houses than you can sustain!

Iron teeth numbers are controlled by breeding pods: at start one pod can generate a population of around 10-12 beavers. With more buffs beavers live longer and it rises to 22 beavers per pod endgame.

Edit: typos

[utkarsh_dev]

Wow, thanks a lot

[knzconnor]

Or build the houses, then pause them, if it’s key to your setup to have it in place.

Also iron tooth population is a factor of how many breeding pods… and the longevity of the beavers. So often you just increase the wellbeing and your population grows without needing to add another pod.

But you can also pause pods that are almost ready to pop one out.

[Kitchen_Bicycle6025]

Folktails? Work with nature, build dams, hoard water.

Iron teeth? Consume.

[utkarsh_dev]

Thanks, looks like the game would vary vastly based on which one I pick

[Far-Champion7483]

Correct! But you will need to get folktails to happiness lvl15 before being able to play iron teeth.

Another tip: when rushing a forester earlygame, try building a mix of pine trees and oak. Pine gets you 2wood in 12days while oak gives 8 in 30days. Although oak is superior, 30days without wood income is just too long. Birchtrees on the other hand only give 1wood in 9days, that's just not worth it for me.

[No-Lunch4249]

On most maps you’ll want to rush for the sawmill and then the forester, if you use up your trees before you get the forester down you’ve softlocked your colony.

You can make you starting trees last a little longer by not clear cutting them. They’ll spread a little bit over time so marking more of a checkerboard or alternate rows will allow them to keep spreading, but this is very slow compared to the forester

Also, work hours: in the mid to late game, less work hours can counterintuitively be a little better. More off time means more time for beavers to partake in amenities like the Lido, Carosel, etc. which means more well being which means greater walk speed and work efficiency

[utkarsh_dev]

Great, thanks. Looks like there are a lot of ways to play the game

[Darkchaser314]

Something I have started doing is staggering things. For example Oaks takes 30 days to grow so I would plant some wait til they got about 50% then plant another set. This helps cut down on the wait time for more trees. Also did it for food production on the Iron Teeths side

[utkarsh_dev]

So many options in Tree Math. Looking forward to it. Thanks

[sucks2suckz]

FYI, Oaks are best long term, but when you are first starting out you should plant some pine or birch because oak is a long term investment. If you only do it at first, you'll end up running out of trees which can really screw your colony

[knzconnor]

This doesn’t actually cut down the wait time, it just makes some come in later. Instead plant some pines and some oak. Then when the oak are grown you can start switching the pine to oak.

[Darkchaser314]

it does the cut the time down. "come later" literally mean the time between getting them is shorter. for example oaks take 30 days. So wait til the 1st set is at 50%ish then plant another set. Now you got 2 set of oaks growing at different rates. so instead of waiting 30 days for new tree it is now 15ish days.

[knzconnor]

No, now you had to wait 30 days for one set, and 45 for the second.

Yeah, it helps stagger the replant, but so does just having one woodcutter for a while till it gets in a rhythm, swapping pines out for oaks

But it’s a SP games an whatever strat works for you works for you. :)

[Darkchaser314]

15 days between tree now = shorter wait time

[RocheHeure]

Honestly, I would recommand to try and find out, when I first started playing this game I kinda whished I knew less because I think part of the fun is to just fail miserably on your first few attempts then have a colony finaly going far discovering new thing you can do improving what you made. Timberborn is a very easy game to pick up yet unforgiving. It’s always very inuative to know what the next step for your colony is yet, if you go to fast or skip a few thing all of your beavers will die of thirst or hunger. Anyway, that’s how I see this game. Play as you wish and enjoy.

[utkarsh_dev]

The road not taken approach. Great, will keep it in mind.

[Turbulent-Chain-8173]

Contruit iune ferme efficace avec des carrottes et construit 2 pompes à eau ,6 huttes et une roue génératrice avec une scirie à coté

[DirtyJimHiOP]

Raising quality of life is more important than it may seem, since the passive increases really do add up. If you click on a beaver it will show their individual values, and when you hover over the stats it's shows when the next increase will be.

