Everyone's favorite post-apocalypse beaver city builder now has horrible, polluted water

City builder Timberborn has a new update out. That's the beaver-based one about all the cool cities they'll build once we wreck the ecosphere and die off and they replace us as the planet's dominant species. The latest update, Badwater, is the fifth major release for the Early Access period of Timberborn and adds a second kind of water to the beavers' lives. It's not good water.

It is in fact bad water. The new red water is filled with «hooman» toxic waste and mixes with un-polluted water, slowly killing plants and making infected beaver so sick they can't work. New sources of badwater exist on all the built-in maps, and spit out the toxic sludge during wet seasons.

There's also a new season on top of wet seasons and droughts. The new badtides convert normal sources of water flowing onto the map into badwater sources for a season, leaving you with nothing but poison.

It's not all bad news, though, beaver fans. The typically inventive and industrious folktails and iron teeth know how to make the best of this, and can build new barriers, filters, and more to deal with the polluted water. They can also build new centrifuges to turn badwater into extract, a bright green chemical cocktail that can be used in new production chains for both the folk tails and iron teeth factions.

Previous Timberborn updates have added deeper hydro-physics systems for moving water and also beaver robots. Timberborn got a deep optimization pass last year and runs better on a lot of systems. You can read the entire Update 5 — Badwater patch post on Steam.

You can find Timberborn on Epic, GOG, Humble, and Steam for US $25.