Potsdam and Damascus, just off the top of my head.
Is there any point to building any of: bench, hammock, hedge, fence, wind gauge? I don’t see them in the well-being breakdown.
Beavers will actually use hammocks, and I assume they’ll use benches as well, so they at least have value in showing animations. And I assume a wind gauge will spin around. So while there is no utility there, at least animations are fun.
But the hedges and fences are totally pointless, right?
Presumably the wind gauge can help with finding ideal windmill placement?
Not sure about the decorative stuff. My beavers were basically sweatshop slaves aside from the occasional river bathing…
I’ll likely never play this game, but I simply had to acknowledge this wild brand new sentance. Is there a thriving 2.5d dam-building colony sim market out there that I’m just now learning about?
Lol, it’s definitely a tiny but mighty niche I enjoy 
Cities Skylines 1 & 2 (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FfYyMFBrDQ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjYLNWznBVI) both have some fluid dynamics simulation built in, and there’s that weird tower defense game Creeper World where you’re trying to defend against an alien fluid.
Fluid simulation alsos play a minor role in many other games, like Oxygen Not Included, Terraria, etc.
Oh, and how could I forget Terra Nil! It’s the best 2.5d pre-utopian beaver-less eco-punk pollution restoration city de-builder you can find.
Now I’m just waiting for that MMO PvP crossover where Cities Skylines players build the cities, the beaver players steal and scavenge from them, and Terra Nil players try to restore everything back to nature…
Let me know when a FPDB hits the market.
A first-person de-builder? Teardown on Steam
Fish-powered deep bases? Subnautica on Steam
Frostpunk diabolical betrayals? Project Winter on Steam
First Person Dam Builder; thought it would be obvious from context.
With my current game stable and with tons of resources and science points, I saved it to a second file and started treating it as creative mode. I spent hours placing two different layouts with the game paused so I could just delete them no-harm no-foul once I decided between them.
Once I landed on my perfect design I gutted my base to implement it, then let it run. Something like four or five game days later they finished the redesign and…
Thanks, I hate it. Like I really hate it. Back to the drawing board. Turns out I want to be able to see all the paths. It takes the fun out of it for me if I can’t see them scurrying around. So much for my beautiful multi-level housing project with monuments and decorations above them.
Off topic, but I like to say Thurn and Taxis (Thurn and Taxis | Board Game | BoardGameGeek) is the best board game dealing with German* postal history.
Brian
* not exclusively Germany, but close enough for a summary
Once I realized the dance hall fits up there, the roof setup was back on.
I landed on a 9x10 area for the housing, which includes 8 triple lodges and 4 double lodges for a total of 96 beavers. That’s enough beavers for me. In the central courtyard are 4 shrubs, 4 scarecrows, the beaver statue and the bulletin post. Those buffs hit all houses. Outside there is one lamp next to each pair of double lodges, plus 3 each teeth grinders and med tents. Out front you can see a couple campgrounds, but those aren’t part of the housing project and can go anywhere.
Adding 4 roofs is sufficient to cover all houses. I needed temporary stairs to sneak lanterns onto the roofs, completing the lantern buff coverage for all houses.
https://i.ibb.co/BKZCZKM9/Timberborn-Roof.png
And finally I added the dance hall, farmer and beaver monuments, 2 rooftop terraces, 4 detailers and 2 hammocks.
Running for several days, all the buffs in this housing project are sufficient to keep 96 beavers fully buffed, The 2 hammocks aren’t enough coverage but there is no associated buff, only an animation, so 2 is plenty. (I tested 6 - 8 hammocks and got 4 - 6 hammock enjoyers at a time.)
EDIT: imgbb is throttling for me at the moment. If the images don’t render, check back later.
imgbb is slow because I foolishly saved and uploaded as png instead of jpg. Oh well, past the edit window now.
Finally got to playing with this, and yeah, it works fine. I use a badwater blocking sluice near the source and divert it off-map. Then it flows to a 3-deep main reservoir. Then, a series of dams, each of which has sluices and adjustable floodgates side-by-side. The floodgate are used in the normal case where there’s plenty of water and I want a controlled overflow. When the source stops, the sluices open. But they’re set at a level such that I don’t waste water out the other end (i.e., there’s another floodgate at the end set to a higher level).
So all in all, it works great. No contamination and my main reservoir lasts through the longest of droughts. I didn’t even need any major re-landscaping–just a little widening of certain choke-points, since with the sluices added I didn’t always have enough width left over for the floodgates.
Started a map with the Iron Teeth faction. Sort of an interesting change in the mechanics, but the population control is super annoying. The Folktails (default faction) would just reproduce to fill the housing you built. The Iron Teeth have to be micromanaged with the breeding pods. Super annoying, especially since they seem to naturally align in lifespan, so you end up with huge numbers dying off all at once, and the replacements take a long time to become adults. There’s a better pod that produces adults which should help, but it still seems like there’s no natural way to limit population like with the Folktails.
Now 50 hours into the game I’m finally starting to mess with fluid management. First effort was to contain badtides, which ended in dismal failure. I figured I’d blast out a single 3-deep channel to redirect, but of course the badtide overflowed and went everywhere.
Now I’m thinking I need the channel to be as wide as there are water sources, but checking the wiki to remind myself of what “water source” blocks are called, I see this fun tidbit:
Water sources have a preset strength of up to 8.0 cubic meters a second (cms).
It then mentions the stream gauge for precise measurement. Interesting. In any case, 50 hours in and things just got way more interesting. Fun!
Width is better than depth, in my experience.
With my new Iron Teeth run (“Dam Nation”), it took quite some effort to stem the badtides and deal with droughts. Built a giant elevated canal system to divert one of the flows. In retrospect it was overkill and I could have blown a hole in the side of the map and diverted it there, but oh well, this looks cooler.
The sluice blocks definitely make auto-diversion easy. Just have two exits from the source with sluices on them with opposite contamination settings. Just make sure to save before the badtide arrives in case you screw up the settings.
There is one inviolable rule for game designers and that is they have no idea how gears work. Example #47,723:
Yep, that does seem to be the optimal solution. I just built up my first badtide diversion system, with the two opposite sluices. Should send badtide from this one water source directly off the map.
Took like a full game cycle, though. Even with four zipline connections, it’s quite a distance. I’m thinking I would have been better off creating a new district for that project. (Though it didn’t help that a bunch of the levees I built could have been dirt for half the resources.)
Well, two more water sources to go, plus I get the fun of waiting for a badtide to see if my first one holds. I think I over-engineered it, but time will tell!
Yeah, building the diversion systems was sloooooow. The Iron Teeth use tube networks instead of ziplines, which are much faster (4x speed) but themselves require a long time to build. There is one advantage, which is that unlike ziplines where you have to get to the destination spot in order to build it, the tube network can be built from inside the tube itself, including the support structures. So mainly you just have to lay it out and wait.
Nevertheless, it still took forever. And yeah, I mostly used levees when they could have been dirt. Don’t care about the resources as much as the number of trips required.