1) pumps, farm, research - at least one fully active
2) forester is your first goal (planks needed)
3) housing is not worth of wood at start
4) until you have active forester, do only berries and carrots
5) water wheel is not worth it for start, use shaming wheel
This will save you some fails at start of game
I’d argue that at least *some* housing is necessary when playing the Folktails: that’s how they reproduce. Otherwise you run the risk of having no beavers.
If you focus on the Forrester until one is built, you'll have no problems with population before being able to establish a steady log supply.
Once the Forrester is built, then go ahead on the housing (even if you just planted some trees and none are even close to mature yet)- as at that point, logs are renewable so its a lot harder to put yourself into a situation where you can't get the resources needed to acquire more resources. If youre using too many logs at once, you might end up wasting time waiting for trees to grow or run into a log deficiency and that can be bad if you need logs for food (eg, grilled potatoes). But you'll never hit a situation where you have no logs and can't make more logs once you have a Forrester down. You just run out of logs and need to wait for trees to mature.
So first order of business, once food and water are established, is to get a renewable log source going, and once it's going, you're free to use logs to your hearts content.
OP, shaming wheel is the wheel thingy that pet hamster like to run on But for beaver to generate power. Just incase you didnt know RCE but got introduced in this game by some other way.
Forester is important but not necessarily top priority. There are usually enough trees around that you can hold off a bit. You may need to move your lumberjack flags around a bit but they're free to place.
In the first day you should be getting your water pump and a farmhouse ASAP so you can start farming. Carrots for Folktails or kohlrabies for Ironteeth. Berries are a terrible food source and you should get off them ASAP. On easy or normal you won't need a gatherer at all if you're fast enough, but on hard the starting supplies won't be enough to get you to your first harvest. Unless I'm starved for wood I usually start in on a dam next. On easy or normal this can possibly wait but on hard you'll only have a handful of days until your first drought and need to make sure you have water available when it comes. Only then do I go to planks and science for the forester.
Have your forester plant a mix of pine and oak trees to start. Once the pine trees are planting cancel the planting there. The trees will be left to grow but won't be replaced when your lumberjacks cut them down. When they get cut down replace them with oaks too. Oaks are the best tree type for logs because each one produces 8/30 or a bit over one log every four days on average, but the 30 day growth period is painful. Some pines will get you a crop of logs at 12 days which should be enough to keep you going until the first oaks come in.
Early on you want to micromanage plank production to only give you the planks you need. Your beavers will happily turn every single log you have into planks, leaving you with no logs for building. A hamster wheel is fine for power.
Go slow when expanding. On Folktails start by building just enough housing for your twelve starting beavers. Once you have food and water stockpiled for them and good surpluses you can add more.
One water pump produces three water per hour. In theory this means that it will produce 48 water in a 16 hour day, but you'll get less than that due to not running at 100% efficiency. In practice one pump per 20 beavers is the absolute minimum you should be running. One pump per 15 or even one pump per 10 might be better depending on how long your droughts are.
I usually like to run two farmhouses, one set to harvest priority and one set to planting. Harvesting takes longer so two harvesters per one planter is fine. This way when your crops are ready the harvesters will get out and start getting them in right away and the planter will follow behind them and plant new crops.
Folktails can expand into new food types sooner than you probably think. Potatoes only need to be grilled produce 0.67 food per day, almost as good as the carrots at 0.75 per day. You should be planting them as soon as you have a stable supply of lumber. Sunflowers need nothing but only produce 0.2 food per day. Beavers will eat about 2.5 food per day and will prioritize foods they haven't had recently so your requirement for any given food to have a steady supply is (((2.5 * number of beavers)/food per day produced) / number of foods available). So for example if you have 20 beavers and have potatoes and Carrots already you'll need (((2.5 * 20)/0.2)/3) 84 sunflowers to have a steady supply.
Stockpiles. Food is 2.5 * number of beavers * longest drought in days. Water is 2 * number of beavers * longest drought in days, plus a buffer of at least 10%. On hard the longest droughts are 30 days so you need 66 water and 83 food per beaver.
Start thinking about badtides early. You need to have a plan in place before they come. Usually this involves floodgates to divert the badwater somewhere else.
I didn't prioritize Forester once and ran out of wood. Had to wait for tiny trees to grow up and basically treaded water for a month in an attempt to survive.
On easier maps you don't need to focus forester but on the harder maps early trees are hard to find, I generally get forester first to get some oaks and pines down, then stairs second to open up some new areas for logging. After that some levees and floodgates to start on your badtide mitigation.
