YMMV / Frostpunk

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The Refugees is full of this. Are the refugees a case of desperate commoners being left by the elites until their ship was taken over as a punishment for their negligence, or a rash group of workers who decided to take over an entire ship unjustifiably and their recklessness being the major source of problems upon their arrival at the generator? Are the Lords a group of entitled people who never knew their situation and their callousness being the result of their ship being taken over, or a group of passengers who were not pleased with their ship being stolen and had to endure hardship in their travels by foot that is not recognized by the refugees? Lastly, is Lord Craven a villain or Well-Intentioned Extremist?
  • The Last Autumn has both Worker and Engineer paths end with mass executions and dystopian conditions respectively when signed. Was your workforce always like this but waiting for a chance to act out their darkest desires or did the rumors of the Great Frost make them throw their humanity to the cold?
• Anvilicious: The game makes a compendium of your behavior in the closure and calls you out if you deviated from the expected, more humane options.
• Awesome Music:
  • The Storm Theme, which plays in A New Home when the City is hit by the final superstorm. The theme perfectly amplifies the desperation, determination, and sheer finality of humanity's last stand against the elements. "The City must survive", indeed.
  • Order, which plays if Hope is replaced with Obedience. It is a somber, brief fanfare that somehow manages to eclipse the bleakness of the ice age with its own brand of misery. Praise your great leader!
  • Faith somehow manages to capture the sheer tragedy that is your attempts at inspiring people in the city to stay being warped by the people, into a means for you to become a messiah in their eyes.
  • The music of the final days of The Last Autumn, which shares several motifs with the aforementioned Storm Theme from A New Home. It's a fitting theme for a final race against the clock as you struggle to finish the generator, to give the people of Liverpool a chance for survival, as the winter bears down on you. The music has a mournful hint to it, because this time, autumn is giving way to winter... and there's no guarantee of spring coming ever again.
• Breather Level: If players complete A New Home, they'll find The Refugees to be this. The scenario doesn't have any storms, which means hunters will always work, and outpost teams can send resources to the city continuously.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • On research for heating, many players will ignore the upgrades for generator range and instead grab the Steam Hub upgrades, as every increase in generator heat range increases coal consumption by an amount which is enough for 2 steam hubs. More importantly, steam hubs have one research which reduces their coal usage by 33% while the generator only has two researches that only gives a a total reduction of 20%. Also, players will not actually use the steam hub range increase itself, as it only gives a range extension of 50% when the increased consumption is enough to run a second steam hub. It is only researched as it is a requirement to unlock their coal reduction tech.
  • Among the first laws many players will sign will be those which lead to Extended Shift hours; that extra 4 hours of labour is invaluable at the start of any scenario.
  • Another law which non-Serenity players will pick is Overcrowding ^note Allows healthcare centres to house and treat twice the number of patients at the cost of discontent only when the extra capacity is used. This law frees up labour, especially Engineers who are the only ones who can operate Medical Posts. Even the discontent demerit is very small compared to other more radical laws.
  • In The Fall of Winterhome:
    • The very first law to be signed will be either Radical Treatment or its alternative; Winterhome's Hope cannot take any more hits from deaths and the scenario starts with several people being gravely ill.
    • Players are likely to choose Order over Faith in The Fall of Winterhome, as the Foreman law is crucial in boosting steel production for the cabins on board the Dreadnought, and helps a lot in speeding up generator repairs.
  • In the "Builders" scenario of Endless mode, most players advocate ignoring the construction of the generator during the first portion of the game, instead focusing on research and strengthening the city's economy. A generator under construction is useless while construction of the generator can be sped up later.
• Difficulty Spike: The main scenario, A New Home is generally fairly calm until news of the fall of Winterhome arrives and nearly pushes your people across the Despair Event Horizon. This causes your citizens to splinter, some even preparing to try and leave back for London while inciting riots and thefts, as well as marking the start of where you have to make some of the game's tougher moral decisions.
• Funny Moments: Frostpunk can be a crushingly bleak game with severe consequences for bad management of resources and crises, as well as tough moral choices you need to make that can decide between life and death. Nevertheless, there a few moments that can elicit a chuckle.
  • In The Last Autumn DLC, your workers take the presence of owls for a bad omen, so when one perches on top of the Generator construction site you have a choice of either shooing it away (raising discontent) or leaving it be for a couple hours until it goes away on its own. A little later, a whole flock of owls shows up and terrifies the workers, leading your Player Character to simply exclaim: "Fucking owls."
  • Be it due to oversight, a bug or to prevent the game from becoming too easy, workplaces that are staffed with Automatons still need the standard food cost to trigger the "Foreman" ability despite that fact that the whole idea behind them are their lack of any needs. Where does the food go? Who knows?
