One of the most important things you need to be able to do in any world-building game is terraform. Changing the landscape to fit your construction needs and creating artificial canals or reservoirs are especially important tasks in Timberborn if you want your beaver colonies to thrive and survive, which is something you’ll ironically need explosives for.
Terraforming can be a bit tricky. Doing so requires explosives, which while easy to use, are a real pain to unlock. Here’s everything you need to know.
Timberborn: How to Unlock Explosives
Your ultimate goal is to unlock the explosives factory, after which you will begin producing dynamite, the explosive used for terraforming.
To begin, you’re going to need to generate power. This can be done by constructing a water wheel at some position in one of your rivers where flow rate is high. By using dams, you can increase flow rate by bottlenecking the river, thus increasing the speed at which your water wheel spins, generating more power.
Up next, you need to attach a lumber mill your to water wheel. The wheel will provide power to the mill, allowing you to produce planks. You’re going to want a few lumber mills and water wheels if you have the space, as you’re going to need planks for both gear and paper production. Once you’ve attained 100 research points, use them to unlock the gear workshop.
Power the gear workshop up, just as you did the lumber mills, and begin producing gears. The next thing you want to unlock is the paper mill, which will require 250 research points, so keep producing and constructing until you get there. Take the downtime to prepare for the next drought.
Once you have the paper mill unlocked, hook it up to your power network to begin creating paper. Next up, you’ll need another 250 research points to unlock the scavenger flag, which is used to begin collecting scrap metal from ruins. Be sure that your current district has a path to the ruins, or if it’s too far away, you may need to establish a new closer district to begin scavenging.
Save up 300 research points to unlock the shredder, then build it and power it to begin the production of metal blocks.
You’re in the home stretch now. Save up 400 more research points to unlock the explosives factory, then get it powered up to start producing dynamite, which will use your paper.
Now, you should be able to produce as much dynamite as you could ever need, and we’re on to the fun part.
Timberborn: How to Use Explosives
So you’ve got dynamite, but now what? Well, using it is actually very straight forward. Dynamite can be placed on any ground tile, and when clicked, will explode and destroy the terrain block you placed it on.
Each stick of dynamite will blow up one block, so massive terraforming projects will require some serious firepower.
If you’d like to carry out a large number of explosions very quickly, you can lay out all of the dynamite before hand and trigger them all at once. When an explosive goes off, any other explosives adjacent to it will also be triggered, so use this to your advantage when carrying out large projects by eviscerating large areas in single sweeps to save yourself some time.
With your newfound toy, the limits of your Timberborn world have been blown wide open (literally). You’ve effectively got complete control to expand your colony in any way you please, without needing to abide by the landscape the game has given you.
Perhaps more importantly, you are now able to manually create water channels and reservoirs to carry water into your new expansions.
If you found this guide useful, take a look at our other Timberborn guides on Gameskinny.
