Advanced Tips

See Advanced strategies for a more concise list of the arguably most important of those tips, especially those which apply to people playing on Extreme/Survivor difficulties.

## Overview

### Build or tech only if you need it. Otherwise, focus on your economy

Frostpunk is a game of priority. If the needs can be delayed, it should then be delayed in favor of a stronger economy.

* If heating technology like Steam Hub is not needed, economy technology like steelworks can be researched instead.
* If people are only going to start eating raw food on day 3, cookhouse only needs to be built on day 2 night instead.
* If there are raw food for cookhouse to process on day 3, raw food production can be delayed in favor of more wood and steel.

There are 2 needs : Food, and medical care. It is linked to heat, which is a soft requirement linked to sickness, and hard requirement to food and medical facilities : all but hunters requiring chilly conditions to operate.

There are 3 economy resources : Wood & Steel obviously, and "research time". Research wins the game. Wood and Steel allows you to reap the benefits of research (and paying for the research).

Your best asset is your people : when you have 600+ people, you're set. When you're 80, it is difficult to produce enough of everything. Keep that in mind, you all tyrants!

### Overdrive : a free renewable resource

Turning on the overdrive in Frostpunk is getting +1 heat level (+2 with research) for free. There is no more coal consumption or damaging the generator as it would happen in real life. You only blow the generator at 100%. 99% stress level is perfectly fine.

Higher heat level means less discontent, less sick for the cost of... nothing. As long as overdrive is off, the generator is recovering from it and thus "generating resource". Use it.

Keep track of the meter though, you might need your overdrive for real in a few days.

## Free storage

You can place building scaffold to bank your resource. Place buildings, like resource storage (steel+wood), medical post (wood), or steam hubs (steel), and pause their construction when your wood or steel is reaching storage limit. Cancel these scaffolds for 100% refund when you need the resource.

After stabilizing the city, you should build them resource storage. Note that big resource depots are mostly useless, it is only to reduce the number of building for very advanced cities: it reduces the load on the PC.

## Micromanagement

* You can use the buildings abilities, like emergency shift, more frequently by having more of the same buildings and moving the people. Like with 2 workshops and 5 engineers, alternating emergency shift and engineers between the 2 workshops to research 24/7.
* Use the R button to rotate between all building of the same type : it is really usefull to use building abilities, turn on/off heaters or extended shifts, staff/unstaff buildings, etc. Of course you can remap it, but R works fine.

* You can operate night-only medical facilities. This would keep your engineers and sick people working in the day, and use the less productive night time to heal. Staff 3 engineer at medical posts gets you 100% (+bonuses) efficiency from 8pm to 6am. This technique allows you to delay "actual healing" when you get infirmaries. Even infirmaries can be used that way as with high efficiency it takes less than a night to heal a sick (but factor in the delay of "going to treatment", which can be very long). This is using medical posts for **their intended purpose**: emergency relief. It's a goddamn red cross tent, not a hospital.

* Hunters can be staffed at night, and work on a partial day shift from 1500 onward. As long as a hunter enter the workplace at night, the 12 hour hunt will begin, even though the rest of the hunters are still far from workplace; hence, staffing for hunters can be done at about 2330 after the hunters are mostly done building. My technique is having one guy preparing the stuff for others: when they bring back food, you can unstaff the hunter houses, and restaff with one guy.

* Cookhouses : a common trick is the "close the cafeteria" to prevent the "going to eat" guy who do nothing the whole day. Always have cooked food while doing so, else starving people will eat raw food (never ever a good idea).
* Cookhouses : at night, always have one guy at work to "protect" the raw food stash from starving people. They will refrain from eating raw food if there is a cook, even if nothing is actually cooked. Use regular shift for cookhouse, extending it is rather useless. Similarly, during day time, it can be staffed with an employee "in treatment", or building alone a building (takes a long time), to prevent starving people from eating raw food. This delays, about 24-36 hours, the time that they eat raw food from recently hungry to when they are about to die from starvation.

