Frostpunk 2 Tips and Tricks

Need some Frostpunk 2 tips and tricks to survive the cold? The city-builder survival game comes with many different gameplay tools: building Districts, researching technology, passing laws… It’s easy to get confused.

If you’re looking for some tips and tricks to help you get started or improve your already bustling city, this Frostpunk 2 guide will help you out.

Prioritize Coal Supply and Housing

Sure, gathering prefabs and food is important, but your main problem at the start of a new Frostpunk 2 game is usually a lack of heat and housing. The longer you go without a properly working Generator, the more citizens will die. And although hungry citizens can survive for quite a while (there’s always the option to tighten belts), being homeless quickly becomes fatal. Be sure to protect them from the harsh environment before looking for food and materials.

Resource Gathering Before Exploration

After the housing and fuel supply has been taken care of, be sure to create a steady food, prefabs, and materials supply. Use most if not all of your resource nodes and don't neglect to build stockpile hubs. As none of your resources will expire, having a huge resource surplus simply ensures that your city is thriving, even when the temperature drops or resources are depleted. This also allows you to safely shift your focus to lawmaking, researching, and exploring the Frostlands.

Pick a Side

In Frostpunk 2, you have to deal with many different factions who are constantly campaigning for their own goals and opposing each other. Since it’s impossible to keep everyone happy, it’s best to choose factions with similar ideas, make sure they form a majority over the rest of your citizens, and side with them. This means you must regularly favor their proposals when implementing new laws or researching new technologies. In return, you gain a very high trust level from these factions and they’ll typically vote in your favor.

In the example below, 18% of the population is devoted, 53% is supporting, 25% is neutral, and only 4% is hostile, which is ideal for passing laws.

Don’t worry about the remaining factions too much; as long as you pick one of their law proposals or technologies every now and then, they won’t cause any issues - they’ll just be ‘moderately’ unhappy while the factions belonging to the majority safeguard your leadership.

Don’t Demand Funds

Building new things costs money - or Heatstamps in this case, the main currency in Frostpunk 2. You automatically get a weekly Heatstamps income, which is basically a ‘tax’ system, based on your population size and the welfare of your citizens. This means that whenever things turn dire, whenever you lack housing or goods for example, your Heatstamps income will fall. If that happens, it’s very tempting to click on a faction and ‘demand funds’ from them to replenish your Heatstamp supply, but we strongly advise against it.

The problem with demanding funds is not just the slight loss of trust (which can be overcome), but the fact that the targeted faction may hate you forever. If you target a friendly faction, you may lose their support and thus your ability to pass laws. If you target an unfriendly faction, they may become a serious source of disruption in the city, and this could carry over into new chapters. What’s more, having unhappy citizens translates to an even lower Heatstamps income, so you’re only making things worse in the long run. Just don’t demand funds if you can help it.

Do Make Promises

If you’re planning on researching a certain technology or passing a certain law anyway, you may as well check if any of your factions strongly desire this. If so, you can grant it to them as a ‘promise’, thus raising their support whenever the research or law is finished.

To check each faction’s promise options, click on the faction icon and go to the ‘trust’ tab, where you’ll see the ‘make a promise’ button. Don’t worry, if none of the potential promises matches your agenda, you can simply click ‘decline to promise anything’ without losing trust.

Get Heat Bonuses

When building new districts, make sure they occupy at least three blue tiles to gain a heat bonus (they will require less coal). For example, when you build a Housing District, you can place it next to a Generator, inside a gorge to protect people from wind, or next to another Housing District. Two important things to keep in mind: you don’t need to occupy more than those three blue tiles (the heat bonus won’t increase any further), but heat bonuses from different sources can stack.

As shown in the picture above, the new Housing District gets a double heat bonus from the Generator and other Housing District. While frostbreaking, create a shaped that’ll allow you to get as many heat bonuses as possible for your future Districts.

Heat bonuses can even bring the heat demand to zero: if a Housing District has -40 base demand and -20 demand because of low temperatures, a sheltered location and a shared border with two other Districts will give it a total heat bonus of +60, thus bringing coal consumption to zero.

Group Your Districts

Related to the previous Frostpunk 2 tip, consider the District type before placing it. Not all types of Districts can be grouped together! For example, placing a Food District next to an Industrial District would contaminate the food (because of ‘squalor’) and make your citizens ill.

Don’t worry, grouping Districts in Frostpunk 2 is surprisingly easy as there are basically two groups: one that causes squalor (pollution) and one that suffers from squalor. These are the District groups that can be placed together:

• Housing Districts and Food Districts: give each other a heat bonus when placed together. They will suffer from squalor when placed next to Extraction and Industrial Districts.
• Extraction, Industrial, and Logistics Districts: give each other heat bonuses when placed together. They won’t cause harm within their own group, but don’t place them next to Housing or Food Districts.

While Food, Extraction, and Logistics need to be placed on specific resource tiles, remember that Housing and Industrial Districts can be placed anywhere - you can use them to improve heating bonuses!

Prioritize District Bonuses

Here’s one more District-placement tip: make sure you get the District bonuses from adjacent Districts first, and use the District expansion option to hit additional resource nodes later. It’s tempting to draw a District in a wobbly line from resource node to resource node, but this will probably create a weird shape that makes it much harder to obtain a (double) heat bonus.

Since you need three adjacent tiles for one heat bonus, and each District has six tiles in total, having three Districts ‘meet’ at one point is a good way to get a double heat bonus for each of those three Districts. To make that happen, each District needs a (roughly) 120-degree angle. Here’s what that looks like:

As you can see, the Food District misses two resource nodes because we prioritized District bonuses; with a District expansion, you can still get those two extra nodes!