How much food and water do beavers need?

Short answer: on Normal or Hard, each beaver eats about 2.67 food and drinks about 2.12 water per day. On Easy it is 40% of that. The rest of this page shows where those numbers come from and turns them into pumps, farms and tanks.

Where 2.67 and 2.12 come from

Hunger and thirst are both needs with a range of -300 to 100. Hunger falls by 80 points a day, and each food item a beaver eats restores 30 points. Thirst falls by 70 points a day, and each water restores 33. Divide one by the other and you get 80 / 30 = 2.67 food and 70 / 33 = 2.12 water per beaver per day. The game's difficulty presets then scale consumption: Easy uses 40%, Normal and Hard use 100%.

Both factions use the same rates in Version 1. The wiki's history notes that Iron Teeth once needed 15% more water, at the Early Access launch, but that difference is gone. Kits count as beavers for this. Bots do not: they neither eat nor drink.

What happens when they run out

A beaver at 0 hunger shows as Starving. Adults work at half speed and are reluctant to finish a shift, and kits grow 40% slower. It takes 300 / 80 = 3.75 more days to die. At 0 thirst a beaver is Dehydrated and moves 25% slower, and dies after 300 / 70 = 4.29 more days. That gives you a few days to react, but a colony full of half-speed workers is also bad at fixing the problem.

Quick reference table (Normal, 16-hour shift)

The pump column uses the Water Pump or Deep Water Pump at about 48 water a day each with one worker. It covers drinking only, so you need extra pumps to fill tanks between droughts. The tank column covers the longest Normal drought (9 days) with no safety buffer, at 300 water per Medium Tank.

How many pumps per beaver?

A Water Pump (Folktails) or Deep Water Pump (Iron Teeth) makes 1 water every 0.33 hours. With the default 16 working hours that is about 48 water a day, which keeps around 22 beavers drinking. The Folktails Large Water Pump makes 5 water per 0.33 hours with three workers, about 242 a day or roughly 114 beavers. Shorten the work day and pump output drops with it, while drinking does not, so recheck your pumps whenever you change working hours.

How many farms per beaver?

The best food guide ranks every food by tiles per beaver; the short version follows.

Crop tiles needed = food per day x days to mature / harvest per tile. For one beaver living on raw food: carrots (4 days, 3 per tile) take about 3.6 tiles and kohlrabi (3 days, 2 per tile) about 4 tiles. Processed food stretches farmland much further. One wheat becomes one flour and then five loaves of bread, so bread needs about 1.8 wheat tiles per beaver. One corn becomes five corn rations, about 2.7 corn tiles per beaver. These are floors that ignore planting and harvest time, so leave room to grow.

Planning for drought

Multiply daily water by the longest drought you might face, then add a buffer. Normal droughts run 5 to 9 days and Hard droughts 15 to 30. Store food the same way if your fields might dry out. The drought calculator does this and checks whether your pumps can refill the tanks during the wet season, and the food and water calculator and production chain calculator size your pumps, fields and kitchens.