* Building : 'Builders' can be manipulated to walk near the building site by assigning them to gather from nearby resource pile first. Builders are not productive when they are walking to the building site; but if they are first walking to their workplace, later dismissed when the builders are near the worksite, the builders would have produced resources while walking.
* Building : Roads. One tile will request one guy. Many guys will cross the map to build one tile, then walk back to their tent. It can be really beneficial to have only one guy during the day building roads, as he will only walk once and build all the road nearly as fast as simply walking.

* Scouting : When your scouts are scouting a new location, move them to a nearby explored location, if possible. Scouts move faster to explored location, reducing the the total time to reach a far new location.

## Heating

Steam Hubs would be the recommended way to provide heating. The heat zone not only provide heating for the workplaces, but also for the residentials. If you need to cover sparse area urgently, Heater might be useful. Insulation upgrade tend to be too specialised to be useful early.

### Steam Hubs vs Generator Range

Steam Hubs are more expensive, costing 20 steel each, but are much better than generator range that has no more related costs. As always, resources (20 steel) let you buy the best option :

Raw efficiency :

* Research time : 1 tech to get unlimited space. Just build more steam hubs VS another research for lvl 2
* 2 Steam Hubs cover more building space than 1 level of Generator Range, at the same coal cost (2\*3coal/h vs 6 coal/h)
* **Twice as efficient** as lvl1 generator range coal consumption wise *(from another removed contribution defending generator range, concluding it is roughly equivalent... **if** a steam hub uses as much as one level of generator range when it actually consumes half)*
* The first level of generator range gives you very little room **(small ring)** when the last level gives you plenty **(large ring)**. This has a huge impact, as the first one is really the one you need when you have nothing.

Work & Housing districts : efficency via flexibility :

* flexible, only build one more steam hub when the previous district is full
* flexible for work-housing separate heating needs
* useful for automatons, especially research automatons. Resources (coal/wood/Steel/food) automatons continue to produce when "going to refuel", but when research automatons end a research, they will not research until refueled. Build and pause steam hubs in front of their research workshop. Make a automated workshop district in the cold btw.

End game efficiency :

* For 6 steam hubs around all the city, you get up to 10 blocks (roads) away coverage (bar some holes you can cover differently use of resource depot). It is equivalent to lvl 4 generator range, which is up to 8 blocks away.
* Steam Hubs benefit from Steam Hub Efficiency Upgrade, which is more efficient than the Generator Efficiency Upgrade for the Generator. (-33% Coal usage with one tech (locked under another useless tech though), vs. -10% & -10% with two techs).
* During storms (endless has them frequently), steam hub and heaters can get your production building to continue production, where generator range leaves you only with heater, that are not enough.

## Wood

On day one, you can clear unnecessary roads for early wood. You can get 13 wood out of the inner ring with careful removing : clear them by 5 wood, 5 wood, then 3 wood.

There are two schools (Frostpunk is balanced as a great game):

* The wall drill rush : aim for Wall Drill by day 2 night, never research sawmills.
* Stick to the sawmill, wall drill is the worst use of steam core. Sawmill is the first research and you lay 3 sawmills and 1 GP by night 1, getting everyone inside a building for day 2.

I would say the wall drill rush is a good tip : I did it for a long time. Wall drill is place and forget. The sawmill is for very advanced if the map allows it (most will). Is there enough wood laying around ? Mostly yes. At least until you get to stabilise and win the game. Then, you can go straight for advanced wall drills with automaton.

