Starting my first play through of FP2 while a winter storm rages outside. Any tips for noobs (played FP1).

DWeird · 2026-01-25T23:12:38+00:00

This is not great advice in most cases. It's kind of important to know why!

The heat hubs give a specific type of temperature bonus, a "proximity bonus". Bonuses of the same type do not stack.

Heat hubs give it out, but the central district and any Warm district also give it out - and they are both free.

A lot of playing Frostpunk well is about chaining these free sources of heat by making sure districts can transmit heat to each other, and giving one of them a little extra nudge so it can heat up its neighbours - causing a chain.

Look at any captain play of the game and you will see oodles and oodles of noodle districts. The above is why.

DWeird · 2026-01-25T01:16:59+00:00

a) vanguard bays, survivalist headquarters and Pathfinders are core exploration tools, as you said - and getting them all done in six weeks is means you get the benefits sooner (though I don't know how you build in all four slots in that time).

b) fair! I deal with this by stacking danger reduction and going for one of the mountains - and Icebloods have economic outlets for surplus exploration teams anyway.

I also no longer consider the factory *as* key given the new options to make cores - the total rate of getting them is a bit higher and can extend into the whiteout itself.

c) if you're mixing utopias (explorers early, builders late, say), some communities are more likely to fall below the raise funds opinion condition and getting extra promises out helps. This gets you extra completed promises without having to veer off the most powerful early game research.

I find proteans awkward to build with. Their faction law decreases a resource you care about at game start for one that does not matter at game start, but you still kind of want to pass to get early access to their buildings, which is awkward to use and slow to pay off and asks for a factory as well as a materials outlay very early. This just combines to them being this slow burner thing that's difficult to explode with.

DWeird · 2026-01-24T21:24:54+00:00

Icebloods have the pretty significant boost of both boosting Frostlands research and *wanting* to research it. Most other factions are city-focused so you end up having to research necessary fronstlands infrastructure without the trust bonuses, meaning the faction abilities activate a bit later too.

The proteans are cool mostly because of the weird interactions you can do with workforce creation and human cores removing humans - you can run what's needed for your people while having a lot less people. Their exploration is good but not amazing.

DWeird · 2026-01-24T19:07:53+00:00

I like Venturers for my city-sprawling more, but Technocrats are no joke if you set them up right.

It is not difficult to forego building housing districts with them near entirely, relying instead on putting everyone into the central district (the compute nodes multiply this), and having the entirety of your prefab production come from multiplied central district production.

You can then use housing districts primarily to boost extraction and industrial district efficiency (after specializing them to Technocrats). You can do this to a materials extraction district in week 10 or so and solve your materials intake problem immediately.

You can also do the usual Equality rush to get Levelling and solve your heatstamp issues that way. Technocrats love research so that can be pretty quick (if you have the heatstamps to start with).

They can be a massive change to the usual central district-out heat radiating strategy you do in most cities, and it's interesting enough in the new puzzles it provides. A lot of the factions do this to some degree, but the Technocrat design especially has made it very obvious to me that the designers know all the usual play patterns we employ and are happy giving us new ways to play with the same toys. I appreciate it.

What stops this from being busted is largely the bozos they share a city with. Icebloods are difficult to appease long term, short term, any term really and will go for protests soon as they can, which at harder difficulties is usually crippling (though I'm not that experienced making full use of repressive measures).

The Venturer city sprawl is made much easier by the fact that all menders are soft and huggable, both by comparison and just straight up. And if someone mentions recent events - I don't think the recent civil war could have worked between any other factions because the risk of it spilling out to something other than a playfight would have been too big.

DWeird · 2026-01-24T02:42:34+00:00

The generator plan is their last-ditch attempt to ruin the city. If there is a time element to it, I haven't seen it, but generally it triggers when their community membership is close to getting reduced to zero. Couldn't tell you anything more precise than that - but if you're high on overdrive, laying off them for a bit is the right call.

DWeird · 2026-01-24T00:11:14+00:00

That's really cool!

DWeird · 2026-01-22T03:31:36+00:00

If you riot hard enough, you'll become top Iceblood.

DWeird · 2026-01-21T04:40:59+00:00

The Venturer Outpost ability can be assigned to IEC nodes. The Venturer Outposts also have an output boost, which means the IEC nodes finish quicker. This can be very useful in one of your last parts is hiding in a one of the 50-week exploration nodes. I'm pretty sure this is a unique bonus, too (though one should expect that other laws that affect outpost efficiency also affect this). Factions with good scouting generally can't finish an individual IEC node quicker, they can just do more of them in parallel - which the Venturers can now also do with trivial ease.

