Hunters Hut Costs 20 Wood. Size 5x3? Manned by up to 15 Workers, who will go out from roughly 18:00 to 6:00 in the morning to collect up to 17/15/13/11 Raw Food per night. Workers who return from a hunt will be forced to rest in a special state for several hours, and so citizens cannot hunt and immediately come back and do a day job. (But they can do a day job and then immediately go hunting) Does not modify Heat, but hunters are inexplicably exempt from temperarure risk from traveling out to hunt in the Frostlands. Cannot use Extended Shifts or Emergency Shifts, and cannot be manned by an Automaton. Unaffected by Shrines and Agitators. Inexplicably has +2 innate Heat, though this normally doesn't matter. Alright, first let's reiterate that when I do 4 numbers separated by parantheses like that, it means it's based on difficulty, going Easy/Normal/Hard/Extreme. The Hunters Hut thus provides enough Raw Food on Normal that the Cookhouse doubling it while converting it into Food Rations results in each Hunter's Hut covering 15 citizens who are not producing Raw Food. This is another way the early game gets really brutal on higher difficulties; on Extreme, each Hunters Hut starts out only providing 22 Food Rations, so you only free up 7 people to do other tasks per Hunters Hut. Since the game's 'default' setup has 15 Children in a population of 80 total citizens, that means if you don't pass Child Labor -Safe Jobs, you'll need three Hunters Huts -45 out of your 80 citizens- to actually reach the point of feeding more than just hunters and non-working citizens! In practice what you do is prioritize the Beacon and Hunters' Gear so you can get 5 citizens doing useful work without eating and make the Hunters Hut food production less terrible, mind, but yikes. Also note that the wiki, when discussing the effect of difficulty settings on resource production, claims that the Hunters' Hut and Flying Hunters produce 80% of Normal on Extreme, as opposed to the general resource rate modifier of 75% on Extreme. This is incorrect: 80% of 15 is exactly 12, but on Extreme you end up at 11 per night, which is about 73%. I suspect the standard 75% modifier is being used, but then rounding down from 11.25 to 11. Also note that there are special storms in Endless Mode and one scenario that disable all sources of Raw Food production, and in that situation citizens assigned to a Hunters Hut (Or a Flying Hunters) will gather at the Hunters Hut and make temperaure checks apprpriate to its lack of heat modification. They only get immunity if they travel into the Frostlands -just like Scout Teams and Outpost Teams, Frostpunk makes the unfortunate decision to simplify these mechanics in a manner that means citizens are only in danger from the cold if they foolishly live in your city. I'm also not sure why the Hunters Hut is so insistent on only letting Workers do the job. Frostpunk largely defaults to jobs being either 'anybody can do this' jobs, or being 'only Engineers can do this'; you thus prefer Workers (Or Children) on these jobs because the Engineers are all forcibly tied up in important tasks, but if you have an excess of Engineers it's totally valid to apply them to most jobs. The Hunters Hut and its upgrade are in fact unique outside The Last Autumn for being a worksite insistent on Workers Only. Even in The Arks, where the devs let you turn Engineers into Scout Teams since you don't have Workers in that scenario, you still can't send Engineers hunting; The Arks disables it and simply forces you to tech up to Hothouses before you starve. It's also a little frustrating you can't assign Automatons to the Hunters Hut. This is the one job in the entire game an Automaton would genuinely be better than a human crew at if it was allowed: you can't extend the work hours any in the first place, hunters can't get the Efficiency boost from a Shrine or Agitator and so that Automaton disadvantage is irrelevant, so if the Automaton tirelessly made two hunting trips per day, even if it only delivered 60% per trip, that would still mean it delivered 120% of what human hunters would deliver per day. If it instead simply cyclicaly performed 10-hour hunting trips, stopping by to refuel for an hour before heading out, it ould b even better, spending 11 hours per hunting cycle and so actually hunting slightly over twice a day. And from a realism stanpoint, it would make perfect sense for an Automaton to be really good at a job centered on going into the cold. You might argue that Automatons don't seem like they'd be capable of hunting animals and loading them up to bring back, but frankly their design looks completely incapable of doing much of anything the game has them doing. You might also point out they to need to refeul, but, again, that's every 12 hours while a hunting trip is a 10 hour process. Frankly, I strongly suspect th real reason Frostpunk doesn't let you assign Automatons to Hunters Huts is visual: when people go hunting (Or are assigned to Scout or Outpost Teams), they do in fact travel out of your city visually, but in a form that relies on the assumption you're not closely monitoring thm, where they walk toward the outer walls