* Wall drill update are horrific, so you never build them, and stay at lvl1 insulation. It can hurt at the first -50°C drop
* Sawmills will have used up all their wood by the first -50°C drop. You will rebuild them farther away as steam sawmills.
* Steam sawmills with the sawmill upgrade is basically a better insulated wall drill requiring no steam core : the production is really close (120 vs 90\*1.25=113).
* Steam sawmills lvl2 insulation protects you from getting gravely ills at -50°C, which is the first scary big drop. This is invaluable.
* End game : 4 Automated steam sawmills produces twice the amount of an automated advanced wall drill. It is necessary to fuel an extremely pro-active research (ex : my personnal challenge is getting all tech by day 30 in extreme endless endurance, or 23 for extreme a new home). Sawmill range extension begins to be usefull only when your first steam sawmills runs out of wood. This is far in the game tbh.
* Very end game : back to wall drills, but you have won anyway ;)

## Steel

Wood is more important in the early game, but have the Steelworks researched before its too late. Steel production is heavily dependent on research.

Note that gathering posts gather steel better than lvl 1 Steelworks, but have limited resources.

I always refrain from building lvl 1 steelworks and always research lvl 1 and 2 steelworks back to back and build lvl 2. Doing so, I build my guys bunkhouses before having my steelworks, and they cost a ton of steel. So don't be afraid of lacking steel while skipping lvl1 steelworks. Just don't forget them.

Each 3 steel technologies are very impactful : it roughly doubles (40=>70=>130 each day on normal) the production each steps, so they are huge improvments : +/- 100% more ressources, to compare to, for example, 15% from faster gathering.

## Food

Delay as late as you can on producing food. Food production is 115-350% more productive with more technology; and also, you do not always suffer to have a few more hungry people. With normal difficulty, 80 people and 80 raw food, you can delay serious food production to day 7 night. Open cookhouse on day 4, and maybe just 1 hunter hut on day 6 to provide the ration needed for emergency shift.

For a detail view of Food additives vs Soup visit this page: Food Additives and Soup Comparison

When you start with at least 3 steam cores, you might consider Hothouse than to go for the Hunters' Huts. Hothouse provide the best worker substitute for your Steam cores, after Wall Drill and in the early game. A normal Hothouse has about the same labour productivity as the Hunters' Hangers with the Hunting Tactics upgrade, but the Hothouse profits from Extended Shifts, Emergency Shifts and Agitators and Shrines. A normal Hothouse using Extended Shifts next to a Shrine produces **50.4** Raw Food per day, that is more than a fully upgraded Hunters' Hanger (**45** Raw Food per Day). For critical situations the laws Emergency Shift, Organic Fertiliser and Foreman can help the Hothouse as well.

Having no Hunters' Huts in the beginning will leave you with a food deficit, but this can be overcome by using one Emergency Shift on the first Hothouse build.

The same argument can be made about Fishing Harbour vs Foragers' Quarters.

## *Steam Core usage*

Common knowledge is way off track concerning steam core efficiency :

* "All hail the wall drill", "sawmills are bad, skip it" are comments you find all over the place
* *"Hothouses are NOT an efficient use of steam cores. You'd save more workforce with automatons."*
* *Of cause you can't exactly build automatons in early game but you don't exactly have many cores in early game either.*
* *Hothouses are at best a "transition technology", and not a very advantageous ones. Skip it and focus your technological advancement elsewhere.*
* *You'll need the cores to secure your midgame and when that time hits you'll be in a far better position if you ignored the hothouses branch altogether.*

Rational best use of steam cores are in order :

