After over a month of beta testing, Timberborn Update 4 is now live. This patch brought massive changes to the game, including a rework to the distribution system, an entirely new set of foods for the Iron Teeth faction, and optimizations for smoother performance.
Aside from that, Update 4 adds the new Crater map to Timberborn. This is a new medium-difficulty map containing three massive craters. You have to get a good look at the area before establishing your factories. Otherwise, your workers will have a hard time being efficient given the map's challenging conditions.
This patch also includes quality-of-life improvements. For one, Engines, Irrigation Towers, and Medical Beds now have progress bars to let you know how long their supplies will last. Additionally, water pumps, gravity batteries, and other "hanging buildings" are now easier to place on the grid correctly.
You can find the other significant changes and improvements brought by Update 4 below:
Quality of Life and UI
- It is now possible to select goods for warehouses using dropdowns available in the storage overlay view.
- Tooltips for several buildings such as Water Pumps and Lidos now inform you that the building needs water access.
- Added new information to crop tooltips to indicate whether a crop can be eaten raw.
- Farmhouses, Flags, and other gathering buildings now adjust their inventory capacity based on resources in range so they no longer skew the fill-rate indicators.
- Ruins now display a number of goods "in stock" in a way similar to other places.
- Tweaked all in-game progress bars to be consistent across the UI.
- Made the font sizes more consistent across the UI.
- The scroll bar is now highlighted when hovering a cursor over it.
- Tweaked the tooltip position relative to the cursor position.
- Fixed click sounds and highlights that were not aligned with the actual clickable areas on the toolbar.
- Added good icons to dropdowns.
- Reordered needs in beaver panels to align them with how the game usually progresses.
- Names for goods across the UI should now correctly use the plural form.
Balance
- Default difficulty settings have been rebalanced in tune with Update 4 changes.
- Ruins can no longer be demolished, making them an obstacle map creators can use to pace the player's progress.
- Power Wheel's power output is now affected by the worker's Walking Speed. That makes sense, right?
- Dandelion is known to be an unwelcome party guest so we've lowered the speed at which it self-spreads.
Optimizations
- Updated the animation system for buildings and characters.
- All in-game models now use Meshy - our custom 3D model format.
- Thanks to an update to how sounds and music are played, the game now utilizes less RAM.
- Decreased loading times by 15% on average.
- Selecting large numbers of objects (for example when marking tree-cutting areas) should no longer cause frame drops.
Timberborn Update 4 is available on PC.
