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 your 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) Though to be clear, housing is one of the few things citizens are actually pretty demanding on. If you have homelessnss for more than a day or so, you'll get an event where you can promise to house half of the homeless within two days, house all of the homeless within two days, or blow them off for a mild Discontent hit. That's no big deal, but if you don't get on top of th problem reasonably quickly, a second event will fire in another couple of days where it's now a demand to fix the problem within 24 hours, with your options being 'promise to do so', 'promise to deliver better-than-basic housing in 24 hours', 'send in the guards/Faith Kepers' (Which is kind of a weird thing given I can't imagine any kind of realistic play that would have this event fire while having thugs available), or ignore it again but this time suffer a super-massive Discontent hit. This makes completely putting off housing for an extended period to focus on solving other problems one of the few realistic ways to get a Discontent-based game over, especially as the promises being demanded of you are probably impossible to complet if that's what you've been doing, making a further Discontent hit unavoidable at that point. That said, the first part of this event is unfortunately a good example of the jank around the game's morale system, in that the game is very fond of having problems result in events where you can pledge to fix the problem, and doing so successfully will give you Hope. Thus in A New Home and The Fall of Winterhome especially but to a degree in all scenarios, you have an incentive to delay fixing certain kinds of problems until they piss off citizens enough to trigger an event, so you can get free Hope out of fixing the problem that only exists because you deliberately created it. I'm... not a fan of this aspect of the design. There's an argument to be made that Real Politics has this happen to some extent, admittedly, but it feels less like Frostpunk was trying to make such a point and more like the devs didn't recognize the incentives they were putting in by doing this. Next! Medical Post Costs 25 Wood. Size 3x2? Manned by up to 5 Engineers, who work 24 hours a day to cure Ill citizens, with a maximum capacity of 5 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, building must be at least Chilly to function. (ie it cannot go below -2 Heat) 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 workcycle 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 instead do that, which for general buildings means 10 citizens that turn into two shifts of 5 people apiece. The only piece of information in-game that conveys any of this is that hovering over the Efficiency meter for such a building will tell you how many people on this shift out of its maximum count are present and contributing to the Efficiency. This also touches on one of Frostpunk's strangest decisions, which has funky implications across much of the game: citizens do not provide a certain amount of labor per-head when at a worksite, but instead contribute labor based on the proportion of total citizens they make up out of the maximum number of citizens allowed. That is, a Medical Post's shift of 3 Engineers seems like it ought to cure people 50% faster than the night shift's 2 Engineers, but in actuality they both work equally fast so long as the full Engineer count for each shift shift is present! Most worksites have this distinction... mostly ignorable, but for example this is part of why I said Automatons are more valuable when applied to worksites with higher citizen maxes: because an Automaton replacing a full work crew has the same outcome on the worksite regardlss of whether it would otherwise use 5 or 10 or 15 people, but of course it frees up more humans for other jobs if applied to a worksite that wants more humans to be maxed. Second: yes, Engineers in Medical Posts can't get sick. Note that an Ill Engineer can still become Gravely Ill even if they're currently assigned to a Medical Post. I also suspect, but have not confirmed, that if their home presents frostbite risk they might be able to get Gravely Ill or become an amputee instantly regardless. But yeah, this is a thing, it's a thing the game oesn't mention, and it's a thing I have very mixed feelings on. Thing is, I suspect the actual reason the devs did this is just to mitigate RNG-screw, where your Medical Posts stop functioning because people are sick and so you have less ability to treat the sick and before you know it you've suffered a death spiral not because you made any bad decisions but because an above-average number of Engineers got sick. RNG-screw regarding Illness is already an issue in the early game of most scenarios, particularly when playing on higher difficulties: a The Refugees Extreme run is just so much better off if the first couple of nights focus their Illness rolls on Children you