* Research automaton (engineer work & engineer working at night which is huge enough for many to use emergency shift on workshops). Hard to get there though, as it is far down the tech tree.
* Infirmaries (engineer work & halves the healing time aka downtime of sick workers & allows to only heal at night saving working time)
* Hothouses (best use for non-engineer work) : I estimate it gives you 20 workers (twice as much as wall drill) compared to hunthouse with hunter gear (1 research for 1 research). Also, see above. It is 1 research vs 3 research (hunter gear, hunter hangar, hunting tactics) to get to the same efficiency, and still is better because extended shifts and shrines/agitator applies. You can automate it. Industrial hothouse is a big step up (100% more productive meaning another 20 workers for the second steam core AND soothes the heating problem, when wall drill upgrades are meh. They close during storms just as hunters huts. Downside is the size and the heating requirements. Ah, for those into child labor (I'm not), it is golden.
* Automatons > 80% efficiency researched (==137% efficiency 10 workers). If you have that upgrade, you are far enough in the game to be settled.
* Wall Drill : equivalent of 10 sawmill workers. Sawmills can mostly get to their level with 2 research : blade and steam sawmills, with lvl2 insulation
* Automatons : They cost a HUGE amount of ressources : 100 wood, 100 steel, 50 coal (or research time better spent elsewhere). At 60% efficiency == 14h 100% efficiency 10 workers. At 70% == 14h 120% (shrine/agitator) 10 workers. Also requires immobilizing a steam core as a factory...
* Factory : Steam core immobilization. Dismantle it to get back the core when you can't produce more automatons... and I hope you don't need the prosthetics :p

## Coal :

There are 4 ways to produce coal : Coal mines, Coal thumpers, Coal outposts, and charcoal kilns.

### Initial Coal :

Building Gathering Posts is highly advised. It roughly doubles the labour productivity when gathering, thereby is also useful on day one, if built before 1500; the construction should start by 1300. Otherwise, the constructing gathering posts is better after 1800.

**One Gathering Post is about as efficient as a Sawmill, a Coal mine or the Steelworks and should not be underrated.**

You can stay a long time without any way to produce coal, if you limit your coal consumption. To do so, bunkhouses are queens, heaters are good, upgrading resource production building to be better insulated is good too. Coal consumption upgrades are impactful. Heater Efficiency Upgrade and Steam Hub Efficiency Upgrade especially.

### Coal Thumpers :

It is the simplest path. They can use child labour for the gathering, require one lvl1 tech, maybe upgrade directly to steam coal thumper. Simple and easy.

To get efficiency, you also need to improve gathering post efficiency, so that makes a lot of research to optimize though.

Fully upgraded coal thumpers and gathering posts are very good. I used them in the Arks to save New Manchester with around 8 days 8 hours lefts in extreme. ( mines were bottlenecked by the number of possible mines). Also, a new home resistant (we are in advanced tips, don't scream spoilers ! Go enjoy the game before reading advanced tips).

### Coal Mine :

* The Coal Mine has a very low production (24/h) : try to avoid
* The Steam Coal Mine is a good mid/late game building (60/h) : this is the heavylifter
* The Advanced Coal Mine (90/h) is a late game building and shouldn't be rushed.

Fully upgraded automated advanced coal mine is the most efficient ***sustained*** way to produce coal (just... not in a new home).

### Coal outpost :

Should be avoided, as there are better outposts ( steel / steam cores) and also "costs" the steam cores you don't get by dismantling it. Also, not "a new home resistant".

### Charcoal Kilns :

They are the oddballs. Clearly. The best or the worse. High risk high reward. And don't underestimate them, they ***will*** burn through your wood, possibly leaving you economically strangled if you don't pay attention.

They are the king of the hill in easy normal hard difficulties, but suffers doubletime from the penalty in resource generation from difficulty. In extreme, they can still be the best, but only coupled with the insane efficiency of the steam sawmill (I've made several posts on those points in reddit, not sure if I can link them here so I won't )

They are often seen as situational, like in an emergency you can have a secondary system. This is bad thinking. You want to optimize your one and only way to produce coal. Research time is precious ! Optimize your thumpers or your mines if you want more coal, don't research a bad unupgraded kiln.

The steam sawmill - charcoal kiln is the most efficient way to produce coal, with little research time sinked in it. You also get the best wood production within the same research time.

