Verified on Timberborn v1.0 (released March 12, 2026). Values may change with updates.
Quick Start: District Planning in 5 Steps
- Keep your first district under 40 beavers before expanding — beyond that, path congestion compounds fast
- Place leisure buildings (campfires, social hubs) within 10 tiles of all housing, not near the factory
- Research District Crossings (600 Science) before you need them — you cannot expand reactively mid-drought
- Build at least two distinct food sources per district — Nutrition II requires a different food type, not more of the same
- Pre-stock your new district with 100 Logs, 50 Planks, and 2 seasons of food before sending any beavers
Why Mid-Game Colonies Die: The Happiness Spiral
At around 30–40 beavers, a common failure mode plays out. Production grows, so you build more factories — deeper into your map, away from the housing cluster. Beavers now commute across the district to reach work. That commute eats into leisure time. Leisure buildings go unused. Well-being scores drop. And here’s the mechanism that kills you: at maximum well-being, beavers work at 260% speed. At low well-being, they crawl. Slower workers means less food, less lumber, more unmet needs — which drops well-being further. The spiral locks in and your colony stalls without a single dramatic disaster.
Districts prevent this by creating isolated bubbles: each has its own population, resource pool, and well-being score. A beaver in District 1 cannot satisfy their hunger with food from District 2, and a food surplus in your industrial outpost won’t save your starving residential hub. That isolation is the entire point — it forces you to design self-sufficient zones rather than sprawling, undifferentiated settlements that slowly poison themselves through long commutes.
Well-being operates at three levels: individual (that beaver’s personal needs met), district (average across all beavers in the district), and global (colony-wide average). For district planning purposes, the number that matters is district well-being — it determines what the production buildings in that zone actually output. Work speed increases by 20% at each well-being milestone, maxing out at 260% above baseline. A well-being-optimized district doesn’t just feel better — it produces at more than double the rate of a neglected one.
The 70-tile threshold is your hard layout constraint. Path lines extending beyond 70 tiles from your District Center turn red, signalling degraded operating conditions. This isn’t a hard cap — districts have no size limit since Update 5 — but it’s a practical warning that commutes have grown into a measurable drag on colony output.
New to Timberborn? Build a stable first colony before tackling multi-district play — our Timberborn Beginner’s Guide covers survival fundamentals.
5 Zone Layouts That Work
Layout 1: The Compact Starter (15×15 tiles, 15–20 beavers)
Your first district shouldn’t try to be efficient — it should be survivable. The Compact Starter keeps everything within walking distance and frontloads well-being before you have the beavers to run complex production chains.
Orientation: District Center in the geographic middle of your footprint. Housing cluster to the north, closest to the center. Workplaces — lumberjack flags, a small farm, a gatherer’s hut — to the south. Storage buildings between housing and workplaces, not pushed to the edge of the map. Leisure buildings (campfire, social structure) to the east, directly adjacent to housing.
The rule that actually matters: every leisure building must be within 10 tiles of every bed. Not 15 tiles, not “near the center” — 10 tiles. Beavers visit leisure buildings during rest hours. If the campfire is a 3-minute walk from the nearest lodge, half the available leisure time disappears in transit and you’ll never push through the early well-being tiers. Log Piles within 5 tiles of Lumberjack Flags and food storage within 3–5 tiles of your Farmhouse cut hauling overhead by 30–50% compared to random building placement.
Layout 2: The Production Hub (20×25 tiles, 25–35 beavers)
When you hit 20 beavers and need to scale production, the Compact Starter strains. The Production Hub separates industrial buildings from residential — not for aesthetics but because industrial districts need power infrastructure that residential areas don’t, and mixing them forces compromises on both sides.
Design: a dedicated waterfront production row for water-dependent buildings, with elevated housing on platforms behind it. Gear Workshop adjacent to Smelter — they share a supply chain and separating them adds unnecessary hauling distance. Hauling Posts at a ratio of one per 8–12 production buildings, positioned between clusters and storage rather than at the district perimeter where they service nothing efficiently.
Path network: main east-west arteries 2 tiles wide to handle hauler traffic. Secondary branches to individual workplaces stay single-tile. A ring-shaped loop path around the housing cluster reduces travel time versus dead-end spurs — beavers can always route around rather than backtrack through the same choke point.
Layout 3: The Well-Being Campus (any size)
The Well-Being Campus is the layout that transforms a functional colony into a thriving one. Instead of optimizing for raw production capacity, it optimizes for the 260% work speed multiplier — because beavers working at max well-being outproduce nearly three times as many beavers at baseline output.
