Frostpunk 2 guide: survive the Whiteout by managing factions and stockpiling resources
Our Frostpunk 2 guide will help you survive the first Whiteout and come out stronger on the other side.
The follow-up to 2018's survival-themed city builder, returns to an alternate Earth where a brutal, neverending winter took hold during the Industrial Revolution. The sequel asks us to manage much larger and more complex settlements than its predecessor, overseeing everything from factions to districts to satellite settlements.
And then, just when you start feeling like you've figured Frostpunk 2 out, the Whiteout hits—a massive storm that strikes at the end of Chapter 3 and can potentially destroy your entire civilization.
Read on for tips on laying out your city, keeping factions happy, and more.
Thinking forward
The first thing to remember is that Frostpunk 2 is a game about planning ahead. Putting some thought into each decision with an eye toward the future is key to survival. Anything that grants you a large benefit in the short-term will almost always turn out to have large drawbacks in the long run. And likewise, picking options that don't do a lot for you now will almost always pay off later.
Not all of the benefits of a decision will be spelled out for you, either. Funding a student art commune might not seem like a great investment on paper, but it might reap rewards for years to come as you engage the youth and receive inspiring works. On the flip side, trying to rule with an iron fist and get everyone to do the maximum amount of work will boost your productivity, but may lead to negative events over time that hurt you more than the extra shifts help.
Location, location
One of the first decisions you'll have to make is how to lay out your city, and this can have a massive impact on your early success or failure. By holding 'Alt,' you can not only see where resource deposits are located, but also areas on the map that give a bonus or penalty to certain kinds of districts.
Most notably, there are two canyons on either side of the central generator district that provide shelter from the wind, reducing the amount of heat you need to generate for housing districts that have at least three of their tiles placed there. Most districts also get a discount on heating for having at least three tiles adjacent to another district. Combining these two ideas, you can build six starter housing districts that get a double heating discount, and house a lot of people without having to burn a lot of fuel.
The district adjacency bonus also applies to extraction and industrial districts—but keep in mind that placing them next to a housing district will increase squalor. Food districts are fine, though, so it makes a lot of sense to build housing along one side of your food districts and industrial on the opposite side.
Don't forget that you can also build heating hubs that will reduce the heating needs of every district they touch.
Mild discomfort
Frostpunk 2 is designed in such a way that it's impractical (if not impossible) to solve every problem your city has at the same time, especially if you're playing on anything higher than the lowest difficulty. The thing is, that's totally okay. People won't immediately start starving en masse the moment you go into the negative on food, and they won't freeze to death on the spot if some of them don't have houses. You won't maximize your population growth, and you'll likely receive some negative events, but your city can survive (and even thrive, to an extent) without meeting all demands.
The five key problems of hunger, disease, cold, squalor, and crime have a maximum value they can rise to based on how many resources you're lacking. For example, if your food meter is only about a quarter of the way into the red, the hunger crisis in your city will only ever rise to the level of a "Minor" issue. It's not a massive disaster. It's just a low level of daily misery that your people can and will tolerate, at least to a point.
Because of this, it's actually better to have all five of these bars slightly in the negative than it is to have four of them completely satisfied and ignore the fifth one completely. When you're thinking about how to spend your resources, deal with the biggest outstanding problems first.
Frigid factions
Factions and communities are probably the biggest new addition to Frostpunk 2, and you have to keep them happy to stay in power. In fact, one of the only ways to get "Game Over" is to lose their confidence and be removed from your role as steward.
It's also impractical to try and keep everyone happy at once, as factions have conflicting ideas about how to run the city. However, if you keep your promises and provide for everyone's needs, your overall trust score will remain high, tension will remain low, and you can mostly ignore a few dissenters. They don't ultimately have to all agree with you as long as you're doing a good job.
The first two communities you'll have to deal with are the New Londoners, who value progress, and the Frostlanders, who value adaptation. Basically, should we use machinery to conquer the wasteland or learn to live with the cold? Each community will then spin off a faction eventually. Communities are fairly easy to keep happy, but factions have more fanatical ideals and more demands that are harder to balance. The Pilgrims value adaptation, equality, and tradition, while the Stalwarts value progress, meritocracy, and reason.
This is where the real choice comes in, because trying to equally satisfy the desires of the Pilgrims and the Stalwarts will lead to both of them just being mildly annoyed most of the time. You should choose one of them to keep happy and mostly ignore the other, if you can. I've found that a good balance is to pick two ideologies from your main supporter faction and one from the opposition. For example, I really like the combination of adaptation, equality, and reason. With this approach, the Pilgrims love me and the Stalwarts are at least willing to tolerate me.
When you need to court supporters to pass a law, I always recommend promising research to the undecided delegates. Researching something doesn't actually require you to build it. It just costs money (called Heatstamps in Frostpunk 2) and time. I always try to avoid promising to pass a law.
Another great tool is using Promote on the factions that already like you and Deradicalize on the ones who don't, though you'll have to wait for events that grant them a level of fervor to do so.
Enough is never enough
When the Whiteout finally hits, it's going to greatly increase your energy needs and completely cripple your ability to produce food. Since you'll probably have offsite oil rigs by then (from following along with the story objectives), the fuel problem isn't as dire if you built your city properly. Running out of food is more likely to do you in, so you're going to need a lot of storage hubs.
With the size of city you should have by the first Whiteout, you will probably need at least 150,000 units of stored food, which means two food storage hubs in addition to the 50,000 you get from your city center. You could maybe get away with a bit less than this if you've set up a permanent food outpost outside your capital already, but I still wouldn't count on that. 200,000 units would be extra safe, especially if you've had a lot of migrants and population growth, as 150,000 was really just enough for me to make it through with almost none to spare.
If you run out toward the tail end of the Whiteout, remember that all is not lost. You will probably lose some population and some trust, and tensions might even rise enough to cause protests. But as long as you have high trust and low tension going into the crisis, you can probably ride it out and stabilize the city once the storm has passed.
You'll only be in big trouble if your city was already in a state of suffering or unrest when the Whiteout started, or if you run out of supplies very early.
Into the cold…
Frostpunk 2 can be a very intimidating and sometimes dispiriting game. It's designed to force you to make hard decisions about what to prioritize when you can't realistically solve every problem, and the first Whiteout is like the big final exam to see if you've learned enough to keep your people alive in this harsh world. But with a bit of grit (and the advice above), you should live to see the skies clear again—and start preparing for even greater challenges ahead.