The Arks! The scenario I went in expecting a gimmick run, did indeed got a gimmick run, but... it's well-executed? And it doesn't obsessively try to be Deep And Moral And Artsy? It's just a straightforward little story, a straightforward challenge, but extremely off-kilter foundations so it's a unique experience.

It's also arguably easier than A New Home when playing down on Medium, which I found a bit disappointing given that A New Home is really, really easy, but going up difficulties jacks up its difficulty a lot more than A New Home: Extreme A New Home is maybe mildly tense for the first few days, but never more than mildly. Extreme The Arks is genuinely a demanding challenge that really wants you to understand the mechanics and execute things to a fairly high level. So where going through A New Home on Extreme left me feeling like I'd basically wasted my time, getting through The Arks on Extreme was a new challenge, genuinely pushing me more than Medium, and more than Hard for that matter.

Anyway, on to that straightforward story.

In The Arks, you're playing not as a city of people just trying to survive the icepocalypse, but as a group with a specific objective: to preserve a bunch of seeds and make sure they'll survive the big freeze, so the plants in question can be brought back in the event the big freeze renders any of them extinct. The whole thing is meant to be a fully automated situation: I think the idea is that your crew of people are prepared for the possibility of the cold killing them while their efforts still preserve the seeds, but in any event this is the justification for why this is The Automatons Scenario. You're going to build a lot of Automatons.

The game complicates things by adding another city in bad shape later down the line so you can have a bonus objective of helping them, but still, pretty straightforward.

In support of this gimmick, the game does many odd things.

First of all, your population is very rigid, and very small. You start with 45 Engineers, and that's basically all the human citizens you'll ever have: you'll later get exactly 1 Gravely Ill Worker showing up to inform you of the city that's in bad shape, but he's it. There's no survivors to find on the Scouting Map, the city in question won't send over any refugees, and no other refugees will show up. So 46 people is all you've got to work with: don't let people die casually!

Second, in support of the above, Scout Teams are made of 5 Engineers rather than 5 Workers. Possibly related to the all-Engineers start (Well, 45 Engineers and 1 Automaton, but the point is you have no Workers) is also that you simply can't hunt at all -you will need to get to tier 1 techs and build a Hothouse to avoid starvation- and Outposts are also simply not available.

Third, Children: since you have no Children at all, ever, in this scenario, the Adaptation Law tree snips out the entire branch of Child Shelters vs Child Labor. All the other Adaptation Laws remain present, though, even the ones that feel a bit weird and/or are mechanically dubious to this scenario, such as Public House.

Fourth, you get a unique tech in Industry and Exploration:


Automaton Scouts
Costs 20 Wood.
6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 1
Requires: Beacon.
Raises Scout Team limit by 1, and allows Automaton Scouts to be deployed, which cost 60 Wood, 60 Steel, 200 Coal, and an Automaton. Automaton Scouts travel 25% faster than regular Scout Teams, but are otherwise identical in function.

I like the idea of Automaton Scouts, but, uh, no.

First of all, Automaton Scouts being inexplicably super-expensive to deploy is really killer to their potential. It's really, really difficult to fit in tying up so much of your resources in the early game, and later in the run when you might not find the cost terribly burdensome, it's too late: you can easily get everything scouted off two regular Scout Teams. Which incidentally makes it underwhelming that Automaton Scouts are slightly faster as the only appeal to using them.

Second, the entire idea feels ignorant of Scout mechanic implications. Sending 5 of your Engineers off to scout reduces your food consumption by 5 Food Rations per day and ensures those 5 Engineers won't need medical treatment, and sending off an Automaton simply lacks an equivalent benefit.

Third, Automaton Scouts-the-tech is a dead-end tech that leads to nothing else. You'll need to grab More Scouts if you intend to get the Scout speed upgrades, whereas Automaton Scouts can be entirely ignored without consequence. They also cost the same, take as long to research, and are in the same tier, so it's not like Automaton Scouts has any notable advantage even if you intend to skip the Scout speed boosts.