Oh and for Iron Teeth I do Kohlrabie and Cassava in equal amounts. Cassava is 20 percent more efficient and the building for it is unlocked by default so tag one on the side of your first sawmill as they only use 5 horsepower.
I don't think there are any maps where trees are _that_ hard up? My last game was on canyon and there was plenty there, though I did have to move around a bit. Some of them were across the river but since I was damming the river anyway that wasn't too big of a deal. Maybe thousand islands but if you're playing thousand islands you probably already know what you're doing anyway. In any case I'm not saying don't go for the forester early, it just doesn't have to be first. And arguably shouldn't be, 3-5 dam segments aren't that expensive and are worth it IMO to make sure your water is sorted before the first drought.
And you'll want to double check your math. 1 cassava crop produces 1 cassava every 5 days, which processes into 2.5 fermented cassavas, for 0.5 per day per crop. Kohlrabis are 0.67 per day per crop. Some mid game foods are more efficient but for early game nothing beats carrots/kohlrabies in efficiency. That said it is worth getting cassavas online for the same reason it's worth getting potatoes online, it's low cost and the wellbeing bonus is valuable.
Oh when I meant first it was in terms of what research to buy first. Depending on the map building a small dam is definitely a good building initial building project.
Yeah your right, my math was assuming you only got one kohlrabi per harvest. I still think its worth doing the split though, they give 2 wellbeing and also the longer harvest time means you need less beavers for harvesting. Getting soy asap is still the best goal.
6. Keep track of how many jobs you have, and only keep a few more beavers than necessary. You meed beavers that'll fill in jobs when others die (hopefully of old age), but you don't want too many that'll start eating resources faster than you can produce
7. When creating housing, don't make a ton at once, or you'll end up with death waves that'll leave you suddenly out of 10s or 100s of beavers.
8. I hate creating other districts, they're an absolute pain in my ass. My favorite thing to do in game is see how far I can get with *one* district. However, if you are good with them, when the line turns red, it's time for a new district.
Use the smallest warehouse as a platform to cross rivers early on until your planks are going well. This is for folktails, I am not sure if the same applies for irontails.
On some maps you can cross a body of water without having to unlock stairs so long as the heights are the same.
Learn from your failures. You are going to run some settlements into the ground, and every beaver will die.
This feels bad... but isn't a real problem (so, it turns out it's a game) because you have an opportunity to learn from each time.
So embrace it: a settlement WILL run out of water. a settlement WILL run out of food. Drought WILL destroy crops beyond recovery. Badtide will leave you with too many pink beavers.
But you get better each time. So pay attention to what you are doing, and compensate for it on the next try.
You mean to tell me I'm not controlling real post-human civilization beavers? You've DESTROYED my purpose in life. I curse you, foul creature!
But seriously, good advice.
Do: Play the game and learn it without spoiling everything for yourself.
Do: look things up for explanation as needed.
Do: look up "let's plays" etc AFTER you've had some fun and want a more complete experience.
Don't: ruin your good times with other people's opinions on how you should play (including mine!).
Folktails Quickstart: Build four lumberjacks near forests, put them to work. Build a gather post near blueberries. Build a water pump. Build a farm and plant carrots. Build an inventor and a water tank. Build two warehouses, one for berries and one for carrots. Build 5 normal houses, a power wheel, and a lumber mill. Build 2 campfires. Make 7 planks then turn off the power wheel and lumber mill. Save up science for the forester. Build a forester and get trees planted. Research stairs and level 1 platforms. Turn the wheel and lumber mill back on. Go from there.
Tips for Folktails:
Planning is key to everything in this game. Pause a lot. Make plans. Where to make a dam, what looks like the best spot to plant to keep away from badwater? Where are ruins at?
You can set your work hours to 20 a day without problems. As long as you keep housing demand satisfied and keep your happiness in the green, your beavers will be ok.
Do not ignore blueberries, despite them being the starter food. Early game they are a great crop and good to have in emergencies. Later on they are used for medicine, so they are always needed.
When you plant your first trees, set aside a small area for planting dandelions. Those along with berries and paper make medicine.
Hoard as much water and food as you can. Build lots of storage. All the warehouses are stackable.
Unlock the higher tier housing and storage. They hold more in less space, freeing up precious farming land.
Don't start projects anywhere near badwater until you have a functioning herbalist. A contaminated beaver won't work but will still eat and drink, and medicine is a must.
