Thank goodness for beavers: even deadly droughts are fun in Timberborn

Debora Pape

17/3/2026

Translation: Megan Cornish

Pictures: Debora Pape

Cute visuals, harsh reality: Timberborn leaves Early Access as a challenging survival heavyweight. In version 1.0, ingenious water physics meet complex automation options. Behind the charming facade, you’ll find experimentation with strategic depth.

When Timberborn was released in Early Access in 2021, it was met with some scepticism. A building game with beavers constructing dams and building tall houses? At first, it sounded like a charming gimmick, somewhere between a niche project and a meme. I wasn’t alone in curiously starting it up without really knowing what to expect. But I quickly realised that Timberborn has substance.

It’s neither a copy of other simulations nor a relaxing, cosy game. Even in Early Access, it’s a surprisingly challenging simulator that confronts me with existential problems early on. Water becomes the elixir of life, droughts are a constant threat, and the cute rodents are the protagonists of this true survival game. There are also plenty of fresh gameplay elements that I haven’t encountered before.

Timberborn has now left Early Access. The 1.0 patch adds to the many new features added in recent years, most notably that life in Beavertown can now be fully automated.

The full release is reason enough for me to start a new game again after a few years away. Within just a few minutes, a handful of beavers pay with their virtual lives. I’d completely forgotten how tough life in Timberborn can be.

The cute little rodents scurry around, transporting logs, barrels and crates. In farm fields, they wear straw hats to protect them from the sun. Late in the evening, the beaver community gathers around a campfire before settling down in bed and snoring away. Later, you’ll see them floating around in the outdoor pool, while sunflowers sway in the breeze nearby – a new visual feature in the full release.

At the start of a game, you choose one of two playable factions: the nature-loving Folktails or the efficiency and technology-focused Iron Teeth. The two factions differ both visually and in terms of several other mechanics and buildings. Folktails, for example, reproduce naturally. An empty bed in a house is all it takes. Iron Teeth don’t have families; their new beavers come from a cloning tank.

The cuteness level’s very high for both factions – and it’s deceptive. What looks cute can quickly turn into a humanitarianbeavertarian catastrophe if you haven’t stored enough food and water. You really feel the heat when dwindling supplies and empty rodent stomachs go up against the ticking clock of a long drought.

The highlight of Timberborn is its ingenious water mechanics. In the beavers’ post-apocalyptic, parched world, they’re totally dependent on fresh water to survive. Rivers irrigate the area along their banks, enabling the critters to grow carrots, potatoes and other vegetables, and they also serve as a source of drinking water and generate power via waterwheels in buildings such as sawmills.

The problem is that there are regular droughts. During these periods, all water sources dry up and the riverbeds lie empty. For your plants, this means death from dehydration after just a few days without being watered. And your beavers won’t survive long either if you don’t ensure they have enough water and food stored in time.

Fortunately, beavers have a proven solution to this problem: building dams to store water. That’s exactly what the virtual inhabitants of Timberborn do. Sophisticated water physics mean the river can be manipulated with structures and interventions in the terrain. The larger or deeper the artificial reservoir, the longer the water supply lasts.

As droughts become increasingly longer, the pressure to make the reservoir larger or create new lakes grows. This is why I’ve built dams, dikes and locks. Later, I even resort to dynamite to blast channels in the ground and divert the water to new areas.

Preparing for future droughts, managing water flow and shaping the landscape have fascinated me in Timberborn from the very beginning. During Early Access, the team also implemented new mechanics such as toxic «badwater» and water channels on platforms. So, if you haven’t checked out the game in years, it might be worth taking another look.

You can build beaver towns on rock faces as residential and storage towers or on platforms on the river itself. A system of bridges, stairs and scaffolding ensures the beavers can reach everything. Since 2025, zip lines have also been available for Folktails. This allows the little critters to move across town faster, regardless of the intricate paths below. In contrast, Iron Teeth can construct a pipe transport system similar to the one in Satisfactory.

Yes, Timberborn also features foresters’ lodges, sawmills and farms. A city-building game needs them. Beyond that, the developers seem to have put a lot of thought into how to surprise players with unusual ideas.

There are fun leisure activities such as carousels, outdoor swimming pools and bubbling mud pits. Beavers can even go to a special building and have their tails printed with individual images. Tooth-grinding stones help with broken front teeth, and showers ensure their fur’s nice and wet.

It’s important that the beavers are happy. When they feel good, they work and move faster and live longer. Later in the game, wooden robots can even take over some of the work, transporting goods and also carrying out some simple production tasks.

Despite such advanced technology, my rodents haven’t discovered electricity yet. But they do use water, wind and elbow grease to power special buildings. For example, a waterwheel in the river can generate up to 270 horsepower, depending on the current. You can use a wooden system of shafts and gears to transfer this energy to sawmills and other buildings.

When the flow stops during droughts, the waterwheels fall silent. Wind turbines and beavers running in hamster wheels ensure the show can go on, at least to some extent. All these elements make the world feel alive and the setting fresh.

However, I find the menu takes some getting used to. There’s no research tree, even though you generate research points. You unlock new buildings in the build menu itself. The advantage is that you decide when you get which new technology. Various functions are clustered in the bottom menu bar: besides several build menus, there’s the tool for prioritising construction sites and the tool for marking trees to be felled. This could be better organised.

The full release of Timberborn has been available for PC since 12 March 2026.

Debora Pape

Editor

Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.

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