The design principle: a central decorated plaza surrounded by housing, recreation, and spiritual buildings. Monuments placed along the main walkway near the plaza satisfy the Awe need for dozens of beavers simultaneously, making them one of the most efficient well-being investments per beaver served. Decorations go on every path beavers regularly walk, not clustered in unused map corners where they provide coverage to no one.
Food variety is the other lever. Run at least four distinct food types by mid-game. Nutrition I covers any food. Nutrition II requires a second distinct food type. Nutrition III requires a third. Each tier delivers a material well-being bonus, and three small food chains producing different outputs provide dramatically more well-being than one optimized mega-farm producing a single item at scale.
Working hours compound the effect. At the default 16 hours of work per day, beavers have limited leisure time to visit well-being buildings — most of the infrastructure you’ve built goes underused. Dropping to 14 hours typically pays back the lost work time within a few in-game days through the well-being recovery. Your beavers are now slower but working at a higher multiplier, and the campfires, social hubs, and spiritual buildings you placed are finally getting traffic.
Layout 4: The Specialized Satellite (multi-district, 40+ beavers)
The right time to expand to a second district is when all three of these are true: your first district has 30–50 stable beavers, you hold a surplus of 100+ Logs and 50+ Planks, and you’ve unlocked District Crossings (600 Science). All three conditions, not one of three. Expanding before hitting all thresholds splits your workforce before either district is self-sufficient.
The geographic triggers that make a second district worth the complexity: your lumberjacks have deforested the nearby area and need to push into distant tree stands; a second water source opens up irrigation potential; you want a dedicated power district near a river for Water Wheels; or your original settlement has no flat building space left for the production buildings you need.
Assign each satellite a primary role — farming, forestry, industry, or residential. Resources flow between satellites via crossings. Each crossing costs 30 Logs and 15 Planks, employs up to 10 workers per side with double carrying capacity, and stores up to 30 units of each resource type. Configure import settings with “Import If Needed” as the default, “Import Always” for resources a district cannot produce at all, and “Do Not Import” for resources you’re actively exporting.
Place storage buildings within 5–8 tiles of each crossing — crossing workers still need short hauling trips to function at full capacity. For every 10 production buildings relying on imported inputs, staff at least 5 crossing workers on the receiving side. Build redundant crossings between your most critical district pairs; one bottlenecked crossing can stall your entire production chain during a drought.
Use the Mitosis Method for expansion: build the new district’s full infrastructure and stockpile 2 seasons of food before sending any beavers. Never send beavers to an empty district expecting them to survive while building from scratch under food pressure.
Self-sufficiency insurance: every satellite district must have at least one Water Pump and a small farm or gathering operation. When crossings get disrupted mid-drought, any district without its own food and water supply becomes a liability immediately.
Layout 5: The Emergency Recovery (when you’re already in trouble)
The warning signs of a happiness spiral in progress: district well-being under 15, work speed buff under 100%, food stores depleting faster than production refills them, and a queue of beavers idling near the District Center while jobs go unstaffed.
Recovery sequence — execute in this order, not all at once:
- Reduce working hours immediately. Drop from 16 to 14 or 12 hours. You lose production output, but the well-being recovery from additional leisure time pays back within 2–3 in-game days through the multiplier effect.
- Set the nearest District Crossing to “Import Always” on food. Get calories flowing in before addressing anything else — you cannot fix well-being while beavers are hungry.
- Relocate your leisure buildings. If the campfire is 20 tiles from the nearest lodge, move it. Place it on the path beavers already walk between housing and workplace so it captures traffic passively.
- Add a second food type. Gather berries if nothing else is available — the jump from Nutrition I to Nutrition II is one of the largest single well-being gains in the game and is achievable in one growing season.
- Stop expanding. Building outward during a well-being crisis extends commutes further and spreads beavers thinner. Consolidate, stabilize, then grow when district well-being reaches 20+.
District Crossing Configuration
A District Crossing connects exactly two districts and is the only way to move goods between them — regular haulers cannot use crossings, only dedicated crossing workers. Each crossing is a 2×3 structure costing 30 Logs and 15 Planks, unlocked at 600 Science. Both sides employ up to 10 workers with double carrying capacity, storing up to 30 units of each resource type.
| Import Setting | When to Use | When to Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Import Always | Resources your district cannot produce at all (metal in a farming district) | Resources you produce locally — creates pointless back-and-forth traffic |
| Import If Needed | Supplementary resources you produce but in insufficient quantity | Critical survival resources — these need a harder guarantee than “if needed” |
| Do Not Import | Resources you export in surplus; prevents reverse-flow waste | Any resource with a production gap in this district |
One crossing maxes at 10 workers per side — a real throughput ceiling for a large industrial district depending on imported food. Build a second crossing between your most critical district pair to double transfer capacity and eliminate the single point of failure. For colonies with 5+ districts, dedicate 5 crossing workers on the receiving side for every 10 production buildings that rely on imported inputs.
