9 Beginner Tips Before You Start Playing Frostpunk 2

Frostpunk 2 is a brutal city builder that will ask you what morally questionable decisions you are willing to make to save humanity from freezing to death. It’s a badass game and loves to kick you when you’re already down. But after playing the first few chapters, we learned a few tricks to avoid those low blows a little more easily.

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

The first thing you should do when you start 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 cherish in your daily life will not serve you here, and you must prepare yourself to let go of most of them if you want to be successful in Frostpunk 2. Never forget that developers push you to make stupid decisions and get yourself into trouble by pulling on your heartstrings.

Maybe you need to drastically relax child labor laws to keep your city running. Maybe you need to send your elderly to the dump to reduce your resource consumption. Maybe you need to eat the last seal on Earth to keep your citizens from starving.

You’re going to implement dangerous working conditions and unpaid overtime. And you’re going to let people die. But the city will survive because of it, and that’s the whole game. If you can’t let yourself fall into that mindset — and that’s perfectly understandable — then you might be better off with a chiller (pun intended) city builder.

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 game’s prologue, you are told to stock up on food for a big storm. And since it looks like you won’t make it, the game will ask you whether 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 path to victory is to become a monster – and at the end of the day, you’re going to have to make compromises in some places. But don’t let the “quick” way out tempt you away from a solvable solution. You can solve that food crisis with some strategic building and overtime.

Sometimes these quick fixes can actually get you into trouble later, because making a tough choice can undermine the trust your people have in you. So before you make a decision that will hurt your feelings in real life, do the math and figure out what’s possible. Pausing the game and putting your head in your hands while you review the data is a perfectly viable strategy

Ensuring your people have enough resources to survive is your main goal in Frostpunk 2. Meeting the diverse needs of your people may seem impossible, but your goal is actually much harder. To have a fully successful city, you need to make everything in abundance.

To play 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 moment. The way to beat that is to have extra of everything. When the next Whiteout storm comes, the game will assume that you are going to lose people to hunger or cold. But if you always stockpile excess food and fuel, your people can survive a big storm for months.

The easiest way to stockpile large amounts of items is to build surplus districts and buildings, find resources in nature and export them home, or have your workers work overtime during low-consumption periods, such as a heat wave.

Winning the votes is crucial to getting important policies and changes in your city. To do that, you’ll need to make promises to certain factions to get them to vote the way you want. Some of these promises are easy, like researching a certain technology within 40 days. Others may require you to implement another law that’s detrimental to your goals. You’ll need to weigh the cost of the current law you win and whether it’s worth making 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 burned won’t work with you anymore, but you can repair bad relationships with factions (like paying them off) easier than you can repair bad laws, in some cases. Don’t destroy your city to keep a promise.

Learning how to manipulate your factions in the voting room is an important part of the game. So remember that just because a faction wants to vote on something, doesn’t mean you have to help it pass. Sometimes it’s better to not influence the vote at all and see where the chips fall.

Speaking of your factions, you can lean on them for help in a crisis. For example, the game warns you early on against asking for money, as it will severely damage your relationship with your allies. However, if you have a favorite faction that you tend to dote on, asking for financial help or a favor will hardly make a dent in their faith in you.

There are factions you like and factions you don’t, and you have to remember that your relationship is a two-way street. If you give the Faith Keepers everything they want, every time they ask for it, you can and should ask them to kick money your way whenever possible. Most of the time they will remain committed to you, and if they back off even a little, they are easy to win back.

Finally, when it comes to factions, don’t make the mistake of completely ignoring or trying to destroy one group. While you have your favorites and should pick a side, try not to immediately antagonize a single faction or they’ll cause problems down the road. Just because a faction only makes up 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 might have a riot on your hands.

Frostpunk 2 is a game that wants you to pick a side and choose 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 — then you’re in a tough spot.

As you start new businesses and try to fill your inventory 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 an additional building site can give you more resources for less work than creating an entirely different district.

The next time you want to increase your material production, don’t put another district on another node. Expand your existing district, put two sawmills in it, and watch your production explode.

The frozen wasteland outside your city is easy to ignore early in the game. You have enough problems at home, why look for them somewhere else? Well, for as many problems as you can find outside of New London (like more hungry mouths to feed), there are solutions. For example, you might find a food source outside of the city that you can build a path to, allowing you to bring in an extra ton of food for a certain amount of time. This can help stabilize a problem you’re trying to solve, or allow you to store a ton of food for free.

As you play through the story, you’ll eventually need to go on expeditions to find new fuel for your generator. But expeditions are time-consuming and expensive to set up, so you want to get the whole thing up and running before you need it, not when you’ve run out of coal for days.

All of the above tips work towards this one goal: over-preparation. The only thing you know is going to happen in Frostpunk 2 — what you can count on 100% — is that the game will throw a big problem at you while you’re already busy doing something else. The way to survive in the wasteland is to anticipate everything as best as you can. Don’t get behind on 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 surpluses, controlling the factions, and using your population wisely, the easier it is to devote your full attention to a problem when it arises. You can minimize the damage from most Frostpunk 2‘s burn relatively easily as long as you can concentrate on them. Where the game will try to trip you up is by starting a fire in the bathroom while you’re still trying to control the fire that’s been raging in the kitchen for hours.

Be prepared for anything and Frostpunk 2 will never be able to surprise you.