might not be able to put into labor yet than if a couple of Engineers get hit and cripple your research rate. I can see how this would be so much more frustrating if this mechanic wasn't in place. But, even if that's the reasoning I still don't like this mechanic. In the first place, the game makes no effort to communicate it; you do not seem to be meant to be aware of it and leverage it intentionally. In the second place, it's an increibly awkward, janky way to try to resolve this problem, creating implications like 'you should build medical facilities for all your Engineers so you can stuff tthem in at night to be immune to illness' that don't make any sense and contribute to Truly Optimal Play in Frostpunk often being kind of insane, anti-fun micromanagement nonsense the game clearly doesn't intend to be a part of the experience. I'd rather the devs had used a different solution if this was indeed the concern -frankly, I wish the medical care system worked differently in general in a lot of ways. I also don't like this mechanic because a common bizarre mentality in real life is to think of medical staff as if they are extra-protected from medical threats and indeed to often expect medical staff to ignore their own health problems and come into work even if they're sick. Never mind that the nature of being medical staff quite often means getting far more exposure to infectious diseases than most folks not in a medical profession, and so the more likely scenario is that they're catching a wide variety of infectious illnesses... ... of course, this brings us to the sheer strangeness of what Frostpunk's Illness system actually is. Because the thing is, Frostpunk isn't modeling anything resembling a disease: your citizens are not meaningfully catching a cold or the flu or whatever, they can't transmit disease to each other at all (Except, apparently, for dead bodies), but rather Frostpunk is using 'illness' as its Negative Consequence For Keeping People Insufficintly Warm. This system is opaque and confusing as to what exactly the game is doing (Made worse by points like 'medical personnel ignore normal Illness checks'), but broadly: a citizen's assigned house and workplace can be rated from -0 to -5 in Heat. If both are at -0 (What the game represents in red with 5 segments), then a citizen by default expects to never get sick. If either are at -1 or less, then they have a chance of getting sick each night, with the chance rising as the temperature gets lower and being greater if both are cold. If a location is at -4 or worse, then a citizen can spontaneously become Gravely Ill at any time they are at that location, ignoring the usual rules of Illness. If it's at -5 or lower, then they can spontaneously become an Amputee! Note that while the game can track still further temperature reduction, it doesn't have a mechanical impact to be at a total of -8 or the like. By the same token, being above +5 Heat doesn't have any further effect: there's no point where your citizens start getting overheated or something. I've seen a few different attempts online to explain the system in more detail, but I'm... skeptical of all of them. Some people say the game tallies up the number of hours a citizen has been tied to a given temperature (was resting in their home, was working at their jobsite), then averages out the percentages of each of those based on the hours spent, so that eg a citizen working an Emergency Shift will have had all their hours spent at their worksite and so only use its temperature, but a citizen who somehow 12 hours and spent 12 in their home would instead use the exact midpoint between both chances. (eg if one was a 5% chance of Illness and the othr was 10%, they'd have a 7.5% chance of becoming Ill) There's also claims that the citizen's actual physical location and its attendant warmth is what matters, so a citizen walking through a long way through empty snow from a +5 Heat home to a +5 Heat worksite still has a notable chance of becoming Ill because they walked for two hours in the -7 snow. There's suggestions of rolling dice per hour for regular Illness and only getting to the pass/fail check in the morning, there's suggestions that the warmth level of the Cookhouse matters to its visiters and the warmth level of the Arena matters to its folks, there's claims that a citizen's actual personal body temperature is what's tracked and takes 12 hours to change based on the warmth of what they're doing... ... I'm not sure what, exactly, the game is actually doing, but I know that a lot of the specific predictions or claims are incorrect, so whatever the game is doing, it doesn't perfectly align with any theory I have seen offered. I will instead give the following observations: -If all citizens have assigned jobs and all worksites and homes are +5 Heat or better, sickness becomes nearly impossible. (Except in The Last Autumn) The only exceptions I've seen is that construction seems to open up the possibility of regular Illness rolls, that