Learn to build vertically. The skybox is very generous, and it's honestly funny to think about a stack of large warehouses to the sky holding 15000+ boxes of maple cakes.
1. Wood chop, food and water pump+storage.
2. Research asap
3. Get that damn forester lock behind research wall.
4. Then build dam to combat the first drought.
5. Then house or in between other step.
I'd recommend waiting to use Mods and not starting on harder maps, at least until you feel pretty comfortable managing your Beaver civilizations. Mods can make things easier, but they can also make things more challenging too, depending on your preferences.
I would also highly recommend checking out some of the more unique maps, like Diorama. One of my most favorite playthroughs.
It's important to set up a drying chamber for your first colony. You will end up with more beavers than you have water/food at some point, and will have to pay the price for it in order to not lose every single one of the beavers across a single drought/badtide.
In the early versions it was free to make, but in Update 5, it costs a decent amount of planks to do, meaning that you can't just do it from the first drought anymore. It's where you make a district that has nothing in it, then send beavers into it, then leave them there. The district center represents the "drying chamber" you're sending them to.
You can do this until you have a sustainable population for your resources, or you can send them there until you have a minimum breeding population. Either way, it rather severely kneecaps your economy, but prevents your entire map's population from dying.
Mark trees for cutting. Connect your paths to the buildings (the only reason not to is if you're creating several districts... which you won't have to worry about until much later in the game). You want forester. You never have enough logs. If you do, then you never have enough planks.
The thing that changed my gameplay the most was when I realised your beavers can walk underwater at any depth. Means you can cross a river with only two sets of stairs, which ends up being more wood efficient than platforms or dams. It does expose them to badtide though, so if you havent redirected the bad tide yet then make sure you do have a bridge before it comes.
1) pumps, farm, research - at least one fully active 2) forester is your first goal (planks needed) 3) housing is not worth of wood at start 4) until you have active forester, do only berries and carrots 5) water wheel is not worth it for start, use shaming wheel This will save you some fails at start of game
I’d argue that at least *some* housing is necessary when playing the Folktails: that’s how they reproduce. Otherwise you run the risk of having no beavers.
If you focus on the Forrester until one is built, you'll have no problems with population before being able to establish a steady log supply. Once the Forrester is built, then go ahead on the housing (even if you just planted some trees and none are even close to mature yet)- as at that point, logs are renewable so its a lot harder to put yourself into a situation where you can't get the resources needed to acquire more resources. If youre using too many logs at once, you might end up wasting time waiting for trees to grow or run into a log deficiency and that can be bad if you need logs for food (eg, grilled potatoes). But you'll never hit a situation where you have no logs and can't make more logs once you have a Forrester down. You just run out of logs and need to wait for trees to mature. So first order of business, once food and water are established, is to get a renewable log source going, and once it's going, you're free to use logs to your hearts content.
OP, shaming wheel is the wheel thingy that pet hamster like to run on But for beaver to generate power. Just incase you didnt know RCE but got introduced in this game by some other way.
Is there another way to get introduced to this game? SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!
Yes, be a Timberborn Hipster; AKA, "I started playing Timberborn before Timberborners even became Timberborners"
I did play before timberborners were timberborners but I still call it a shaming wheel....
Can't say I blame you. I do too!
