Frostpunk 2: Build order/Guide for Captain Utopia Builder

This guide is intended for general-purpose city building, and should be reasonably effective on captain mode or lower.

If you want to do something specific with your run – say, go for an “all Bohemian” city where you never do any research or laws other than what the Bohemians would want, you will probably need more sophisticated strategies than what this guide has.

Additionally, this guide will rely primarily on priority lists, as RNG/community promises/chosen maps and starting communities can make a big difference in terms of what you’re able to do when. Having a solid idea of what your city needs, and constantly pushing for improvements, is more important than doing things in a specific order.

For this guide’s screenshots, I used a run on Windswept Peaks with random ambition and starting communities selected. If you want to know what starting communities are “optimal”, I’d say go for Foragers and Machinists, but you can win with any starting communities.

This guide will hold your hand up until the end of the first whiteout. After the first whiteout, your city should be in a good, stable position. You can manage it yourself from that point forwards.

Our primary objective: Get an upgraded coal settlement, to provide for our heating needs during the whiteout.

With that out of the way, lets get right into it!

When the game begins, we need to hit the ground running.

Before we do anything else, you need to meet the first of your three new best friends, which will be your constant companions for surviving Captain Mode:

Friend 1: Harsh taxation

You can expect to use this CONSTANTLY. As soon as the game hands you control, IMMEDIATELY raise funds from all three of your starting communities. Yes, this will damage your trust, but guess what? Keeping a functional city is more important! Just like in Frostpunk 1, all problems can be solved by squeezing your people until they bleed in the name of survival.

Also… on captain mode, you start with 6 heatstamps a week. 6! If you try to rely on that, your city will never be ready in time for the whiteout.

You can raise funds once per 50 weeks (separate timer for each community), and we should be firing that ability whenever we need heatstamps – and we ALWAYS need heatstamps.

Next, we start with 15,000 coal stockpiled, but that’s really not going to last us very long. Our second friend is here to help.

Friend 2: Unsafe heating levels

The generator overdrive acts as a multiplier on all coal you’re burning. Therefore, the more heating you’re using, the more overdrive helps you save. You need to be managing it regularly as the temperature rises and falls. Good overdrive usage has it turned on during colder seasons, and off for the warmer seasons, to get the most efficiency from the multiplying effect possible. Bad overdrive usage is when you forget overdrive exists and leave thousands of coal on the table because you forgot to turn it on!

In particular, you should make sure that overdrive is at or close to 0% when the whiteout hits, as you want it on for as long as possible then.

With our citizens having made such a large initial investment, we should have around 900 heatstamps to play with, and can now build our initial districts and buildings:

Council Hall

There’s no reason to wait on this, the sooner we start passing laws the sooner we start solving our city’s many many problems.

3x Housing district

This won’t be enough to solve our housing problems, but at 200 prefabs a pop, we simply can’t afford to build the entirety of the housing we need. Three should be sufficient to hold Cold at “Notable”, as long as we’re otherwise meeting our heating needs. Some may die from cold, but we can keep it to a minimum.

1x Food district
1x Extraction district (Materials)
1x Extraction district (Prefabs)

We start with some food and material stockpiles, but the longer we can make them last, the better, so we should start gathering everything ASAP rather than waiting for a crisis. Getting a district on prefabs in particular is important, so do it even if you need to spend extra time frostbreaking.

1x Industrial district

Start with this set to Prefabs, until you have enough stuff built that your initial workforce is all used up. Then, switch to goods until and unless you urgently need prefabs again. Your primary source of income early on is raising funds from communities. The weekly heatstamp payout is going to be a trickle until you seriously get going, so its okay to ignore it a little early on.

Frostbreaking

Frostbreak as necessary to make sure you can build all of the above. Consider what your eventual expanded 9-tile districts will look like, and how you can get them to hit as many resource nodes as possible. ESPECIALLY consider heating bonuses from putting districts next to each other. All housing built early on should be getting one bonus from having 3 tiles next to the generator, and another bonus from touching 3 tiles on another housing district. This should keep the heat demand for housing at 0 until the initial temperature drops hit – a major boon.