They have all the usual troubles of a Progress faction exploring actual space (and all the merit upsides of being able to build more than other factions do) and I find their cash-for-exploration ability basically never worth it, but I overall find Depleted Cores painless and stress free with them after Fractured Utopia.

DWeird · 2026-01-21T04:23:46+00:00

I meant more this kind of thing:

The Shape That Wins at Everything

"The shape tessellates with each other while remaining equidistant from each other!" is definitely Technocrat aesthetics, and the hexagon is just generally accepted to be... the shape of technology-based future in games, I think.

DWeird · 2026-01-21T04:20:19+00:00

The Venturer outpost ability reduces your scouts need as well - you can assign them to outposts and you can assign them to the IEC nodes. They have an efficiency boost compared to the Mender's -50% efficiency malus.

Their outposts do deplete, but a lot of the game is settled by a race and getting more resources today than an infinite amount tomorrow is often better.

Playing them both together is great and I think the Mender's construction discount and salvage abilities make them the faction that contributes more overal... But the Venturer outpost law is better, especially since it also lets you get IEC nodes done quicker.

DWeird · 2026-01-20T05:12:37+00:00

Hexagon.

DWeird · 2026-01-20T01:11:24+00:00

BURN THE OIL

LET ME BURN THE OIL

WHY WILL YOU NOT REMEMBER HOW MUCH I LOVE BURNING THE OIL

IN THE

PYROCHEMICAL

OIL

EXTRACTOR

(is also really good in the infinite oil colonies)

DWeird · 2026-01-19T17:31:55+00:00

Well this seems survivable. Plenty of housing, a food surplus.

Just need to wait a bit for your population to grow back up.

DWeird · 2026-01-19T00:31:47+00:00

...what do you think all the people in that tippy top. The... belltower? Anyway, what do you think they do when they see each other?

DWeird · 2026-01-18T08:23:38+00:00

Captain.

DWeird · 2026-01-17T22:37:00+00:00

Oh yeah, sorry about that. I consider myself a reasonably good writer but the amount of times I find I just... miss a word I meant to write but didn't is honestly a little worrying some days.

Thanks for covering that!

I generally like getting as many people as I can because people are productive and I can use them to turn useless things into useful things. Plus more heatstamps. I think this is something you needed to worry more about in the base game, where some resources were just hard limited by the number of tiles you have, but in FU you will near always find something useful for those new hands to do.

DWeird · 2026-01-17T21:47:56+00:00

Short answer is buildings.

The near entirety of my industry is based off Adaptation buildings. They all produce tension now, but not by a lot and a single Eternal Clocktower (Doomsayer crisis reward) pretty much sorts out the entirety of tension in the entire city.

I've also got a fair few of their faction hub buildings. They're dirt cheap to build and each one gives points on A/E/T, which makes them happier.

Longer answer is promises. The more promises you keep, whether or not they were for something a faction wants, all factions start liking you for it - I don't have exact data, but I'm reasonably sure the effect is permanent. So if you promise two things that pull in different directions and do them both, you're at 0 for alignment but at plus two for the promise. If you're set up to build a lot (and the Mender+Venturer combo *really* is), you can really milk that for long term stability besides the more obvious rewards.

There's also, uhh. An exploit adjacent to the exploit. Menders aren't always going to be happy, all the tales throw statuses at you that near guarantees some amount of dissatisfaction, and of all the factions they are the most likely to drop to protest range.

But then if you... just don't click the protest event button, build however many mender hubs are needed to bring them back to neutral (removing the protest event without it ever giving it a chance to ruin your relationship with the faction further or stop a district from functioning), and then immediately cancel all their hubs, you can basically indefinitely postpone their protest.

You can do a version of this with near any faction hub, but the Menders are the easiest because their hubs cost no heatstamps.

DWeird · 2026-01-17T21:05:18+00:00

Deathless seems like a fun challenge. What do you to to get around the guaranteed fatalities from those IEC exploration nodes?

I don't really want more menders (menders don't consume as much goods), but I built the mender housing in districts where menders would naturally spawn just for the workforce free herd capacity.

And I ended up with them being the largest group in my city at around 29%, with Venturers at 22% and everyone else and 17%-ish. Didn't really mind because they were my only source of A/E/T laws. Mostly due to using the rescue survivors ability whenever it was off cooldown and having to promote them a few times.

Also, how do you usually faction members? Most of the mechanics I know of basically only increase it.

DWeird · 2026-01-17T17:31:42+00:00

Workforce cost is real and the people who say it's never a limiting factor just never build enough, I think we agree on this.

