What are the best tips for Frostpunk 2? Any good strategy or city-builder game really challenges you, and Frostpunk might just be one of the most difficult, given the treacherous, apocalyptic climate you and your colonists are trying to survive in.
Given the situation, it’s not easy to be a leader and keep everyone happy while they’re starving and freezing to death, so we’ve got some Frostpunk 2 tips to get you going in the right direction. We learned all of these through playing the strategy game ourselves, and we wish we’d known them sooner. While we’re at it, we can also help you heat homes in Frostpunk 2 and earn more Frostpunk 2 Heatstamps when you’re feeling the pinch.
Here are our top tips for success in Frostpunk 2:
Prefabs are a crucial resource
When excavating the area in your first days, you might be tempted to focus purely on food and fuel. Don’t sleep on prefab extraction, though, arguably the most important resource. Prefabs are basically building materials, and are required to erect buildings, so without them, you could end up in a vicious circle in which you can’t get more, and you’ll be stuck.
Instead, focus on building up a stockpile of them early, and you won’t have to worry when it then comes to building more food or coal extraction sites later on.
Don’t concentrate on one area
With the above point in mind, don’t get stuck just focusing on one material at a time. Spread your resources around, and ensure you’ve got food, prefab, material, and fuel extraction all going on at the same time, they’re all important for survival.
If at any point you need to focus more of your attention on any one area, you can expand that site, add another, or temporarily stop operations from lesser needed sites, but it’s better to have your options open than to be scrambling to build things last minute.
Utilize your HUD
There’s a lot going on in the Frostpunk 2 HUD, but it’s actually really useful once you get familiar with it all, and using it regularly could be the difference between success and failure. For a start, there’s your factions, trust, and tension at the bottom, which tells you how liked you are and by whom. If you are regularly reviled, we’ve got some advice on how to increase your Frostpunk 2 trust.
Easy to forget are the five icons at the top: hunger, disease, cold, squalor, and crime, but these should not be overlooked. Hovering over any one of these icons tells you in great detail what needs changing. For example, squalor might be increased by a specific law, such as machine-centric shifts, so you might consider reverting this law.
Another important part of the HUD is the bar along the top, but, more crucially, the right-hand side, showing housing, food, materials, and goods for the current colony. If it’s red, get to work on it right away, perhaps using the materials sharing feature discussed below.
Your current quests also show up in your UI in story mode, making it far easier to progress through the story. However, something even more important about this far left section of the screen is that it shows current promises to factions and how long you have to keep them – always have one eye on those countdowns.
Don’t forget to pause
If things are getting overwhelming, the pause function is incredibly useful. While it does mean you won’t be making any progress on research or exploration, it also stops relations getting worse and gives you time to think about your next move.
Generally speaking, you won’t need to use this while things are trudging along in the early chapters, but as you get further in, have more colonies on the go, and more troublesome faction members, it helps to have a but of a breather.
Similarly, speeding things up can come in handy, too. It’s a great little feature when you’re desperate for research to finish or for council to open up again, just be sure things aren’t in a rapid decline when you switch into fast-forward mode.
Make full use of the research facility
Once you’ve unlocked and built your research institute, make the most of it by ensuring something is always being researched. This one is along the same lines as utilizing your HUD, as the research tree icon in the lower right-hand corner of the screen tells you in just a glance whether anything is being researched and how far along it is, or whether your researchers aren’t being utilized.
Across six different areas, the research tree is huge, so the more you get researched, the more you unlock, and the greater your options. The other thing to remember here is that simply researching something holds no obligation to actually implement it, so you can research as many ideas as you like.
Tap into other colony’s resources
Unlike in the first Frostpunk, in which you had one colony to look after and focus all your efforts on, you can get up to three or four colonies at a time in the sequel, depending on how you play. At this point, it gets quite tough to keep track of each area and ensure each has its own share of the materials, especially when some locations don’t have certain resources at all.
This is where the handy resource sharing mechanic comes in, but it’s easy to miss. In the top right-hand corner, next to the Frostland icon, single-click on any colony other than New London. This gives you a quick snapshot of how things like cold and hunger are faring over there, but also shows up to very useful features: ‘Resource transfer’ and ‘Send people’.
As your main colony, you can only send resources and workforce to and from New London, not between outside colonies, but it’s a great way to ensure all of your colonies are receiving their fair share of items. You can even use the simple ‘meet demand’ icon to make things easier.
There is a limit to how much can be transferred depending on the trails capacity, so if you’re having trouble, try adding Frostpunk 2 skytrails to the route for increased capacity.
Use chapter saves to reset
So, there’s this thing in Frostpunk 2 where you might be told you’re at a point of no return. The next decision you make is tough, and will change the outcome of the rest of your game. And its true – to an extent. However, if you want to try various outcomes, or one turns out too difficult and ends your rule, you can turn back to Chapter saves. Autosaves also stack up, but it’s often hard to tell at which point you were at then. Chapter saves, on the other hand, are perfect to reverse time and try again from a safe(ish) place. Especially when those tough decisions come into play.
These tips should help you on your way to survival, but we can’t do it all for you. Read our Frostpunk 2 review to find out just how tough it is, then make the most of our guides on how to unlock the Frostpunk 2 Council Hall and how to get more Frostland teams for further exploration.