    • An alternative interpretation of the law's text partially mitigates this. Since the ability explicitly states that the rations are for the foreman when signing it, use on automaton-staffed buildings can be rationalized as you bringing in a person from outside the crew, instead of adding extra responsibilities to one of the workers already present. This interpretation, however, only moves the issue from "who is eating the rations" to "who is working as foreman", since the ability does not require you to have any spare workers.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Child Labour + Faith Laws + Overcrowding. With this combination, you can treat up to 20 patients with one facility (House of Healing) manned by 10 children, if you don't mind the scripted death. The work isn't considered dangerous (and so, the children won't be hurt in accidents), and the treatment speed is at least on par with Medical Posts (which require Engineers). Throw in a Shrine along with the other medical upgrades, and the city's medical woes become a minor irritant.
  • After using abilities such as Foreman or Emergency Shift, dismantle the facility and rebuild it. This removes the cooldown(s), and the abilities can be used again.
  • In A New Home, rushing to find Tesla City and setting up an Outpost there ASAP. This nets you a free Steam Core every day, which if you get it early enough can result in an army of Automatons and a city full of fully-upgraded production structures (Coal Mines, Wall Drills and Hothouses, as well as extra Infirmaries if you need them). None of the other outposts (which only provide resources you can already generate yourself) even come close to its value.
  • In The Last Autumn, signing the Two Shifts law and manipulating the shifts, by running the normal day shift until 1800hrs, before switching to 24-hour shifts for the night, and then switching back to the normal day shift at 0800hrs. This ensures that you only need to find extra labour during the night.
    • Heck, even without this the Two Shifts Law is incredibly powerful, as turning a 10-hour shift into 24-hour shift for double the manpower (which itself can be lowered with Shift Work Coordination) does wonders for accelerating research and Generation construction progress, which in turn increases the productivity of your city exponentially.
• Good Bad Bugs: Signing the Corpse Disposal law, followed by the Organ Transplant Law gives your medical facilities a boost in efficiency. The text implies you're using the organs and tissues of the dead to help heal the sick, but the bonus unexplainably applies even if there are no corpses. This means that it's perfectly viable (if not the best choice) to pick these laws on a deathless run, as your medical facilities will be more efficient regardless.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A common criticism of the base game. Despite its high quality, it ultimately contains a fairly small amount of content: A New Home can be easily finished in just a few hours, as is the case with the other scenarios, and the difference in playstyle between the Faith and Order playthroughs is seen as too minor to justify many repeat games. It was later rectified with the addition of Endless Mode, which allows players to play a Wide-Open Sandbox version of the game.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Due to their lack of needs of any kind carrying around resources and people, all the while traversing the frozen wastelands, Scouts are often considered almost-indestructible demigods.
  • A New Home has a desperate father run out to the frost lands to find and get back his daughter who has ran away. Said daughter lost hope in response to the approaching storm and ran away, meaning that it is at least -100 Celsius outside when the event triggers. Send him off your way to prevent Hope from falling and he later comes back with his daughter alive and well, restoring Hope. No wonder players call him a man among men.
• Memetic Mutation: Whenever a new trailer for new content is released, expect to see some form of "Hope rises. Discontent falls." in the comments section, treating the addition of new stuff like a completed quest.
• Moral Event Horizon: Thanks to the Well-Intentioned Extremist nature of the game.
  • Choosing to bury corpses in frozen pits, and eventually using them as fertilizer and organ banks, were done to reduce labor usage and recycle the dead into useful Human Resources.
  • Allowing Child Labor to reduce shortfall of manpower, even if it involved denying them a chance to be educated and (potentially) sending them to work in hard conditions, increasing their exposure to injury and death.
  • Treating the gravely ill with experimental but damaging treatments, overcrowding hospitals, and singling out the recoverable ill at the price of killing others, so that resources can be spent on more manageable goals.
  • In A New Home, New London can be placed under strict laws in response to growing unrest from the news of Winterhome's demise. The measures ranged from propaganda to brutalizing the populace into obedience that would eventually replace Hope with Obedience, representing the populace's submission to cruel and harsh rule in place of an optimistic future. Of course, the end of the Faith path isn't that benign as it involves manipulating people into guilting and lashing themselves, along with occasional executions. In addition, Devotion would replace Hope, too.
• Narm:
  • Getting the "grieving woman holding her dead husband's hand in the snow pits" event even when nobody's buried there.
  • Likewise, if you build watchtowers in an "The Builders" Endless Mode city, you can get the notification that your guards caught and saved a child that was trying to climb the generator when the generator hasn't even been built yet.
