How to beat chapter 1 in Frostpunk 2

Our next leg of the journey takes us back to New London, where the Captain has moved on and divisions have fractured the city. Our next challenge is to obtain enough coal to keep the city alive, and to keep the city as united as possible.

It can be a tough ask, but it’s possible, and here’s how to beat Chapter 1 of Frostpunk 2’s story mode.

How to beat Chapter 1 in Frostpunk 2 – first steps

The first thing you always want to do is hit pause. Use the pause function to get your bearings, and click on Frostbreak area and then take a good look at all the resources you have available.

You’ll need to get coal as quickly as possible, so start a Frostbreak towards the coal, and then build two housing districts on the outskirts of the city.

I also decided to Frostbreak towards the materials to the south of the city, so that we could build a district covering all of those material deposits.

Now wait for your Frostbreak to open up, and then immediately open more space around the coal deposits with another Frostbreak area command. You’ll need to fill six tiles for an Extraction District, and we want to keep space open for additional housing districts later.

So we’ll just have to be patient for a little longer before we can secure coal.

When the next Frostbreak opens up, if you aimed it towards the next coal deposits, you should be able to get three deposits into one Extraction District, providing increased efficiency. .

While you wait for this to finish building, you can build a Food District or two, but I am holding onto my materials for now, while we still have a good surplus of food.

The second that the Extraction District completes, turn your generator on by clicking on it in the center of the city and hitting the toggle button. You’ll get some dialogue here, and you’ve survived the first little challenge. Well done.

Chapter 1 – Frostpunk 2 – Get established

Unlike the prologue, Chapter 1 in Frostpunk two is complex enough that there are a hundred different ways to play this mission and still win. However there are some basic rules that you’ll need to follow in order to ensure success. These are…

• Keep an eye on your resources. Make sure to build Food Districts before you run out of food.
• Optimize District management. You can’t just build forever, your resources are limited (especially your workforce). Build enough Districts that you’re able to gather all resources, but activate and de-activate these according to what resources are most needed.
• You can also change the number of workers in a district using the watch icon when you’ve clicked on a district.

• Be mindful of your reputation with the different factions. If you go around implementing double shifts and order folks to tighten belts, this will hurt your reputation. Try to manage efficiently without these extremes.
• Frostbreak areas early and often, but don’t overdo it. All you want is to ensure that you have access to at least some of every resource, including both of the Old Waystations on the map, since these will help you navigate towards your end goal here.
• Follow the mission prompts as priority. We have limited time here, and we need to get through as quickly as possible.

Keep these rules in mind, and you probably don’t even need the rest of this walkthrough, but just in case, I’m going to write it anyway!

Priorities during Chapter 1 in Frostpunk 2

The first thing we need to do after we start getting coal in is to build a research building. To that, we’ll first need to expand a Housing District. You can do this by clicking on the District and selecting the four arrows that point in an outward direction.

While waiting for this to complete, I ran out of coal, so I decided to implement double shifts at the coal extraction facility while waiting. We can deactivate this again once we’ve built a better coal mining solution.

For now, build your Research Institute in that Housing District that we expanded.

Now we can access the Idea Tree. Go ahead and click through the prompts and research one of the options. The Frostlanders offer Dust Coal Mine, and the others offer the Blasting Coal Mine. Given the high materials demand for the Blasting Coal Mine, I went with the Frostlander’s idea.

I now established a Food District to help arrest the slide of the food stores.

While waiting for the research to complete, I ran out of coal again, so I decided to break open all of the remaining coal deposits to see if I could build an Extraction District to cover them all. It worked.

But while doing that, our new building completed and we were in a positive with our coal use. Naturally, as soon as the idea tree finishes research, you want to build your Dust Coal Mine in the coal Extraction District. Once that’s done, remember to deactivate the double shifts if you implemented them.

After that, you’ll get a new prompt and you’ll need to build a Council Hall inside of your city and pass a vote of confidence. While that builds, continue to establish new Food Districts and Extraction Districts where necessary.

Now, as for the Council Session, I just let them vote. I tried this three times just to be sure, and I passed every time — however, the number of votes does change, so it could be possible to lose this vote. Save beforehand just in case.

If you aren’t getting the vote at all, you can negotiate with one of the factions by clicking on Negotiate in the voting screen. Next, click on the faction you want to negotiate with. Select “Vote For” and then you’ll need to select one of their terms on the right-hand side of the screen.

You will need to either pass a law or complete research within a certain time frame, or you’ll lose a lot of trust with the faction.

Now it’s time to build that Logistics District on one of the Old Waystations. If you were pro-active in your Frostbreaks, you’ll have one open by now. If not, open one up and build the District.

When you get the prompt to allow more New Londoners into the city, it’s really your call, but I accepted, since we could use the extra hands. Additionally, keep researching new and useful Ideas, such as the Housing Insulation.

Once you can go exploring, there’s a choice to make. You’ll either explore the Foothills and discover a coal mine which could give you a steady supply of coal, or you can explore the Frozen Bay and then the Desolate Coast to find oil.

I decided to go straight for the Desolate Coast. You will have to wait for the Pilgrims to emerge as Delegates in the council before you can get the oil though.

Once you do find the oil, you’ll need to connect it to New London, and then you’ll need to actually send a colony, which requires 20 Frostland Teams. Time to open up that other Old Waystation and build another Logistics District.

While working towards that, now might be the right time to explore the Foothills and uncover that coal mine. My coal stores were suffering at this point, so that’s what I did.

Now just keep things ticking over until you have twenty Frostland Teams available. You’ll need to either deactivate the coal mining in the Foothills, or the food gathering in the Frozen Bay.

Now send your colonists over!

Continue to manage resources wisely while the colony settles in. Once they do, it’s time to break open some of those oil deposits.

At this point, I decided to up food production in New London so that I could send the food from the Fishing Village to the Old Dreadnought. You’ll need to establish a trail here. Once that’s all done, you’re in the final stretch of Chapter 1!

Finishing Chapter 1 in Frostpunk 2

In order to build Districts at the Old Dreadnought, you’ll need to transfer resources from New London. This can be done by clicking on the Old Dreadnought icon in the top right-hand side of your screen, and then click on Resource transfer.

On this screen, you can allocate where your resource production must go, and you can even transfer 5k resources over at any time. I immediately transferred oil over to New London, and Materials over to the Old Dreadnought.

Now simply focus on Oil Production. Build Extraction Districts over the oil deposits, and if you want to collect oil even faster, research Pumpjacks from the Heating Idea tree.

Once you’re ready, transfer 75 oil from the Old Dreadnought to New London, and Chapter 1 is done. Time to start Chapter 2.

Well played, but the challenge is only just getting started. If you need some more guidance, here’s how to beat Chapter 2 in Frostpunk 2.