## Laws

I*t's more than possible to beat the game by sticking to only the most humane laws. You may think that extorting your citizen leads to results, and yes in a way it does, but you'll almost always have to pay for those results later and the costs are rough equal the benefits.*

Start off with Emergency Shift and get Extended Shift right after; this will boost most buildings by 40%. Most importantly, due to how research work, it gives you research time. Those 2 and simply mandatory as the first 2 laws. Heck, it is about survival !

You can use Emergency Shift on one workshop you would have built on day 1, then on any resource pile you want at the end of the day, without triggering the scripted death. Just handle the massive discontent ! No deaths on resources piles : this is intended, they have crappy production rate, unheated, everyone gets sick and all, they can't build at night because they work, and the massive discontent makes it balanced.

In italic is another contributor's point of view :

*Extended shifts are everyone's bread and butter. Emergency shifts after the first use can cause deaths, but it's first use can give you an extra 14 hours worth of research and is thus priceless. Food tricks are unnecessary, and so are the organ transplants. In a well managed settlement you wont even have any food shortages or dead to deal with in the first place.* *Faith and order are pretty darn straightforward. The main advantage of faith is advanced healing without cores, the main advantage of order is the foreman ability. Take your pick. Other than that they serve mostly the same purpose and face mostly the same issues.*

Some of the useful laws are :

* Soup vs food additive : as a 3rd law, allows you to extent your initial raw food by a big margin. This allows you to delay food production researches. Another user wrote : *With Hunting Tactic, about 25% of the population would have to be hunter. Soup would only increase the labour productivity by about 5%.* It is true it only improve a minor part of the city*,* and the drawbacks are importants. I'm actually wondering if theses 2 law's are actually good to be honest.
* Child Labour(Safe). Child Labour would expand the labour force by about another 30%. It has drawbacks, so its benefits is less than expected. Also another user point of view : *Child labour looks great on paper but in fact costs you quite a lot down the line.*
* Faith's Shrines or Order's Foreman. Order's Agitators are unfortunately very deep in the law tree. Faith's House of Healing have their defenders, I don't due to the scripted death.
* Overcrowding is king and should be prioritized, due to games mechanics, when you expect many sick (this is my playstyle tbh).
* Child shelter allows those kids to get livable environment, hence less sick to heal. This is impactfull. Medical apprentice or engineer apprentice have minimal impact and should really be delayed.
* Organ Transplants. It is labelled as a bad law, but I always takes it as the advance of medecine as a science over the obscurantism of cemetery and funerals. i only do deathless runs anyway so that is my way of honoring people.

After that :

Fighting arenas, public pub and moonshine all helps with discontent. These are nice to have but not game changer mechanics, as discontent is somewhat manageable. Other faith/order laws can come with no real impact, then Care house, prosthetics, and a law for the kids (I prefer medical) shouldn't be forgotten...

*"In the entertainment wing of the adaptation anything other than the arena, pub and moonshine will also cost you down the line."*

As this user said, please refrain from dueling laws, which is utterly bad. House of pleasure seems to have no problems though. There is an suicide event associated to it, but i never had it. I suspect you need high discontent to get it.

My personal law order :