In addition, also begin frostbreaking towards a waypoint for a future logistics district. Our strategy relies on getting one set up early.

If iron is available on the map, you may want to break towards that as well.

My day 1 setup on windswept peaks. I’m frostbreaking towards coal and wood, as well as to that logistics district at the top of the map.

My housing might look haphazard. In my opinion, complicated flower-like district designs built to accommodate hubs are utterly unnecessary. Hubs are kinda bad and inefficient in comparison to just having more buildings and districts, and this guide won’t be using any. You can account for hubs or not, but don’t compromise on proximity effects – you need that heating boost!

Once these initial builds start to complete, do the following ASAP:
Expand 1 housing district
Build 1 research institute

How my city looks on Week 5. As expected, I’ve run through the entire starting prefab supply and will have to rely on my extraction and industrial district for more. Note that I’m taking advantage of heating proximity bonuses with my extraction, industrial, and food districts.

Once the Research institute is up, building slows down by a lot. Prefabs and workforce are now in short supply and will be a problem as we want to build more, so our focus from here on out is good management of our laws and research projects.

Your building projects between now and Week 50 should be the following, as prefabs and heatstamps allow:

-Expanded industrial district (gives more stuff; doesn’t need more workers or materials)
-Fourth housing district (prevent cold deaths)
-Initial coal/food producing buildings
-Material producing building, OR iron extraction district
-Logistics district

Good political stewardship is extremely important. General guidelines for cutting deals with factions and communities:

1: The best promise is something you wanted to do anyways.
2: Never hold a vote unless you’re sure which way it will go. Save scumming should not be necessary to get the laws you need passed.
3: Never break promises… unless, of course, you really really need to.

You generally want to be making and fulfilling promises regularly. Promises provide guidance and keep your city’s economy flowing and growing. Also, each fulfilled promise boosts relations with all communities, even the ones you didn’t make the promise to. This helps smooth things over after all that money you asked for earlier, and also will keep asking for in the future.

That being said, tying yourself up in impossible competing demands can cause real issues for you. This guide will provide a general order of priorities. Those at the top should be tackled early; those at the bottom may be delayed.

Top Priority:
Food Additives (Either will work)
Goods (Either will work)

High Priority:
Community Service Law (Heatpipe watch)
Basic Necessities (if you want Paid Essentials, if you’d rather have Free Essentials wait until whenever)

Medium Priority:
Outsiders
Contagion Prevention
Childhood

In terms of which of the competing Zeitgeists/ideologies you should go for… each has their advantages and disadvantages. Some law sets are definitely easier than others – for example, almost all of adapation’s frostland-related stuff is better than Progress’s equivalents, and merit laws beat equality laws almost always, with a few exceptions. That being said, if you’re good enough at the game, almost any type of city setup can be made to work. However, there are a few specific things in each run which you shouldn’t compromise on:

Food Additives law should match your hothouse’s zeitgeist – chemical additives with chemical hothouse, foraged additives with biowaste hothouse. This will cause a synergy between them, giving you a big food boost. Doesn’t matter whether you go adapation or progress, as long as the law and hothouse match!

Community Service law should always be heatpipe watch. It provides a flat 20-heat reduction to all districts, practically the equivalent of constantly being 1 temperature level higher, all the time.

State-run alcohol shops is massively better than Merit’s equivalent, and should be taken even on runs which otherwise go hardline merit.

Otherwise, for the sake of your city’s survival, its best to deal with multiple factions and pick and choose whatever law is best for your city’s situation. If you want to make your city go hard in one direction, fear not – being flexible early on makes it easier to go crazy with an ideology once your city is properly established. But that’s outside the scope of this guide…

With our laws making progress, we also need to keep research moving as fast as possible to succeed. In order to make that happen, we’re going to rely on our last friend:

Friend Three: Just work harder lol

Its a free 80% research speed! The only downside is a trust debuff that wears off promptly as soon as the ability stops working! Use it again and again and again and again.

