Frostpunk Beginner’s Guide: Essential Tips and Tricks for Survival

Frostpunk throws you into the thick of things right away, meaning you’ll quickly learn that making quick, deliberate decisions is the key to surviving Frostpunk. However, that’s a difficult prospect with the cards stacked against you. 

In this beginner’s guide full of tips and tricks for survival, we’ll cover everything you need to know about managing your time (what you should pay attention to first), properly gathering your resources (it’s less straightforward than you think), and signing better to make for a better settlement, among other essential tidbits of information. 

Tip 1: Manage Your Working Hours Wisely

When you begin a settlement in Frostpunk, it’s important to know that time is a deciding factor in everything you do. 

In the upper-left menu, you will see the clock. This will tell you whether it’s day or night, which is important because your workers don’t work at night. That means you have to properly manage your workers’ time during daylight hours so that your settlement is operating at maximum efficiency. 

The best way to manage your time is to assign all necessary workforce actions at night. This means you have fewer administrative duties during the day and more time to spend maximizing worker efficiency during that time.  

Since you only have a limited number of days to survive, there’s no reason to waste waking hours assigning tasks. And if you can’t manage all the necessary steps to start your colony in the first 10 days, you will most likely fail.

Note: you can also increase gameplay speed using the clock if you assign everything you need and want work to begin immediately.  

Tip 2: Gather Resources Around the Generator

The first thing necessary to begin work is to gather coal for your generator, wood for your buildings, and steel for your workshop.

Starting the generator, a building in the center of the settlement, is your first big task. It will produce heat for your population and make them less grumpy.

However, you need to start the generator by putting some coal inside. So assign as many workers as you can to collect coal from the coal piles located to the north of the generator.

Assign other workers to collect steel and iron from the wreckages to the east and west of the generator. And the rest can start collecting wood in the southern part of the settlement.

When you have enough resources for the generator and your first buildings, you can start assembling other basic structures.

Tip 3: Construct Essential Buildings Around the Generator

The first buildings that you should construct are tents, hunter’s hut, and medical post. 

The tents will provide your population with basic shelter. The hunter’s hut will provide food. And the medical post is essential for healing the injured workforce.

As time goes by, you’ll need even more resources. However, build a workshop before going into the mines. 

That way, you can start building coal and iron mines. The new technologies will become available in the tech tree after building the workshop, and you can start using them to build even better and more efficient buildings and add-ons.

Tip 4: Upgrade Your Technology Tree

After building a workshop, start upgrading your generator efficiency, mines productivity, resource gathering, accommodations, and exploration. All these upgrades will help your city grow and thus maintain the needs of your population much better.

Different upgrades require wood and a certain amount of time. The first thing you’ll need to upgrade is the hunter’s hut, which will be able to provide even more food for the starved population.

Then, focus on the heating system and exploration. All of these extra activities will give you more possibilities to find additional resources for your further upgrades.

The expeditions will give you opportunities to find new survivors outside the borders of the city, which means a larger workforce.

Tip 5: Sign New and Better Laws

Inevitably, your settlers will get unhappy because of constant hard work and general social discontent. In order to fulfill the desires of your population, you will need to sign new laws in the Book of Laws.

The most important laws are the ones that protect children and take care of the injured. Be sure to sign the Child Shelter law, which will take care of all of the kids in the settlement while their parents are at work. Then, issue Care House law, which will take care of the terminally ill.

Apart from these, you need to dispose of the dead. The best option is to issue the Cemetery law, but if you’re low on resources and time, then you ought to just sign the Corpse Disposal law. People will not be happy with this, but you can counteract this with other laws.

Lastly, you need to keep your healthy population entertained. For this reason, sign Fighting Arena and Public House laws to keep discontent levels low. 

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And that’s all you need to know to start surviving in the harsh climate of Frostpunk.

If you want to know more about the survival strategy game from 11-Bit Studios, be sure to head over and check out our review of the game. Also be sure to check out our review of Frostpunk‘s expansion and our other Frostpunk guides.