citizens with no jobs are able to get sick for some reason (I suspect they are treated as 'working' at the Generaor or some such silliness), and that citizens can get into buggy states where they're stuck somewhere and potentially become Ill and then Gravely Ill while in this state without any regard to other conditions. (Sometimes this kills them, sometimes they are a zombie who refuses to die unless I manage to do something like negate their current task) -Citizens definately aren't continuously checking against the temperature of their environment as they walk for all relevant outcomes, as otherwise the -4 and -5 results of 'instantly Gravely Ill' and 'instantly an Amputee' would be basically impossible to prevent from occurring, but in actuality they only occur if an assigned workplace or housing building is sufficiently cold. And no, this isn't the 'gradual temperature shift' idea: a citizen left unattended at eg a -5 Sawmill can become an Amputee in just an hour or two of it opening no matter how warm their home is. This can in fact happen as they are traveling to the worksite, operating it telekinetically. -Most tasks don't seem to factor in to the Illness rolls. Citizens who fight in or watch a Fighting Arena don't seem to gain any risk of cold-based issues from it, even if it's placed outside your Heat Zones. Citizens who are praying or protesting or otheris hanging out around the Generator in the open can do so with zero added Illness risk. The Cookhouse being Chilly seens to only give its assigned cooks a chance of Illness, not the people eating in it. Same for the Public House and its patrons. I don't think citizens being treated in a medical building care about its temperature either, though this could easily be me being fooled by the fact that already-Ill people are excluded from Illness checks and so deflate the expected rate of new Ill people just for that reason. Also, some sources online say the Illness chances are 3%/15%/30%/45%/60% based on how far below red you are. I... mistrust these numbers given they give 5 steps when there's only 4 tiers of 'you can get Ill here' temperatures, and they don't clarify how this relates to the overall behavior, but the proportions feel roughly correct to me in the sense that eg a Workshop left a -1 Heat for days on end will usually be basically just as reliable as one that's officially completely safe from Illness, whereas being at -2 Heat much more reliably results in a worksite losing 1-2 people to Illness most days. Overall, it seems to me like the game only really cares about housing assignment and worksite assignment, and I suspect the game quietly treats construction and demolition of structures as 'worksite' as well, but that really seems to be the extent of what matters. Regardless, also odd is that these checks only start showing themselves from 0:00 to 5:00 in the morning, and citizens largely prefer to get Ill from 2:00 to 4:00; you usually only see citizens getting Ill just after midnight and/or between 4:00 and 5:00 if a LOT of people are going to get sick, as the game attempts to space out the new Illness occurrences, not simply add 100 sick people all at once. This timing is one of the game's most unintuitive elements and I hate that nothing in-game mentions this weird, arbitrary limitation on Illness timing, because it heavily impacts many things about how one ought to play and I don't believe for a second that a real human being ever intuited this bizarre system on their first run. For example, a Medical Post really isn't a very high priority on the first day: ideally you have it ready and manned by midnight, but otherwise you should prefer to get other buildings up first, like Gathering Posts and the Workshop, as the Medical Post is genuinely always going to do nothing prior to midnight at the absolute earliest. As a pure gameplay system, the Illness-from-cold mechanics appear to be functional enough as far as I can tell. Aside broken edge cases and having many unintuitive elements, at least. Cold is bad, your citizens need more ongoing care if you don't stay on top of temperature, thus you better keep things adequately warm if you don't want your labor force perpetually understrength. Sure, okay. On a more narrative level, I'm... less fond of it. For starters, it's perpetuating the oddly common belief that cold weather somehow induces illness in its own right. I've spent literally decades trying to see if there was anything resembling the slightest bit of scientific support for this notion, and not only have I never found such but basically everything I hear is the opposite: humidity is a much higher predictor for things like 'mold infests your home and starts killing you', and humidity is necessarily very low in extremely cold environments since the water, y'know, turns into ice. Mummification tends to naturally occur in very dry environments, not rot. Many cultures throughout history have stored maat through winter months by dropping it in a lake that freezes