Frostpunk: Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Familiarize Yourself With the Basics

Frostpunk Beginner Tips

Like any other city-builder game out there, Frostpunk’s gameplay loop centers around a few primary resources that are vital to survival. The main resources you’ll be harvesting are coal, wood, and steel. Right out the gate, you’ll notice how incredibly important coal is. This is the resource that keeps that generator pumping; if you run out of coal and the generator fails, it’s game over. Needless to say, you’re going to want to have a ton of coal to work with. Early on, you can get coal by sending your people to dig up coal piles. Once those dry up, you can build coal thumpers to generate new coal piles, or build a mining station on top of a coal deposit to keep it flowing.

On the other hand, wood and steel are the basic resources you need to craft anything. These are used to build tents for housing, medical posts, the workshop, and cook houses. Coal should always be your number one priority, of course, but once you have some time on your hands, look towards gathering wood and steel to provide shelter and food for your people. If all your civilians die, it’s game over. One note about food rations: you’ll want to build a hot house or a hunter’s hut to gather raw food. After that, build a cook house to convert the raw food units into consumable food rations.

Aside from that, don’t forget to connect all your buildings to the generator. All your buildings need to be adjacent to a street or they won’t be accessible. Simply open up the construction menu, click the street icon, then click on the point where you want the new street to end.

Keep Your People Busy

Frostpunk Beginner Tips

In the bottom right corner of your screen, you’ll see the total number of people you have in your city, along with the number of people who are currently unemployed. In Frostpunk, an unemployed civilian is basically a waste of space, and you’ll want to make sure you’re maximizing your resources at all times. Always make use of every single civilian you have and put them to work. Whether they’re out hunting for resources or shoveling coal, it doesn’t matter. Every single person should be contributing to the city in one way or other.

You need to learn the difference between workers and engineers as well. Workers will only provide manual labor, and they can take on almost every job in the city. Engineers are more specialized, and you can only employ them in medical posts, infirmaries, and the workshop. Workers can’t be placed in these facilities, but they can be used to form scout teams once you build a beacon.

Be Careful With Your Laws

Frostpunk Beginner Tips

After every 18 in-game hours, you’ll be able to pass a new law in the city. However, this can seriously affect your Hope and Discontent meters. If Hope falls to zero or Discontent is maxed out, it’s game over. You need to strike a delicate balance between the two meters, so keep that in mind when passing new laws. For instance, passing the child labor law will cause Hope to fall, but if you choose to build child shelters to educate the children instead, Hope will rise. At the same time, child labor can be very useful early on in the game when you’re short on manpower. On the other hand, child shelters allow you to educate them and they can assist you in engineering and medical facilities later on.

It’s a risk-reward balance that forces you to think about short and long-term consequences. Always check your book of laws after every 18 hours and see if there’s anything you can pass to raise your city’s Hope. Passing new laws will also unlock new buildings and facilities for your city, and this could make things easier for you.

Always Be Researching Something

Frostpunk Beginner Tips

Once you build the workshop in Frostpunk, you’ll unlock the extensive technology tree, which is vital for efficiency. At the start of the game, I recommend researching medical posts and generator upgrades. Your people will get sick when the temperature drops, but if you have medical posts, you can still save some of them. On the other hand, the generator upgrades are important as you’ll need to keep improving it to warm up your whole city. The quicker you expand the city, the more power you’re going to need to keep everyone warm.

To stay afloat, you’ll also want to research those coal thumpers, sawmills, and steelworks as soon as you can. These will provide more jobs in the city, and also allow you to generate even more resources per hour. After every generator upgrade, you’ll also want to work towards researching coal efficiency, which allows the generator to burn coal at a slower rate.

Keep a Stockpile of Everything

Frostpunk Beginner Tips

This should go without saying, but it’s extremely important to try to have a surplus of every resource in the game. You can easily expand your storage by building resource depots in the city, allowing you to store more units. As you play through Frostpunk’s main scenario, the temperature will continue to dip, forcing you to expend even more resources to keep everything running. The game is also fond of throwing curve balls and other unexpected challenges at you, but you should be able to handle these if you’ve got enough resources at hand.

Don’t get too comfortable with your city’s progress; whenever you feel like you’ve got a bit of breathing room, plan ahead and think about how you can expand your city even further and generate even more resources.