Frostpunk 2 is a brutal city builder that will ask you what morally questionable decisions you’re willing to make to save humanity from freezing to death. It’s a hopeless game that loves to kick you while you’re down. But after playing through the first few chapters, we’ve learned a few tricks to make avoiding those low blows a little easier.
In this Frostpunk 2 In this guide, we’ll give you some beginner’s tips on how to upgrade your city and facilities before the freezing icy takes them away from you.
Leave your morals at the door
The first thing you need to do after starting Frostpunk 2 remember that you—the sophisticated set of ideas and beliefs reading this article—are not Captain New London. All those moral ideals that you should value in your everyday life will not be of operate to you here, and you should be prepared to abandon most of them if you want to succeed in Frostpunk 2. Always remember that tugging on your heartstrings is how game designers make you make stupid decisions and get into trouble.
You may have to drastically relax child labor laws to keep your city afloat. You may have to banish the elderly to the wasteland to reduce resource consumption. You may have to eat the last seal on Earth to make sure your citizens don’t starve.
You’ll introduce unsafe working conditions and unpaid overtime. And you’ll get people killed. But the city will survive because of it, and that’s the whole point of the game. If you can’t afford that mentality—and it’s completely understandable if you can—a colder (pun intended) city builder might be a better fit.
Do the math before you overreact
To counter what we just said, the game will present you with moral sacrifices very early on that you absolutely do not have to make. For example, in the prologue of the game, you are asked to stockpile food for a great storm. And since it looks like you will not achieve your goal, the game will ask you if you want to sacrifice the last seal on Earth or the elders. You can also choose to wait for both options and solve the problem without resorting to extremes.
The game wants you to believe that the only way to victory is to become a monster – and at the end of the day, you will have to compromise in some places. But don’t let the “quick” exit distract you from a solvable solution. You can solve this food crisis with strategic buildings and overtime.
Sometimes these quick fixes can even get you in trouble later on, because making a tough choice can lower your people’s trust in you. So before you make a decision that hurts your true feelings, do the math and figure out what’s possible. Pausing the game and putting your head in your hands while you analyze the data is a completely viable strategy
Just meeting the limit is not enough
Your main goal is to ensure that your people have enough resources to survive. Frostpunk 2. Meeting the various needs of your people may seem impossible, but your goal is actually much more complex. To have a fully successful city, you have to do everything in excess.
Game Frostpunk 2 is like owning a house, in that the general rule is that the unexpected will always come and kick you in the shins at the worst possible moment. The way to beat this is to have an excess of everything. When the next snowstorm comes, the game will assume you’ll lose people to hunger or icy. But if you always stockpile excess food and fuel, your people can survive months of a major storm.
The easiest way to accumulate huge amounts of goods is to build surplus districts and buildings, scavenge for resources in the wild and export them home, or assign overtime to workers during periods of low usage, such as during a heat wave.
Learn how to raise your voter support early
Mobilizing votes is key to getting vital policies and changes in your city. To do this, you need to go in and make promises to certain factions to get them to vote the way you want. Some of these promises are simple, like researching a certain technology within 40 days. Others may require you to implement another law that is detrimental to your goals. You need to weigh the cost of the current law you want to mobilize and whether it is worth another sacrifice.
On the other hand, you can always make promises and not keep them. Now, you can’t do it too often, because the faction you burned will no longer cooperate with you, but you can fix bad relationships with factions (e.g. by paying them off) more easily than fixing bad laws, in some cases. Don’t destroy your city to keep a promise.
Learning how to manipulate factions in the voting room is a key part of the game. So remember that just because a faction wants to vote on something doesn’t mean you have to support them pass. Sometimes it’s best not to make a decision at all and see where the chips fall.
Get support from your factions
Speaking of your factions, you can count on them to support you in times of crisis. For example, asking for funds is something the game warns you about at the beginning, saying that it will seriously damage your relationships with your allies. However, if you have a favorite faction that you often spoil, asking for financial support or a service will barely dent their faith in you.
There are factions you will like and factions you will dislike, and you should remember that your relationship is a two-way street. If you give the Faith Keepers everything they want whenever they ask for it, you can and should ask them to kick money your way whenever possible. They will remain committed to you most of the time, and if they drop even a little, it is simple to get them back.
Choose a side, but don’t burn bridges
Finally, when it comes to factions, don’t make the mistake of completely ignoring or trying to destroy one group. While you will have your favorites and will have to choose sides, try not to directly antagonize any faction, otherwise they will eventually start causing problems. Just because a faction only covers 4% of your city doesn’t mean you can easily wipe them out. That 4% will likely turn into 14% before you know it, and then you could have a riot on your hands.
Frostpunk 2 is a game that wants you to pick sides and choose a faction to be nice to. But if you do that by burning bridges—or, more accurately, burning the same bridge over and over—you’ll end up in a bad place.
Don’t just build up-to-date districts, modernize existing ones
As you start up-to-date industries and try to fill your stockpiles with as much food (or anything else) as possible, you’ll naturally want to create up-to-date districts to raise your production. However, it’s vital to remember how powerful buildings can be and that expanding a district to create another building slot can net you more resources for less work than creating a completely different district.
Next time you want to raise your material production, don’t just drop another district onto another node. Expand an existing district, drop two sawmills into it, and watch your production explode.
Start exploring the wasteland early
The frozen wasteland outside of your city is simple to ignore early on in the game. You have a ton of problems at home, why would you look for them anywhere else? Well, because for as many of the problems you can find outside of New London (like more hungry mouths to feed), there are also solutions. For example, you might find a food source outside of town that you can build a path to, allowing you to bring in a ton of extra food for a while. This can support you stabilize a problem you can’t solve, or allow you to stockpile a ton of food for free.
If you play the story, you’ll eventually need expeditions to find up-to-date fuel for the generator. But expeditions take a long time and are steep to set up, so you want to have everything up and running before you need it, not when the coal is a few days away from running out.
Plan for the next problem before you know what it is
All of the above tips work towards one goal: over-preparation. The one thing you know is going to happen, Frostpunk 2 —that you can count on 100%—is that the game will hit you with a substantial problem while you’re already doing something else. The way to survive in the wasteland is to anticipate everything as much as possible. Don’t neglect food. Solve your crime problem before the game tells you a storm is coming—because you know it’s only a matter of time.
The more you can keep your city in tip-top shape by having surplus, controlling factions, and using your population wisely, the easier it will be to give full attention to a problem when it arises. You can reduce the damage to most Frostpunk 2fires are relatively simple, as long as you can focus on them. The game will try to throw you off balance by lighting a fire in the bathroom while you’re still trying to control the one that’s been raging for hours in the kitchen.
Be prepared for anything and Frostpunk 2 will never be able to surprise you.