and either go through them and vanish sometime afterward or just disappear before they reach the walls. (Depending on how large the map is) This is easily overlooked with human citizens since the snow they walk through piles up higher than thir heads and so losing track of them is visually intuitive, but for an Automaton it would be much harder to miss them walking through walls or just vanishing in the midle of their journey toward the wall, and similarly the return trip involving fading into existence wherever they vanished at would be rally blatant. I honestly hope I'm wrong about this being why Hunters Huts can't have Automatons assigned to them, but... it remains my suspicion. Hunts themselves are pretty unique in their mechanics for a resource site. A hunt starting fills up a circular meter you can see by clicking the Hunters Hut, and nothing happens until it finishes filling up and the hunters are streaming in; at that point, all Hunters Huts rapidly unload their full night's efforts into storage. Every other resource intake mechanic in Frostpunk ticks regularly, delivering a small amount at a time, with in-game descriptions like "Delivers X amount of Y resource per day" being summaries, not fully accurate to the mechanics. This unfortunately has several layers of jank to it, which can be devastating to a high-difficulty run. First of all, if a Hunters Hut becomes disabled mid-hunt for some reason, you lose all existing progress instantly and won't get it back. As hunters are only willing to set out for a relatively brief portion of the event, if eg this happens at 1:00 in the morning you can't restart the hunt to get even part of the Raw Food. (Most egregious: upgrading a Hunters Hut into a Flying Hunters costs you the progress) Worse yet, techs can trigger this loss of progress; it's inconsistent for whatever reason, but Hunters' Gear, Hunting Tactics, and Flying Hunters' Gear finishing during the night are all able to cause the game to decide to trash your hunting progress entirely, probably costing you a full night of Raw Food from them. (Note that I said 'able': this behavior is, like many things in Frostpunk, not even consistent about happening) This is part of why I heavily prefer to move to Hothouses as swiftly as possible: so I don't have to worry about starvation caused by inconsistent code screwing me for otherwise-reasonable decisions. Unfortunately, Hunters' Gear is an essential early research by default, so you just need to try to arrange for it to finish during the day. Second, the nighttime hunt overlaps directly with when the game performs Illness checks, and to compensate for this hunters will only make their Illness checks once they get back from the hunt, which both obfuscates that Ilness checks normally only occur in the morning (As hunters will increase your sick people in the 8:00 to 9:00 range) and just generally creates funkiness. This is also wonky for the fact that the only factor hunters are checking for Illness is the temperature of their home: if your hunters have a nice toasty House that's maximally warm, your hunters cannot get sick from the cold, even as they rove the Frostlands at -8 Heat. If they are assigned to a Tent currently sitting at -2 Heat, though, that awful flappy tent will reach its icy grip out into the Frostlands to strike them with Illness. It's bizarre, counterintuitive behavior. A related bit is how this interacts with the stupid 'if the Generator is off, homeless people can spontaneously die' behavior, as the game is perfectly happy to decide that one of your hunters in the Frostlands died 'sleeping on the cold ground around the Generator', y'know, while they weren't sleeping and shouldn't care at all about the Generator's current status anyway. Seriously. To be honest, I really don't get why Hunters Huts operate on a nighttime schedule. People can hunt during the day, and I'm not aware of any reason why hunting up near the Arctic Circle would strongly reward nighttime hunts, and in fact it would make the whole 'everything is freezing' issue so much worse since there wouldn't even be warmth from sunlight, so really I'd expect Frostpunk's citizens to hunt uring the day. It also just highlights the artificiality of most workplaces only doing daylight hours unless you hit them with an Emergency Shift or assign an Automaton to them. So I don't even get why the devs invited all this trouble upon themselves? I'm also given to understand that the 'resting from the hunt' state didn't exist in Frostpunk's early days and you could in fact work citizens all day and then send them to hunt all night for basically free. Which I fully believe in part because the 'resting from the hunt' state is so weird for how it's an actual mandatory break you can't violate, unlike the regular 'rest' state that your citizens never actually need to do, they just do it when idle at night. To be fair to the devs, the scenario progressions suggest they might have noticed how broken the Hunters Hut actually is and prferred to move away from it. Of the four base scenarios, A New Home is the only scenario that really expects you to engage with hunting's broken mchanics for an