Frostpunk 2: Best Resources To Farm In The Early Hours

Key Takeaways

• Frostpunk 2 focuses on society management and resource balancing; coal and food are critical for survival.
• Heat remains essential in both Frostpunk games; warmth is necessary for building and expanding the city.
• Heatstamps act as currency in Frostpunk 2, crucial for funding buildings, districts, and gaining favor with factions.

Frostpunk 2 was released recently to major acclaim for its balance of society management, roleplaying elements, and challenging but engaging strategic gameplay. Anyone who has played the first game has some understanding of what’s in store – hard decisions, relentless cold, and egregiously unsafe working conditions.

Like its predecessor, Frostpunk 2 is as much a game about resource management as it is anything else, and if players don’t get a good resource base happening early, it can be very difficult to get some of those rarer resources, such as cores. For the early hours of play, here are the main resources players should be focusing on.

4 Coal

As Much In This Title As The Last, Heat Is Essential

Many would say that Frostpunk focuses on the micro, while Frostpunk 2 focuses on the macro. The predecessor is a small picture, a relatively intimate look at the struggling lives of workers and their plight, trying to make it in the frostlands. The second game is instead focused on shaping a society as a whole through ideology and factions – but in one of the various areas where the two games align, it’s that without warmth, there’s no city to build.

Finding coal seams through frostbreaking is the main way to accrue this resource in the early game, and then beyond this, players will have to push to ensure they’re constantly researching tech that can keep up with the demands for heat as their city continues to expand. Frostpunk 2 tends to be quite lengthy, so securing a stockpile of coal early on will greatly benefit players looking to see this one through to the very end.

3 Food

Food Is Slow To Build Initially

Like the previous title, food can be a concerningly pressing resource for the first chunk of Frostpunk 2. Citizens eat rations at a rate far greater than what can be basically acquired, so it’s important to prioritize building a heavy influx of food early on to make sure the game does not outpace the player, and citizens don’t start to starve. Players will need to frostbreak for fertile soil and frostbreak around established food sources in the earliest parts of the game in order to ensure they’re maximizing their food production and begin making preliminary frostbreaks to try and secure further sources where fertile soil might be.

Building a logistics district is a similarly pressing matter, as it ensures players can send scouts out to scour the world for more fertile soil deposits, as well as other resource deposits, and notify the player of where they are. Mirroring the smaller scale of the previous game, Frostpunk 2’s much larger scope means that there is a bigger map to explore and discover resources on, but this does mean that there are more dangers to be wary of, and the title is by no means set in a paradise—it’s every bit as dark and gruesome as its predecessor was.

2 Heatstamps

Currency Makes A Comeback In Post-Apocalypse

If there was one thing that stopped Frostpunk from being an ever darker title than it turned out to be, it’s that there wasn’t any ruthless monetization to be had. Frostpunk 2 fixes this with Heatstamps, a resource that essentially amounts to money, produced through daily accruals that are linked to overall population size, as well as certain laws. Heatstamps are utilized by the citizens of the player’s city and are also used to essentially fund any building or district that needs building or upgrading. It’s also used as a means of placating or gaining the favor of factions, which is surprisingly useful in the early game when having a faction or two aligned with the player can make starting out much easier.

Heatstamps can be gained via the tax policies in the player’s city. They can also be raised with any of the major factions, but that will upset them to an extent. The size of the faction directly correlates to how many heatstamps they’re able to give you with each petition for more funding, so the larger a faction, the more players will gain. Of course, if a faction is larger, then it has more sway and influence, so upsetting them will have greater consequences. For especially big factions early on, it’s a good idea to have some way to placate them before, rather than after, petitioning them for funding.

1 Workforce

Workers In Large Quantities Are Needed For Optimal Output

The Workforce in Frostpunk 2 operates at a fixed percentage of the player’s overall population. It stands to reason that the population would be a cap of sorts for the amount of workers available to manage and produce resources in each district. While there are a plethora of ways to gain workers, there are some early-game tricks to ensure players are maximizing their workforce efficiently. It’s important to note that the maximum amount any district can produce is subject to the maximum number of workers it can hold.

A band-aid solution to the resource of Workforce is to reduce the amount of workers in one area if another resource producer needs more attention. Changing laws to affect the percentage of the population that is recruited as the workforce might foster a negative reputation among particular factions, but it’s an easy way early on to get a better stockpile of resources before the going gets truly rough.