Summary
There has been a certain appeal tohard video gamesthat has kept people coming back to them for decades. Something about the challenge, and the rewards for persisting against them, is a common theme within a plethora of titles across many genres.
This is no less true with theFrostpunkseries, which places the hopes and lives of a myriad of citizens in the hands of the player, asking them to guide the last embers of civilization in a cruel, relentless world of cold storms and scarcity. For fans who enjoy the difficulty of thesemore complex management games, or for newbies who wantFrostpunk 2to be their first foray into this frigid genre, there are a handful of survival buildings essential to getting a good start.
4Biowaste Hothouse
Greatly Increases Food Production
The Biowaste Hothouse is an integral building for early game foot production, producing 70 food when it is staffed at capacity with part of the player’s workforce. This hothouse is used to supplement the primary means of early game food acquisition, which are the food districts founded on fertile soil, seal colonies, or other sources of nutrition. Acquiring this Biowaste Hothouse technology also allows for a special ability to be activated that will further bolster the player’s food stocks - Excessive Fertilization. Excessive Fertilization greatly increases the amount of food produced every day, though it does come at the rather grave costof increasing disease.
The Biowaste Hothouse, Excessive Fertilization, and Emergency Shifts on food production districts all come together to produce a phenomenal amount of food in the early game, but not without its risks.Frostpunk 2isn’t atitle fit for beginners, and such a large output of resources does have its drawbacks. The aforementioned disease will take its toll on the population, and this plus the drawbacks of emergency shifts will decrease trust among the factions.
3Heat Dispatcher
Provides Warmth With A Few Strings Attached
Building houses as close as one can to the generator is a great way to be economical with warmth, as the individual heat demand of housing districts decreases if they are piled together in a neighborhood of sorts (make sure there is enough free land to make a few housing districts at a time!). However, warmth is not just required for the immediate region around the furnace, and as the city expands into multiple extraction, food, and housing districts, alongside individual buildings, the cold will eventually outpace what the generator can provide for - and generator upgrades are too expensive to focus on so early in the game.
A lack of warmth is one of the main ways playerstend to struggle in chapter one, and as such, the Heat Dispatcher is an absolute must-have. This dispatcher can be added to any housing district to produce 20 warmth - requiring a large workforce to remain in operation, however. It can be a bit expensive for early game, but the result is a great burden lifted as players don’t have to worry about their expanding housing districts expanding right into the cold.
2Untreated Sawmill
Acquiring Materials - At Any Cost
Materials are an essential resource for reducing the squalor of players' citizens. It’s all well and good to have citizens well-fed and warm, but their living conditions will remain low unless they have their material needs met. At first, it’s quite easy tostay on top of prefabsneeded to build districts by frostbreaking to them until later in the game, so focusing on quality over quantity for these housing districts is key - and that means a surplus of materials to ensure, even in times of blizzards or other catastrophes, that citizens' living conditions don’t worsen.
The untreated sawmill produces a reliable 170 materials for just 20 heat, however, it requires a disproportionate amount of workforce compared to other survival buildings, and beyond this, will also increase the disease in an area slightly. It’s a great way to build a surplus of materials to use for those first few disasters, but if used in tandem with other means of maximizing productivity, such as Excessive Fertilization, one might find their city becoming a hotbed of disease.
1Teaching Hospital
A Great Way To Counteract The Disease Being Accrued
So,food is under control. The citizens of New London are warm, and they’re not living in squalor. The last thing necessary to ensure they have a holistic lifestyle and that the major needs are taken care of is a reduction in disease. Especially with some of the more extreme measures used in producing resources, or through buildings, disease will quickly become a major burden on the player and could even spell the end of their tenure as Steward. The main way to counteract this in the early game, and a survival building that should be very high up on the player’s priority list, is the Teaching Hospital.
The Teaching Hospital is built in housing districts to reduce the amount of disease within that district. It’s a great way to compensate for Untreated Sawmills or Excessive Fertilization, reducing the overall disease produced by these measures. Similar to Excessive Fertilization, this building grants an ability that increases output at the cost of a drawback. Preliminary Triage further decreases disease, but at the cost of increasing deaths overall.
