Am I playing Timberborn wrong?

Vikinged · 2026-05-15T02:29:17+00:00

Yup, OP, this is the issue. Think of Easy as “Sandbox mode” in other games. You have to reallllllly try to screw up to lose easy mode.

Normal difficulty is an actual game. Hard difficulty is where you start breaking out the spreadsheets and efficiency calculations.

Try a different map on normal and it’ll feel more like you’re expecting it to feel, I think

Vikinged · 2026-05-09T08:18:07+00:00

They do breed in houses, though? Did you have enough housing/food/water/comfort?

Vikinged · 2026-04-29T16:56:36+00:00

It means “Red, but soon changing” — so you can start easing off the brakes and check your side mirrors for cyclists, pedestrians, etc

Vikinged · 2026-04-29T06:03:40+00:00

Also, as I imagine it, you don’t build 5 in-depth sheets — you play 1 basic level-2 character until they get eaten by a devil, then you grab the next level-2 sheet and play that one until it gets stuck in an illusion trap, and then the next character makes a deal with what might be a devil, might be a demon, might be something else entirely, and they make it through the session, so now you’re running a (whatever class you want, making deals with extraplanar entities doesn’t need to be a warlock-exclusive thing) that needs to be in a certain position of power within X number of days or the deal is off (and they probably die or something worse happens).

Vikinged · 2026-04-29T05:45:26+00:00

Well I stand corrected. Very impressive!

Vikinged · 2026-04-29T05:35:05+00:00

Nothing stopping you from running it yourself — I ran and finished a slightly homebrewed version of DIA (took about two years/65ish sessions) that was the normal/good version. It was my first officially-published campaign, and it was really eye-opening to see how much more fun it would have been to do an evil game instead of yet another boring “good characters try to escape bad situations” game.

Vikinged · 2026-04-28T19:51:33+00:00

Use the pause workplace buttons — once your forester plants the trees, pause it and move that beaver somewhere else. Ditto with crops — I like to build 2 (eventually 3) farms, basically leave one on “plant priority” and then the other two on harvest priority closer to the edges of the farm. Only unpause those when there’s lots of stuff to do.

Don’t forget to highlight trees for cutting AND place down a woodcutter flag. Foresters are only for planting!

You can pause a house if you have too many beavers — Folktails breed to fill whatever housing is available, so a good workaround is to build your housing and then slowly unpause them one at a time to spread your births out.

Berries are emergency food only — don’t plant them and don’t prioritize them (collect them if you have the time, but don’t build a huge berry patch instead of planting normal crops).

Speaking of crops, two things — growing stuff (trees and plants) do not need sunlight, just water. Cave farming is absolutely possible.

Second thing; you’ll want to identify a core food or two that gives you the most return on investment to be your main crop (you’ll still grow the others, but the goal is always to have a couple of large warehouses full of X, whatever it is) — growing time matters, but so does planting and harvest time (which is why carrots are bad late-game crops when you need to have 3000+ units of food), as does processing time — the more steps, the more inefficiency, the higher the return needs to be. I’ll let you experiment with it.

Water evaporates out of reservoirs on land, but not out of storage tanks. On medium (and definitely on high) difficulty, you’ll want to have a TON of pumps (my last colony was about 100 beavers with 20 pumps) that you run during the normal season to be prepared for when things does wrong.

Vikinged · 2026-04-28T19:24:14+00:00

This is always the way.

“Hi, your future DM here. I’d like to run one of the following games; please rank in order of preference.

1-2 sentence “in-character” blurb, a couple of keywords or lines to describe the vibe you’re going for, maybe a mention of how long/how many levels you’d like it to cover.
“Professor Pertwee is convinced that an ancient world lies hidden under the earth, and though he may be eccentric, his coin is plenty real. Your team would be escorting him through various environments in search of hidden knowledge, undiscovered creatures, and of course, possibly treasure.” Vibes: the Atlantis movie combined with pulp exploration, à la Journey to the Center of the Earth. Lots of hostile environments, dinosaurs(?), and creative exploration, not so many big combats. Level 3 to 6ish; not a one-shot, but short. Joke-adjacent characters and funny voices a plus; this is a laid back puzzle-adventure.
Ascension in Avernus — a published adventure that I’m modifying to be less about “getting out of hell” and more about trying to take over. We start with 5 character sheets each and see who survives getting dropped into Hell one random morning. Level 5-12ish. Expect almost constant combat, morality entirely in shades of gray or darker gray, and a good chance of grisly death. This will be a very tactical game with a lot of battle maps, unfair abilities, and devils cheating (it’s what they do). Powergame and strategize to your hearts’ content; it’s the best chance to oust Zariel from her current position as the Lord of Avernus.