over, with this preventing microbes from doing things with this flesh. Indeed, Frostpunk itself builds on this principle with the Snow Pit being quite literally 'throw the bodies into a pit full of now: they won't rot if we refrigerate them'. Cryostasis is a pop culture meme for a reason: because it has some degree of reality to it! I could go on forever in this vein. By contrast, 'cold leads to illness' is... mmmmaybe true of hypothermia. Maybe. As of this writing, the data isn't very strong. So I'm not fond of Frostpunk perpetuating this weird counterfactual myth as the foundation of its Illness system, not to mention unfond of it simply ignoring the entire framework of infectious disease except exactly and specifically with corpses. (Espcially since The Refugees has a point in it where your citizens don't want to let in a bunch of sick people because 'they might be contagious': contagion is not a concept Frostpunk believes in mechanically, but it does narratively??) I'd really have preferred for it to use injury as its framework on a more funamental level: it already likes to have people get hurt in events and this mechanically render them Ill, and honestly, a dangerously cold environment will produce numbness and risk of slipperiness, both of which are dangerous on their own and would be extremely dangerous in many of the work environments Frostpunk is depicting. I'd readily accept, narratively, a risk of limb loss or overt death at -5 Heat at most of these worksites, and many of the exceptions refuse to function at -3 or less so whatever. I'd also accept 'an injure person left untreate will then go on to become ill', as severe injuries do in fact often lead to infection if no preventative measures are taken, not only from elements in the environment but even potentially from microbes that harmlessly live in or on a person turning opportunistically dangerous or simply becoming harmful because they're outside the context they're safe for humans in. Replace 'Ill' and 'Gravely Ill' with 'Injured' and 'Gravely Ill', and the whole thing works much better without even needing to change mechanics and having the bonus effect of reducing the 'no mechanics for communicible diseases' issue since the main state demanding medical treatment wouldn't be about disease. I'm similarly pretty down on the game attempting to bound medical care with Engineers. The two primary jobs of importance Engineers fill in Frostpunk are 'man Workshops' and 'man medical buildings'; as Workshops are designed so stacking many Engineers onto them rapidly becomes essentially worthless, this element is pretty non-interactive. You don't generally make real decisions about how to use your limited supply of precious Engineers, you mostly just build your two Workshops and then try to have medical care scaled to Engineer count (In part so they become immune to Illness; even if a Medical Post never admits patients, assigning 5 Engineers to it still reduces the load on your medical system), aside that you might sub in Engineers if you don't have enough Workers to cover all your general labor needs while also having more nngineers than you truly need for Engineer jobs. In practice, this system mostly arrives at being a way for the devs to accidntally or intentionally tune difficulty up or down through what the ratio of Engineers is in your overall population in any given scenario. There really needed to either be more Engineer-specific jobs of importance -I sort of wish Hothouses were an Engineer-specific job- or for Factories to be a more worthwhile building that a player can meaningfully appreciate eg building 3 of as part of a specific strategy. I especially have concerns on this point regarding Frostpunk 2 an Frostpunk 1886, as Frostpunk 1's progression doesn't seem to recognize the problem. The Last Autumn is, if anything, much worse about it. Anyway, returning to gameplay mechanic stuff... I've already mentioned Illness eventually progressing to Gravely Ill. What I haven't mentioned is this is a difficulty-moulate thing: on Normal, an Ill citizen will take 3 days to then become Gravely Ill, and from there will take roughly 3 days to ie from 'lack of treatmnt'. If your "People's Need's" setting is reduced to Easy, these windows each expand to 4 days. If instead you raise it to Hard, they drop to 2 days apiece, and then on Extreme they drop to just 1 day apiece. This is one of the biggest ways Extreme makes for a brutal early game, as citizens must be treated essentially immediately or else they entirely leave the Medical Post's ability to cure them, sentencing them to death if you're not going to almost immediately pass Radical Treatment, or House of Healing, or get an Infirmary up. Radical Treatment is also not exactly a good solution to the situation given it takes 2 days for a 100% Efficiency Medical Post to treat a citizen; I'm pretty sure the main reason a Medical Post can in fact save Gravely Ill people at all on Extreme is purely because all medical facilities actually