* Emergency Shift into Extended Shift, no question asked
* Sawdust Burgers as the 3rd law to extend the initial raw food. It is timed for it. I only play in extreme, so sickness is a heavy hit. I'm wondering if going Soup or no food law wouln't be better though. If you have food requirements as a quest (The Arks, ANH...), it is king because you can prepare normal meals for your citizens to eat and stockpile sawdust burgers for the quest.
* Sustain life is a must when you intend to get infirmaries ASAP, which I do. Radical Treatment is a trap : 48h to heal one gravelly ill ??? With 1/3 chance to get a useless amputee ? Send it to a care house, god damnit ! They eat half rations è\_é (get care house if a gravelly ill happen, find why it happened and correct it not to get gravelly ill)
* Overcrowding, because many emergency shifts on resource piles combined with food additive gives no other choice.
* House of Prayers for hope or whatever. Usually i build them for the quest, then dismantle-pause them to prevent time consuming sermons until build time is less constrained.
* Shrines : a neat passive 20% boost whereever you want ? I take it anytime. It reimburse itself in less than a day. If I could get that sooner, I would.
* Child shelter, because it reduces overall sickness and is a 18h cooldown law. The small cooldown is the reason why it is before snow pit & organ transplants.
* Snow pit into organ transplants. I don't care about snow pit, but organ transplant really helps health care. Organs has a long cooldown, but I basically don't need any more laws. The others are "nice to have".
* Fighting arenas, Public House, moonshine for discontent management.
* Makes little to no difference : The Temple, the Faith Keepers, Medical apprentice.
* Now just to get it : field kitchen, care house, prosthetics (one guy will be crushed by an automaton in an event).
* Sometimes I get House of Pleasure, but it will be closed down by my puritans anyway. Never got the suicide event.

## Technology

Remember the 'tech only if you need it'.

Excess manpower should be channelled towards research. Try to free up engineers from other work, and allocate them towards research.

*Don't bother going beyond 3-4 shifts worth of tech lab. Actually even the advantage of the 4th shift is pathetic, the 4th lab is mainly worth placing just to counter shortages in the first 3 (sick leaves etc).*

Aim to start researching on day 1 morning and apply emergency shift immediately, to save your engineer from an early death due to emergency shift. Aim to have 2 workshop at least by day 2 night, so that you can at least swap the engineers in to research 24/7 by alternating emergency shift.

*I used to pull the same crap, but then I got an arrow in the knee... err... I mean... but then the devs fixed it. It used to be that the death triggers near the end of the shift, now it seems to trigger at a random time DURING the shift. You'd need to constantly savescumm to avoid it, and frankly that's not worth it. Just rush (within reason) for automatons research instead.*

Heating, Health and other upgrades, which are needed in the future, but not urgent, can be researched if the resources for the desired upgrade is not available.

A good starting sequence:

1. Beacon
2. Drawing Boards (T1)
3. Wall Drill
4. Steelworks
5. Hunters' Gear
6. Steam Hub
7. Coal Thumper

This sequence is recommended because the piles usually deplete in the order Wood, Steel and then Coal. This also provides a good setup for the entire early game.

Having early scouts is practical, but expensive. Having a stable economy is much more crucial in the early days at higher difficulties.

*Beacon and drawing boards are both costly investments, ones you normally can't afford during your first day of research. DB just costs too much wood and beacon costs too much iron to build and then too much wood to field a scouting team. Save it for d2 or even d3.*

*Wall drill is a waste of steam cores while there's wood for sawmills around. Steelworks as a 4th research is way to early.*

*There's a difference between having scouts early and having them too early. They are lucrative, yes, but the resources you spend on establishing them will set your earliest days too far behind.*

*Start with gathering and hunting research, beacon goes in 3rd, DB goes in when you can afford 50 wood.*

## The First Day

1. Sign Emergency Shifts.
2. Delete unnecessary roads for wood.
3. Build the first Workshop, start Research and apply emergency shift.
4. Assign everyone to gather, mainly focusing on the wood and steel needed.
5. Place more Gathering Posts until around 1300, freeing up labour from the resource pile as needed.
6. Staff the Gathering Posts whenever possible
7. Apply Emergency shifts on 2 more gathering post/resource pile on 1759, if there is still have enough discontent to spare on around day 3. Make sure the resource pile would have enough resource to continue work for another 12 hours.
8. Go on building spree. Build more gathering post and maybe another workshop.
9. Sign Extended Shift and use it as much as you can.
10. The Medical Tent and Cookhouse should be built on the second night.

*I'd advice against abusing the emergency shifts. You don't want to have to build the cemetery do you? The one shift on the workshop is a must, but after that only ever use them on resource piles if for some reason you still have to have people directly manning the resource piles by d2 20:00.*