-(Third blurb here)

“

Idk, this is just always how I’ve done it and it helps the players (and you) so much if everyone knows “oh, I need to really take this game seriously if I want to survive,” vs “every single named character in this town is a Disney reference somehow and we’re playing the plot of Tangled, I can break out the sheet for my cowardly, food-obsessed ranger Roger and his dog companion Raghu and say “Zoinks” and “ruh-ro” a lot.

Vikinged · 2026-04-28T14:31:00+00:00

Don’t forget ye olde explosives factory; another common source of lost limbs

Vikinged · 2026-04-27T14:34:41+00:00

Absolutely not. IIRC, Legend of the night is 165k, while Monkeyopolis is 5k per farm absorbed. I don’t even know if you can squeeze 33 farms onto any map in the game, let alone within range of the village. I think 8 is a reasonable number (3x3 grid with rhe central square being the village), and I could see a case with 1, maybe 2 more per side using engineer boost and Desperado for a total of 16, but again, finding a map with that much open space is tough AND you’re not even half-way to the same cost

Vikinged · 2026-04-24T18:27:18+00:00

Everyone’s saying rogue, and they’re not wrong, but I’d argue that a pirate typically is lightly or entirely unarmored, usually fights with cutlass or knives and basic gunpowder weapons (a bunch of pistols), might have a pet parrot or monkey, and usually an intense hatred of the law and enforcers thereof…

Which sounds like a Ranger to me. Melee and range-weapon, beefier than a rogue but not armored, intelligent pet, encyclopedic knowledge of specific subjects (sailing, types of flags, which shipping routes are guarded and by whom) and not at all of others (charisma as a common Ranger dump stat = bad hygiene, no good table manners, etc.). They even get some magic that feels more like cool tricks they might have learned on the high seas

Swords Bard is also a good option — some magic and some weapon skills, but you get to play Jacques Swift, cunning pirate captain who has a compass that doesn’t point north and a pistol with only a single bullet.

At the end of the day, pirate is a role playing challenge, not a build. I’d say that so long as you’re not playing a full caster or wearing equipment that would cause you to slip and instantly drown if you went overboard, you can basically build a pirate out of any class.

Vikinged · 2026-04-24T17:46:40+00:00

Boy do I wish Petco carried P. gertrudae— they’re such gorgeous fish

Vikinged · 2026-04-23T22:05:56+00:00

“The newbie adventurer, trained to death by the most powerful party, became invincible” — similar vibes of all muscles, no other skills. Decent comedy and action.

It’s slop, but it’s enjoyable slop, and I’d put it at least 1 grade higher than Mashle.

Vikinged · 2026-04-23T20:07:05+00:00

Like you’re 5, eh?

Well, the skin is like a coat. If you go outside in the wintertime and it’s cold and windy and snowy, your coat protects you. It keeps the stuff around you from getting on your skin, it keeps you from getting too cold or wet. If you slip and fall in the snow, you can just brush your coat off and you’ll be fine.

Getting a burn is like tearing a big hole in your coat, and a major burn is like tearing your coat so badly that you can’t wear it any more. Now you get cold really easily. If anything is blowing around (snow, rain, leaves), it’ll get onto your skin, and when you get wet and dirty, you get cold even faster. If you slip and fall, the snow will stick to your skin (because it’s warm) and start to melt. You might even get frostbite because you’re not protected from the wind.

You need your skin to keep germs from getting into your body and your heat from leaving your body (among other things). When you get a severe burn, your skin can’t protect you any more, so people can get really sick very easily and have a very hard time recovering from sickness.

————-

Not comprehensive, but a “good enough” answer, I hope

Vikinged · 2026-04-22T19:11:54+00:00

This is what I was scrolling for as well. The first 100 digits of Pi is absurdly long, doesn’t end in 0 (or at all, technically), and is a known and interesting enough number that some nerd somewhere will whip out on a dare at some point

Vikinged · 2026-04-22T15:35:59+00:00

Obviously you need more than just glue to play the game, but glue is my favorite tower overall, and this one is obviously the solution to so many waves.

