9 beginner’s tips before starting Frostpunk 2

Frostpunk 2 is a brutal city builder that will ask what kind of morally dubious decisions you’re willing to make to save humanity from freezing over. It’s a bummer of a game, and loves to kick you while you’re down. But after playing the first few chapters, we’ve learned some tricks on how to avoid those low-blows a little more easily.

In this Frostpunk 2 guide, we’ll give you some beginner tips to improve your city and outposts before the bitter cold has a chance to take them from you.

The first thing you need to do when you boot up Frostpunk 2 is remember that you — the complex set of ideas and beliefs reading this article — are not really the captain of New London. All those moral ideals you should hold dear in your daily life will not serve you here, and you should prepare yourself to let go of most of them if you want to be successful in Frostpunk 2. Always remember that pulling at your heartstrings is how the developers get you to make stupid decisions and put yourself in a bind.

You may have to dramatically relax child labor laws to keep your city afloat. You may need to expel the elderly into the wastes in order to reduce your resource consumption. You may have to eat the last seal on Earth to ensure your citizens don’t starve.

You will implement dangerous working conditions and mandate unpaid overtime. And you will get people killed. But the city will survive because of it, and that’s the whole game. If you can’t let yourself get in that mentality — and it’s totally understandable if that’s the case — you might be better served with a chiller (pun intended) city builder.

To push against what we just said, the game will present moral sacrifices to you very early on that you absolutely don’t need to take. For example, in the game’s prologue, you’ll be told to stockpile some food for a big storm. And as it looks like you won’t meet your mark, the game will ask you if you want to sacrifice the last seal on Earth or the elderly. You can also choose to wait on both of those options and solve the problem without resorting to extremes.

The game wants you to believe the only path to victory is to become a monster — and at the end of the day, you’ll have to compromise in places. But do not let the “quick” way out entice you away from a solvable solution. You can solve that food crisis with some strategic buildings and use of overtime.

Sometimes these quick solutions can even get you in trouble later, as making a hard choice could lower your people’s trust in you. So before you make a decision that will hurt your real life feelings, do the math and figure out what’s possible. Pausing the game and putting your head in your hands while you pour over the data is a perfectly viable strategy

Making sure your people have enough resources to survive is your main goal in Frostpunk 2. Meeting your people’s various needs might seem impossible, but your goal is actually much more difficult. In order to have a fully successful city, you must make all of the things in excess.

Playing Frostpunk 2 is like being a homeowner, in that the general rule is that the unexpected will always come along and kick you in the shins at the worst possible time. The way to beat that is to have extra of everything. When the next Whiteout storm comes, the game will assume you’re going to lose people to starvation or cold. But if you’re always stockpiling excess food and fuel, your people can live through months of a major storm.

The easiest way to stockpile mass quantities of items is to build excess districts and buildings, find resources in the wild and export them home, or mandate overtime for your workers during windows of low consumption like a heat wave.

Whipping the vote is crucial to getting major policies and changes in your city. To do that, you’ll need to go in and make promises to certain factions in order to get them to vote the way you want. Some of these promises are easy, like researching a certain technology within 40 days. Others might ask you to implement another law that’s detrimental to your goals. You need to weigh the cost of the current law you’re whipping and if it’s worth another sacrifice.

On the other hand, you can always make promises and not keep them. Now, you can’t do that too often or the faction you burnt won’t work with you anymore, but you can fix bad relations with factions (like paying them off) more easily than you can fix bad laws, in some cases. Do not break your city to keep a promise.

Learning how to manipulate your 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 need to help it pass. Sometimes it’s best to not whip the vote at all and see where the chips fall.

Speaking of your factions, you can lean on them for help in a crisis. Asking for funds, for example, is something the game warns you about early on, saying it will heavily damage your relationship with your allies. However, if you have a favorite faction that you dote on often, asking for financial help or a service will barely make a dent in their belief in you.

There are factions you will like and factions you don’t, and you should remember that your relationship is a two-way street. If you give the Faith Keepers everything they want every time they ask, you can and should ask them to kick money your way whenever possible. Most of the time they’ll remain devoted to you, and if they drop down just a tick, they’re easy to win back.

Finally, when it comes to factions, don’t make the mistake of completely ignoring or attempting to destroy one group. While you’ll have your favorites and will need to choose sides, try not to directly antagonize a single faction, or they’ll eventually start to cause problems. Just because a faction comprises only 4% of your city doesn’t mean you can easily stamp them out. That 4% will likely become 14% before you know it, and then you might have a riot on your hands.

Frostpunk 2 is a game that wants you to take a side and pick a faction to be nice to. But if you do that by burning bridges — or more specifically, burning the same bridge over and over again — you’re going to end up in a bad spot.

As you’re spinning up new enterprises and trying to fill your stockpile with as much food (or whatever) as possible, you’ll inherently want to create new districts to increase production. But it’s important to remember how powerful buildings can be, and that expanding a district to create another building slot could net you more resources for less work than creating a whole other district.

Next time you want to increase your material output, don’t drop another district on another node. Expand your existing district, drop two sawmills into it, and watch your production explode.

The frozen wasteland outside of your city is easy to ignore in the early game. You have plenty of troubles going on at home, why would you seek them out elsewhere? Well, because for as many problems as 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 period of time. This can help you either stabilize a problem you’re struggling to solve or allow you to stockpile a ton of food for free.

If you’re playing the story, you’ll eventually need expeditions to find new fuel for your generator. But expeditions take a lot of time, and spinning them up is costly, so you want to get the whole thing going before you need it, not when your coal is days from running out.

All of the above tips work toward this one goal: over-prepare. The one thing you know is going to happen in Frostpunk 2 — that you can 100% count on — is that the game will hit you with a big problem while you’re already dealing with something else. The way to survive in the wasteland is to anticipate everything as much as possible. Do not run behind on food. Solve your crime problem before the game tells you a storm is coming — because you know it’s just a matter of time.

The more you can keep your city running in tip top shape by having excess, controlling the factions, and using your population wisely, the more easily you’ll be able to fully devote your attention to an issue when it arises. You can reduce the damage of most of Frostpunk 2’s fires relatively easily as long as you can focus on them. Where the game will try and trip you up is by starting 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.