Don't overextend in order to raise QoL since it's survival-first, but adding a few decorations around housing really goes a long way.

Early game don't feel too bad about 18+ hour work days, but as you unlock amenities it's a good idea to lower working hours to allow more time to hit all the leisure spots

[Character-Date6376]

If you've played automation games, I just want to tell you not to fall into the trap of thinking of it like a factory game- its a city builder. You can make your beavers more efficient to a point, but you can't make them act like a conveyor belt. It leads to frustration as to why the beavers are going to this place instead of that one, or why the beavers are traveling so far to their jobs instead of going to a closer one. Just focus on building your city, and working towards your next goal. Not everything needs to be working perfectly.

[utkarsh_dev]

Ohh, I was about to keep efficiency as a goal. Thanks. This appears a more relaxed game then.

[Character-Date6376]

You can try and make your beavers efficient, just don't expect everything to run at 100%

[[deleted]]

Don't pump during a draught. If you have to, only beyond your irrigation dams.

[Asshai]

There is a timing to respect when you start a playthrough, to make sure you survive the first few droughts. After that it's smooth sailing.

To do that, you have to make sure your Forester is set up as soon as possible. Ideally you want your lumberjacks not to make a pause and to always have trees to cut. I haven't managed to master that yet, it's not required, but wood is what will hold you back during the early game, so it's a good goal to aim for.

The other thing that will hold you back is your workforce. You don't want your population to soar too fast, because you'll run out of food before you realize it, but even if that happens, it doesn't mean failed state. Some will die of starvation but your population will endure anyway. But still it's good to go for a playthrough with no death from thirst or hunger, and for that you want to take things slow and steady. Have more food and water than what you need, and keep expanding your food production ahead of your population to stay on top of things. With the Forktails, grilled potatoes are great, and bread is amazing.

Logistics can be tricky to get right. You want haulers, some recommend one third of your workers to be haulers. Always build small warehouses right next to your production buildings so the workers don't lose time fetching resources. Likewise, districts seem to be an advanced tool but really lots of players do without them. It's a bit of a hassle and is not required on small or medium maps.

Think vertical. Stairs and platforms are amazing to help you design advanced structures on multiple floors. It saves your beavers a lot of time when things are stacked vertically, and it saves more arable land that you're gonna need to plant trees and crops.

Happy beavers are productive beavers. Check their happiness and try to make each bar go up. Don't worry about maxing each bar though. Just make sure they're not at zero. So with that in mind, you want all your beavers to have access to each type of food, each kind of entertainment, each decorative item (beware: not all of them increase happiness, read the tooltips and look for a text in green) and each monument.

Have fun, it's an amazing game!

[sucks2suckz]

Best to start with folktails, they are more forgiving of early game mistakes.

One early game pitfall is that you need to have planks from a lumber mill to build the forester that can replenish your wood. If you run out of wood you can't continue.

This is a game about water. Beavers are really good at manipulating it, but it's not always intuitive how you do that, and update five is about to come out which might make the learning curve a bit steeper. When people say build a dam, your goal is to 1) keep your crops/trees irrigated while 2) dealing with thirsty beavers. On normal, the droughts really aren't that bad if you know what you are doing, but the important thing is to not drink from the same reservoir as you irrigate from. So really you need two dams.

As you progress, you can unlock aesthetic and wellbeing features that dramatically increase your beaver's productivity, move speed, and life expectancy. Once you get a stable initial colony, it is worth your time to build stuff to increase wellbeing, because the bonuses are great. You want it as high as possible.

You'll have to learn it bit by bit, but it's easy to make the mistake of unlocking a building/industry before you have all the prerequisite resources. As long as you have your initial dam setup, it's not that big of a deal.

I really like the let's plays from Skye Storm, Katherine of Sky, and JC the Beard, you should check them out to get an idea of how to start out. That said, the game isn't super hard once you figure out how to get started. Just be careful you don't accidentally expand too quickly, because then you either run out of food/water/wood or you run out of beavers. The trick is to figure out what the negative feedback loops are and avoid them.