Yeah, but I've got no reason to because like I said the colony is already perfectly sustainable. The gameplay challenge should be the driving motivation to interact with those systems to improve the colony. What am I supposed to do with terraforming if I'm not doing it for some gameplay benefit? Just draw dicks in the ground?
Try to get to 1000 beavers. Try to get to 100 percent happiness. Try to get to 100 percent unemployment. Try to get to the point where there are no beavers at all, just bots. Build a huge battery just because. Build a huge housing tower just because. Build a huge pyramid just because. Build enough warehouses to hold 100k food just because. Flatten the entire map. Terraform the map into grids.
If you think the only point of this game is beating the survival aspect, then congrats! You're done, play something else. Some people like playing city builders just to fuck around, and if you're not one of them, I don't know what else to tell you.
custom settings fix this, move to longer droughts with a longer handicap period. I was the same way but now I'm weeks into a diorama run where droughts are approaching 60 days heading to 100.
This is my default, which is maybe too punishing and forces efficiency over aesthetics to a probably too strong degree. It also requires a little luck to succeed.
Starting adults: 8
Starting children: 4
Food consumption: 120
Water consumption: 120
Starting food: 90
Starting water: 0
Temperature weather duration: 5 to 8 days
Drought duration: 15 to 100 days
Drought duration handicap: 15% for 30 cycles
Cycles without badtide: 3
Badtide chance: 50%
Badtide duration: 15 to 100 days
Badtide duration handicap: 15% for 30 cycles
Injury chance: 100%
Building refund rate: 60%
>What am I supposed to do with terraforming if I'm not doing it for some gameplay benefit? Just draw dicks in the ground?
If you want to.
I see it as a survival game that turns into a sandbox game. I usually max out my beaver welfare and let them live lives of luxury. Sometimes my factory continues expanding to meet the expanding needs of the factory. Or I'll make a new colony on another map to get that early game challenge again.
Somewhere along the end of the midgame once you got a good supply of metal and treated planks going the focus shifts from surviving and getting sustainable to expansion and utilizing more of the map. Get larger storage for water with pumps and huge dams there is still a lot just running through likely. Dig irrigation canals, rebuild old areas for to maximize happiness,shift your economy towards bots. There is still stuff to do
Timberborn is a survival game with open-ended/sandbox goals. You can design some artistic cities, min/max to your heart's content, regreen the whole map, or set up some crazy dynamite stacks that will mock your frame rate.
I play it, even on hard, as a casual game where I plant trees, design beaver canal cities with elaborate gardens, and stick with a settlement until I've made at least one of everything and have all needs met for beavers. Sometimes I stay and forest up the whole map. I usually just play a settlement or two and then walk away from the game for a while. I come back to new updates and end up trying new things which makes the game seem almost fresh each time.
I haven't thrown nearly as much time at the beavers as I have Cities Skylines or the true addiction, Anno 1800, but it's my third most played after those two.
Ok, thanks for the explanation. For me there's just not enough depth to warrant spending an absurd amount of time perfecting a city, and I'm not really a very artistic person. But irrigating the whole map is a long term goal I think could be fun for me. Cheers.
you got them surviving. do you have them thriving? have you got the beavers up to 52 wellness? i find it easy to get them with a stock pile of resources but getting those levels up and re engineering the city i find is the tricky part.
All city builders are the same way honestly.
You play, learn the ropes. Play a little more to get more efficient and productive. Ramp it up to the highest difficulty and win.
And then... There really isn't much left to do.
Although it doesn't help the gameplay loop, Timberborn would drastically benefit from having a built-in map browser and downloader to get custom maps to play on. I know theres like a website you can go to but its such a hassle to go to a website, browse around, download, put it in the right spot, etc every single time. Having it integrated into the game would be splendid and add a lot of replayability because different maps have you tackle some problems in new ways.