Faction District Planning: Folktails vs Iron Teeth
| Factor | Folktails | Iron Teeth |
|---|---|---|
| In-district transport | Ziplines — rapid downhill travel between two points | Tubes — function in badwater zones, reducing district isolation pressure |
| Housing | Automatic breeding via Lodges; no extra resources | Spawning Pods require dedicated resources |
| Storage | Log piles not stackable — larger footprint | Stackable storage — more space-efficient in compact satellites |
| Industrial district timing | Later — wood-first economy | Early — metal production required from mid-game |
| Water access | Standard pump, 2-tile depth | Deep Water Pump, 6-tile depth — larger reservoir potential per district |
| Best layout match | Well-Being Campus (Layout 3) | Specialized Industrial Satellite (Layout 4) |
Folktails’ Zipline network handles intra-district commutes elegantly, making the Well-Being Campus layout easier to sustain at scale. Iron Teeth’s Tube network and stackable storage reward tighter industrial satellite design, but the metal requirement means your industrial district needs to come online earlier and demands more active management.
Which Layout for Which Player?
| Player Type | Start With | Priority Order |
|---|---|---|
| New player | Compact Starter (15×15) | Leisure buildings within 10 tiles of housing → food variety (2 types) → then expand |
| Casual player | Well-Being Campus | Hit Nutrition III before second district; max multiplier beats more beavers every time |
| Optimizer | Production Hub → Specialized Satellites | Hauling Post ratios, crossing worker counts, redundant crossings, export thresholds |
| Completionist | All 5 layouts across one map | Each district a distinct specialized zone; maximize global well-being through complementary satellites |
Frequently Asked Questions
How many beavers should one district hold?
25–40 beavers is the practical sweet spot for most maps. Below 25, you lack the workforce to staff a complete production chain and districts feel like management overhead for minimal benefit. Above 40, path congestion and resource distribution delays compound — you’ll see workers standing idle waiting for haulers before any other warning sign appears. The right number depends on your specific map layout; 40 is the threshold to watch, not a ceiling to hit.
What is the minimum District Crossing setup to avoid bottlenecks?
Two crossings between your residential hub and your main production district. A single crossing is a point of failure — if it gets disrupted or all 10 worker slots are occupied, transfers stop entirely. A second crossing doubles transfer capacity and ensures the supply chain survives any single building disruption. Staff both fully; an under-staffed crossing creates false confidence that transfer is happening when it isn’t.
How do I know it’s time for a second district?
Three conditions must all be true: 30–50 stable beavers in your first district, a surplus of 100+ Logs and 50+ Planks in storage, and District Crossings unlocked (600 Science). Expand before all three are satisfied and you split your workforce before either district is viable. The triggering geography matters just as much — expand when map resources justify it: a distant forest, a second river, mineral deposits outside your current district’s reach.
Folktails or Iron Teeth for district-focused play?
Folktails for players who want to focus on well-being optimization and layout depth — their Zipline network handles intra-district commutes cleanly, and the wood-first building economy keeps early districts cheaper. Iron Teeth for players drawn to industrial efficiency and compact satellite design — the Tube network and stackable storage make tight specialized districts more buildable, but you’ll need to commit to metal production early and manage it actively. Both factions support multi-district play; they just reward different layout priorities, and understanding that difference before choosing your faction saves you from fighting against your own architecture.
Sources
- District Center — Official Timberborn Wiki (timberborn.wiki.gg/wiki/District_Center)
- Well-Being — Official Timberborn Wiki (timberborn.wiki.gg/wiki/Well-Being)
- District Crossing — Official Timberborn Wiki (timberborn.wiki.gg/wiki/District_Crossing)
- Timberborn District Guide: Multi-District Colony Management — timberborn.org
- Timberborn Colony Layout Guide: Pathfinding & Optimization — timberborn.org
- Timberborn Well-Being Guide: Max Happiness, All Needs & Score Calculation — timberborn.org
- Timberborn: Understanding Districts and Resource Transfer — My Gaming Tutorials
- Timberborn District Guide: Migration and Hauling Routes — NeonLightsMedia