extended period: The Arks denies you hunting entirely, The Refugees gives you reliable early access to Steam Cores and so transitioning to Hothouses can be done quite quickly, and The Fall of Winterhome literally starts you with Hothouse access and Steam Cores to build them. The DLC scenarios are even more extreme, throwing out the baseline Raw Food production mechanics in their entirety, with The Last Autumn reusing the Hunters Hut graphic but using completely different mechanics for it bringing in Raw Food while On The Edge simply denies you Raw Food production in general and expects you to turn to its Settlements system to feed your citizens. So for one thing I have hopes that Frostpunk 2 and, to a lesser extent, Frostpunk 1886 won't walk right into the same problems. In any event, the Hunters Hut is... semi-functional as your starting crappy source of Raw Food you try to swiftly move on from: it's very labor-intensive, gives poor returns, can't be enhanced by Laws, andd it's only selling points are that it takes up little space, doesn't need a Steam Core, and can be placed outside of your Heat Zones. It gets a bit better with technological support, and is actually kind of important in Endless Mode if you have random events enabled, so there's some nuance here, but especially in A New Home an The Refugees they're largely an early-game option you move on from. Cookhouse Costs 20 Wood. Size 5x3? Can be manned by up to 5 Workers, Engineers, or Safe Jobs Children. +1 Heat, must be at least Chilly to function (So cannot go below -2 Heat), converts Raw Food into Food Rations. By default this converts 2 Raw Food into 4 Food Rations, but Soup produces 5 Rations and Sawdust meals produce 6 Rations, still off 2 Raw Food. Produces 10 meals per hour, meaning it can spend up to 20 Raw Food per hour and by default can produce up to 40 Food Rations per hour. The other component to food stuff, and I really need to explain the moderately insane mechanics around citizen hunger to give you proper context. Alright, the food part of things is, at a glance, pretty straightforward. You produce Raw Food, citizens will only eat Raw Food ifthy are Starving and don't expect it to be turned into Food Rations soon, then the Cookhouse turns Raw Foodd into Food Rations, which your citizens will happily eat under normal conditions. Citizens eat 1 meal per day, consuming 1 Raw Food or 1 Food Ration; I actually quite like how elegant it is that Cookhouses convert Raw Food into Food Rations at a highly favorable rate, so it's straightforward and obvious that letting starving citizens eat uncooked food is bad, since eating 1 Raw Food is feeding them only as well as 1 Food Ration and you could've gotten them 2 Food Rations out of it. (Actually, someone on the internet claims that eating Raw Food to fill hunger results in being hungry more quickly than a Food Ration, though I've not confirmed this and am honestly a little skeptical the game works that way) But! The "People's Needs" difficulty setting applies to hunger in a manner parallel to how it applies to Illness progression: on Normal, citizens only become Hungry if they miss a meal 3 days in a row, and from there only become Starving if they miss a further three ays of meals. Changing difficulty tweaks that by 1 day on both parts per difficulty, so on Easy it's 4 days, on Hard it's 2 days, and only on Extreme do your citizens actually get hungry if they miss a day of food! I call this 'moderately insane' because your citizens simply reset their hunger meter to its baseline upon eating without any regard to that whole daycount thing. If you're playing on Normal, it is technically optimal to prevent your citizens from eating for 2 days bfore actually letting them eat, because eating before that third day is actually just wasting food in mechanis terms! Only it's worse than that twice over! First of all, it's actually mechanicaly optimal to get your citizens to be Starving before they get a chance to eat. Why? Well, for regular hunger, your citizens walk into a Cookhouse and spend an hour in there enjoying their meal. If they are Starving, however, citizens gain the magic ability to teleport food directly from the Stockpiles into their belly, no need to actually physically travel anywhere: I assume this was meant to be a mercy mechanic, ensuring Starving citizens don't die of hunger on their way to a meal, but this can be exploited by a savvy player to simply delete that hour of idling in the Cookhouse, Not Working, so you can squeeze out more labor time from citizens for free. Second, all of this is depressingly trivial to do if you're willing to do the nonsensical micromanagement involved. See, on paper this all shoulddn't really matter because Starving citizens will in fact teleport Raw Food into their stomach if no Food Rations are available and no manned Cookhouse exists to be expected to convert Raw Food into Food Rations, and as noted earlier you don't want people eating Raw Food, and if a Cookhouse exists and is cooking up Rations, then obviously people can go walk to the Cookhouse and eat inside it, right?... right? Well... thing is, you can order a Cookhouse to be Dismantled, and