Overall, I wish The Arks had had Automaton Scouts replace More Scouts in the tech tree so you would at least have cause to grab it on the way to other techs. I would also have been okay with The Arks more completely committing to the bit and making it so you can only deploy Automatons as scouts, not Engineers. This particular choice just ends up somewhere from 'pointless' to 'obnoxious newbie trap'.

Anyway, returning to Fundamental Differences: more unexpected is that you're not allowed to research the Factory in this Automaton-focused scenario, and can't see any of the techs locked behind it: this is because your crew somehow lost the Factory plans on their way to this site, and you'll have to send a Scout Team to retrieve it, recycling the 'Scouts grabbing techs' mechanic from A New Home but this time with a clearer design functionality. Once the tech is retrieved successfully, all the techs gated behind Factory become visible in Industry and Exploration, making it look much less barren. (Retrieving the Factory plans is in fact your very first objective of the scenario)

Also, you simply don't have access to Purpose Laws. This is probably for the best overall for various reasons, but it is a bit frustrating that The Automatons Scenario doesn't actually let you use Order with it to really lean into the 'Order synergizes with Automatons' thing.

But returning to that whole 'keeping some seeds intact' concept, this notion comes with actual mechanics! Specifically, you start with four of these:


Seedling Ark
Size 6x4
Heat +1.
If this building's Heat is -3 or worse, a gauge will begin draining on it very slowly. (Taking 48 hours to fully empty, specifically) If this gauge fully drains on a Seedling Ark, Hope falls heavily and that Seedling Ark ceases to be usable. If every Seedling Ark has their gauge empty, the scenario ends immediately in failure. When at -2 Heat or better, the gauge will instead slowly refill. Cannot be demolished.

These are the seed caches you're supposed to ensure the survival of. The need to keep them adequately warm is... pretty bizarre from a realism standpoint, since freezing seeds is normally one of the main ways to preserve them, and letting them get too warm is what can cause them to sprout, but Frostpunk's gameplay framework kind of demands that your goal be to prevent them from freezing. The devs probably should've picked something else to be trying to keep warm, honestly, but I can see how we got here, given for one thing the real-life seed bank is probably the main inspiration here.

Anyway, since the gauge drains and fills slowly, optimal play involves eg turning off the Heaters on Seedling Arks to save Coal, letting them drain to half the gauge or whatever, then warming them up enough to refill the gauge, repeating infinitely throughout the scenario. On Medium you can easily just keep them Adequately Warm at all times, but on Hard and especially Extreme you'll probably need to budget your Coal more. Also note that the gauge's rate of draining and filling isn't affected by the exact temperature: if you, say, turn off a Steam Hub that's helping to keep a Seeding Ark warm enough in an attempt to stretch Coal reserves, you should also turn off its Heater if this brings it to -3 or less. It won't freeze any faster for being at -4 than for being at -3. By the same token, even if an Ark is recovering, you should always prefer to warm it to -2 Heat and no higher.

As the Seedling Arks need to be protected on a semi-continuous basis and their base Heat can never be directly improved, they actually provide the 'floor' to the scenario's temperature: the worst the game can do for an extended period is drop to a total of -10 Heat, because if the weather went to -11 for more than a day, the Arks would be guaranteed to freeze to death no matter what you did, since you can only add +3 from Heaters and +4 from the Generator's power level beyond its innate +1. This has some kind of funny effects on the scenario, in that your housing is very unlikely to be a main cause for temperature concerns, unlike other scenarios.

This is also the scenario that first clued me in to how incredibly bad the Generator range upgrades are, as the scenario is designed to make them especially worthless. The first radius increase to the Generator doesn't cover any of the Arks, and even if it did, it's just more Coal-efficient to use Steam Hubs (And even cheaper to use Heaters preferentially), and since your population is tiny and most of your work will be done by Automatons, you'll never need a large Heat Zone footprint. Just covering the Arks will leave you with a bunch of Heat Zone coverage you don't really have any use for, and you will need to cover them with a Steam Hub apiece eventually.

