The adorable economics of Timberborn

Timberborn sits in my steam library in much the same category of game as the famous ‘Banished’ or the ambitious ‘Farthest Frontier’, but also stands apart from those examples as having a total playtime an order of magnitude larger than the other two combined. A post-apocalyptic, beaver-themed city-builder, Timberborn secured its place in my heart when I first got to grips with its water physics and the possibilities of the game’s sandbox were revealed to me.

The game is set in a world where humanity has become extinct and an evolved species of beavers have taken up the task of rebuilding civilisation. At the core of the gameplay – and crucial to the survival of your beavers – are the rivers that flow across your map, leaving along their banks’ thin strips of fertile land in the otherwise barren wasteland. These precious, green tiles provide your only opportunity to farm food and cultivate trees which in turn provide your core building material: wood. When you add into the equation the drinking water taken directly from the river, the game quickly teaches you that the river will be at the centre of your attempt to keep your beavers alive and expand your civilisation.

So, your first game of Timberborn will begin… you’ll gather up berries from surrounding bushes as an emergency food source, set up water pumps to quench your beavers’ thirst, begin to gather logs from surrounding forests and once settled, set up your first carrot farms and build housing to maintain your population (naturally it would be absurd to expect your beavers to mate outside beneath the stars).

Then, just as you’ve got to grips with core gameplay, the words ‘Drought Approaching’ appear on a big, orange banner across your screen accompanied by the ticking of a clock. Your first drought will only be short, but if you’ve not managed to harvest your first crop of carrots yet or - much more devastatingly – not stored up any water whilst the river’s still flowing, you might end up with a lot of dead, little beavers.

Its here where Timberborn breaks up the repetitive gameplay loops of similar small-scale city-building games with the threat of water-based economic depression and teaches you to stock up and prepare for the next aquatic recession. You can do this in multiple ways, adding new storage facilities and expanding your production which will ensure your little beavers survive. But much more on-theme, you can also erect dams. Starting on the smaller scale that ensures a low-laying amount of stagnant water continues to hydrate your crops even whilst the rest of the map dries up, going all the way to building big vats of water which can provide water throughout longer, late-game droughts whilst also maintaining a constant flow which - with water wheels - can provide power for your beavers’ various industries.

The latest update to the game has added a variant on the traditional drought: badwater. This is - in thematical - terms polluted water which can cause beavers to become sick and if present for too long can pollute the surrounding land leading to the immediate destruction of crops. In this sense, the badwater tide which begins occurring as an alternative to the droughts in the mid-game, takes the form of an extreme recession or even a great depression. That’s not to say everything about the badwater is… bad. Just as the rich and powerful will often make a quick buck during real life recessions, there are some upsides to a badwater tide. For example, it will still provide power through waterwheels and primarily it is itself a crucial component in the production of a majority of late-game components. Not the least of all being dynamite, the production of which is allows the player to begin terraforming and, for the first time in the game, seriously expand the amount of space you have to produce food and wood.

My favourite way to play the game is on the super-small, 50x50 ‘Diorama’ map. The lack of space on this map creates a hardcore mode of sorts where the lack of fertile land requires you to keep a keen eye on population growth and forces you to plan ahead to ensure the space available is used as efficiently as possible. On the other hand, this is one of the only maps that provides all of the raw materials (water, badwater, scrap metal and a mine) within reach of your starting settlement. This removes the need to set up new district centres and in turn speeds up your ability to use mid and late-game technologies.

By the 12th cycle of my playthrough of ‘Diorama’ I had reached the point where my beaver population was too large for the massively limited carrot-growing space at my disposal. Nor did I have the space to build new water pumps which left my production rate only just sufficient to maintain the current demand. To make things worse, at the end of that cycle a badwater tide was due and the mass-dehydration of my colony was imminent. In response, I increased my dynamite production, levelled out an oak forest to expand my carrot farm and crucially, expanded the length and depth of my reservoir to increase water production and improve water security during droughts.

The beavers survived that following badwater tide and even a few more droughts, yet despite expanding the reservoir even further and even levelling a mountain to build a new carrot field, by cycle 19 the limitations of space have surpassed my planning skills and sadly an extinction seems inevitable.   

The gameplay of Timberborn ends up presenting a curious mixture of economic models which produces a very fun game. On the one hand, the beaver societies in the game are fundamentally communistic. The means of production are owned commonly by all the beavers, there are no classes except apart from the natural divide between adult and child beavers and the principle of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’ is universal. Beavers will work as best as they can – even when their teeth are blunt, they’re poorly or polluted by some badwater – and – so long as the resources are available – all the beavers will receive the food, water and shelter they need regardless of if they have a job to do or not.

But then contradictorily, the gameplay revolves around the recessions and depressions that are innate to a capitalist mode of production in the form of the natural droughts and badwater tides. The irony that the environmental devastation of Timberborn’s world which causes these simulated recessions appears to be the result of the now long-gone human society I doubt is lost on many players. We can reasonably presume – from the remains of the mines or tall metal structures that dot the map – that this human society had reached a level of productive capacity to be capitalistic in nature, so Timberborn carries at its core a reminder that environmental devastation and capitalism go hand in hand and that the destructive effects of our irl economic order could have devastating consequences far beyond the destruction of the human race.

Still… the little, communist beavers are very cute.