Timberborn - Ways to deal with drought

The first stage of the game to be done is to build a dam. The dam will raise the water level, making the water last longer during a drought. Another important element is storing water, but depending on the level of difficulty, you may get to a point where this is not enough. It takes a long time to fill all the reservoirs, and if the drought is quite frequent, you need to take more action.

A more advanced way is to create irrigation tunnels and water reserve tanks. The combination of these two methods, will ensure that even during a month of drought, your crops will function without any interruption, and workers will provide drinkable water all the time.

You can read about land irrigation here:

Construction of the dam

Rivers always flow in a certain direction as you can see from the water animation itself. When you build a dam, the water level will rise so that it won't dry up as quickly. On the Plains map, the river runs near the village to the east, so block the flow of water on that side.

Build the dam as far away from your village as possible. Lead the path to it and make sure it is within the construction range. By clicking on the District Center, the construction range is highlighted on the path. At greater distances it turns red until it goes away.

After clicking on the second and each subsequent block of the dam, a message is displayed that says the building is out of construction range. The beavers, after building the first block of the dam, will climb it to build the second, so it doesn't matter.

Standard rivers are 1 level deep, so you don't need stairs or larger structures either. Remember also that the wider the part of the river you want to block, the more raw materials you will need to build.

Building water reservoirs

During a drought, the river will dry up and this is inevitable. If you build a reservoir, you will get the opportunity to irrigate it again. The reservoir should be built on the opposite side from the dam. Look around and look for a suitable place. In the case of the Plains map, there is an elevation of the land to the west of your village to the 2 ground level. It's great for blocking the flow, so the water will start to store to form a reservoir.

Build a few Floodgates in the marked area, and the rest of it with a Levees. It should look like this:

If you build too few Floodgates, the water will not be able to flow freely and once the reservoir is full, it will start overflowing.

Notice that on the right side I built a staircase and a path under the water. Beavers can also build the Levees from above, walking on it like a path, but they can't go through the Floodgate. From below, they will have full access.

After building such a structure, click on the Floodgate and set its height to 1.5 (this should be the standard value). A height of 2 will cause water to overflow the top and flood the side areas. 1.5 will cause the water to rise to that particular level and continue to flow freely continuing to irrigate the riverbed.

When there is a drought, the river will dry up, but your reservoir will hold water much longer. You can now build pumps and farms around this reservoir. Most importantly, once the river dries up, you can lower the dam and the stored water will flood the riverbed. You can dose the water accordingly according to your needs.

This was an example of a simple reservoir that can be built very early on the plains map. During a long drought, it may dry out anyway, so it is worth building much larger ones. You can deepen and widen them with dynamite, or increase the height with Levees. An example of a reservoir I started building for a 30-day drought with Hard Mode:

I raised the level already too high and the water poured over the edge of the map (visible at the very top of the above screenshot). Therefore, I built up that edge as well and after the construction was completed, the water filled the huge area. I deepened the reservoir with dynamite:

Such tanks can be built on any map, it all depends on how much time you want to spend on it.

Examples of reservoirs on the Terraces map:

I built the last reservoir directly on the water source. By the way, placing a Gravity Battery on the edge made it possible to store 30000KMh of energy, and there is room for several pieces. The reservoir, when full, is sufficient for quite a long drought. 

The previous photo is the same map from the other side of the hill. The creation of a small dam made it possible to flood a huge part of the area:

Building water reservoirs higher than 3 fields

The highest dam is 3 fields high. Many people create tutorials where they build much higher reservoirs and simply put a Levees below the dam. This doesn't make much sense, because the water below the dam will never be poured, so it only serves to hold water in the reservoir itself and irrigate the area around it. 

An effective reservoir is one that allows you to provide water for the entire village. If the height of 3 fields is not enough, you can try the method with one dam, which I used in hard mode. Droughts last up to 20-30 days and I needed a large reservoir. I built one dam at the very bottom with a height of 3 fields, and another 3 dams at the very top (just in case, so that the water would not overflow). As a result, I obtained such a dam:

At first glance, it may seem pointless, since the water overflows the dam. It's just that the width of one field is not enough for the water to flow freely. Therefore, yes, everything overflows over the top, but gradually the water level rises anyway. 

In practice, it turned out to be a jackpot. When the water rose a few fields above the dam, and the reservoir was huge (flooded a large part of the map), then after the drought came, the water overflowed for more than 8 days before it dropped to the level of the dam. And then there were still 3 fields of water left, which I could open at any time.

Such a reservoir allowed maintenance-free irrigation throughout the drought at the most difficult level. When the water in the reservoir dropped to the level of the dam, the entire village was still filled with water in the irrigation tunnels. It takes a while for such tunnels to dry out so, as a result, the village could survive even without opening the dam - its construction is more of an emergency, as there might as well be a permanent clearance.