All You Need to Know About Frostpunk 2
Back in 2018, Frostpunk took the world by a storm — it was BAFTA-nominated, well-recieved by both the audience and the critics, and defined a new genre. It’s a survival game set after a global cooling and you, as a player, have to help the society survive, manage tricky politics, enact laws, etc.
Now, six years later, 11 Bit Studios is releasing its sequel, Frostpunk 2. This one is set 30 years after the events of the original game, but it focuses on more than just survival (though it’s still an important element of the game).
About Frostpunk
Frostpunk combines survival, city management and strategy in one, very compelling, package. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a global cooling happened sometime during the 1880s, which nicely blends steampunk and dystopian vibes.
Your goal, as a player, is to build the last city on earth and keep its people safe and relatively happy — which isn’t exactly easy. Some of the game mechanics include making decisions and laws which won’t always gel with your population. You have to manage resources, develop new technology, and venture outside of your city to find new resources, more people, and better understand the history of the world.
It’s definitely a lot to manage — not only do you have to build a functioning city and keep people fed and hopeful, but you also have to weigh the benefits of certain laws and decisions. The game is built to challenge your strategic and tactical thinking while questioning the morality of your choices.
How is Frostpunk 2 different from Frostpunk?
When you start playing Frostpunk 2, you’ll first need to solve some puzzless/tasks which are pretty hard to survive. After this, you can begin the chapter 1. It’s good to know that some of your choices from the first game can still make an impact on this game, and some snippets of history or events of part one will appear in Frostpunk 2, which ties it very nicely all together.
Focus
In Frostpunk, the focus was mostly on survival and keeping people happy and hopeful. However, thirty years have passed since then and people have changed. There’s a new generation. And while before, they were bonded by trauma and the will to live, now they figured out that the worst has passed and your population will want to get involved with politics, influence the laws and overall get the best quality of life they can. What this means is a lot more politicking on a larger scale.
It also means you won’t be concerned with individual worker deaths or similar issues — instead, you’ll be focusing on the population as a whole. People dying won’t affect the city so much because of increased birth rate, as well as immigration.
Overall, the feeling of Frostpunk 2 is more zoomed-out. Time passes in weeks. There’s more to explore and find. The focus is not only on survival — though you still have to do that — but more on rebuilding the society and improving life for everyone.
Politics
Instead of making all the laws yourself, like you could in Frostpunk, you’ll now need to get a majority vote in a 100-member council, with representatives from all communities and factions. In order to get the majority vote, you can either surender to the voting process and take whatever decision they make, or you can negotiate with different factions.
To negotiate, you can promise that you’ll pass another law that the faction cares about, you can promise that you’ll build something they want, research something they want, abolish a law they disliked, etc. Whatever you promise, you pretty much have to do, otherwise your relationship with that faction could get destroyed and then you’ll get protests. These protests usually stop all production in certain districts.
To disband protests, you can use your guards, though that will further deteriorate your relationship with the protesting faction, or you can negotiate with them. Depending on what they want, either choice could be good or bad.
Exploration
The map in Frostpunk 2 is huge and there’s a lot to explore. Some areas are richer in resources than others, and some can be walled off completely after whiteouts. After you explore an area, you need to build a line back to your city in order to get the resources from that area.
A new addition to your exploration is that you can now settle in the newly found areas — yes, you can build colonies! But, keep in mind that you’ll need to manage resources and everything else for these new settlements at the same time as you do that for New London too.
Factions
You’ll start of Frostpunk 2 with 2 main communities: Foragers and Machinists. As you play, you’ll encounter other main communities like Merchants, Workers, Lords and Thinkers. Each of these communities can then branch off into factions which are more radicalized, but not cartoonishly so — their political demands make sense for their ideology.
Frostpunk 2 has three political axes:
- Adaptation versus Progress
- Merit versus Equality
- Tradition versus Reason
Now, each faction will value three of these elements. For example, Foragers will value adaptation while Machinists will value progress. From Machinists, you can get a faction called Technocrats (though they can come from Thinkers or Workers) and they value Progress, Equality and Reason. On the other hand, Icebloods, which come from Foragers, Merchants or Lords, value Adaptation, Merit and Tradition.
It’s expected that there will be 8 factions and 6 communities, but this could be wrong too.
You’ll have to balance your laws and decisions to appease all of the factions, though their demands will sometimes be entirely different. But even if you do this, you can still expect rallies and protests which will pause work in your districts. To appease them, you can negotiate or simply disperse the protests with your guards (though this will deteriorate your relationships).
Building
In Frostpunk, players needed to build one building at a time — and it made sense. With the population in low hundreds, there was no need for more. But your population in Frostpunk 2 is numbered in the thousands — and constantly expanding — so instead of individual buildings, you’ll be building entire districts.
For example, you can build a housing district, an industrial district, a logistics district, food production district and more. This is certainly effective since you’ll need to feed or house a lot of people, produce more coal and materials, etc.
The building map is hexagonal which makes the expansion easier to both plan and do than in the original, though you can still get stuck with no more room to expand.
You can demolish districts that are no longer working or you can temporarily stop them from working if you need workers for something else or any other reason. Building closer to already existing districts will lower your worker requirements too.
So, while slightly different and on a larger scale, building is still a fun and strategic element in Frostpunk 2.
Misc
- Instead of the great storm, now you’ll get whiteouts which, based on what I’ve seen, seem pretty bad.
- Frostpunk 2 has a currency called Heatstamps which you get as tax from people or can request from factions.
FAQs
When is Frostpunk 2 coming out?
Frostpunk 2 is getting released on July 25th, 2024. However, if you pre-order, you can start playing the game 72 hours before anyone else. There was also a closed beta in April, and a demo version for a few weeks in April for people who pre-ordered a lot sooner.
How many factions are there in Frostpunk 2?
In Frostpunk 2, there are 6 communities — Foragers, Machinists, Lords, Thinkers, Workers, and Merchants. From each of these communities individual factions, which are basically more radicalized communities. There will only ever be up to 4 factions at a time, so they can break down and pop up, depending on the situation in your city.
Each of these factions will have their own requests and wants, as well as ideas on how to move forward, and you’ll have to find the balance between them all. Otherwise, you’re in for a lot of riots, rallies and more.
Do I need to play Frostpunk before Frostpunk 2?
Playing Frostpunk is not a requirement for playing Frostpunk 2, though it could help you better understand the world. If you’re not interested in playing Frostpunk, I’d recommend watching some videos or reading up on it to get a better idea of the world and gameplay. However, this is not strictly necessary since Frostpunk 2 employs similar, but ultimately different and expanded game mechanics.
How many hours can you play Frostpunk 2?
Frostpunk was about 10 and a half hours long if you wanted to complete just the main quests and around 60 hours long if you wanted to explore all the possibilities. Based on that, and the new aspects of Frostpunk 2, as well as the larger scale, we can assume that Frostpunk 2 will be at least that long, if not longer.
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