Timberborn is a city builder where you lead a colony of beavers, and every game takes place on a map. A map is the land your colony grows on, with its own shape, rivers, trees, and ruins. The official maps fall into beginner-friendly, standard, and unconventional groups, and each group asks for a different level of experience. Knowing how the maps differ makes it much easier to pick one you'll enjoy.
Map Category
Beginner-friendly
Lakes
A broad map of interconnected lakes and channels.
- Map Category
- Beginner-friendly
- Map Size
- 256×256 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 16.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 7.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 3
- Starting Challenge
- Water is spread across connected lakes, so reservoirs and clean-water refuges must be planned across several basins.
Plains
A broad, flat starting map with a river flowing into a lake.
- Map Category
- Beginner-friendly
- Map Size
- 256×256 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 9.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 3.5 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 3
- Starting Challenge
- Flat terrain and a river feeding a lake give new colonies room to dam water and expand.
Waterfalls
A compact map with cascading water above flat building ground.
- Map Category
- Beginner-friendly
- Map Size
- 128×128 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 12.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 4.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 2
- Starting Challenge
- A high-flow waterfall reaches flat land below, where dams can capture water for settlement and irrigation.
Map Category
Standard
Canyon
A compact desert canyon with a river through its steep valley.
- Map Category
- Standard
- Map Size
- 128×128 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 4.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 4.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 2
- Starting Challenge
- Steep valley walls funnel water into narrow channels that are easy to dam but leave limited flat building land.
Cliffside
A narrow strip map where every building tile matters.
- Map Category
- Standard
- Map Size
- 100×50 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 5.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 3.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 1
- Starting Challenge
- Its long, narrow footprint leaves little room for buildings and forces a linear settlement plan.
Craters
A crater landscape where fast water and narrow forks complicate diversions.
- Map Category
- Standard
- Map Size
- 192×192 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 10.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 8.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 3
- Starting Challenge
- Crater basins offer reservoir sites, but fast currents and narrow forks can overflow poorly sized diversions.
Helix Mountain
A spiral river around a mountain, with scarce farmland and heavy badwater.
- Map Category
- Standard
- Map Size
- 256×256 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 12.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 13.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 4
- Starting Challenge
- A spiral river winds around steep slopes, leaving little arable land while badwater flow exceeds clean-water flow.
Hollows
A carved landscape with caves, overhangs, and underground passages.
- Map Category
- Standard
- Map Size
- 192×192 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 7.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 9.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 3
- Starting Challenge
- Hollows, caves, overhangs, and tunnels add underground routes where water and contamination can travel.
Meander
A winding river circles an elevated starting plateau.
- Map Category
- Standard
- Map Size
- 128×128 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 11.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 2.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 2
- Starting Challenge
- The colony starts on an elevated plateau above a winding river, making paths down to water an early need.
Mountain Range
A long map of steep mountains and narrow valleys.
- Map Category
- Standard
- Map Size
- 256×150 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 8.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 12.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 4
- Starting Challenge
- High peaks and deep valleys limit flat construction space and place water far above the valley floor.
Terraces
A high plateau that expands downward through stepped terrain.
- Map Category
- Standard
- Map Size
- 256×256 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 15.5 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 11.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 4
- Starting Challenge
- The start sits high above stepped terrain, and water flows downhill through levels that each need storage and contamination control.
Thousand Islands
A water-filled archipelago where buildable land is scarce.
- Map Category
- Standard
- Map Size
- 256×256 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 54.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 27.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 3
- Starting Challenge
- Water dominates the archipelago, leaving little dry land and carrying high badwater flow; the main task is containing it and reclaiming islands.
Map Category
Unconventional
Beaverome
A crater-filled map where abundant water leaves little dry ground.
- Map Category
- Unconventional
- Map Size
- 192×192 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 21.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 10.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 2
- Starting Challenge
- Seven water-filled craters leave little dry ground; preserve clean water while building around the basins.
Diorama
A 50×50 map that turns colony planning into a compact puzzle.
- Map Category
- Unconventional
- Map Size
- 50×50 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 6.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 2.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 1
- Starting Challenge
- The tiny footprint leaves little land for farms, storage, reservoirs, and future expansion.
Nomads
An arid map where the active water flow shifts with the cycles.
- Map Category
- Unconventional
- Map Size
- 256×256 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 17.0 m³/s total (effectively 2.0–5.0 m³/s at a time)
- Badwater Flow
- 8.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 4
- Starting Challenge
- Water sources change flow with the cycles across the arid map, so settlements may need to move to follow water.
Oasis
A desert map where aquifers supply most of the clean water.
- Map Category
- Unconventional
- Map Size
- 256×256 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 10.0 m³/s total (including 9.0 m³/s in aquifers)
- Badwater Flow
- 11.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 4
- Starting Challenge
- A small green refuge sits amid wasteland, and aquifers provide most clean water through Aquifer Drills.
Pillars
A multilevel map with limited safe ground above a hostile lower area.
- Map Category
- Unconventional
- Map Size
- 192×192 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 5.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 24.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 4
- Starting Challenge
- The upper level has scattered, limited livable space, while the lower area is hostile and badwater-heavy.
Pressure
A map where unstable cores add sudden terrain-changing blasts.