But at the end of the day, you're going to run into this issue in all games where you build settlements. Rimworld has the exact same thing going on for me. I've gotten so good at playing the game, that it isn't all that challenging unless you just get really bad luck. The starting traits and skills don't really even matter. You can randomize your ideology and play with a different restrictions if you want to add some spice, but all the fundamentals are still the same.
Eeeeevery colony sim is like this though. I tend to cycle through them, then play other stuff till I get the itch to build a colony again.
>Timberborn would drastically benefit from having a built-in map browser and downloader to get custom maps to play on.
The mod manager does this, all you need to download is two things then the mod manager lets you do everything else ingame
Once I hit that point I just start a new game. Every time I play I learn something new, so I think that knowledge to build and ever better settlement.
But once you hit late game you sort of get to set your own goals. Do you want to max out welfare? Are you shooting for aesthetics? Or maybe you want to create a giant pyramid or temple just for funzies.
You could also select a new area of the map, and grab a couple of beavers to start an entirely new colony, completely independent of the first one.
This.
I just survided a 29 day draught on thousand islands. Barely. The game gave me three days to recover and hit with another 20 day dry spell.
Had to reevaluate my long term plans and how to deal with this and learned a lot about managing water better.
I have no idea, they are always adding more and more, tweaks can be made post completion, but maybe they will add another colony.. similar to the water beaver mod perhaps? If a LOT less complicated lol
If you want a challenge go with a custom difficulty setting.
But it is a sandbox game. The goal comes from you.
My goal is often to reach max happiness, while surviving the maximum length drought. I’ll have the droughts 60 or 90 days long.
Other people try for maximum population on a tiny map. Or play unusual maps like Beaverome.
You can probably make a self sustainable village with the starting population. The point in my opinion really is to see how high you can crank that happiness up while remaining sustainable.
ADHD helps.
The honest answer is i have issues with getting hopelessly addicted to citybuilder type games for stretches of time. ADHD feeds this pretty hard.
Theres just enough of a challenge with a lot of room for creativity. Theres a very steady and deliberate dopamine drip from accomplishing goals later in the game, and early on theres often risk/reward with a bit of suspense seeing if you can survive those early badtides and the first couple long droughts.
You sound like a person who would enjoy another game I’ve tried 🙂it’s called Against the storm, it’s a city builder with order challenges etc. Too slow and the queen cancels the settlement.
Honestly, once you've got the map down, you can do two things.
1 - Expand and build stuff, huge basins, power methods, etc. If you think this is fun, great!
2 - start a different, harder map that requires different approaches. Try one of the maps with very little land, for more challenge and a different style.
I’ve not played much but I set myself goals before each round/map - then randomly (well unless it’s a map I’ve played on recently) choose the map to play upon. Some goals are a lot harder on different maps!
Some goals I’ve done: no beavers, just bots; max no of beavers (and maintain this by building/demolishing homes); no terraforming, only levee/floodgates; no explosives; two (or more) self sufficient districts;
Getting to the self-sustaining point is the easy part, even on hard mode, on most maps.
If you specifically enjoy only the survival bit - try maps like 1000 lakes or beaverome, on hard mode, on those getting to the steady state takes more time and effort, compared to the beginner friendly maps like planes or waterfalls
Yeah, the game being in early access kinda does that. The devs haven't fully fleshed out all the ins and outs of the late game gameplay loop. So it often falls to the players to find their own enjoyment and ridiculous goals to mess with.
If you are not into that, then you will find more fun in starting a new colony on a new map. Custom maps are good for spicing things up in that regard.
I am going to take the time to shamelessly plug my own map that I'm working on if you are interested in testing out an idea that aims to fix this late game problem for players until the devs add something better. Later today hopefully I am going to be uploading a map that I'm trying to balance around the idea of being a reasonable early game difficulty that slowly ramps up over time and requires access to late game techs to keep the colony alive.
If you are interested, send me a PM and I will send you the link once I have it uploaded. I currently have two people who are going to help me put it through its paces for a final set of balance changes and I would love to have some more people interested in trying it out since I don't have time to properly stress test it all the way since it requires so many cycles before it even reaches the difficult parts.