reduce Gravely Ill to regular Ill halfway through treatment. (ie a Radical Treatment Medical Post reduces them to Ill after 24 hours, and 24 hours after that actually cures them. Note that if Radical Treatment turns somebody into an Amputee, this occurs in the transition from Gravely Ill to Ill) If a citizen takes a few hours to be admitted for Radical Treatment, they can in fact simply die in the Medical Post, wasting the 'slot' they were eating while your Engineers tried to cure them. Annoyingly, the game is also prone to being buggy when it comes to new arrivals who show up sick. Mechanically, such citizens usually show up Ill, but up on Extreme they will sometimes die from 'lack of treatment' as they're walking to a medical facility, skipping right past Gravely Ill for some reason. An additional nuisance to this whole thing is that your citizens consistently enter and exit the city through a general zone whose location isn't communicated to the player at all and basically never makes the slightest bit of sense to be th direction they're coming from: special shout-out to On The Edge, where narratively basically all travel comes from the Transport Depot you must place in a ixed location, but mechanically people don't travel through it at all and instead enter and exit from the general area where most of your trees are at the start of the scenario. This jank makes it extremely annoying to properly plan out medical facility placement so new arrivals are maximally able to reach medical facilities swiftly. I will in fact be providing screenshots and verbal descriptions for every scenario and map to let players know what bizarre, nonsensical place every Ill person is going to teleport in to without explanation. Especially because citizens can also show up hungry, and it's useful to make sure at least one Cookhouse is nearby the entry point. I should also point out some UI funkiness. Firstly, you get a red icon for representing your current number of people who are Ill or Gravely Ill (And not in treatment), and the game layers the two numbers atop each other and never explicitly explains that these numbers overlap That is, if the game informs you that you have 1 Gravely Ill citizen and 3 Ill citizens, what it actually means is you have 3 citizens who are sick, 1 of whom is Gravely Ill. Second, the game uses a grey version of the icon to inform you of how many people are in treatment: this element doesn't track the number of Gravely Ill citizens at all, and more importantly it credits a citizen as 'in treatment' the instant they assign theirself to a medical facility, never mind that treatment doesn't start until they physically enter the building. This can result in moments where the game feels like it's lying to you, because everyone sick is 'in treatment' and yet you get deaths from 'lack of treatment', because they died on the way to get treatment. There is so much jank to Frostpunk's medical system... 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. As a bonus, The Last Autumn further breaks the whole thing by shuffling some art assets into different tabs from thir original usage, so even your building tabs don't end up visually coherent. Bunkhouse Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel. 6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 1 Requires: Nothing. Unlocks Bunkhouses. Building time: Bunkhouse Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel. Size 3x2? Houses up to ten citizens, who will sometimes pretend to sleep inside this builing. +2 Heat. Upgrade of a Tent. Time to talk about building upgrades! These don't work the way you probably intuit. Certainly not the way some sources online talk about them. Okay, some buildings can be upgraded into other buildings; you click Bunkhouse, and any Tents in view will be highlightd in green, and you can order the Bunkhouse to be built where the Tent is. This immediately renders the Tent completely non-functional until the upgrade completes or is canceled; for worksites, anybody assigned to the building is technically de-assigned, but so long as you don't assign them elsewhere, they'll reassign themselves to the worksite once it becomes available again. In the event you are low on relevant resources, the game may kindly inform you that you can afford to build a building you're considering, but only by upgrading. What you likely assume is that you are paying the cost difference: a Tent costs 10 Wood, a Bunkhouse costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel, therefore upgrading a Tent to a Bunkhouse spends 10 Wood and 10 Steel. Right? Nope! No, we must now properly explain deconstruction: when you order a building demolished, upon compltion of the task roughly 75% of the building's cost is refunded, except for Steam Cores where you always get all of them back. I say 'roughly' 75%, because plenty of building costs can't actually do exactly 75% without doing fractions; a Tent's 10 Wood would mean 7.5 Wood, and Frostpunk doesn't like fractions, so instead