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With the sequel’s announcement, now’s the time for fans to revisit Frostpunk and new players to discover it. The game takes place in a fictional Victorian Era apocalypse where the entire planet is covered by a seemingly unending winter. It’s not confirmed what exactly caused the catastrophe, but it’s left millions dead and many groups of survivors struggling to stay alive. Before collapsing, the British Empire constructed massive generators designed to produce large amounts of heat, giving survivors the chance to rebuild society.
As the leader of one of these bands of survivors, it’s your job to ensure the city’s survival. Frostpunk is quite difficult for most players the first time they play the game but think of it as a colder, more depressing and higher-stakes version of City Skylines. Players are likely to fail on their first try, as it might take multiple tries before nailing down what to do for each scenario.
The Basics
A lot is going on in Frostpunk, so make sure to use the pause button judiciously; this lets you make many decisions at once without any more in-game time passing. When starting a new game, players should immediately assign workers to gather nearby resources to have an early stockpile and quickly build up the city. Using resource depots is best as they keep your workers warm while they gather from any pile within the depot’s effective radius. Workers are best for general labor, while engineers are needed in your city’s more complex infrastructure and economy. One of the first buildings that should be built early on is a workshop to research new technologies. As the weather gets worse and resources become harder to come by, advanced technology will be the answer.
As technology is advanced, you’ll need more and more materials to build and maintain. Always try to build with the long-term in mind and being proactive. If you’re always reacting to new developments and crises, your city won’t last long. Sawmills, for example, are useful for gathering wood and clearing space to expand the city, but this is a finite resource. Players should invest in the wall drill, which provides a virtually unlimited supply of wood. Don’t neglect your workforce, though. Whenever your workers get sick or injured, keeping them working will only make their conditions worse. Having a hospital to take care of them is better in the long run as sick pops can heal and get back to work, whereas a dead pop stays dead, decreasing hope as well as your city’s economy and workforce.
The game doesn’t just take place in the city you need to manage. The surrounding tundra, referred to as Frostland, is open to exploration once a beacon has been built. Sled teams sent out will occasionally uncover treasure troves of supplies or survivors to bring back to the city and increase your population. This is also a useful way of finding steam cores, which can’t be manufactured by any buildings and must be scavenged.
Building Your City Properly
As long as steam cores are available, more advanced and productive versions of resource buildings can be made. They’re also used to build massive automatons capable of running a building continuously without the risk of unhappy workers. You’ll first need to build a factory that can produce them, which could take a while. The factory can produce prosthetic limbs for sick pops that needed to have amputations, putting them back into the workforce. In such inhospitable conditions, there’s a high chance that some of your citizens will die during the game. Each death will decrease hope, so building a cemetery is a good way to mitigate such decreases.
Constructing better housing with more insulation means not having to use as much coal to heat the city. Steam hubs might seem like a great technology to use, but each can potentially double your city’s coal consumption. It’s better to invest in indoor heaters for each building. Resource depots and hunting lodges don’t have pops working in them, so warming them up isn’t necessary.
Book of Laws
As a new society born from the ashes of the old world, players can select maws that mold society as they see fit and provide useful bonuses and actions with certain buildings. Laws will have a cooldown timer after each one has been passed, so players should look to passing a new one as soon as the cooldown is lifted.
While some initial laws might not be seen as very useful, they can lead to branching laws that are. For example, passing a law to build child shelters for the city’s children rather than having them also work can eventually lead to having children assist engineers in workshops or hospitals. But not all laws should be utilized all the time, such as the emergency shift, which has workers producing resources 24-hours straight but raises discontent considerably. If used too often, it could result in a worker dying from exhaustion. This measure should only be used when absolutely necessary.
Occasionally your people will come to you with a request or concern that you can choose to promise or ignore. Fulfilling the promise within the allotted time will raise hope while failing to keep it will cause discontent to rise dramatically. In other words, don’t make promises you know you can’t keep. And after a long day’s work, your citizens are going to need some way to blow off steam. Building a tavern or fighting areas can bring down discontent.
At some point, it won’t be enough to simply survive for your citizens. You’ll have to give them a symbol to rally behind and give them hope for the future. This gives the option of either molding a Faith or Order based society.
The Great Storm
In the story modes and free play, a storm will eventually make its way to the city, drastically decreasing the temperature and preventing any expedition teams from leaving. The storm will also prevent hunting lodges or greenhouses from producing any food, so your city should have a stockpile that can outlast the storm.
Such an event can potentially push your city to the breaking point and act as the ultimate survival test. The generator has an optional turbo switch in truly desperate moments that increases heat out beyond its normal capabilities. However, this will gradually raise strain on the generator that will eventually cause it to blow up if left unchecked. The only way to fix it is either with an extra steam core or sending a child to their deaths inside to fix it.
Each scenario from the base game and DLCs will pose radically different environments, goals and resources made available. Staying alert and micromanaging throughout the game is ultimately the best strategy for every scenario.
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