- Map Category
- Unconventional
- Map Size
- 256×256 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 6.25 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 8.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 4
- Starting Challenge
- Unstable Cores can reshape terrain; keep essential buildings and stockpiles away from their blast areas.
Spillage
An elongated map where water spills across several elevations.
- Map Category
- Unconventional
- Map Size
- 256×150 tiles
- Clean-Water Flow
- 8.0 m³/s
- Badwater Flow
- 5.0 m³/s
- Underground Ruins
- 3
- Starting Challenge
- Water can spill between connected basins at different heights, so routing it in one area can flood another.
What Is a Map in Timberborn?
A map is the piece of land your beaver colony lives on. Each one has a set size, which decides how much room you have to build, along with its own terrain, water, trees, and ruins. The land isn't fixed, either. With terraforming tools, you can blast through hills, dig out dirt, and build new ground to redirect rivers or create reservoirs, though removing a block that holds back water can release a flood. You choose your map when you start a new game, and that choice shapes most of what follows.
Why Water Decides How Well You Do
Water shapes almost every choice you make on a map. Beavers need it to drink, and a drought stops every water source on the map, so a colony has to live off what it stored beforehand. Droughts also get longer as the game goes on, and the difficulty setting decides how harsh the early ones feel. Easy keeps the first drought short, while hard leaves almost no room for error.
Stored water sits in tanks and reservoirs, and it doesn't all last the same. Water in an open reservoir evaporates, and a wide, shallow pool loses far more than a narrow, deep one. Covered water tanks lose nothing to evaporation, which is why they're the safest place to keep your reserve. Badwater is a different problem, since it's contaminated and can harm your colony, though the Explosives Factory turns it into explosives.
Beginner-Friendly Maps: Where to Start
Lakes, Plains, and Waterfalls are the beginner-friendly maps, since each gives you easy access to water and room to learn without too much pressure. Plains is wide and flat, which keeps laying out districts and farms easy, and a large river flows into a lake that can store water ahead of droughts. Lakes has plenty of water and is a good setting for learning water engineering, with reachable water from several sides. Waterfalls is a compact map with strong water flow, which keeps droughts manageable for newer players.
Standard Maps: The Balanced Middle Ground
The standard maps sit between the beginner maps and the unconventional ones, and their challenges come mostly from shape and space. Terraces and Cliffside reward building upward, since Terraces is stepped and Cliffside is very narrow. Meander and Helix Mountain ask you to plan around their winding riverbeds, while Thousand Islands is a scatter of islands where dry building land is scarce. Canyon is a desert map where water runs low, and on Mountain Range you have to climb high peaks to reach fresh water.
Unconventional Maps: Each One Changes a Basic Rule
The unconventional maps are built for experienced players, and each one changes a rule you may have come to rely on. On Oasis, the challenge is water. A green refuge sits in a wasteland, and most of its clean water comes from underground aquifers that you tap with Aquifer Drills, which need power to run. Surface water plays a smaller role, so finding those aquifers early matters.
Pressure and Spillage are both about where water ends up. On Pressure, Unstable Cores can activate suddenly, and a blast destroys everything in its zone while reshaping the ground. Keep your primary water storage and emergency stockpiles away from the cores, and spread essential buildings across several areas.
Spillage is a long map where water spills between connected basins at different heights, so routing water in one place can flood another. Floodgates at each spillway point help you control where the water goes.
Nomads and Pillars push the rules further. On Nomads, the water flow changes with every cycle, and settling in is never an option, so you have to keep adapting. On Pillars, tall plateaus offer shelter from the Badwater underneath, but surviving there depends on careful resource management.
Beaverome and Diorama each play differently. Beaverome is seven water-filled craters that take up much of the map, so finding dry ground for farms, trees, and buildings is the real challenge. Diorama is a compact puzzle where every placement matters and mistakes are hard to recover from.
Which Map Should You Pick First?
Start with Plains or Lakes, since they leave you room to learn the basics before the map starts pushing back. Folktails are the faction every new colony starts with, and Iron Teeth unlock later, through the well-being of your Folktails colony. Once you're comfortable, move on to the standard maps for a balanced challenge. Save the unconventional maps for when you want something that breaks the usual rules.
Custom Maps and the Map Editor
Timberborn comes with a Map Editor, so anyone can design their own map. Custom maps appear alongside the official ones when you start a new game, marked with a [Custom] tag. To share yours, upload it from the editor while you're online and signed into Steam, and other players can subscribe to download it from the Steam Workshop.
FAQ
Which Timberborn map is the hardest?
Pressure is one of the most demanding maps in the game, and it's meant for players who have already mastered the standard maps. On top of droughts and Badtide, its Unstable Cores can blow up suddenly, so your layout has to plan for blasts as well.
Which Timberborn map has the most water?
Thousand Islands has the strongest water supply of any official map, so water is less of a worry there than on drier maps such as Canyon.
Will a big map slow down my computer?
Very large maps can cause performance problems, so if your game runs slowly, try a smaller one. The largest maps are 256 by 256 tiles, so those are the ones to watch.
Is Diorama a good map for short play sessions?
Yes. Diorama is the smallest official map, at 50 by 50 tiles, so games on it can wrap up in shorter sessions.