Beavers Overview: Life, Death & Daily Routine

Beavers are the heart of every Timberborn colony. They work, eat, drink, sleep, and socialize according to a daily rhythm that determines your settlement's productivity. Understanding their life cycle, needs, and behavior patterns is essential for building a thriving colony that can survive even the harshest droughts.

Beaver Overview: The Core Unit of Your Colony

Each beaver in your colony is an individual unit with its own name, needs, and assigned job. Beavers perform all labor in the settlement: they chop trees, haul materials, farm crops, operate machinery, and construct buildings. Without enough beavers, your colony cannot function. Population growth is managed through breeding, which requires adequate housing with available capacity. The number of beavers you can sustain depends directly on your food and water production. Every beaver contributes to the colony's output, but every beaver also consumes resources, so growth must be balanced against supply. Different factions (Folktails, Iron Teeth) have slightly different beaver characteristics and available buildings, but the fundamental life cycle mechanics remain consistent across all factions.

Life Stages: Kit and Adult

Beavers have two life stages: kit and adult. When a new beaver is born, it starts as a kit. Kits are smaller than adults and cannot perform any work. They still consume food and water, but at a reduced rate compared to adults. A kit remains in this juvenile stage for approximately 6 days of in-game time before maturing into a full adult beaver. Once a beaver reaches adulthood, it can be assigned to any available job and begins contributing to the colony's labor force. Kits require housing space just like adults, so you need to account for them when planning your housing capacity. During population booms, a large number of kits maturing simultaneously can create a sudden spike in labor availability, which is useful if you have queued construction projects waiting for workers.

Daily Routine: Work, Leisure, and Sleep

Each beaver follows a daily cycle divided into three phases: work, leisure, and sleep. During the work phase, beavers travel to their assigned workplace and perform their job. The default work schedule spans the majority of daylight hours. During leisure time, beavers seek out recreational activities and amenities such as campfires, rooftop terraces, and shrines. Access to leisure activities contributes to a beaver's well-being score. During the sleep phase, beavers return to their assigned housing to rest. Beavers without housing will sleep outdoors, which negatively affects their well-being. The work schedule can be adjusted per building: you can set buildings to operate during different shifts or extend work hours at the cost of beaver happiness. Balancing productivity with leisure and rest is important for maintaining high well-being across your colony.

Consumption Rates: Water and Food

Every adult beaver consumes approximately 2.25 units of water per day and between 2.5 and 3.0 units of food per day, depending on the type of food consumed. Processed foods like bread and grilled potatoes provide more nutrition per unit than raw crops, meaning beavers eat fewer total units when consuming higher-quality food. Kits consume roughly half the rate of adults. Water consumption remains constant regardless of season, though beavers will prioritize drinking over other activities when thirsty. When planning your resource production, multiply the per-beaver consumption rate by your total population to determine daily demand. For example, a colony of 40 adult beavers needs roughly 90 units of water and 100 to 120 units of food per day. Always maintain a surplus buffer beyond your daily consumption to prepare for droughts when water production may drop to zero.

Aging and Lifespan

Beavers age continuously throughout the game. After reaching adulthood, they have a natural lifespan that determines when they eventually die of old age. The base lifespan varies, but well-being plays a significant role in extending it. Beavers with consistently high well-being scores live longer than those with low well-being. Well-being is influenced by several factors: access to housing, variety of food, availability of leisure activities, and overall colony conditions. Maintaining a diverse range of amenities and food types across your settlement is the best way to keep well-being high. When a beaver approaches the end of its natural lifespan, there is no visual warning before death occurs, so it is important to maintain steady population growth to replace aging beavers. A colony that stops breeding will eventually decline as older beavers die off.

Death Mechanics

Beavers can die from three causes: starvation, dehydration, and old age. A beaver that has no access to food will starve to death after approximately 1.5 days without eating. Similarly, a beaver that cannot drink water will die of dehydration after roughly 1.5 days. These timers are unforgiving, which is why maintaining adequate food and water supplies is the top priority at all times. During droughts, dehydration is the most common cause of death since water sources dry up. Starvation typically occurs when crop production fails due to lack of irrigation or when food stockpiles are depleted during extended dry periods. Old age deaths are natural and unavoidable but can be delayed through high well-being. When a beaver dies, its body disappears and its job slot becomes vacant. If the death was caused by resource shortage, the remaining beavers face the same threat, so mass casualties can cascade quickly if the underlying problem is not resolved.

Beaver Names and Personality

Every beaver in Timberborn is given a unique, randomly generated name. You can view a beaver's name, current job, needs status, and well-being by clicking on them. While names are primarily cosmetic and do not affect gameplay mechanics, they add personality and attachment to your colony. Some players enjoy tracking individual beavers across their lifespans. The naming system draws from a pool of whimsical, nature-themed names that fit the game's tone. Beyond names, each beaver's behavior is determined by their assigned job and the priority system rather than individual personality traits. All beavers of the same type (adult, kit) behave identically in terms of work speed, consumption, and movement. The individuality comes from their unique names and the specific paths they take through your settlement as they go about their daily routines.