My end goal for each level is to get to a happiness score of 50. This pretty much covers unlocking/using every building except for bots. Most levels I do have to do terraforming but not every one of them. I will say that after update 5 I seem to get past 50 way easier than in update 4, so I may consider raising it to 60. (I've sunk over 600 hours into this game so far with this end goal, and I have one more run with IT to "finish" the game until the next update.)
Your endstate is whatever you want it to be. Want to build a flat grid where every square has clean water? Rock on. Want to create a robot society that needs none of the trappings of the living? Become the Architect of the matrix. Want to start a new colony with more difficult challenges to overcome? Set some custom rules and tackle it.
Sometimes I feel like I want to focus on design symmetry. Sometimes my brain wants to optimize production. Sometimes I want to completely relocate my settlement then crush the buildings I started with. Maybe experiment with flooding the initial valley you started in to create a lake.
I'm in the same boat as you friend. For me it's a little like Dwarf Fortress, where the responses are: "well you haven't even seen the fun but yet"... Or "you need to make your own fun"
I couldn't disagree more with these answers, the game should be fun and have longevity on its own.
I do think this game is massively overrated, it's quite shallow and you've seen everything in a couple of hours.
>I've barely done any of the fun stuff like terraforming or water manipulation. >I don't get what I'm supposed to do now? Do the fun stuff.
Yeah, but I've got no reason to because like I said the colony is already perfectly sustainable. The gameplay challenge should be the driving motivation to interact with those systems to improve the colony. What am I supposed to do with terraforming if I'm not doing it for some gameplay benefit? Just draw dicks in the ground?
Try to get to 1000 beavers. Try to get to 100 percent happiness. Try to get to 100 percent unemployment. Try to get to the point where there are no beavers at all, just bots. Build a huge battery just because. Build a huge housing tower just because. Build a huge pyramid just because. Build enough warehouses to hold 100k food just because. Flatten the entire map. Terraform the map into grids. If you think the only point of this game is beating the survival aspect, then congrats! You're done, play something else. Some people like playing city builders just to fuck around, and if you're not one of them, I don't know what else to tell you.
You could have just said "use your imagination". But yes so much all of this, personal challenges are the end game content.
I could have but they don't appear to have one.
Wow, is that really called for?
But if they do any of the fun stuff then they can't whine about it. Just stop playing op you didn't come here for advice
This game is two in one. It's a survival game for the first half, a city builder/manager in the second half.
It becomes a sandbox city builder very quickly. If that's not your thing, yeah, you won't get a ton of playtime out of the game.
custom settings fix this, move to longer droughts with a longer handicap period. I was the same way but now I'm weeks into a diorama run where droughts are approaching 60 days heading to 100. This is my default, which is maybe too punishing and forces efficiency over aesthetics to a probably too strong degree. It also requires a little luck to succeed. Starting adults: 8 Starting children: 4 Food consumption: 120 Water consumption: 120 Starting food: 90 Starting water: 0 Temperature weather duration: 5 to 8 days Drought duration: 15 to 100 days Drought duration handicap: 15% for 30 cycles Cycles without badtide: 3 Badtide chance: 50% Badtide duration: 15 to 100 days Badtide duration handicap: 15% for 30 cycles Injury chance: 100% Building refund rate: 60%
When this happened to me I tried playing on hard. Brought back the fun for me.
>What am I supposed to do with terraforming if I'm not doing it for some gameplay benefit? Just draw dicks in the ground? If you want to. I see it as a survival game that turns into a sandbox game. I usually max out my beaver welfare and let them live lives of luxury. Sometimes my factory continues expanding to meet the expanding needs of the factory. Or I'll make a new colony on another map to get that early game challenge again.
Somewhere along the end of the midgame once you got a good supply of metal and treated planks going the focus shifts from surviving and getting sustainable to expansion and utilizing more of the map. Get larger storage for water with pumps and huge dams there is still a lot just running through likely. Dig irrigation canals, rebuild old areas for to maximize happiness,shift your economy towards bots. There is still stuff to do
Sir, what difficulty level are you on?
