Breeding

The  Folktails and  Iron Teeth have different methods for increasing their population.

Folktails

Generally, increasing the population is as simple as constructing more  Lodges. Two adult  Folktails have a small chance to breed and produce a Kit when:

• they have no Negative Effects,
• their  Well-Being is positive,
• there are spare beds in their Lodge.

Due to the mechanism of occupied Lodges requiring vacant beds,  Mini Lodges cannot produce Kits, as they only have space for one Beaver. Consequently, replacing all Lodges with Mini Lodges results in Beavers being unable to have new Kits and declining.
Note that  workers with 24h shift will only go to sleep with the  Exhausted status and therefore won't reproduce

👀 Note: Although the population size does not normally exceed the total number of beds, if you use automatic migration you can create problems.

Iron Teeth

See also: Breeding Pod and Advanced Breeding Pod.

The  Iron Teeth produce  Kits in  Breeding Pods, using  Blueberries and  Water. In the late mid-game,  Advanced Breeding Pods produce adults directly, using Blueberries and  Extract. The population size is proportional to the number of active Breeding Pods and the population Well-Being. It is not limited by  Housing capacity. A breeding pod sustains about 10 Beavers, increasing with the population's  Life Expectancy.

👀 Note: Increasing Well-being increases the size of an Ironteeth colony without adding more Breeding Pods. This can unexpectedly increase food and water consumption and lead to mass starvation and dehydration. Esnure you have adequate Housing and Water and Food production before adding Decorations and Well-being buildings.

With this breeding mechanism, an Iron Teeth colony's Beavers can perish and be re-introduced after the fact, so long as  Hauler  Bots are still present to maintain the Breeding Pods.

Breeding pods halt when lacking adequate nutrients, displaying Status Icons of  Breeding halted.

Population Size with Breeding Pods

Each breeding pod can support k beavers based on the lifespan $A_m{}_a{}_x$of each beaver, which depends on their well-being, according to the following formula:

$k=\frac{A_m{}_a{}_x}{5}$

Use the following lookup table for reference:

Average Well-Being	Average Beavers per Pod
1-6	10
7-16	12
17-26	14
27-36	16
37-46	18
47-56	20
57-66	21
67+	22

Unlike Advanced Breeding Pods, Beavers are born as Kits and must mature before working.

Strategies

For a small optimization, ensuring that new beavers are born right after daybreak maximizes their effective lifespan. This is because age increments by one at daybreak rather than tracking the time of birth for each beaver. You can manipulate the time that beavers are born by selectively pausing and unpausing breeding pods.