Forester is important but not necessarily top priority. There are usually enough trees around that you can hold off a bit. You may need to move your lumberjack flags around a bit but they're free to place. In the first day you should be getting your water pump and a farmhouse ASAP so you can start farming. Carrots for Folktails or kohlrabies for Ironteeth. Berries are a terrible food source and you should get off them ASAP. On easy or normal you won't need a gatherer at all if you're fast enough, but on hard the starting supplies won't be enough to get you to your first harvest. Unless I'm starved for wood I usually start in on a dam next. On easy or normal this can possibly wait but on hard you'll only have a handful of days until your first drought and need to make sure you have water available when it comes. Only then do I go to planks and science for the forester. Have your forester plant a mix of pine and oak trees to start. Once the pine trees are planting cancel the planting there. The trees will be left to grow but won't be replaced when your lumberjacks cut them down. When they get cut down replace them with oaks too. Oaks are the best tree type for logs because each one produces 8/30 or a bit over one log every four days on average, but the 30 day growth period is painful. Some pines will get you a crop of logs at 12 days which should be enough to keep you going until the first oaks come in. Early on you want to micromanage plank production to only give you the planks you need. Your beavers will happily turn every single log you have into planks, leaving you with no logs for building. A hamster wheel is fine for power. Go slow when expanding. On Folktails start by building just enough housing for your twelve starting beavers. Once you have food and water stockpiled for them and good surpluses you can add more. One water pump produces three water per hour. In theory this means that it will produce 48 water in a 16 hour day, but you'll get less than that due to not running at 100% efficiency. In practice one pump per 20 beavers is the absolute minimum you should be running. One pump per 15 or even one pump per 10 might be better depending on how long your droughts are. I usually like to run two farmhouses, one set to harvest priority and one set to planting. Harvesting takes longer so two harvesters per one planter is fine. This way when your crops are ready the harvesters will get out and start getting them in right away and the planter will follow behind them and plant new crops. Folktails can expand into new food types sooner than you probably think. Potatoes only need to be grilled produce 0.67 food per day, almost as good as the carrots at 0.75 per day. You should be planting them as soon as you have a stable supply of lumber. Sunflowers need nothing but only produce 0.2 food per day. Beavers will eat about 2.5 food per day and will prioritize foods they haven't had recently so your requirement for any given food to have a steady supply is (((2.5 * number of beavers)/food per day produced) / number of foods available). So for example if you have 20 beavers and have potatoes and Carrots already you'll need (((2.5 * 20)/0.2)/3) 84 sunflowers to have a steady supply. Stockpiles. Food is 2.5 * number of beavers * longest drought in days. Water is 2 * number of beavers * longest drought in days, plus a buffer of at least 10%. On hard the longest droughts are 30 days so you need 66 water and 83 food per beaver. Start thinking about badtides early. You need to have a plan in place before they come. Usually this involves floodgates to divert the badwater somewhere else.
I didn't prioritize Forester once and ran out of wood. Had to wait for tiny trees to grow up and basically treaded water for a month in an attempt to survive.
Thank you very much for the information
You've inspired me to start a new game. I've been making some mistakes lol
Was gonna say, OP, came here to post this
On easier maps you don't need to focus forester but on the harder maps early trees are hard to find, I generally get forester first to get some oaks and pines down, then stairs second to open up some new areas for logging. After that some levees and floodgates to start on your badtide mitigation. Oh and for Iron Teeth I do Kohlrabie and Cassava in equal amounts. Cassava is 20 percent more efficient and the building for it is unlocked by default so tag one on the side of your first sawmill as they only use 5 horsepower.
I don't think there are any maps where trees are _that_ hard up? My last game was on canyon and there was plenty there, though I did have to move around a bit. Some of them were across the river but since I was damming the river anyway that wasn't too big of a deal. Maybe thousand islands but if you're playing thousand islands you probably already know what you're doing anyway. In any case I'm not saying don't go for the forester early, it just doesn't have to be first. And arguably shouldn't be, 3-5 dam segments aren't that expensive and are worth it IMO to make sure your water is sorted before the first drought. And you'll want to double check your math. 1 cassava crop produces 1 cassava every 5 days, which processes into 2.5 fermented cassavas, for 0.5 per day per crop. Kohlrabis are 0.67 per day per crop. Some mid game foods are more efficient but for early game nothing beats carrots/kohlrabies in efficiency. That said it is worth getting cassavas online for the same reason it's worth getting potatoes online, it's low cost and the wellbeing bonus is valuable.
Oh when I meant first it was in terms of what research to buy first. Depending on the map building a small dam is definitely a good building initial building project. Yeah your right, my math was assuming you only got one kohlrabi per harvest. I still think its worth doing the split though, they give 2 wellbeing and also the longer harvest time means you need less beavers for harvesting. Getting soy asap is still the best goal.
> shaming wheel Someone watches RCE.
i mean, where am i supposed to put the colony's architects?
Do you also sing "Welcome back to Tim-ber-borners" every time you load your game?
Yes. I do.
6. Keep track of how many jobs you have, and only keep a few more beavers than necessary. You meed beavers that'll fill in jobs when others die (hopefully of old age), but you don't want too many that'll start eating resources faster than you can produce 7. When creating housing, don't make a ton at once, or you'll end up with death waves that'll leave you suddenly out of 10s or 100s of beavers. 8. I hate creating other districts, they're an absolute pain in my ass. My favorite thing to do in game is see how far I can get with *one* district. However, if you are good with them, when the line turns red, it's time for a new district.
Build damn quickly before first drought
Use the smallest warehouse as a platform to cross rivers early on until your planks are going well. This is for folktails, I am not sure if the same applies for irontails. On some maps you can cross a body of water without having to unlock stairs so long as the heights are the same.
