In Frostpunk 2, you are not just managing a city but leading humanity’s last hope in a frozen, unforgiving world. Every decision you make will decide New London’s fate. It is going to be a constant tug between survival and extinction.
It is important to balance resources, build new districts, and maintain harmony between the different communities all while battling the devastating cold spell. If you are feeling overwhelmed, this guide will help ease that burden by telling about the best beginner tips you should remember when starting out in Frostpunk 2.
1. Learn to Recycle
In the Arctic age, saving up on resources and not wasting them is the key to an everlasting society. That is why you should play smart when it comes to managing your resources. Recycling is one of the best ways to get the most out of the resources you no longer require.
An example of such a situation is when you put up an entire extraction district in a location. There will be a time when the resources in that area are exhausted, and the extraction district will no longer be needed there. Instead of just leaving it up as it is, recycle the entire district to get back a lot of the materials which you can use later for other expeditions.
You will not only get back resources, but you will also free up a bunch of workforces and you can utilize that area for another purpose, perhaps a housing district if the conditions are suited for it.
2. Always Have Surplus
Extreme situations call for extreme measures. You cannot predict the weather and other calamities in Frostpunk 2. You might get hit by a Whiteout Storm when you are least expecting it. In such situations, the resource consumption will significantly rise.
Even though you were not in the negative with the drastic rise in food and heat consumption, you will very soon fall in the negative territory. That is why you should always prepare for the worst and have an ample amount of reserves for such situations.
If you take our recommendation, you should have a whole year’s worth of stock in your reserves so that even during a blizzard, the city doesn’t take a hit in terms of food and other resources. You can easily pile up extra resources by building more districts and mandating overtime when the weather is a bit on the hotter side. Build more extraction districts in locations with plenty of resources and export them back home.
3. Harmonize Your Relationship With Factions
Your city harbors multiple communities and within those communities lies multiple factions. These groups of like-minded individuals are usually led by either a political agenda or a powerful leader with some far-fetched ideology. Regardless, these groups can either cause problems or be of great help but it all boils down to how you play things.
These factions have favorable conditions and if you meet those conditions, they will start to like you and when the time comes, they will vote your way to pass laws in the city council. You can also ask for funds if the need arises. Different factions can offer different kinds of help.
That is why you have to maintain a healthy relationship with each faction. You can favor a certain faction over the other but you have to keep a balance because the first priority is your city. Oftentimes, the demands might negatively affect your city so you have to gauge things in order to not take a hit while winning over a certain faction.
You cannot win over every faction at the same time so you must get the most out of the situation.
4. Pause Before You Act
The passing of time has always been an interesting aspect of the Frostpunk franchise. Everything happening in the city; the shifts, weather, and research, is happening in real time. You can choose to speed up the timeline if you cannot wait or you can also slow down things if it is favorable.
With so many things happening all at once, things might start to pile up and quickly become overwhelming. That’s where the pause features come into play. You can pause time in Frostpunk 2. This gives you the breathing room to sit down and carefully plan your next move or idea before executing it. You won’t have to worry about weather shifting while you are busy deciding on where to put the next housing district.
Every time you need time to plan, we suggest you pause the time, map everything out, and when you are ready to act, hit play and you will pick up exactly where you left things off.
5. Frostbreaking is the Way
You cannot just place districts anywhere you want. You first have to make the area habitable by a process called Frostbreaking. In the start, you will quickly run out of space to place more districts so you will have to frostbreak to expand your city. You will also need to frostbreak areas with resources to put up extraction districts.
Frostbreaking requires 200 workforce and 30 headstamps, so make sure you have enough of them. Also, make sure you have enough for the rest of the city and that your frost-breaking expedition doesn’t starve the rest.
There are two types of frost breaking; Safe and Fast. The prior takes more resources and keeps the workforce occupied for longer but the latter takes less resources and time and you will lose a bunch of your workforces to extreme conditions.
If your population and workforce aren’t declining then you can opt for Fast Frostbreaking because it saves resources but in the start, we recommend you take the safer route because the workforce is much more valuable than heatstamps.
6. Propose and Pass New Laws
Running a whole nation requires you to propose and pass new laws so that you are able to keep peace and also keep everyone on the same page while you are on your way to a progressive society. You can propose a new law every 10 weeks, and you will need at least 51 votes to pass the law.
You will have the option to choose from a bunch of categories; City, Society, Survival, and Rule, with each law giving you an estimate of how many votes will be in favor. If things aren’t going your way, you can negotiate with certain factions who are open to talk and make promises that will make them vote in your favor.
You can fulfill the promise or not, but if you betray them a number of times, they will no longer trust you. Passing new laws early on lets you do things how you see fit and gives you a path to your vision. This is also a clever way to sway the factions in your direction.
7. Expanding Over Building
You will have two options when you are trying to increase the production of either food or other resources. You can either frost break new nodes or drop a new district. This will surely increase your overall production but the cost to build a new district is something you need to take into account as well.
On the flip side, you can upgrade your existing district. This will also increase your output but at a significantly lower cost and will occupy much less workforce. This is of course not always true and you have to calculate your input-to-output ratio before deciding if you should build a new district or upgrade the existing one.
During the initial stages, almost always upgrade is going to be the better option.
8. Voyage into Wasteland Early
After your resources have started to pile up and you have the cushion to take some risks, that is when you should start to explore outside New London. There are tons of far-off places where you can send expedition teams. You can find a bulk of food or a large reserve of coal for your generator.
This is of course a hit or miss and sending a team to the wasteland is expensive. Focus on stabilizing your economy and then voyage into waste land because the risk is often time worth the reward and you can quickly pile up tons of extra resources that you can store for a rainy day or in this case, a snowy day.
9. Prefabs Are Really Important
Like food and coal, Prefab is another very crucial resource that is the building block of every building, every district in Frostpunk 2. It is quite literally the building block as this is going to be the main material that is used in building or upgrading a district.
Similar to coal and food, prefabs are extracted through the extraction district. While it might seem like food and coal are the most important resources that you should extract first prefabs are just an important because if you want to expand your territory, you will need them.
Stock on a reasonable amount of food and coal then go full throttle on extracting Prefabs. That way, you will have a lot of it in stock and you can go back to focusing on food and coal extraction.
10. Complete Story Before Utopia
There are two modes in Frostpunk 2. In the main story mode where certain plot bounds will constrict you, the progression will be linear, and your choices will lead to different outcomes. Whereas Utopia is much like an open-world sandbox where you can do whatever you want and however you want without any bounds.
If you are new to the genre and are still learning the game’s ins and outs, story mode is the place to start. You will learn everything about the game and by the time you are at the end of the story, you will be well-versed in the ways of New London and then you can go full beast mode in Utopia mode.
This was our two cents on what you should be doing and focusing on as a beginner in Frostpunk 2. We have tried to keep things as objective as possible. If you keep all of these things in mind, you will have a much smoother experience when you set out to build your wonderland in this ice age.