Beaver colony sim Timberborn's biggest ever update brings a tidal wave of pollution and disease
You liked good water? Well, have some bad water
Your favourite beaver-based colony sim Timberborn's latest big update has arrived, and honestly, I'd say your poor beavers won't appreciate it one bit. The main reason being, it adds a new ecological hazard called Badwater, that doesn't only make your water bad, but your crops and beavers at risk of being bad. Still, there are plenty of new buildings to help you harness the power of the stanky water and errr, exercise halls for beavers to get their sweat on. I wouldn't recommend they rehydrate with the bad water, though.
The bad water doesn't just pour into your colony at random, which you'll be vaguely pleased to hear. Instead, it's all part of a new in-game season called Badtide that slots 'nicely' into the rotation of Droughts and Wet Seasons. Bad water is all thanks to us, basically. It's toxic sludge us awful humans have created, which then filters into your rivers from several spots across the map, making your beavers sick, killing your crops, and tainting your lush blue streams a hellish red.
The update would be very mean if it just added horrible water and no way to deal with it. Thankfully it isn't that mean, as it adds 25 new faction-specific buildings all designed to take the bad water and turn it into something good. Decontamination pods and new production chains mean you're able to extract the badwater gunk and transform it into new types of dynamite for faster terraforming, a way to supercharge your bots, and *checks notes* a means to mass produce new beavers.
Besides a swathe of sickness and pollution, the update adds new faction-specific decorations and attractions. Hammocks. Lanterns. Exercise plazas. Big fans where beavers can participate in mock skydives. And bundled in are many quality of life changes, including custom keybinds and the ability to flip asymmetrical buildings.
We thought Timberborn was a pretty special building game when it first launched, with Sin Vega singing the praises of how you're encouraged to use the land to your advantage. "Instead of a sprawling mess awkwardly strung around rocks and trees, or worse, a boring, efficient grid-shagging bureaucrat's idea of a town, I can build up, and thus I create needlessly elaborate warrens with a visible history, local preferences and ideas," she wrote back in 2022.
You can find the game on Steam, GOG, Epic Games and Humble Bundle.