it rounds down and your Tent only refunds 7 Wood upon its demolition. And it's this number that matters to upgrades: when you replace a Tent with a Bunkhouse, the game effectively demolishes the Tent, minus the labor time that would normally take, and credits you that refund for the upgrade. Thus, upgrading a Tent to a Bunkhouse actually costs 13 Wood and 10 Steel. As such, while you should certainly make use of upgrades, do keep in mind that it throws some resources in the trash compared to skipping to the end: if you need a building only somewhat soon and will be able to make its upgrade very soon (eg the research is about to complete), you should consider waiting and just building the upgraded version directly. Especially since doing so also saves on labor: building a Tent and then upgrading it to a Bunkhouse and then to a House means laborers hammering away at the construction site much more than if they just build the House directly. The Bunkhouse itself is an essential early tech you should usually prioritize to an at least modest degree. +1 Heat to your housing reduces illness and/or saves you Coal expenses, passively, for free past the initial construction. Just keep in mind the Steel cost; don't be trying to grab it before you have Steelworks researched, for example. Narrativly, it kind of bothers me that Bunkhouses don't include 'holds more people' as a benefit. They're visibly two-story buildings, and while their mechanical footprint is identical to a Tent's, visually they fill it out quite a bit more. Even if I assume each person is being given more space than in the Tents, I'd still expect this to store 15 people or something. Indeed, I kind of wish the game had broadly had a bit of an 'up vs out' set of options available, where you could either focus on vertical housing to cram more people into your Heat Zones or sprawl wider at less expense per building but with less people stored in a given footprint. That would open up some intersting strategic variation. Next tech! House Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel. 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Bunkhouse. Unlocks Houses. Building again! House Costs 35 Wood and 25 Steel. Size 3x2 Houses up to ten citizens, who will sometimes pretend to sleep inside this building. +3 Heat. Upgrade of a Tent and Bunkhouse. The best housing building, but also the most expensive. Ideally, you don't build any Houses until you have... House Redesign Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: House. Reduces the Wood an Steel costs of Houses by 10 apiece, resulting in a cost of 25 Wood and 15 Steel. ... this tech, which makes Houses only 5 Wood and 5 Steel more than a Bunkhouse. You only need 5 Houses built for this to be resource-positive: even on The Arks, where you only need 5-6 units of housing, this tech will pay for itself, and in most scenarios it will pay much bigger dividends. This is in fact one my most common reasons to push for tech 4 early; when you've got a population of 200-600, this is saving you 200-600 Wood and Steel, which is an absolutly insane swing! That easily covers not only the House Redesign cost but also the tech 4 cost, with Wood an especially Steel to spare for other projects! Outside pure mechanics, Houses frustrate me enormously. Visually, they're too easily conflated with Bunkhouses; the shapes are very similar from several angles, the coloration is basically identical, there's not really anything to trivially separate them out. I have to rely very heavily on the upgrade-preview aspect to building construction to make sure I have in fact found and upgraded all the Bunkhouses, with this most egrgiously standing out in The Fall of Winterhome. Name-wise and apparent-concept-wise, they're also poorly-considered; we're really going from a bunkhouse to a house? That's not as clear as it ought to be, and the suggestion that we're basically switching from a barracks-esque 'everyone in a shared sleeping space' to 'something more like a small apartment building with each citizen in their own space' isn't really reflected by the graphics (I'm a bit doubtful the devs even know what a 'bunkhouse' is, frankly) nor by the mechanics. You're not, say, giving people relatively spacious accomodations to reduce Discontent, or raise Hope, or reduce disease risk: you're just making an even warmer Bunkhouse that accomodates the same number of people. Call it a Longhouse or Storm Shelter or something, don't pretend the 10 people crammed into this space have a nice little house life. Ugh. They're fine as far as the 'three tiers of housing' part of the game design, but basically everything else is ugh. Next tech! House Insulation Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel. 10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: House. Raises House Heat by +1, bringing them to +4 total. You'll want it eventually. Probably not urgently, but eventually. This is the only 'insulation' tech where I'm basically going 'yeah, okay' about the