Frostpunk – Rocketing your technologies, Super Strategy to beat hard/extreme

What is the bottleneck of harder game mode?

If you are going to beat hard and even extreme game mode, thinking about what are the difficulties of there modes compared with normal difficulty, well there are basically 4 types of indicators in the game: people’s attitude towards good or bad things, people’s physical needs(they are more prone to sickness and hunger), weather and economy(generally only 80% or less). If you consider the latter 3 settings, you will find that you just struggle to meet people’s basic demands: foods , medical services, shelters and heating. Your people needs more and you will get less.

1. On extreme mode, you have only 1 day gap between different state of people’s needs, that is, people will get 1 day from full to hunger, 1 day from hunger to staring and finally 1 day to die. The same applies to medical needs: with more patients, you only have 1 day from sick to gravely ill and then die.This can cause massive problems in the early game since people start to get hungry on day 2 and in the first night you need to build 2 medical posts(50 woods) and 10 engineers to treat the sick!
2. While looking for more resources, you will be shocked by the scarce gains of your economy. Thinking about building hunters’ hut quickly to provide some foods to feed your citizens? The original hunters’ hut gives you 11 raw foods with 15 people hunting all the night and cannot work elsewhere until 15:00 in the afternoon. Even with soup law you can only feed 12.5 more people beyond the hunters themselves! If you have researched the tier 0 hunter’s gear tech, then you can get 16(80% of the normal difficulty) raw foods. And that is the case for all your economy.
3. Well, you may think that the previous problems are the lethal ones then you are sorely wrong.With all the little foods you can get from the original hunting, you will rationally think immediately upgrade your gains by researching the technologies like gathering tools and hunting gears. Then suddenly you find you need 14 hours+ to research the basic tier 0 and 1 technologies !! That is literary the killer of this difficulty: with enough technologies you can easily get more resources and provide better heating and medical conditions for your citizens on workplaces and at home.

Keep this in mind and we will discuss the key to rush technologies on extreme mode.

General discussions about the mechanics of workshops(research)

Before we move on the strategy, we need to understand how the research works in the game. Unlike gathering resources of any kind, research done in workshops do not count in the linear calculations. I assume you already know that the 1st workshop contributes 100% efficiency, 2nd up to 130%, 3rd to 150% and each one more workshop beyond 3 adds 10% efficiency to the final number.

However,All of the efficiencies of your functioning workshops during a specific time will be added up into a number of 100% workshops. That is , if you have 2 automatons with 70% efficiency working during the night with engineer automaton tech, you would think the total efficiency at the moment is 0.7*1+0.7*0.3=91%, but the real case is here is a counted number of 1.4 full workshops which gives you 1+30%*0.4=112%.

If you keep in mind of the border effect of calculated number of workshops, you will understand that it is not that worthy to have a added number of workshops beyond 3(150% efficiency) with limited resources.(You will still need to build a lot of workshops to boost your tech on extreme mode if you have enough resources for building and engineers). You will also realize that the economic way to do more techs is to increase the length of your working time for researching.And it is highly recommended that you have at least a equivalent of 1 full workshop working during the night if you are going for automatons to research during the night.

For example, if you have 1 automaton with the basic 70% ( you need to research the first plus 10% automaton integration tech to unlock engineer automaton tech)researching during the night, you get 70% total efficiency. If you get 2, 112% efficiency with a 42% boost! 3 automatons give you 132% with a further 20% increasing. So the first 100% total efficiency is the real bonus you can get at any give time.

But I am not here to merely discuss how to maximize the using of engineer automatons. You will wait a long time to do so on extreme difficulty. I am going to introduce you a much cheaper strategy.

Emergency shift as a trick to rush technologies

Besides automatons, there is only one way to research 24 hours: use emergency shift. what? I already know this any way you would think. But think about the deaths due to overwork, these are precious engineers as scientists and doctors!

Well, this is the tricky part of the game. If you use emergency shift as a 2nd time on any workplaces other than wreckage and piles, surely there is a scripted death—–except that you let the working people have a break for a few hours to rest(you will know the irony of this later 🙂 ), then there will be no death at all.

To do this trick you need at least 2 workshops functioning, however, 3 or more is optimal in my opinion. When the workday begins, you immediately use emergency shift in the morning in one of the workshops, and then pull of all the engineers off the workshop for 3 and half hours(I wonder if it could be 3, if you have better ideas please tell me ) You can put these resting engineers on a vacation sawing woods or building something during the work hours, and let them in after. They will be touched experiencing the toil of workers therefore do not die because of overwork. In this way, you can literally keep your research 24 hours going.

The next day you could just switch to another workshop to use emergency shift and let this one to cool down its 2d break. Now you can count the gains and losses of this trick. If you have mere 2 workshops, losing a 3.5h time of 1 workshop during the day actually reduces only 0.3*3.5=1.05 hours of research. But you can have a 10 more hours of 100% research during the night even with extended shift. If you have 4 and moreworkshops, it only makes you a 0.35 hours of loss which I consider a very trivial calculation.

Tips and conclusions

This method is surely powerful, it gives you a 100% efficiency research bonus during the night as long as you have 2 fulled-staffed workshops,while you need 2 automatons with 70% efficiency and have engineer automaton tech done to have 112% efficiency research during the night.

However there are few drawbacks and tips you need to remember. First and foremost, you really need to keep an eye on your discontent especially on extreme mode. Using emergency shift is going to really piss off your citizens and your discontent bar is likely to keep high as long as you use this trick almost everyday to keep rocketing your technologies. Since discontent can be regarded as a precious resource to boost your science, it must be dealt with caution. I have seen lots of youtubers’ guides telling you to take advantage of the safe usage of emergency shifts to collect piles in the early game to rush resources, unfortunately this way cannot be allowed in my strategy. You can still launch some shifts as long as you control your discontent bar below 60% in the very beginning. But do not, I repeat do not use it on any other things unless it is a real emergency.

Several methods are also used to reduce discontent. Fighting arenas are very good and cheap buildings to reduce stress and should be adopted early in the game. You could have some extended shifted turned off to keep discontent in check. Public house should be open during working hours by replacing other workforce from other workplaces.And keep in mind that people need to rest to enjoy all the stress relief public places, citizens busy constructing buildings cannot use this benefits.Therefore it is important to control your construction plan during the evening and use the trick of free engineers pulled off form emergency shifting workshops to build during work time.

Finally, as human beings, it will take you some attention to remember the time to put these free engineers back to workshops so that they could work overnight. When switching workplaces, it is possible that these engineers may want to eat first, just use the dismantle and cancel trick or you can spare their time to feed themselves as a reward to work restlessly.

This is all about Frostpunk – Rocketing your technologies, Super Strategy to beat hard/extreme; I hope you enjoy reading the Guide! If you feel like we should add more information or we forget/mistake, please let us know via commenting below, and thanks! See you soon!