then you can pause that order so the building won't actually be dissassembled. In this state, the Cookhouse is not a viable location to enter and eat inside of. However, you can then at anytime cancel the ismantle orer, at which point the Cookhouse springs back into existence as a viable location to get food from and to make food in. Citizens who are merely Hungry won't interrupt a job to get a meal: you can thus Pause-Dismantle all Cookhouses late in the workday, having been cooking up Food Rations during work hours, so most citizens will end up Starving but with Food Rations in storage for them to teleport into their stomachs rather than getting an opportunity to grab a meal at a Cookhouse proper. A further benefit to this insanity is that it cuts around another bit of funkiness with Cookhouses: while a fully manned Cookhouse making standard Rations can generate 400 Rations per day on a standard 10-hour shift, and indeed can make 560 Rations per day with an Extended Shift, not to mention up to 700 Rations per day if it's Soup on an Extended Shift... a Cookhouse can actually only have so many people inside it at any given moment, and citizens have a limited window each day in which they'll actually keep in mind their desire to eat inside a Cookhouse. At around 200-250 citizens (Depending in part of how far people have to walk to get to the Cookhouse and all), a single Cookhouse can't actually service everyone the intended way and you'll end up with people getting Hungry and Starving, where the default ideal would be for you to build additional Cookhouses to feed everyone. But if you're relying on Starvation-based food teleportation to feed everyone anyway, there's no need for further Cookhouses, letting you ignore that Wood expense entirely. Oh, by the way, the Cookhouse is the only resource-related building whose throughput is not directly affected by difficulty: at 100% Efficiency, the Cookhouse makes 10 'recipes' per hour even up on Extreme. Which is sensible enough given that the Cookhousee will always spend a large part of the early game being held back exclusively by there being insuficient Raw Food; the game doesn't need to dirctly damage its productivity when the effect on your Raw Food producers already does so indirectly. I should also point out that at the beginning of a run there's really no reason to commit a full 5 citizens to the Cookhouse. You only need 1 to start (20% Efficiency will make 2 recipes per hour, converting 40 Raw Food into 80 Rations per day), or 2 if you want to be safe, and the outragous throughput of the Cookhouse means you can just add a citizen on occasion as your population grows, or dump a bunch of extra Children on it for free once you're out of other Safe Jobs for them, whatever. I should also clarify that citizens eating at a Cookhouse is, oddly, completely disconnected from its actual status. You might expect them to need to eat at a manned, functional Cookhouse, but no, you can just build a Cookhouse in the middle of nowhere (no road connection) and have it absolutely freezing and never man it, and people will happily wander in to the unmanned icicle of a building and sit down to eat. Not only that, but they won't suffer any ill effects for doing so! They can't get frostbitten or anything! (This is one of many reasons why I'm pretty sure citizen temperature is modeled pretty simplistically) Also worth pointing out is that Cookhouses are in fact completely unable to convert a single unit of Raw Food; the '2 Raw Food into 4 Food Rations' thing is not simply a ratio, it does in fact also specify the minimum amount of Raw Food that needs to be on hand to cook up more Rations. In the very early game, this comes up pretty readily as not only visible at all but in fact kind of painful, as Hunters Huts working at full Efficiency don't actually bring in an even amount of Raw Food per night and if you ever fully unman your Cookhouse to respond to a crisis while somebody is Starving you can have that Raw Food vanish, making a bad situation worse through multiple janky mechanics interscting to be a jank greater than the sum of its parts. Incidentally, the Cookhouse is a non-trivial part of why I rate Child Labor -Safe Jobs as such a solid Law. In the worst-case scenario, you're at least putting Children to work in the Cookhouse; there is no scenario whre it's unavailable, just scenarios where you on't have Children, and it's a nice bit of lazy utility to be able to just max out Cookhouse labor with your Children to free up Workers and Engineers for other jobs. -------------------------------------------------------- Alright, on to techs after that wall of text! Hunters' Gear Costs 10 Wood. 5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier:0 Requires: Nothing. Increases the maximum Raw Food a Hunters Hut can bring in per night by 5 units. (This number is not affected by difficulty, and does not affect the Hunters Hangar) This is an important tech to get early in general, but climbs significantly in importance as you rise in dificulty: for a Normal run, it means you go from 'each Hunters Hut supports 15 citizens doing other work' to 'each Hunters Hut supports 25 