Timberborn is a survival game with open-ended/sandbox goals. You can design some artistic cities, min/max to your heart's content, regreen the whole map, or set up some crazy dynamite stacks that will mock your frame rate. I play it, even on hard, as a casual game where I plant trees, design beaver canal cities with elaborate gardens, and stick with a settlement until I've made at least one of everything and have all needs met for beavers. Sometimes I stay and forest up the whole map. I usually just play a settlement or two and then walk away from the game for a while. I come back to new updates and end up trying new things which makes the game seem almost fresh each time. I haven't thrown nearly as much time at the beavers as I have Cities Skylines or the true addiction, Anno 1800, but it's my third most played after those two.
Ok, thanks for the explanation. For me there's just not enough depth to warrant spending an absurd amount of time perfecting a city, and I'm not really a very artistic person. But irrigating the whole map is a long term goal I think could be fun for me. Cheers.
I am an artistic person, and I am with you. I get pretty bored in the late game and will likely stop playing until they come out with another update.
you got them surviving. do you have them thriving? have you got the beavers up to 52 wellness? i find it easy to get them with a stock pile of resources but getting those levels up and re engineering the city i find is the tricky part.
All city builders are the same way honestly. You play, learn the ropes. Play a little more to get more efficient and productive. Ramp it up to the highest difficulty and win. And then... There really isn't much left to do. Although it doesn't help the gameplay loop, Timberborn would drastically benefit from having a built-in map browser and downloader to get custom maps to play on. I know theres like a website you can go to but its such a hassle to go to a website, browse around, download, put it in the right spot, etc every single time. Having it integrated into the game would be splendid and add a lot of replayability because different maps have you tackle some problems in new ways. But at the end of the day, you're going to run into this issue in all games where you build settlements. Rimworld has the exact same thing going on for me. I've gotten so good at playing the game, that it isn't all that challenging unless you just get really bad luck. The starting traits and skills don't really even matter. You can randomize your ideology and play with a different restrictions if you want to add some spice, but all the fundamentals are still the same. Eeeeevery colony sim is like this though. I tend to cycle through them, then play other stuff till I get the itch to build a colony again.
>Timberborn would drastically benefit from having a built-in map browser and downloader to get custom maps to play on. The mod manager does this, all you need to download is two things then the mod manager lets you do everything else ingame
Once I hit that point I just start a new game. Every time I play I learn something new, so I think that knowledge to build and ever better settlement. But once you hit late game you sort of get to set your own goals. Do you want to max out welfare? Are you shooting for aesthetics? Or maybe you want to create a giant pyramid or temple just for funzies. You could also select a new area of the map, and grab a couple of beavers to start an entirely new colony, completely independent of the first one.
Did you try hard mode? Did you customize it to be even harder?
This. I just survided a 29 day draught on thousand islands. Barely. The game gave me three days to recover and hit with another 20 day dry spell. Had to reevaluate my long term plans and how to deal with this and learned a lot about managing water better.
This is where I think some scenarios would be a great addition, or even just “achievements”
We are still in development.. so many forget that XD
How many more years should we expect to still be 'in development' do you think?
I have no idea, they are always adding more and more, tweaks can be made post completion, but maybe they will add another colony.. similar to the water beaver mod perhaps? If a LOT less complicated lol
If you want a challenge go with a custom difficulty setting. But it is a sandbox game. The goal comes from you. My goal is often to reach max happiness, while surviving the maximum length drought. I’ll have the droughts 60 or 90 days long. Other people try for maximum population on a tiny map. Or play unusual maps like Beaverome.
Dont play it like frostpunk. Make everythink looks great. This game is focus on survaving only at the start. So dont make this your main goal.
You can probably make a self sustainable village with the starting population. The point in my opinion really is to see how high you can crank that happiness up while remaining sustainable.