Anyway, your first objective is, much like A New Home, the game pushing you to get started on scouting: this time because you need to send a Scout Team to go retrieve the Factory tech so you can actually do all the Automaton-building the scenario wants you to do. This is presented in an annoyingly unclear way where it's easy to think the scouting node being highlighted as important and that is right on top of your city will have the Factory, but no, you have to travel multiple nodes out, and will in fact find an Automaton you send off to the city before you reach the node with the Factory tech.

Once you've done that, your second objective is a kind of pointless More Automatons objective. It wants you to build three Automatons, except actually it means it wants you to have three Automatons: since you start with one and get another on the way to retrieving the Factory tech, in actuality this just wants you to build one more Automaton, which is not exactly a big ask.

The bigger reason I say it's kind of pointless is how very redundant it is with the very next objective: 'Autonomous City', which wants you to have Automatons working on all your core resource needs: 2 Automatons bringing in Coal, 1 bringing in Wood, 1 bringing in Steel, and 1 bringing in Raw Food, for a total of 5 Automatons needed to meet this objective's requirements.

This has a very long duration on the objective, which is a bit of misleading opacity. Once you complete this objective, your next objective will have the exact duration that was left on 'Autonomous City' when you completed it; in both cases, the actual thing deciding the timer is that you need to be prepared fully by X date, but this isn't communicated to the player clearly until after Autonomous City is completed. A secondary aspect to this worth explicitly noting is that there's no point to delaying the completion of 'Autonomous City'; it won't give you more time in the scenario overall or anything.

The fourth and final main objective is to stockpile 8000 Coal and 500 Food Rations, get 5 Houses built, and to disband all your Scout teams before the storm hits. That might sound intimidating, but it's not really? Soup (Or Sawdust, I guess) makes it really easy to hit that Ratons goal well before the end, and a couple of Steam Coal Mines worked by unupgraded Automatons is 1296 Coal per day coming in up on Extreme. While you'll be spending Coal, your Coal needs are just not that large: the Generator spends at most 576 Coal per day, and that's if you run it at max, which you don't need to do, and this is ignoring the potential to improve Automaton Efficiency and/or grab the passive Coal Mine boosts. Point being, if you're managing things right, you can easily get to 8000 Coal in 8~ days.

However, I said 'main' objective for a reason: around day 15, a single Gravely Ill Worker will arrive to your city, and you'll be informed of New Manchester and asked to find it and send help to it. You can, of course, blow this off entirely and ignore the barrage of events criticizing your decision, but that's boring and for the rest of this page I'm going to just take it as a given that you want to help New Manchester.

Do note that you're on a mildly tight time limit for helping New Manchester. Not only do you have less than two weeks until the scenario's deadline at the point that the Worker shows up (About 12 days, more specifically), but around that point The Arks brings in the superstorm mechanics from A New Home: the furthest-north scouting node will freeze, denying you it forever if you haven't gotten to it. By extension, if you're slow to find New Manchester, you may be getting a Scout Team killed by the storm during the return trip.

New Manchester itself is multiple scouting nodes to the east: three, specifically, over three days travel out at default Scout Team speed. Once you do find it and commit to trying to save it, you'll be told this is a three-stage operation, but annoyingly you'll only be told the first stage immediately. Said first stage is gathering 600 Wood, 600 Steel, and 1 Automaton to send to New Manchester. The game also fails to explain that you do this at the Beacon, and furthermore it uses a new UI option that's easy to overlook, of an arrow you use to switch from the Scout Team tab to the 'shipments for New Manchester' tab. The second you have sent out that shipment (You don't need to wait for it to arrive, which is very convenient given the shipments take 24 hours to reach New Manchester), it reveals the second stage, which is to send 2000 Food Rations and 2 Automatons. Yikes! Lastly, once you've sent that batch, it reveals the third and final stage: deliver 6000 Coal and for some reason 4 Automatons.