Don’t mess around with any nonsense like “building a second research institute”. That wastes valuable workforce, prefabs, and heatstamps that could be directed elsewhere, when all you really NEEDED to do was force your current workers to pull double overtime shifts!

Well, that’s research speed solved. But what to research? Its okay to jump around a little to fill community promises, as long as your research facility never stays idle longer than a week. As you’re working through the initial laws you need to pass, your research priorities should be, in roughly this order:

1: Coal Mine
2: Hothouse (that matches the food law you passed or intend to pass)
3: Sawmill (Exception: If you can get an extraction district onto an iron node, you can delay materials-related research)

These three should provide for your short-term heating, food, and material needs, and prevent your city from collapsing early, even if they’re not enough for the long term on their own. If you can, try to get a community to ask you for one of them in a promise.

Next up:

4: Factories (Very important, you want a mechanical or salvaging factory going shortly after Week 50).
5: Whatever stupid promises you had to accumulate to get the laws you need in place
6: Housing insulation (if you can’t get it right away, fine, but try to get it before the second temperature drop)

Thanks to you heroically demanding the researchers research harder, you should be moving at a speedy 8 weeks per project. Make sure to keep some heatstamps in the bank to pay for all this, you don’t want to have to stop getting research just because you’re broke. This might mean delaying setting up a building for a while so you have enough stamps to pay for research; that’s fine. The goal is long term solutions to problems.

Churning through the initial laws, research, and buildings should keep you busy for a while. The next section details your medium-term priorities as your city starts to get off the ground.

Let’s pick back up at Week 51. Here’s how my example city looks:

(First shot is to show districts, second is for buildings)

I’ve managed to complete all the building projects outlined in the first section, though I used an extra extraction district on iron instead of a sawmill. My logistics district went up on Week 49, try to get yours going around then.

I’ve lost a few people to cold, and had to fiddle with workplace assignments to do all that expansion. We need more population ASAP.

We should still have minor shortages in several areas – we can fix these issues in the long-term, the key is to avoid a death spiral.

I have the following research done, in this order:
Blasting Coal Mine
Chemical Hothouse
Mechanical Factory
Asbestos Lining

I also have the following laws in place:
Chemical Additives
Mass-produced goods
Paid Essentials
Infectious badge
Heatpipe Watch

I’m only going with Progress stuff because I started with Machinists. You can go with whatever works for you. Its okay if you’re a little behind, or had to take one or two detours to fulfill whatever nonsense your communities made you promise, as long as you’re generally keeping up.

Once we hit Week 51, a few things happen. For one, the first temperature drop hits. If you passed Heatpipe watch, that should blunt the blow significantly. Several of your districts may remain at 0 heat demand if you’re taking advantage of enough proximity effects.

The second, and more important thing… heatstamp taxes are off cooldown! Shake down your three communities once again – these heatstamps are going to fund our next big round of expansion and improvements.

The first and most important thing is to build a factory – mechanical or salvaging, doesn’t matter, just build one. This is going to be one of the key moves that launches our city from poverty to plenty. That factory will give us enough goods we can actually get more heatstamps from expanding our population, and make prefabs much less of a problem. That 180-heatstamp cost might make you cringe, but trust me, its well worth the asking price.

Depending on how well you’ve been doing, the first population boom may be approaching. Don’t resist this! A common mistake new players make is trying to reduce their population growth. However, more population means more districts and buildings, and more heatstamps – both from our weekly income, and when we raise funds from our communities. We WANT more people. Resist the temptation to try and tamp down on population growth – more workforce will only help us right now, if we’re being smart about it.

With the first 50 weeks behind us, make sure to save your game. You should have reliable infrastructure to produce all core resources, even if you still lack the workforce to staff everything. You should have a solid foundation which you can now begin building on – and you’ll have to build quickly. The whiteout is coming no matter what.