name. I still think insulation isn't a great angle for justifying +Heat techs, but I'm not sitting here going 'but there's obvious alternatives that make more sense!' or the like. So, y'know, whatever. Next tech! Cookhouse Insulation Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Bunkhouse. +1 Heat to Cookhouses, bringing them to +2 Heat total. I'm not sure why this requires Bunkhouse be completed first. It's not terribly important given Bunkhouse is typically going to be a priority tech anyway, but it's another rare example of Frostpunk having a tech require something unrelated for no clear reason. Cookhouse Insulation is a nice-to-have, but not really a big priority. While Cookhouses need to be kept warm to function, and are inexplicably very cold (Why is a place food is actively cooked in one of the least warm buildings in the game?), you also don't care a ton about keeping their employees in top form and needing to run a Heater on a Cookhouse (Or two, if your population is large) is a very light Coal expense that Cookhouse Insulation doesn't necessarily save you from anyway. It also doesn't lead to anything: this as warm as Cookhouses can get on their own, and no alternate benefit lies beyond it. I started out moderately prioritizing it, but nowadays I'm prone to ending runs on Extreme having never bothered at all. Next tech! Medical Post Upgrade Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel. 6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 1 Requires: Nothing. Increases Efficiency of Medical Postd by 10%. (No effect on Infirmaries or Houses of Healing) This makes Medical Posts very slightly faster at healing people. 10% faster healing means shaving off about 1.2 hours from curing a regular Illness, which, uh, whatever. This tech is essentially worthless on its own, and the only reason to bother is when you're trying to get to either Infirmaries or Healthcare Insulation. Speaking of! Infirmary Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Medical Post Upgrade. Unlocks Infirmary. One of the most important buildings in the game: Infirmary Costs 30 Wood, 20 Steel, and 1 Steam Core. Size 5x3 Manned by up to 10 Engineers, who work 24 hours a day to cure Ill and Gravely citizens, with a maximum capacity of 10 citizens. Ill citizens take 12 hours to cure at 100% Efficiency, while Gravely Ill patients take 24 hours at 100% Efficiency. +2 Heat, building must be at least Chilly to function. (ie it cannot go below -2 Heat) Engineers assigned to an Infirmary cannot become ill due to temperature checks. So staple two Medical Posts together, halve how long curing citizens takes, and let Gravely Ill patients be treated with no risk of becoming Amputees, all while also being passively warmer. This is an extremely good payoff for taking up a Steam Core. (Okay, it also costs some Steel, but whatever) The only serious obstacle is how enormous it is; you can't simply replace Medical Posts with an Infirmary directly, and Infirmaries can be clunky to find heated space to put them in. The Infirmary's arrival generally marks the point at which disease switches from 'an actual danger to lives' to 'an annoying break from work', unless you got House of Healing online first anyway. The degree to which it's better is absurd, far greater than you might assume; for one thing, the doubled curative speed tends to compound on itself. If your Medical Post system ends up with more patients than it can quite handle right now, then by the time slots open up you've got Ill people 1 day closer to becoming Gravely Ill and further burdening the system. (Assuming you even have Radical Treatment or Sustain Life) On Extreme, this will reliably result in such Gravely Ill people, but evn on Normal an extended period of being slightly overburdened can still result in citizens ending up Gravely Ill, as citizens who have been neglected don't actually get reliably prioritized on later days for medical treatment, and thus a citizen might simply fail to check in for 3 days in a row and become Gravely Ill. Infirmaries curing Ill people in 12 hours means that what happens is that people get admittedly immediately, are cured partway through the day, and then the Ill people who weren't admitted immediately still get started before their 'Ill clock' can advance another step; unless your Infirmaries are being overburdened by over 100% of their maximum load, having more people get sick than can be imediatly admitted isn't really a problem. In fact, it's arguably a good thing, since the overload ciizens will do more or less their full normal shift before peeling off to get treated. Oh, by the way, the game says citizens who are Ill will wait until their current task is done before getting treatment, and this is... misleading, There are tasks they'll insist on finishing first, like loading a corpse into the Snow Pit or Cemetery, but if they're at a worksite you assigned them to? They'll bail the instant a slot is available. On the plus side, your citizens understand that they shoul always assign themselves to Infirmaries before Medical Posts. A citizen in a Medical Post won't switch to an Infirmary if a slot opens, mind, not even if they're Gravely Ill and at risk of becoming an Amputee, but otherwise they're smart about this, so you don't need to demolish your Medical Posts to prevent that stupidity. (Maybe disable one if Gravely Ill people are unwwisely staying in it while Infirmary slots are open, though) Infirmary Mechanisation Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel. 