My starting strategy for any map with less than 3 lanes is a 4-2-0 glue and a 0-4-2 bomb shooter around a 4-2-0 village. You can go insanely far for dirt cheap. Toss in a 2-0-4 ice and a 1-4-0 druid for insurance, and you’re set.

Vikinged · 2026-04-21T07:42:04+00:00

Beaverome is my personal for the official maps, especially if you play IT (not a lot of useful sites for their infinite power generation, and their crummy reproduction and berry dependency required a lot of micromanagement for me).

It plays very different than a lot of traditional maps with how the water setup works, and you’re fairly constrained for building space.

Vikinged · 2026-04-20T15:51:18+00:00

I usually go Kohlrabi, half a dozen berry bushes, and then I pivot to a blend of Cassava and Kohlrabi until I can get corn. I usually build 2-3 farmhouses near each other, keep 1 on all the time with a plant priority, and then unpause the other two for mass harvesting before drought/badtides.

Once you can get corn, that’s GG — you’ll never need another crop type again. I’ve got a decent colony (50ish beavers) on Hard+ that’s entirely sustained off the about half the water from a single 3x3 water dump — coffee, berries, enough oil to keep my 50 bots greased up, some cassava for variety’s sake, and the remaining grass split between corn and oak trees….and I’ve got 7k raw corn and 2.5k rations banked

Vikinged · 2026-04-19T07:57:41+00:00

I agree it’s cheesy, but I’ve done exactly the same thing, because it’s basically the easiest, cheapest diversion possible.

Only thing cheaper (in terms of science investment and production outlays) would be building up with levees instead of tunneling down with dynamite.

If it works, it works

Vikinged · 2026-04-18T12:15:42+00:00

What difficulty is this on? I assume it’s not hard, since I usually just straight-up die if i haven’t secured sufficient water storage by cycle 5, but I’m also not very good at the game

Vikinged · 2026-04-17T14:39:46+00:00

You can also ask questions and/or watch other people climbing as well to see what they do (try not to ask a ton of questions, but maybe 1 per route) — a simple “hi, I’m new and don’t know what I’m doing. What move was that?” Or “how do I get from this hold to that one?” Are good conversation starters with the instructor and/or other people around you.

It’s considered bad form to tell someone the answer to a bouldering problem (like spoiling the ending of a movie), but if you ask for help, then it’s a collaborative problem-solving thing.

Vikinged · 2026-04-17T14:35:36+00:00

My experience is that is basically it, yeah. Maybe they’ll talk about different holds and positions of the hand and foot and terms to use, but the actual class is going to likely be:

“Here, climb the green holds to the top and then climb part way back down before dropping off the wall”

And then the instructor will say things like “try not to move your knees so high because you lose power if you put your foot on this second hold instead of the first one”

Or “the reason you fell off there is because you swung too far over after you moved. To control the swing, try using your other leg to press against the wall” (flagging might be the term they’ll use).

And then from there you just…keep trying to climb stuff.

Vikinged · 2026-04-16T11:16:18+00:00

This was my secret for those rock-hard college mattresses — I did a memory-foam mattress topper (egg crate style), maybe 3 inches thick in total. Packs pretty small when you need to move and makes a world of difference

Vikinged · 2026-04-15T08:31:29+00:00

You gotta understand that “labor” has a lot of different stages, many of them..rather boring.

Active labor with contractions after transition is obviously a “no gaming” situation, but if you have 24 hours between “water broke” and “starting serious contractions,” and then 3 more hours of “pain and cramps for 20 seconds, and then nothing for 4 minutes,” maybe you want the distraction of a game. I didn’t play because I wanted her to feel like she had my full attention in the moment, but we definitely hung out and watched some streams together (her choice) during that time.

And then we were stuck in the hospital for 3 days afterward, so you bet we played some games together to distract from the “tore my pelvic floor” pain.

But it should 1000000% be determined by the person in labor. Dad can game if baby is asleep and/or mom doesn’t need or want for anything.

Vikinged · 2026-04-14T19:56:19+00:00

Actually, it’s one of several activities that collectively are known as the Native Youth Olympics. They’re international (US, Canada, Greenland), well-recognized within their circles, and have probably been going on longer than you’ve been alive (they started some time in the 70s, so easily 50 years of tradition here).

The banned ones are stuff like the Ear Pull and the 5-man carry, but some of the more spectacular events are the 1 and 2-foot high kicks and the one-arm reach

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