To get the city ready for the whiteout, we need to continue shoring up our weak areas and improving our economy. To this end, for the next 50-70 weeks, there are three projects you should focus on to improve your city. Try to get at least two out of three done:

Project #1: Long-term Heatstamp solution
1: Research a work compensation law – efficiency bonuses is superior, but maybe you want to run an Equality city?
2: Research and pass City-Run alcohol shops

Equality’s alcohol law generates a MASSIVE amount of heatstamps, especially if you choose to expand them when the event comes around – which you should! This will bring your heatstamps income up so much, you might not even need to raise funds from your people… you should still do it anyway, of course.

Project #2: Frostland Exploration Improvements
1: Build a second logistics district (when workforce allows); expand both districts for more teams
2: Research Skyways (You need these for the coal settlement we’ll eventually want)
3: Research and construct at least 1 logistics bay, preferably a Vanguard logistics bay
4: Research and construct a Survivalist’s Headquarters

Investments in your logistics teams will pay off big, and you want them going early so you can profit as much as possible before the first whiteout hits.

Project #3: Solving housing woes
1: Research a Housing Block, either Merit or neutral – Equality’s housing block is so terrible, the normal one is actually better.
2: Research and pass any housing distribution law

As you’ve probably already learned, housing is a constant issue on Captain mode, so tackling it aggressively early will help a lot.

These three projects should keep you moving and pushing forwards. Do them in whatever order your available communities and factions allow – you might need to wait for the opposition faction to appear before some of the research you want is available. That’s fine, just make sure your research facility and council spend as little time as possible idle.

In addition, keep constructing housing districts/housing blocks as needed, expand your districts when you have extra heatstamps/prefabs, and build a new prefab extraction district when your first one runs out.

Grab these researches if you can – especially if you can convince factions to vote for things in exchange for them. These are minor improvements which can help you stay on top of problems in your city, but aren’t necessary for survival.

-Maintenance Law
-Hospitals
-Guard towers
-Youth law
-Treatment law
-Work shift/industrial heat laws

Remember our main goal: Survive the whiteout using an upgraded coal settlement. At the start, our frostland exploration needs to be geared to making that happen. In the long term, the frostland can solve a lot of our city’s problems.

RNG affects your run a lot here, in terms of Frostland generation. That’s why we got the logistics district up early – so we have some breathing room if we can’t find what we need right away.

Your initial priorities are to get these three things – one of each:

1: Coal mine (Ideally one with settlement upgrade potential)
2: Food
3: Survivors

In my example run, I’m sending my scouts towards a potential coal source that spawned nearby.

As the run goes on, we’ll have more opportunities to invest in our logistics districts, and to do more and more Frostland stuff. We should follow a script like this:

1: Have I found a coal mine I can upgrade to a settlement? If no – keep investing in logistics upgrades.
2: Are my city’s immediate needs met well enough I have breathing room? If yes – invest in more logistics upgrades.

Logistics districts pay off BIG in the long run, and can help us solve a huge number of problems. An extra stockpile of 50,000 food or coal can be the difference between victory or defeat when the whiteout hits. You want logistics going early and upgraded often.

That being said, ultimately its all RNG. Use what the frostland gives you, but keep your focus on the three pillars above – coal, food, and more survivors.

Once you have a coal mine, get a skyway built to it as soon as you can spare the heatstamps. A working coal mine will almost guarantee effective heating until the whiteout hits, and let you pull some workforce off the coal mines in your city so you can use them elsewhere.

When Week 110 approaches, we need to shift gears once again.

For reference, here’s how my own city is looking as the whiteout comes into view on the temperature chart:

I’ve managed to complete projects #1 and #3 above – as I didn’t have any access to Adaption research until the Menders appeared, I wasn’t able to make much progress on Frostland research. Even so, I have two expanded logistics districts, and they’re pumping coal and food into my city.

