Of course, the carrot and potato farm I had meticulously laid out came good just a half day later. I didn’t realize it until only three beavers remained, two of which perished on their way to pick blueberry bushes, reducing my entire colony to one living child beaver. Within the hour of my first playthrough, I accidentally solved my beaver unemployment problem by having a mass die-out due to starvation. It’s a satisfying, at times punishing, balancing act. And then, of course, resources necessitate warehouses for storage, or they become raw ingredients for building or maintaining other processes.

Rather than city-building alone, Timberborn’s colony management elements lean survival sim, requiring players to take care of food and water through farming and constructing water wheels, all while the river level shifts over the seasons.

Super-intelligent beavers have evolved and formed “lumberpunk” societies, where timber is a core resource that powers farming, river control, and society growth. Timberborn takes place in a future version of our world where humankind has sapped planet Earth of her precious resources. As the game’s developer Mechanistry described it on its Twitch channel, in Timberborn “beavers either work or die.” The city-building sim has a cuddly exterior, but don’t let that fool you - it’s legitimately challenging. Beavers are nature’s builders, and in Timberborn, released on PC in Steam Early Access on Wednesday, players manage a colony of these industrious critters in a post-human world.

Designer city building