citizens doing other work'. For an Extreme run, it means you go from 'each Hunters Hut supports 7 citizens doing other work' to 'each Hunters Hut supports 17 citizens doing other work'! That means on Normal it extends your non-food labor by 40%, vs on Extreme it more than doubles the number of people who can be doing other tasks! This is further exacerbated by the shortening of the food clock and the slowed pace on research. On Normal, it's plausible to get Hothouse researched and one built well before anybody starts starving to death, simply skipping on all Hunters Hut techs, but on Extreme that's not an option in most scenarios. (Exception: The Arks, where this strategy is outright necessary) I'm not sure you can really afford to have it be any later than your first tech in most scenarios on Extreme. Overall, though, it's a pretty straightforward tech. Hunting Tactics Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Hunters' Gear. Reduces the maximum Worker count at Hunters Huts and Hunters Hangars from 15 to 10. This is our first example of something Frostpunk does a few times: a research whose benefit is reducing how many citizens need to operate a building to max out its throughput. This is an interesting usage of Frostpunk's odd worksite mechanics, as 10 Workers working an upgraded Hunters Hut do in fact have just as much effect as 15 Workers working at an unupgraded Hunters Hut, and therefore the upgrade does reduce the workload on your city... ... but it has a fair amount of odd funkiness to it. For starters, these upgrades actually make the buildings more vulnerable to Illness disrupting work: an unupgraded Hunters Hut having 1 Worker fall Ill loses about 6.66% of its output, whereas an upgraed Hunters Hut will lose 10% of its throughput. There's comparable oddness to labor redistribution, where pulling a couple Workers from an unupgraded Hunters Hut to do some other task only costs it about 13% of its throughput, whereas if it's upgraded it loses 20% of its throughput. The Hunters Hut isn't impacted too badly by this jank overall, as for one thing you can scale your Hunters Hut count so long as you have space; making the upgrade and going from 2 Hunters Huts to 3 Hunters Huts is a clear improvement to Raw Food production and is not meaningfully more vulnerable to Illness. This would be a lot more problematic to apply to a Wall Drill, Coal Mine, or Steelworks, and thankfully the game doesn't have such an upgrade for any of those; I suspect the devs did recognize at least somewhat the potential funkiness with this concept. But honestly, while it is an interesting usage of Frostpunk's worksite-centric approach to output dynamics, I sort of wish the game didn't do it at all: the other main example of a tech doing this is much more clearly wonky, and in general I feel the game wasn't very cognizant of the precise implications of variable laborer load for worksites. Regardless, this tech is a decent enough tech. I tend to not bother in most scenarios, but that's more commentary on how hunting as a food source is something the game makes pretty unappealing in general; The Fall of Winterhome's unique setup gives hunting a pretty good opportunity to shine, and depending on your other settings it can be noteworthy in an Endless Mode run. Flying Hunters Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Hunters' Gear. Enables the construction of Hunters Hangars, which are the upgraded form of Hunters Huts. Building time! Hunters Hangar Costs 40 Wood and 40 Steel. Size 5x3? Manned by up to 15 Workers, who will go out from roughly 18:00 to 6:00 in the morning to collect up to 35/30/26/24 Raw Food per night. Workers who return from a hunt will be forced to rest in a special state for several hours, and so citizens cannot hunt and immediately come back and do a day job. (But they can do a day job and then immediately go hunting) Does not modify Heat, but hunters are inexplicably exempt from temperarure risk from traveling out to hunt in the Frostlands. Cannot use Extended Shifts or Emergency Shifts, and cannot be manned by an Automaton. Unaffected by Shrines and Agitators. The Hunters Hangar is around twice as good as a Hunters Hut (Except actually it's only 50% better on Normal and Extreme and about 45% better on Hard, since Hunters' Gear boosts Huts but not Hangars), but really suffers from the fact that Hothouses are more accessible (They're tier 1), more improvable with Laws (And Automatons), innately eat less labor, and can be worked by Safe Jobs Children, making them basically 'free' from a labor perspective by default. The Hunters Hangar is also weirdly demanding of Steel, which pretty consistently makes it hard tto fit in. The Fall of Winterhome is the main scenario I find Hunters Hangars actually valuable, due to its unique setup. (Though that's for another page) Also, the Hunters Hangar changes how Workers get in and out, as they actually travel to the Hunters Hangar and vanish inside it, and then reappear from it when its zeppelin lands at the end of the hunt, rather than walking out toward the edge of the map and vanishing at some point. I wouldn't call this important enough to make them