7 Frostpunk 2 tips and tricks for beginners

Diving into Frostpunk 2 for the first time is overwhelming. The ever-present cold, the demands of your citizens, trust, disease, squalor, factions, research, resource management – it’s a lot to deal with even if you’ve played the original.

To help make those first few hours a little easier, we’ve pulled together 7 tips and tricks picked during our time playing Frostpunk 2 for review. They are general tips to guide you in the right direction, but still keep the core experience intact without spoiling too much.

Pause and fast forward

Frostpunk 2 is a game that rewards planning. Blazing ahead on the max speed setting is a recipe for failure. As soon as you load into a game, pause, take stock of where resources are located, what factions live in your city, and how the topography will have an impact on the shape of your city. From there, play in short fast forward bursts, pausing regularly to make choices, construct new districts, research new tech, and so on. Every decision matters and pausing often grants you the time to make the right decisions.

Research is key to survival

Playing Frostpunk 2 is a bit like trying to solve a problem, only for three others to pop up when you finally hit a solution. You’ll often be short on something, be in heat, workers, or resources. The only way to manage this ever-changing puzzle is by using and abusing the research available in the Idea Tree. 

Without research, you’ll quickly chew through starting resource deposits and your population’s needs will quickly exceed your production capacity. Research is 90% of the time the solution to any problem that might pop up. Low on food? Research and build Hothouses. Heat Demand is too high? Look to get Housing Insulation, Food Energy Efficiency, and Heat Dispatcher. Need Shelter fast? Invest in Housing Blocks. Squalor rising? Opt for Filtration Towers.

Research the Melting Deep Deposits early

Though the starting resource deposits, especially coal, may seem abundant, they aren’t and will deplete faster than you think, especially as your population and production grows. One of the best Idea Tree techs you can get to mitigate the loss of finite resource deposit is Melting Deep Deposits. Once researched, you can place Deep Mining Drills on Extraction and Food districts to gather from Deep Deposits, which house an enormous amount of resources. Deep Deposits have an infinity loop symbol next to them and will show the type of deposit they house – Deep Fertile Soil, Deep Coal Vein, and Vast Frozen Forest.

✓ Tip

One of the best tips for novice players is to save often. Hit a major story milestone? Save. About to side with a faction? Save. Frostpunk 2 is all about trial and error so having a convenient save to jump back to if things get awry is a lifesaver.

Establish colonies and explore the Frostland

Though Deep Deposits offer a major lifeline, they aren’t enough to sustain a growing city. Set up a Logistics District and get Frostland Teams out exploring for new settlements to gather resources and colonies to settle as soon as possible. Doing so will beef up the influx of resources. Similarly, make sure to explore as many regions as you can and to gather any resource deposits you come across, especially cores, which you’ll need for the most advanced building upgrades and tech.

You can customise the difficulty settings to your liking before starting the story of a new Utopia Builder city. If you’re just starting out, it’s well worth lowering everything down to Citizen level to learn the ropes.

You can’t please everyone

Frostpunk 2 leans heavily on factions and communities with different ideals and ambitions for the future. Try as you may, there’s simply no way to please everyone so don’t waste time trying to keep everyone sweet. Instead, favour one or two factions that align with your vision for the city then try to keep the rest of them neutral by funding the odd project and passing the odd law they agree with. 

Build Stockpile Hubs

Play your cards right and you’ll have times when you’re pulling in plenty of resources. To make the most of this, make sure to build Stockpile Hubs where you can store excess resources for when things get hard during the next Whiteout. If built next to their corresponding Extraction District, they also decrease the Workforce Demand, giving you more workers to use in other places. For example Fuel Stockpile Hub built next to a coal Extraction District will lower the Workforce Demand in the coal mine.

Read the tutorial notes

Frostpunk 2 is a complex game with many moving parts. Developer 11 Bit Studios is more than aware of this and has pieced together a robust set of tutorial pages that dive into the specifics of everything from Squalor and Tension to the Idea Tree and exploring the Frostland. If you’re in doubt about anything, then lean on the tutorials as they’ll more often than not lay things out clearly to help you move forward. Tap the question mark icon the top right of the screen to access the tutorial pages.