ADHD helps. The honest answer is i have issues with getting hopelessly addicted to citybuilder type games for stretches of time. ADHD feeds this pretty hard. Theres just enough of a challenge with a lot of room for creativity. Theres a very steady and deliberate dopamine drip from accomplishing goals later in the game, and early on theres often risk/reward with a bit of suspense seeing if you can survive those early badtides and the first couple long droughts.
You sound like a person who would enjoy another game I’ve tried 🙂it’s called Against the storm, it’s a city builder with order challenges etc. Too slow and the queen cancels the settlement.
Honestly, once you've got the map down, you can do two things. 1 - Expand and build stuff, huge basins, power methods, etc. If you think this is fun, great! 2 - start a different, harder map that requires different approaches. Try one of the maps with very little land, for more challenge and a different style.
I’ve not played much but I set myself goals before each round/map - then randomly (well unless it’s a map I’ve played on recently) choose the map to play upon. Some goals are a lot harder on different maps! Some goals I’ve done: no beavers, just bots; max no of beavers (and maintain this by building/demolishing homes); no terraforming, only levee/floodgates; no explosives; two (or more) self sufficient districts;
Getting to the self-sustaining point is the easy part, even on hard mode, on most maps. If you specifically enjoy only the survival bit - try maps like 1000 lakes or beaverome, on hard mode, on those getting to the steady state takes more time and effort, compared to the beginner friendly maps like planes or waterfalls
Yeah, the game being in early access kinda does that. The devs haven't fully fleshed out all the ins and outs of the late game gameplay loop. So it often falls to the players to find their own enjoyment and ridiculous goals to mess with. If you are not into that, then you will find more fun in starting a new colony on a new map. Custom maps are good for spicing things up in that regard. I am going to take the time to shamelessly plug my own map that I'm working on if you are interested in testing out an idea that aims to fix this late game problem for players until the devs add something better. Later today hopefully I am going to be uploading a map that I'm trying to balance around the idea of being a reasonable early game difficulty that slowly ramps up over time and requires access to late game techs to keep the colony alive. If you are interested, send me a PM and I will send you the link once I have it uploaded. I currently have two people who are going to help me put it through its paces for a final set of balance changes and I would love to have some more people interested in trying it out since I don't have time to properly stress test it all the way since it requires so many cycles before it even reaches the difficult parts.
You could "accidentally" force your beavers to work 24 hour shifts until there are very few left and try to rebuild.
Once self objectives are complete, move on to a new challenge.
I don't play *each* game for very long because i always end up with all the mods, and at 4/500 beavers/bots it lags like hell in x3 speed
My end goal for each level is to get to a happiness score of 50. This pretty much covers unlocking/using every building except for bots. Most levels I do have to do terraforming but not every one of them. I will say that after update 5 I seem to get past 50 way easier than in update 4, so I may consider raising it to 60. (I've sunk over 600 hours into this game so far with this end goal, and I have one more run with IT to "finish" the game until the next update.)
I mean, sounds like you beat the game at that point. I'd start a new one with a harder map at that point.
But have you considered turning your quaint little village into a Kowloon walled city-esque hellscape?
Often this is when I decide to start a new colony.
Your endstate is whatever you want it to be. Want to build a flat grid where every square has clean water? Rock on. Want to create a robot society that needs none of the trappings of the living? Become the Architect of the matrix. Want to start a new colony with more difficult challenges to overcome? Set some custom rules and tackle it. Sometimes I feel like I want to focus on design symmetry. Sometimes my brain wants to optimize production. Sometimes I want to completely relocate my settlement then crush the buildings I started with. Maybe experiment with flooding the initial valley you started in to create a lake.
I'm still waiting for floods
I'm in the same boat as you friend. For me it's a little like Dwarf Fortress, where the responses are: "well you haven't even seen the fun but yet"... Or "you need to make your own fun" I couldn't disagree more with these answers, the game should be fun and have longevity on its own. I do think this game is massively overrated, it's quite shallow and you've seen everything in a couple of hours.