appealing, but it is a nice benefit if you do make the upgrade, making your hunter arrival points more intuitively logical and so easier to plan your city to fit to. Next tech! Flying Hunters' Gear Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Flying Hunters. Hunters Hangars bring in 15 more Raw Food per night. (This number is not affected by difficulty and does not affect Hunters Huts) I really don't get why this isn't affected by difficulty? In any event, this does mean higher difficulties are slightly less stacked toward Hothouses, as Hothouses have their entire production amount affected by difficulty and so on Extreme a Hunters Hangar isn't quite so far behind an Industrial Hothouse once you're getting into upgrades. It's still behind, to be clear, but less so, and your ability to feed the same number of people being worse on higher difficulties while your number of Steam Cores stays the same means you're more likely to want to supplement the Hothouses with Hunters Huts/Hangars, so all-around this upgrade is more likely to see use on higher ifficulties. I should also point out that if you have any Hunters Hangars, this tech is a better way to turn Steel into more Raw Food production, vosting 75% of a Hunters Hangar in Steel while providing a Raw Food increase that is, on Normal difficulty, equal to upgrading another Hunters Hut into a Hunters Hangar. (And on higher difficulties, it's instead providing more Raw Food) As Steel is a constant painpoint in every scenario (If you're having any difficulty at all, at least), this is genuinely nice to keep in mind. It's also more Wood-efficienct than building a third Hunters Hangar from scratch if you already have two, and while Wood is often abundant it's easy to end up tearing through a lot of it at once and needing to spend less aggressively for a bit, so this can also be worth keeping in mind. Next tech! Hothouse Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel 6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 1 Requires: Nothing. Building time! Hothouse Costs 20 Wood and 1 Steam Core. Size 6x4? Can be manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or Safe Job Children. Works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, Heat +1, must be at least Chilly to function (ie it cannot drop below -2 Heat), and at 100% Efficiency it produces 2.8152/2.4/2.0784/1.92 Raw Food per hour. (This works out to 28.152/24/20.784/19.2 Raw Food per day at default hours) The thing you normally replace Hunters Huts with. The base values make this look like a pretty dubious trade. A Hothouse spends a valuable Steam Core, uses up a ton of space, must be placed in a Heat Zone to keep it functioning, and for all that hassle you only get 60% more Raw Food per day. The context of Laws and to a lesser extent tech stack things way more toward Hothouses in practice. First; Child Labor -Safe Jobs. Hothouses are a Safe Job-valid worksite, with little competition for the slot, and as I've said already the mechanics are stacked very heavily toward Child Labor over Child Shelters. Putting Children onto Hothouses is basically free from a labor perspective, and directly lets you switch Workers from hunting to other jobs, whereas Hunters Houses can only be manned by exactly Workers. Second: Extended Shifts. There's really no reason to not be running this basically everywhere all the time, and Hothouses can use it while Hunters Huts can't. A 10-hour Hothouse is only 60% more Raw Food than a Hunters Hut at base values, but a 14-hour Hothouse is a bit over 120% more Raw Food than a Hunter's Hut. You can literally replace two Hunters Huts with a single Hothouse, and you're still making more food than before! Even if you're just assigning Workers, that's massively better, especially when you consider that Hothouse is a tier earlier than Hunting Tactics and so you're normally displacing 30 laborers with 10. Even accounting for Hunters' Gear... up on Extreme, the 14-hour Hothouse is still over 65% more Raw Food than a Hunters Hut, using 2/3rds the workforce. This is really, really good. Third: Emergency Shifts. While you can't combine this with Child Labor without getting kids killed, you can still use Emergency Shift with adult labor to get additional Raw Food in a way Hunters Huts simply can't match. Even assuming you're already abusing Extended Shift, that's another 10 hours of Hothouse production you can add in; up on Extreme, that's another 19.2 Raw Food added, and even with Emergency Shift eventually picking up a 5 Food Ration cost, that's effectively just 2.5 of that Raw Food being eaten, leaving you still at 16.7 Raw Food added by the Emergency Shift. That's more Raw Food than an upgraded Hunters Hut provides all by itself! This can let you skate through when food prouction is just a little low for your city without a significant cost attached, and Hunters Huts can't do anything equivalent. Fourth: Purpose Laws. Eventually you'll get either the Shrine or Agitator passively raising Hothouse productivity by 20% while having no effect on Hunters Huts. Going back to my Extreme numbers example with Hunters' Gear already researchedd: at that point, the 14-hour Hothouse is now producing very slightly over double the Hunters Hut. Passively, at no serious ongoing cost. Notably, no scenario creates a situation where you have full access to both types of food production while not having access to Purpose Laws: On The Edge and The Last Autumn deny access to all of these things, while The Arks denies access to Purpose Laws but also to hunting, making Hothouses your only food prouction option, full stop. For Order, you also get Foreman, which can't be used on Hunters Huts. 40% more Efficiency means an Extreme Hothouse adds 7.68 Raw Food on a 10 hour shift, 10.752 Raw Food on Extended Shift, and 18.432 Raw Food if combined with Emergency Shift: since Rations are double your Raw Food, those are all net positive and so there's really no reason to not spam Foreman on Hothouses. So that's another thing skewing things toward Hothouses. Fifth: Automatons. While I have a low opinion of Automatons overall and this isn't an amazing way to use them, it's still the case that they can be assigned to Hothouses and not to Hunters Huts, and this can be very valuable if eg you're refusing to abuse Emrgency Shifts (You're shooting for a true 0-death run, say), where an Automaton can run the Hothouse for 10 extra hours at night. Sixth... Industrial Hothouse Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel. 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Hothouse. Unlocks the Industrial Hothouse. Building time! Industrial Hothouse Costs 20 Wood, 35 Steel, and 2 Steam Cores. Size 6x4? Can be manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or Safe Job Children. Works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, Heat +2, must be at least Chilly to function (ie it cannot drop below -2 Heat), and at 100% Efficiency it produces 7/6/5.2/4.8 Raw Food per hour. (This works out to 70/60/52/48 Raw Food per day at default hours) ... Industrial Hothouses are a much bigger boost to Hothouse prouction than Hunters Hangars are to Hunters Huts. An Inustrial Hothouse is 150% more Raw Food than a Hothouse: it's literally more Food produced to have one Industrial Hothouse than to have two regular Hothouses. Contrast this with the Hunters Hangar being on paper twice a Hunters Hut in value but in actuality being 45-50% better thanks to Hunters' Gear. By extension, an Industrial Hothouse's Food production capacity is much better per-building and per-citizen, espcially whn considdering all th Law support: a fully upgraded Hunters Hangar on Normal brings in 45 Raw Food per night. An Industrial Hothous benefiting from Extended Shifts and an Agitator or Shrine brings in 100.8 Raw Food per day, more than twice as much. Even going up to Extreme, where the Hangar benefits from its Raw Food upgrade being unaffected by difficulty, just brings that to the Hangar bringing in 39 Raw Food per night vs the supportd Industrial Hothouse bringing in 80.64 Raw Food per day: still slightly over twice as much! Anyway, note that the Industrial Hothouse costs the same amount of Wood as a Hothouse: only the Steel and additional Steam Core is an increasse in cost. If you upgrade a Hothouse into an Industrial Hothouse, you'll still end up paying a little Wood, mind, but this is good to be aware of. But yeah, Industrial Hothouses are amazing, and the main limitation on them is that 2 Steam Cores is a hefty enough price you might not be able to justify having them cover all your food needs. This is the main reason Huts or Hangars are liable to be ussed in the long haul: to free up Steam Cores for other uses. Next tech! talk about timeframe oddness Hothouse Selection Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel. 10/12/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Industrial Hothouse. Hothouses and Industrial Hothouses gain 15% Efficiency. This is a much more mild boost than Flying Hunters' Gear gives, but Hothouses have much stronger bases, and note that my earlier numbers weren't actually including Hothouse Selection. A Normal Industrial Hothouse adds another 12.6 Raw Food per day with my earlier example, and an Extreme Industrial Hothouse adds another 10.08 Raw Food per day. You might notice those are both a sizable fraction of what Flying Hunters' Gear gives Hangars. The main strike against Hothouse Selection is honestly that it's a tier 5 tech. You generally have food firmly solved by the time you can get it online, where it's not truly adding serious value to grab it if it's in reach. On a different note, the Hothouse is a good example of one of the main bits of jank that haunts Frostpunk continuuosly: its chosen timescale is a severe mismatch to much of what it wants to do. A typical scenario lasts less than two months, with the game putting a lot of focus on individual days, but so much of the game really feels like... if Frostpunk were instead a turn-based game, I'd expect it to have each turn be a week, multiplying the length of every scenario by 7. The Hothouse proviing food on a continuous basis is, uh, bizarre? Like, in general, but especially when the game's explicit timescale is so small: a Hothouse providing food on a weekly basis would still feel game-ified, but it wouldn't simply shatter suspension of disbelief if examined for even a moment the way the current timescale does. Construction projects in Frostpunk all take a matter of hours, not even a full day, which is pretty wild, and so too is Illness by default completely cursed at worst in two days, which is pretty magical. As the game is a real-time game, this isn't as trivially fixable as it would be in a turn-based game, but some of the decisions are still pretty odd to me in the context of the chosen timescale. Why do citizens only eat once per day, for example? In a turn-based game, I'd readily accept this as significant abstraction, but Frostpunk bothers to be simulationist enough citizens normally have to travel to a plac and sit down to eat, so it's conspicuous they don't even do breakfast in the morning and dinner in the evening. Anyway... Hothouse Insulation Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Hothouse. Hothouses and Industrial Hothouses gain +1 Heat. Ah, 'insulation' techs. 'Insulation' is how Frostpunk presents the innate Heat value of buildings, and is also how it prefers to justify tech being used to make the buildings even warmer at no further Coal cost or the like. I don't use this framing on Vigaroe because that's just... not what insulation is, not what it means, not how it works, and not how Frostpunk seems to truly conceptualize itself. Buildings in Frostpunk seem to first and foremost keep citizens warm by virtue of steam from the Generator being pumped through the pipes underlying road tiles, and that steam radiating heat into the rooms, like a traditional radiator-style heater. They secondarily provide some warmth by, yes, being an enclosed structure that reduces temperature interchange and reduces exposure to windchill, but that's not primary. Importantly, insulation is just... attempting to create 'friction' in heat interchange. Using materials and arrangements of those materials that reduce the ability for heat to transmit from Area A to Area B. A heavily insulated building sitting in freezing weather will take longer to fall to the temperature outside than a building with minimal insulation, but if nothing is providing warmth inside the building, it's still eventually going to equalize with the outside: the only part of Frostpunk's mechanics that resemble real insulation behavior is the part where the Generator takes times to change its temperature in either direction. Put a different way, if Frostpunk was acually modelling insulation, a high-insulation building would take longer to have its internal temperature change in response to changing conditions: this would be a scenario where temperature dropping a tier would cause a Tent to rapidly arrive at the new outside temperature, while a House would take longer to have its internal temperature match the outside temperature. A mildy realistic model could have this sensibly produce a higher sustainable temperature, in the sense that you'd have the Generator continuously pumping in heat and the heat bleedding away more slowly with strong insulation would result in a higher standing temperature, but Frostpunk isn't trying to model anything like that. Instead, buildings in Frostpunk just generate Heat levels from nowhere for free, with more 'insulation' causing this smokeless, costless magic Heat source to output more Heat, still for free. It's pretty obvious the devs just decided they wanted +Heat techs to be a thing for game design reasons and some poor sucker had to try to figure out a way of 'explaining' these techs, but man, improving the insulation is such a bad explanation for the actual mchanics. It's especially frustrating for buildings that use Steam Cores, like Hothouses: it makes a kind of intuitive sense that a Steam Core might itself be a heat source, and because of Automatons the game is already committed to the mechanics having Steam Cores only need a cheap steam topoff periodically to keep functioning, so these techs could easily have been framed as somehow better leveraging the Steam Core-derived heat. It's also really absurd for a different building, but that's for later. In any event, this is the first of two such techs for Hothouses: Hothouse Insulation II Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Hothouse Insulation Hothouses and Industrial Hothouses gain +1 Heat. Between the two techs, Industrial Hothouses can ultimately sit at +4 passive Heat, which is the highest passive Heat amount the game is willing to let a building be. Most buildings can only reach an ultimate max of +3 passive Heat, and several -such as Law buildings, as I've covered before- cap out at +2 passive Heat. In any event, upgrading Hothouse Heat is, like most 'insulation' techs, nice for both reducing the load on your medical system and for reducing your Coal load. Being able to turn off your Hothouse Heaters because you researched Hothouse Insulation an be moderately helpful when Coal is tight. The first tech especially is early enough, cheap enough, and quick enough it can often be slipped in fairly smoothly. ------------------------------------------- Next time, we move on to the fourth and final default tech tab: Resources. See you then.