For the past week, I’ve had fun playing Frostpunk, a new steampunk-inspired survival game by 11 Bit Studios. I’m not into city-building games and the only survival game I played for any length of time was Don’t Starve Together. In this case, it was the steampunk theme that attracted me to it.
Your challenge in Frostpunk is to build a city large enough to keep survivors warm, fed and fit. You’re also tasked with finding other survivors who were lost on the way north, deciding if you want to take survivors who find their way to your camp and other random events.
You are required to start with the official first scenario, New Home. You must survive twenty days of New Home before the next scenario will unlock. And since the third scenario is also locked, I assume you have to make it through some portion of Ark, to unlock it.
New Home begins smoothingly enough. However, once you have a couple hundred survivors on your hands, it becomes a very delicate balance of continuing to press for resources and maintain the population’s hope of survival. I elected to take on all survivors who found their way to our city, including those who were sick, and therefore unable to work but had to be housed and fed.
By the time I had 500+ survivors and was inching toward the finale, a week at -150 Celsius, the game become minute-by-minute micromanagement. This aspect wasn’t as much fun as the earlier part of the game, where I was focused on building and collecting enough cores to construct gigantic automatons. That’s what I was most interested in doing.
Also, the anal retentive part of me kept wanting to create the perfect city layout, which became less and less possible as the city grew and I had to start slapping things down where ever just to keep the city’s head above water. It’s a race against time and mother nature. I’m eight days away from the mother of all storms and not sure we’ll make it.
I hope to find some time this week to finish the first scenario and survive it - doubtful. It was fun either way. Playing on easy starts to become a challenge halfway through. Some of the confusion could be alleviated by making critical information prominent in the tools tips. Not using the same icons for issues that require a different response. One that tripped me up and I’ve seen people asking the same question on Reddit, is when to build a new Resource Depot versus Gathering Hut. Both issues use the same icon and cautionary/error text. If the response is different - construct this building not that one, the icon and error message should be too.
I’d love a mode where I could focus on casually gathering resources and seeing how many steam contraptions I can build to automate the city versus the race against the 40-day countdown. Random events, storms, and survivors can still be part of it. Just not the escalating circumstances tied to the week-long storm.
As I’ve said, there’s no singular way to “win” the New Home scenario. It’s a combination of your choices, responses to random events, how you prioritized resource gathering, how many survivors you took on, which laws you signed and so on. However, there are some basic things to focus on from the start or survival isn’t likely.
- Harvesting resources is a priority, along with upgrading anything that improves related efficiency.
- Upgrade the generator. You may not survive the precursor temperature drops if you neglect the generator.
- Start scouting as soon as your city and resources are stable. Scouts can find free resources and those all-important Cores used in manufacturing.
- Improve Hunter efficiency to reduce the number of people needed and increase how much food they bring back.
- Keep Hope as high as possible to avoid triggering negative events related to morale. This also gives you some leeway when you need to extend working hours to get you through a crunch.
- Save your game in stages, something I wish I had done. This would allow you to experiment and rollback if an idea wasn’t successful.
11 Bits Studio recently released a roadmap of additions planned for 2018. Of them, I’m looking forward to sandbox mode the most. It sounds like the endless playing mode I’m looking for. If you have the time and interest, definitely check out Frostpunk. I’m having a blast with it.
Here's a bit of in-game video. I love the ambiance, soundscape and art style.
I’d love to read a book in this sort of setting if anyone has something to recommend. I read all the novels written by Rand Miller, David Wingrove, Robyn Miller for the Myst games and enjoyed them immensely.
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