That's a total of 7 Automatons, 600 Wood, 600 Steel, 2000 Food Rations, and 6000 Coal, on top of needing to stockpile 8000 Coal and 500 Food Rations for yourself. And also ignoring regular expenses, of course; among other points, shipping out 7 Automatons is by default another 700 Steel, 400 Wood, and 350 Coal of expenses to budget for.

Also note that during the second shipment, you'll get Engineers complaining that The Mission is vital; you can (and honestly should) promise to keep at least 6 Automatons in the city to reassure them. If you make this promise and then ship out the Food Rations without dropping below 6 Automatons, this inexplicably convinces them you're not going to ruin The Mission as part of saving New Manchester, which gives a hefty-sounding +20% Efficiency bonus... that only applies to Workshops, so it runs into the step-down behavior and will have a very tiny effect on your rearch speed. (It also works with Engineer Automatons, which is weird given it's 'the Engineers are motivated') And I say you 'should' make the promise, because you really ought to have over a dozen Automatons at the ready by then; this promise is a joke unless you're being really weirdly reluctant to build Automatons. Indeed, you get a total of 33 Steam Cores in this scenario if you scout fully; even with shipping 7 Automatons out, even if you build an Infirmary and two Advanced Coal Mines and two Steam Hothouses and never dissassemble your Factory, you'll still have 18 Automatons lying around at the end!

And... that's it. Ship a ton of stuff to New Manchester, stockpile Coal and food for yourself, build Houses. Pretty straightforward overall.

A few tips or observations:

-You can completely skip speed upgrades for your Scouts and still hit every node with plenty of time to spare, just so long as you've got a Scout Team able to head east to New Manchester shortly after the Worker arrives. There's just not that many nodes to hit, and there's limited value in assuring collected resources arrive in a timely manner. You do need a second Scout team, though.

-There's really no reason to bother with unlocking and building Wall Drills. The amount of frozen trees on the map is completely nuts, and your overall Wood needs are much lower than in most scenarios since your population is so tiny. Just use Sawmills.

-A trick for automatically managing Seedling Ark heating/cooling is to have their Steam Hubs running on Extended Shifts, so they'll be heated for 14 hours and freezing for 10 hours. If you have human-manned workplaces in range (Such as Workshops, Hothouses...), this can easily be more Coal-efficient than manually turning Heaters on and off.

-Once you start getting a lot of Automatons going, you should probably pile Engineers into more Workshops. The effect will be small, but, well, what else can you have them do? The Wood and Steel costs really aren't significant either: you just don't need a ton of them in this scenario. Of course, once you have a ton of Automatons, maybe you want them in the Workshops to run research for 24 hours? This is worth keeping in mind if you want a true-no-deaths run.

Lastly, notes about entry/exits:


This random stretch of ice wall near the western Seedling Ark is where citizens exit when going on an expedition. Yep. Why here? No idea.


Inexplicably, when entering, they instead arrive here. This at least looks kind of natural to be a path in or out of the city, but I'm not sure why The Arks has two different such points?

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The main thing unfortunate about The Arks to me is that its nature makes it by far the scenario with the least replayability. No Purpose Laws means no Purpose choice, and in general it limits your options to such an extent that even trying to challenge yourself with gimmick runs is difficult. A concrete example is how your food supply is coming from Hothouses no matter what: in A New Home, The Refugees, and The Fall of Winterhome, you have some room to go for Hothouses or Hunters Huts, potentially change things up that way, but not here. Your limited Laws and limited techs have that type of implication in general.

The Seedling Arks are also pretty one-dimensional in their design. There's not really multiple stratagems one can employ to vary runs on that point; you will be researching Heaters and covering them with Steam Hubs, with only some limited room for varying which of the two you rely on more initially.

It's too bad. I enjoyed the Arks enough that as soon as I finished it, I wanted to do another run: this ended up being my first Hard mode run of any scenario, because it was the only way I could think of to get something new out of the experience. A New Home, by contrast, had the really obvious option of just picking the Purpose path I didn't pick last time, but it was so boring I didn't really want to go back to it at all. The Arks is tightly-designed, but, like, too tightly.

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Next time, we cover scenario three: The Refugees.

See you then.