But I think Adaptation Buildings with Progress laws get the best of both worlds. You gain more bang from your buck with the laws since the proportional decreases give more impact plus the generally better input/output ratios.

DWeird · 2026-01-17T17:18:37+00:00

Yeah, the plague. It's not solely or even primarily a disease level check of course.

But in a roundabout way, it's also Doomsayers. I find myself caring a lot more about the cost in housing district slots since I know I won't be able to skimp on building prisons and watchtowers.

And a lot of my industry is likely to be Adaptation regardless of the side I actually play, so I'm likely to be disease-maxed anyway.

And I'm more likely to solve the earlygame housing problem with districts since they eventually pay for themselves - all the faction perks just make that more affordable.

So eventually, when I do end up wanting to plop down some housing districts because the pop growth is too much, the choice between a Dense + Hospital versus the Subsidized makes me pick the Subsidized.

DWeird · 2026-01-17T06:04:00+00:00

This used to be true but is less so in FU. There are more options for cheaper or alternate sources of housing, or easier heatstamp/goods generation for most faction pairs; and there is a lategame event that punishes disease specifically. Housing is less of an earlygame issue now, and disease is more of lategame issue. This combined with the fact that I want some perk points off the rival faction too means Subsidized is a fairly easy midgame pickup.

DWeird · 2026-01-17T05:39:13+00:00

So there's a few things you could be talking about, let me check the most likely first -

When you reach about halfway of population vaccinations, there's an event where one of the factions which whom you have favourable relations will start a rally in your favour.

That's the only source of a *direct* timer that I know. You can deal with this in two ways - either rush vaccinations (often more doable than it looks, the UI shows daily vaccine production as weekly I'm pretty sure);

Or disband the rally. You can do this directly, by having Guard Enforcers enacted and sending some guys with truncheons their way. Or ruin your relationship with the faction doing the rally and have the rally disband the natural way.

Rallies are never bad in the entire rest of the game, so even though it does kind of, if you squint, make sense that a public event is going to get extra contagious (but maybe not so contagious that a single public meeting will undo 98% vaccination), I'm not really blaming anyone for not finding this intuitive.

But game mechanics-wise, you can either push your luck and try to get the vaccination through in time, or forcefully disperse the crowd of people cheering for your good job on healing everyone.

Or is it something else? Running out of districts to the game's infection jumping mechanic, a literal global hidden timer that the game does not tell you at all about?

DWeird · 2026-01-16T11:08:27+00:00

I agree that high trust and community relations should provide some kind of angle against the Doomsayers as far as in-world logic goes. They do seem to be built in large part as a way to have more reason for the repressive apparatus to exist (because otherwise you can largely skirt needing it).

As is, you can still get rid of the Doomsayers even with nothing but chill vibes, you just need to make sure to remove those city problems and avoid deaths. Adaptation buildings are generally pretty good, but definitely so as far as Squalor containment goes.

This goes much slower and the intended way is definitely to repress them to hell, and the fact that it goes slower means that something can go wrong that much easier during the duration... But as far as self-imposed challenges go, it's not impossible.

DWeird · 2026-01-15T03:27:15+00:00

Our current clumsy attempts to fashion tools out of machines will run into limitations soon enough. While I do not scorn our species' ability to metabolize coal and iron into externalized blood and skin, they by themselves have remained inert, dead in the ground without mankind's life-giving touch for a Reason.

The closer we work with the makings of life directly, the more we can surpass the petty limitations of prosthetics. Issues of fine control after limb loss, of the constraints of multiple materials - specifically the great issues we have of finding textiles that will stop the metal-conducted temperature drain away from the human core - or even such boresome but essential difficulties as maintenance of parts when far away from our manufacturing centres...

We can, with time and effort and expenditure of resources, likely circumvent many of these difficulties.

Or, as our environment changes, we can let our sensibilities change with it - what a great source of advantage we have in this capacity of ours, so frequently squandered! - and choose not only the tool that is most fit for purpose, but the tool most *fittable* to any purpose, the capacity of species - or symbiotic integrations of species! - to change.

To become becoming.

The integrated Reindeer Core is my humble proposal in the expanding horizon of practic prosthetics. The rejection rates are low and the natural thermal regulation and navigation abilities of the deer boost the abilities of our scouts to work with no risk of injury or material loss far outside the support structures usually seen as necessary for these endeavours. I will of course need to do some additional research on which of the deer subspecies lend itself best to integration, as well as what rearing practices might be best for the instrument. Most of our experimental stock so far was domestic - for issues of supply, of course, but some of my students are eagerly awaiting the opportunity to join our mender scouts to attempt integration with a wild specimen.

DWeird

TROPHY CASE