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Infirmary. The Infirmary's maximum Engineer capacity is reduced from 10 to 5. This is by far the jankiest of the employment reducer techs: the theory is sound and mostly works tolerably well, but it switches the Infirmary from even shifts to the 3/2 system, which is only not visibly janky in regards to Illness because Engineers in an Infirmary are magically immune to Illness and so you can't have the night shift pair get sick. It similarly is funky because Infirmaries are usually bounded much more heavily by their need for Steam Cores than by their hunger for Engineers: since Engineers have almost no jobs exclusive to them and the only jobs that are exclusive to them and also not bounded by Steam Cores are Medical Posts (Usually basically worthless if you have Infirmaries) andd Workshops. (Designed so heavily stacking Engineers on them is nearly worthless) As such, it's easy to free up Engineers and then realize you don't... really have anything for them to do. The Fall of Winterhome is the main scenario it works reasonably smoothly in; in every other scenario, it's at risk of being 'wait, did I just completely waste time and resources on zero benefit?' A further wonkiness is that the devs inexplicably think Automatons in medical facilities is a desirable thing to do, and they of course get zero bnefit out of this tech. This isn't very consequential in real play given Automatons are terrible to put in medical facilities, only mattering particularly to The Arks where getting an Automaton in a medical facility is an actual objective, but it's a predictable bit of design jank. I wish that instead this reduced Steam Core needs on Infirmaries, either in the form of them needing 2 to start -they'd still be worth it- and being knocked down to 1 Steam Core by a tech, or just take away the Steam Core cost with a tech. I'm not sure the engine could readily support that with minimal jank, admittedly, but if it can, this would be a much more consequentially useful benefit. You'd probably need to bump it up to tech 5, though, given how good that would be. Next tech! Infirmary Checklists Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Infirmary. Infirmaries gain +15% Efficiency. Notice that this is an even higher bonus thab Medical Posts get out of their personal tech. Infirmaries are thus ultimately worth more than two Medical Posts. For reference, an Infirmary backed by Infirmary Checklists, Organ Transplants, and an Agitator or Shrine will passively have 162% Efficiency, meaning it will cure Ill patients in about 7.4 hours, meaning a single Infirmary can safely keep up with over 30 Ill people per day, or 60 if you have Overcrowding. This is completely absurd: Frostpunk doesn't like you having more than around 600 people, and if you're staying on top of temperature and all, you should only have 10%, maybe 20% of your population getting Ill on any given night even up on Extreme, which is to say 2 Infirmaries with Overcrowding and the passive boosts really should be more than adequate basically all the time unless you're doing some kind of funky challenge that, I dunno, refuses to ever run the Generator or something? But yeah, Infirmaries are fantastic. Next tech! Healthcare Insulation Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Medical Post upgrade. Increases the Heat of Medical Posts, Care Houses, Infirmaries, and Houses of Healing by +1. First of two techs: Healthcare Insulation II Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel. 10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Healthcare Insulation. Increases the Heat of Medical Posts, Care Houses, Infirmaries, and Houses of Healing by +1. Between the two, Medical Posts end up at a respectable +3 Heat and everything else at +4 Heat. As Care Houses are the main case where temperature matters as anything other than 'make sure the structure operates' an/or 'make it stop costing Coal to keep running', these are nice techs but usually you should grab them in a kind of targeted way: grab the first one because a temprature drop is coming soon that will cost you Coal to keep them running, that kind of thing. This is another janky implication of medical personnel being immune to Illness, incidentally: it makes the healthcare Heat techs way less generally impactful than other +Heat techs! -------------------------------------------------------- Next time, we wrap up this tech tab by covering Food stuff. See you then.