Your stats might not be as good as this, especially if you aren’t using merit laws. That’s okay, this strategy should give you enough breathing room that you can slip behind a little. The main thing that should worry you is if you haven’t found a coal mine you can turn into a settlement yet – if the RNG isn’t being kind to you, up your investments into logistics districts and buildings. There’s still time left to explore the frostland, but you can’t wait any longer than this.

With the whiteout approaching, set aside anything else you’re working on for a little while, beg your people to give more heatstamps if you need them, and start prioritizing these major improvements for your city:

1: Skyways (if you didn’t pick it up earlier)
2: Generator Upgrade 1
3: Settlement Heating

You can take either the progress or the adaption generator, depending on the map you’re using and/or your preference. One note: If you go with the adaption generator go ahead and install the upgrade ASAP, but if you want the progress generator, wait to actually build it until after the first whiteout – unless you’re certain you can have an oil settlement running and upgraded by then.

During the next 80 weeks, you may also have protests or rallies occur. If you get a rally, its usually best to ask for heatstamps. If you get a protest. you can use a counterprotest if available, otherwise, just agree to the demands. Its best for the city’s survival if you manage to keep relations at neutral, but sometimes factions will start hating you at the drop of a hat. Fulfilling promises at this point can tie up your research facilities for ages – that’s why we pushed so hard on research early on. Its okay if you have to take detours to fulfill promises and resolve protests, as long as that coal settlement is up in time.

Once you have your coal settlement and the necessary research, get the settlement upgraded as soon as you can spare the workforce. It should now be producing 600 coal, and thanks to the upgrade, won’t be disabled when the whiteout hits. This settlement is your primary weapon against the extreme cold, but dont forget about your other needs.

Food: Keep gathering from the Frostland as you’re able, and consider a second food district, as your first is probably getting close to empty.
Materials: Consider a second materials district, or even a frostland settlement/outpost if you’re lucky enough to find one. Being behind on materials usually isn’t catastrophic in the time period a whiteout lasts, so materials are generally a lower priority.

If you’ve completed the three key research items above, and you end up with any extra time, keep making improvements:

-Ventilation towers, hospitals, and guard towers to resolve squalor, disease, and crime
-Deep melting drills, to have access to more resources during the whiteout
-If steam is available and you have the adaption generator, consider getting an extraction district on the steam.

As you reach Week 150, keep an eye on your generator overdrive – ideally, you’ll begin the whiteout at 0% overdrive, allowing you to keep overdrive on for most of the whiteout.

If you’ve generally been following the guide so far, and you have some stockpiles and the upgraded coal settlement by the time the whiteout hits, you’re looking good.

The whiteout is the ultimate test of how prepared your city really is. Once it begins, prep time is over. Here’s how to survive.

First, save your game.

Second, assess your stockpiles. How many weeks can everything last?

Even with the coal settlement, you probably still won’t have enough heat. The solution is to scale back how much workforce districts are getting. This reduces the heat they consume. Cut back on your industrial district, your food districts, your housing districts, your (unused) logistics districts – anything and everything you can to reduce heat demand. Doing this can save you hundreds of heat, and if your city suffers minor shortages, you can endure that.

Check how much heat your coal extraction district is using. Its entirely possible for the coal district’s heating demand to be so high that its consuming more coal than its producing.

Once you’ve made the math work, sit tight and ride it out. Continue to research through the whiteout – if you have the adaption generator and some steam cores, getting the level 2 generator upgrade, adaptive pumps, can massively improve your generator’s effectiveness and reduce coal consumption. You can also use this time to either pick up things like weather-adjusted shifts, food heating efficiency, or any other heat-producing research you missed earlier. Alternatively, if you feel confident, you can research things you want to build once the whiteout is over.

If you’ve followed the guide, have that coal settlement going, use overdrive judiciously, and cut back on heat consumption appropriately, you should survive the whiteout with no deaths from cold. The hardest part of your run is now over.

Your city has a stable foundation to build on, with a functioning economy and plenty of potential for the future. Continue onwards and build your Utopia, Steward. You’ve earned it.