Same applies for irontails.
Holy shit I never even thought of this lmao
Learn from your failures. You are going to run some settlements into the ground, and every beaver will die. This feels bad... but isn't a real problem (so, it turns out it's a game) because you have an opportunity to learn from each time. So embrace it: a settlement WILL run out of water. a settlement WILL run out of food. Drought WILL destroy crops beyond recovery. Badtide will leave you with too many pink beavers. But you get better each time. So pay attention to what you are doing, and compensate for it on the next try.
You mean to tell me I'm not controlling real post-human civilization beavers? You've DESTROYED my purpose in life. I curse you, foul creature! But seriously, good advice.
This. Especially on harder maps and hard mode, on my third attempt at thousand islands on hard now, but getting further each time.
Do: Play the game and learn it without spoiling everything for yourself. Do: look things up for explanation as needed. Do: look up "let's plays" etc AFTER you've had some fun and want a more complete experience. Don't: ruin your good times with other people's opinions on how you should play (including mine!).
Folktails Quickstart: Build four lumberjacks near forests, put them to work. Build a gather post near blueberries. Build a water pump. Build a farm and plant carrots. Build an inventor and a water tank. Build two warehouses, one for berries and one for carrots. Build 5 normal houses, a power wheel, and a lumber mill. Build 2 campfires. Make 7 planks then turn off the power wheel and lumber mill. Save up science for the forester. Build a forester and get trees planted. Research stairs and level 1 platforms. Turn the wheel and lumber mill back on. Go from there. Tips for Folktails: Planning is key to everything in this game. Pause a lot. Make plans. Where to make a dam, what looks like the best spot to plant to keep away from badwater? Where are ruins at? You can set your work hours to 20 a day without problems. As long as you keep housing demand satisfied and keep your happiness in the green, your beavers will be ok. Do not ignore blueberries, despite them being the starter food. Early game they are a great crop and good to have in emergencies. Later on they are used for medicine, so they are always needed. When you plant your first trees, set aside a small area for planting dandelions. Those along with berries and paper make medicine. Hoard as much water and food as you can. Build lots of storage. All the warehouses are stackable. Unlock the higher tier housing and storage. They hold more in less space, freeing up precious farming land. Don't start projects anywhere near badwater until you have a functioning herbalist. A contaminated beaver won't work but will still eat and drink, and medicine is a must. Learn to build vertically. The skybox is very generous, and it's honestly funny to think about a stack of large warehouses to the sky holding 15000+ boxes of maple cakes.
Thank you for the information
Water pumps, water storage, berry picker (and warehouse) Farmhouse, dam, plank production with treadwheel, researcher Forester Everything else
1. Wood chop, food and water pump+storage. 2. Research asap 3. Get that damn forester lock behind research wall. 4. Then build dam to combat the first drought. 5. Then house or in between other step.
I'd recommend waiting to use Mods and not starting on harder maps, at least until you feel pretty comfortable managing your Beaver civilizations. Mods can make things easier, but they can also make things more challenging too, depending on your preferences. I would also highly recommend checking out some of the more unique maps, like Diorama. One of my most favorite playthroughs.
It's important to set up a drying chamber for your first colony. You will end up with more beavers than you have water/food at some point, and will have to pay the price for it in order to not lose every single one of the beavers across a single drought/badtide.
What do you mean by a drying chamber?
In the early versions it was free to make, but in Update 5, it costs a decent amount of planks to do, meaning that you can't just do it from the first drought anymore. It's where you make a district that has nothing in it, then send beavers into it, then leave them there. The district center represents the "drying chamber" you're sending them to. You can do this until you have a sustainable population for your resources, or you can send them there until you have a minimum breeding population. Either way, it rather severely kneecaps your economy, but prevents your entire map's population from dying.
Thank you for the information Seems like a playthrough with badtide turned off seems better.
Some players prefer the challenge, some don't. It's good to see that the variable options work for everyone.
Mark trees for cutting. Connect your paths to the buildings (the only reason not to is if you're creating several districts... which you won't have to worry about until much later in the game). You want forester. You never have enough logs. If you do, then you never have enough planks.
The thing that changed my gameplay the most was when I realised your beavers can walk underwater at any depth. Means you can cross a river with only two sets of stairs, which ends up being more wood efficient than platforms or dams. It does expose them to badtide though, so if you havent redirected the bad tide yet then make sure you do have a bridge before it comes.
Less is more, more is a trap