Timberborn

Timberborn drops a city-building sandbox into a post-human Earth, where mankind has long since dried itself out and the beavers have taken over the engineering work. You pick one of two factions — the nature-leaning Folktails or the heavier-industrial Iron Teeth — and try to keep a colony alive across recurring dry seasons and waves of toxic runoff that periodically poison the rivers.

Water is the central system. The game runs a full 3D water simulation with terraforming on top, so dams, floodgates, aqueducts, canals and tunnels carved with explosives all behave the way you'd hope; you can reshape the riverbed itself, irrigate crops well past where natural rainfall reaches, and reroute the toxic floods to where they'll do the least damage. Vertical architecture compensates for the limited footprint of most maps — lodges stack on platforms, ziplines and tubeways link rooftop districts, and an entire late-game power grid runs above your earlier ground floor.

Technology climbs from water wheels and lumber mills through engines and mechanised pumps, with metal scavenged from human ruins gating the most advanced structures. An automation layer adds sensors, relays and counters so you can build self-regulating dams, factories and irrigation systems, and mechanical bots handle the most dangerous work around the clock once you can manufacture them. The full map editor and official mod support sit alongside the bundled scenarios, and the community has been adding maps and quality-of-life mods steadily since early access.