  • As the trigger for the cannibalism law is only mass starvation, it is possible for the first cannibal event to be eating out of the place you put your bodies to even if no one is dead yet.
• Nintendo Hard: Frostpunk is brutally difficult, mainly due to story events that a first-time player won't know about, and thus cannot prepare for. It's very easy to make early mistakes in the first few hours of gameplay that will doom your colony to failure several hours later, without the player even realizing they made them. Prioritizing the wrong research and accidentally triggering plot events too early can be especially devastating.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Unlike Steam Hubs, Heaters are fixed to the highest available level upon researching, meaning that you cannot turn down their coal usage at warmer temperatures.
  • Research requires resources and it becomes more costly the higher you go. Many newbies had their tech advancement frozen (no pun intended) due to having used them up on other stuff.
  • Unless you are not going for a deathless run or already have dead people under your watch, there are various events that will trigger an unavoidable death event like the first House of Healing in the Faith path and the Propaganda Center in the Order path. Said deaths actually count so you can kiss your deathless run goodbye unless you do some fiddling with the mechanics or resort to dismantling and rebuilding the place at a certain time.
  • The "Builders" scenario of Endless mode has a few critical mistakes that makes the scenario more difficult than it should be.
    • You are not provided the Braziers that you would expect to stand-in for the Steam Hubs while you build the Generator unlike the expansions. This means that around Day 30 onwards, expect your medical and food buildings to stop working even with fully upgraded Heaters and insulation whenever the temperature drops which will cripple your town.
    • Upon finishing the Generator, the initial heat zone cannot have structures built within it unlike normal Generators even if it was built flawlessly. You need to quickly research higher heat levels and build Steam Hubs to extend its warmth to your freezing town. Hope you don’t have an storm around 1-2 days away…
    • Due to an unfixed bug, you cannot complete the Archives with all known Relics collected, as the initial Relic that is supposed to start the quest wouldn't spawn on default after the first storm unlike other modes. Hope you aren't going for the related achievement...
• Strawman Has a Point: The Ministry of Propaganda telling citizens how much the captain is taking care of them is regarded as the stock Propaganda Machine, with citizens exclaiming "Now there's a Ministry of Truth to tells us what to think!". However, the point falls flat because it is true that everything you do is to ensure the city's well-being (supposing you are neither exploring Video Game Cruelty Potential nor grossly incompetent) and the opposition is really spreading false claims that would lead people to certain death. Also, the Ministry is the closest resemblance to newspaper in this post-apocalyptic scenario, and keeping the people informed of the authority's actions is necessary for a well-organized community. Then again, the presence of Londoners meant that they might be misinformed about its purpose to begin with.
• That One Achievement: Obtaining the "Golden Path" achievement in A New Home, which is obtaining the best variation of the Golden Ending, both Adaptation and Purpose laws signed actually count towards the achievement and there is no indicator if it is locked out by signing a harsh law or using a certain ability. Even signing the law alone to unlock other non-harsh laws or to placate the populace will get it locked out, even if it was never used. That is not counting the other various stuff like promises and letting in refugees. Not having it pop upon completion often makes players tear their hair out in frustration due to the wasted hours in achievement runs.
• That One Level:
  • The Rifts map in Endless Mode cuts the main generator off from various islands with resources on them. The only way to access these islands is by building bridges, which cost a lot of Wood and Steel. Better examine the map thoroughly lest you get stuck without any resources!
  • As scenarios go, On The Edge is this, as not only does the city not have a generator, it cannot produce Food or Wood (once all the trees have been cut down) or even pass laws independently until two weeks have passed.
  • Of the four base game scenarios, The Fall of Winterhome is easily the most difficult. You have to deal with extremely low hope and high discontent right from the start and need to clean up the city's completely broken infrastructure. It's very easy to get a Game Over early on if you don't make the right decisions immediately and once things do calm down and you seem to get the city back on track, the discovery that the generator is broken beyond fixing and its subsequent breakdowns can cause things to spiral out of control fast.
• That One Sidequest: Among the people' promises, providing a high enough heat level for housing is considered the hardest to do for all the wrong reasons. This is because this request would only trigger at temperatures below normal and to prevent cheesing with a flick of the Overdrive, the required heat level has to be maintained for a few days with no interruptions. More often than not, there is usually a temperature drop during said days and that often causes you to fail. General advice for players is to ignore these requests.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Hope mechanic is essentially a victory/defeat condition, and doesn't do anything else other than trigger a few events when it's very high or low. This is mitigated in The Last Autumn, where it's replaced by Motivation, which gives a penalty or bonus to efficiency depending on its level.