Gdańsk, Poland – July 19, 2022. At the Save & Sound music festival, Mechanistry revealed “The Shores of Beaver Bay”, a rodent-themed song based on a 19th-century sea shanty, arranged by Timberborn’s composer Zofia Domaradzka and sung by the game’s community members. The song premiered in a video that also covers the creation of a soundtrack for the post-apocalyptic beaver city-builder, as well as its players’ sea shanty fascinations.
Held between July 14 and 18, Save & Sound is a digital music festival airing on Steam, Twitch, and YouTube, featuring performances and deep-dives focused on music in video games. This year, the event’s line-up features Timberborn, a popular beaver city-building game released in 2021, often praised for the score composed by Zofia Domaradzka. Timberborn’s festival entry offers a behind-the-scenes look at the soundtrack’s recordings, including the instrumental differences between in-game wet seasons and droughts. It also features “The Shores of Beaver Bay” - a song recorded with the help of the community that will be added to the game’s credits.
For the purpose of the song, Domaradzka arranged a famous 19th-century sea shanty “The Shores of Botany Bay”, originally telling the story of an Irish bricklayer migrating to Australia. The song received new lyrics describing the beaver hardships, written by two Timberborn players, Marco “Synthron” Müller and Thorsten “DerHouy” Houy. The duo also performs lead vocals on the shanty, while the chorus was created using submissions collected from players during the “Timberborn Sing-along”, open to the public and hosted by Mechanistry in May.
The game’s community, centred around the game’s Discord channel with over 30.000 members, had already recorded multiple other similar songs on their own, such as the fan adaptations of “Wellerman” and “Old Maui”. Michal Amielanczyk, Timberborn’s community manager, explains:
"The ingenuity of our players shows both in their beaver settlements and in their artistic creations, and we know they love Zofia’s soundtrack. With “The Shores of Beaver Bay”, we wanted to honour their passion for music, specifically the shanties. This unlikely mash-up is the best result we could hope for, and even our - developers’ - participation couldn’t ruin it".
According to Amielanczyk, players can expect further contests and official creative projects in the future. Right now, the community is busy playing with the game’s Update 2, available on Timberborn’s experimental branch and slated for an official release later this summer.
Timberborn Early Access highlights
- Two different beaver factions, each with unique buildings, visual style, and gameplay traits: expert farmers Folktails and the industrious Iron Teeth.
- Floodgates, canals, river control – all the cool beaver stuff that utilizes destructible terrain and water physics.
- Dry seasons – beavers need to irrigate the land to keep fields and forests alive even when the droughts hit. They use pumps, irrigation towers, reservoirs and more.
- Vertical architecture – buildings are stacked atop one another, allowing the player to create tall megastructures or vast cities spanned by platforms and bridges.
- Lumberpunk – the beavers build sophisticated machinery, use dynamite, and scavenge human ruins for resources.
- Running a living settlement: with individually simulated units, day-and-night cycles, and district mechanics, the player maintains a truly advanced wood-chewing colony.
Contact information
Michal Amielanczyk, Communication Manager
About Timberborn
Timberborn on Epic Games Store
