Extreme difficulty can be a major selling point for a video game, and this is absolutely the case in Frostpunk. This game is billed as the first “society survival game.” It blends aspects of the survival genre with city-building and resource management games. It is an extremely bleak and very challenging game, developed and published by 11 Bit Studios and released in 2018. The title is available for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. There is also an upcoming mobile version with an unidentified release date. Frostpunk is not for the faint of heart, but if you think you’re up to the challenge, here’s what you need to know.
Frostpunk Premise
This game takes place in an alternate version of the 1880s. Volcanic eruptions have led to a harsh period of global winter and a new Ice Age. You control a settlement built around a generator, a structure built by the British Empire and the US in order to support life in this new frigid world. As the leader of your people, it’s up to you to manage resources and morale. The bitter cold is an ever-present threat, and various factors can impact not only your survivability but the productivity of your citizens. You can attempt to rule as kindly as possible, or turn to crueler methods of leadership like child labor in order to better withstand the harsh environment.
Frostpunk has three main story campaigns, with three more arriving as post-launch DLC. These stories chronicle the survival and growth of settlements in this icy landscape. A post-launch patch also added an endless mode. Instead of a structured narrative like the ones featured in the campaign, endless mode simply tasks you with surviving as long as possible. Your only goal is to build up the most successful and longest-living settlement you can before inevitably succumbing to the ice.
Frostpunk Main Characters
The only real main character in Frostpunk is the player protagonist. Your character is referred to as “the Captain” across the game’s various campaigns. This nameless figure leads as best they can in the face of overwhelming opposition. Their practices are of course determined by you, the player, over the course of the game. But no matter how cruel and callous they become, everything they do is in the name of keeping their settlement alive. Aside from the Captain, there are no real characters to speak of in Frostpunk. In a harsh world like this, it’s best not to get attached to other people.
Frostpunk Cheat Codes
Frostpunk does not have any official cheat codes. The game’s bleak tone and strong atmosphere of scarcity would be undercut by the sort of free resources cheat codes tend to provide. That said, if you really want to cheat the game. There is a way. Running Frostpunk in developer mode will let you input console commands to increase your resources and modify the state of the game in a variety of ways. In order to run in developer mode, find Frostpunk in your game library, right-click it, select Properties, and add “-devconsole” as an additional command line argument. Then, once in-game, simply hit the grave accent key on your keyboard to open the console window. This unfortunately only works on PC. Here are the command codes you can enter in Frostpunk.
- SetGameTime(Day): Sets what day it is in-game.
- SetResources(“ID”, amount): Changes the amount of available resources. Resource IDs can be found below.
- ShowDebugButtonsPanel: Displays debugging buttons.
Here are the resource IDs you’ll need to survive in Frostpunk. Enter them into the middle code followed by whatever amount you want.
- Coal: Coal
- Wood: Wood
- Steel: Steel
- Steam Cores: Steam Cores
- Raw Food: Raw Food
- Food Rations: Food Rations
- Bodies: Bodies
- Wooden Materials: Structural Profiles
- Steam Tools: Steam Exchangers
- Steel Plates: Steel Composites
Frostpunk FAQ
Is there an easy mode for Frostpunk? There is a lot of debate over whether difficult games like Elden Ring and Frostpunk should have easy modes. For better or worse, though, Frostpunk does have an easy difficulty option. Each story scenario features an easy difficulty that will allow you to start with higher numbers of resources in order to set yourself up better for success. It should be noted that very little else is changed from the default difficulty. If you don’t carefully ration these increased resources, the game will still be very unforgiving to you.
What is the coldest it can get in Frostpunk? The cold is your greatest enemy in Frostpunk, and it’s understandable to want a better understanding of it. The very lowest recorded temperature in the game is a staggering -150 degrees Celsius. In the real world this would equate to -238 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature is encountered in a devastating final storm that comes at the end of one of the story campaigns, so you’ll have to make sure you’re ready for it if you’re taking on those scenarios.