While recovering from the flu I had been sinking countless hours into Frostpunk. Its first mission entails a group of survivors that are seeking a new home at the turn of a new ice age which threatens humanity. Everything seems totally bleak and the few survivors you do have are a mere handful that you must manage properly in order to grow the small village into a town and from a town into a thriving, surviving city. Countless challenges are faced as the weather shifts back and forth from colder weather to just slightly warmer weather. Resource management is a stressful but essential aspect of the game as you juggle between researching new technologies, but also affording them and the upkeep of all your buildings and developments through coal, steel, wood, and food. Warmth is also its own form of commodity, something that needs to be distributed in a managed manner that keeps the citizens warm but also efficient in the workplace. Focus too much on warmth and your coal depletes rapidly. Ignore the homes and upgrades and your people grow too cold and sick, slowly dying off and becoming incapable of work. This leads to a series of developments that ideally has you seeking automation, allowing you to manage all of the upkeep and resources through robots which you must develop throughout the game. This first mission has an end-game, however. It isn't just building and expanding until something goes wrong. You must survive a week of intense weather as a storm rolls in towards the end. Where all the factories and income industries collapse entirely. No production. Just waiting it out.
It took me quite a few attempts to really figure things out. Most of the time something would go catastrophically wrong. Either the people would revolt and leave without me managing to contain their anger, or resources would suddenly run thin and lead to total despair and collapse of all other industries as I attempt to patch the gaping hole in my upkeep. Often enough this was coal, leading to me diverting attention from other factories. Sometimes I'd fail to keep things warm enough, leading to factories running dry as workers grew sick and died off, with my medical industry being too weak to keep up and heal them enough to send them back to work. It was only when I discovered the heat map in the game which showcased the colder and warmer areas of the city that things sort of clicked. I realised I could utilise the warmth of certain industries to warm homes, while also rapidly focusing on research to jump ahead and get industries upgraded well in advance of any issues. This meant diving into the coal upgrades, increasing mine efficiency and stacking it up in storage. I ensured very quickly that coal wouldn't be running dry, and I kept an eye on the generator consumption to ensure that certain areas of the city weren't eating it all up without it going anywhere important. I ended up actually turning off all of my steam heaters having focused attention on the home upgrades which increased warmth. And then from there upgrading the generator for increasing its radius, efficiency in coal usage, and then the heat it throws out.
With coal not even a concern, I managed to reach the point (and quite late out of my own discovery) that the factory produces more of the robots for automating. Once I realised this, I started to try to pump those things out, throwing them at the factories so that the workers would stop getting sick and the production wouldn't end in the evenings and all night. Endless, and automated production meant everything ran smoothly, but one thing I failed to keep track of kept becoming a problem: food. I had no idea how to go about increasing food production at the later part of the game, having had my scouts exhaust the surroundings and ultimately coming across nothing. For solid food production I needed more steam cores, and I just was not finding those at all. Everything my steam cores had gone to were essential, I couldn't risk removing anything. Though to my surprise I managed to keep the discontent at a minimum and actually reached maximum hope. This was about the time that I was removing people from workplaces and keeping them warm in their homes. I kept that eye on the warmth in the residential zone and focused on every possible upgrade I could at this point with resources (outside of steam cores) at a constant high. I went for the more passive route of handling with the people with any sort of discourse that appeared within the city whenever any minor problems arose, and this was through religion rather than going full totalitarian. Though I did have religious structures built around areas of industry for the workers to keep them motivated. I guess that isn't too different from starting something rather cult-like.
I threw up churches in the surrounding areas around the homes and would have the people attend prayer, boosting up the hope and keeping the discontent down with a few guard stations that also patrolled the areas here and there. I don't think the guard stations really did much in comparison to the frequent church events, though. I barely manned them as they kept getting a bit too cold, also feeling like a bit of a waste of human resources when I desperately needed to handle food production and medicine. A little bit of automation in these fields but not enough to handle it all, after all I was incredibly late to the automation side of things in this instance. I'm surprised I managed to make it this far, but at this point it did start to feel like a (no pun intended) breeze. Everything was running smoothly, I had little management to deal with and the coal production was outpacing the generator's coal hunger even at its maximum with all upgrades. But this is where things were starting to hit me: I had to prepare for an upcoming storm. I had a series of tasks to pursue: recall my scouts that were searching for resources and survivors in the wild. Save the nearby settlements by bringing them in. Make sure my generator was prepared. But the worst challenge: achieve a week's worth of food. It was already too late. I didn't notice these requests appearing at first. I was so caught up in everything else and making sure it continued to run smoothly that I unintentionally wasted the preparation time I had.
I panicked and tried to research additional food production facilities and man them as soon as possible. This wasn't working as it was already getting too cold to keep people in them. I had to place them in the outer parts of the city where the warmth wasn't enough. And the steam heaters just didn't do anything at this point. I had about a day's worth of food rations. And the cooking building that turned raw food into rations was too cold to operate. I had just one raw food left around the time the storm rolled in, and all production of anything that wasn't automated came to a total close. People started to get sick, people started to request more medical facilities. I didn't have enough, nor enough warmth for them. Food eventually ran out and people started to complain. Fortunately it takes a while for people to get hungry, and a lot longer for them to begin starving. I managed to make it through the week without people dying from the cold, but with people starting to get gravely sick and very hungry. Hey, I did it, at least! It only took about ten hours of playing to figure it out. But it was really rewarding to see the city flourish and to adapt to the problems it faced as I managed to learn more about what the facilities offer. Super fun!
I liked how the use of politics worked here, it felt a bit odd that even at the end of the world there would be this level of turmoil. Where people are threatening to uprise, thinking of running out into the ice and storms. Where murder and theft runs rampant in the hardest of times. There could've been a bit more of that, I think. But I don't think such features are in the game, though I did hear that this side of things is increased in Frostpunk 2. Off to the next scenario!
Congratulations @namiks! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPCheck out our last posts: