Research tab three: stuff to do with taking care of your poor, frail humans, with their need for a place to sleep that won't turn them into an icicle, and food that's been not encased in a solid block of ice, and a place to cure their sniffles. Before we cover researches, we should in fact cover four core buildings that are the founations this tab builds on: Tent Costs 10 Wood. Size 3x2? Houses up to ten citizens, who will sometimes pretend to sleep inside this builing. +1 Heat. I've said this before, but: while citizens will 'rest' in their housing if they have nothing to do during the night, the game does not actually require citizens to sleep in any mechanically meaningful way. You only really care about builing and keeping warm housing so yuor citizens will stop complaining about homelessness and to make them less prone to getting sick and to prevent frostbite. Even with the jank of this exact implementation, Tents are the foundation of housing in Frostpunk. Every scenario starts you with them, and you're going to be building a lot of them unless you're playing The Arks or On The Edge. (Where you'll still build several, just not a ton... because your population is so tiny) Next! Medical Post Costs 25 Wood. Size 3x2? Manned by up to 5 Engineers, who work 24 hours a day to cure Ill citizens. Ill citizens take 24 hours to cure at 100% Efficiency. If Radical Treatment is passed, then Gravely Ill patients may be treated, taking 48 hours at 100% Efficiency. +1 Heat, builing must be at least Chilly to function. (ie it cannot go below -2) Engineers assigned to a Medical Post cannot become ill due to temperature checks. Alright, first let's actually explain that 'works 24 hours' thing: in Frostpunk, every building that innately employs a 24 hour orkcycle is secretly broken up into two shifts: a day shift, and a night shift. In the case of buildings with a maximum of 5 people, these shifts are specifically 3 people during the day and 2 people at night. Buildings that can divide their labor evenly As an aside, notice that the Medical Post is strikingly blue: this is part of a broadeer thing Frostpunk does that I like in principle but that I think the game didn't land very well in practice, where buildings in each tab pretty consistently share a unified color scheme; Medical Posts are in the Healthcare tab, which is all blue, Tents are in the 'People' tab, which is largely heavy on a dark brown shade for its buildings, food-related buildings all have a non-trivial amount of green to them, the Faith builings all have a bright yellow on their roofs (Except Houses of Healing, which the game places among medical care buildings and puts in blue), 'Tech' tab buildings tend to be a brown-to-black coloration, and Resource tab buildings all have red roofs... as, unfortunately, do Order buildings. I think this is a good idea that would help a lot with 'readability' of the city if executed well, where you'd be able to glance at an area and ascertain what types buildings are in it at a glance just by checking for colors (Other than the issue of Ordder and Resource buildings sharing the same shade of red), which is great! ... but Frostpunk has two problems with the execution. The first problem is the snow issue. Unless you're playing The Last Autumn, buildings outside Heat Zones inevitably get covered by snow, and Frostpunk is particularly insistent on covering the iconic colored parts with the snow; only a few buildings put their color more on their sides or otherwise have their color able to be visible even when snowed-in. While this problem isn't too bad for eg medical buildings and housing, since those should be kept inside Heat Zones as much as possible, it's very noticeable on eg Houses of Prayer and more erratically on Resource tab buildings; buildings you either don't want in a Heat Zone ever if you can avoid it, or where Heat Zones are optional at least some of the time. (Because you use the Heater ability to keep the building adequately warm, or you assign an Automaton to it, or you hyper-prioritize Steelworks upgrades and so they're passively pretty warm, etc) The Last Autumn evades this parrticular problem and the effect actually kind of works in it, but this brings us to the second problem: The way the overall lighting, camera angle, etc, all comes together doesn't work out right. The bright colors on these buildings that are meant to identify them as their category largely don't 'pop'; I regularly have trouble visually identifying Medical Posts clustered among Tents evn when they're all in a Heat Zone, for example, and lots of othr buildings are similarly easy to misread. In practice I've tended to rely on size on the grid and distinctive shapes to try to identify buildings, both of which are impefect solution as well, and I often have to other turn to other supplemental tools (eg turning on the temperature view to swiftly confirm where in the mass of housing are the builings that are not housing by looking for the Heater icons) and sometimes just end up clicking manually anyway to find the right building. So that's unfortunate. need to check the shift hours for House of Healing and all... 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. 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 one 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 ffeeding 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. 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 the game does in fact remove hunters instantly from the Hunters Hut if they become Ill and your medical system has open slots for them to assign themselves to. I don't like the baffling 'Illness checks only occur in the wee hours of the morning' behavior in general, but my point in this case is that the Hunters Hut is uniquely susceptible to Illness checks: with every other job, unless the Heat is -3 or lower so they are at risk of frostbite, the number of people available for work when it's time to clock in is the number of people you'll have available for the day. Only Hunters Huts (And their upgrade) can start the shift with everyone healthy and then end up bringing less than a full shift of their resource. This is especially onky 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 furthermore weird because normally Ill people working a job will refuse to assign themselves to medical care unless they either become Gravely Ill (Which automatically denies citizens the ability to do jobs and so immediately removes them from their shift) or stop working at their job; an Ill individual who shows up to the Steelworks at 8:00 in the morning will normally work their full 10 hour shift and then go seek treatment if medical care slots are now available. Why doesn't the Hunters Hut work the same? 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. 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. 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 glanc, 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) not affected by difficulty Costs /// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs /// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs /// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs /// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs /// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. 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