Research tab two I'm covering: Heating! Heating is basically exactly three things by default: upgrading the Generator, unlocking and upgrading Steam Hubs, and unlocking and upgrading the Heater ability for buildings. I'll be starting with Steam Hubs, because they're a good jumping-off point for discussing the central and highly counteriintuitive mechanic o Heat Zones. Here we go: Steam Hub Costs 10 Wood. 5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 0 Requires: Nothing Unlocks Steam Hubs. Cue up that building: Steam Hub Costs 20 Steel. Sockets directly onto a road segment, and so does not compete with most buildings. Steam Hubs by default run at all hours of the day, spending 3 Coal per hour at Generator Power Level 1, extending the Generator's Heat Zone in a circular area aroun the Steam Hub, but Steam Hubs may be set to automatically shut themselves off outside of work hours, including that passing Extended Shift will allow you to set Stam HHubs to run from 6:00 to 20:00 to match Extended Shift hours. The Heat modification and Coal consumption of Steam Hubs is tied directly to the Generator's Power Level, with no way to set individual Steam Hubs to a different value. Alright, time to explain Heat Zones, Frostpunks most important, counterintuitive, straight-up nonsensical mechanic. While the Generator is active, it generates a circular Heat Zone, spreading out fom its center to its maximum range as it first comes online. A sane person who lives in the physical world is likely to assume that heat is being radiated from the Generator like a fire, and in turn is liable to assume that when a red-hot Steam Hub is placed somewhere that it too is radiating heat, with the potential to stack up and produce lots of heat, and also likely assuming some kind of drop-off effect where being further from the heat means getting less heat. In the world of Frostpunk, however, the laws of physics don't apply in a remotely recognizable way. Heat Zones are instead a binary toggle: is that Tent inside a Heat Zone? If yes, it gets full warmth added, if no, it gets nothing, even if it's right next to the Heat Zone. If multiple Heat Zones overlap? Yeah, sorry, that's just a waste of Coal; try to make sure your Heat Zones don't overlap. Oh, and you might be wondering what counts as 'inside' a Heat Zone given buildings can be variably large and stick out quite far without necessarily missing out: the game only cares about whether a building's exact center is inside the Heat Zone. This can look incredibly wrong with the more rectangular buildings, as it is in fact possible for them to be 'sideways' to a heat source such that only a tiny part of the building is actually covered, but whatever, it's that center bit that is the only part that matters. A related bit of insanity is a visual choice: unless you're playing The Last Autumn, Frostpunk defaults to the world being covered in snow, including that buildings rapidly have their rooftops cloaked by snow upon their consstruction completing. That part is fair, but the crazy thing is what decides whether the snow melts or not: again, a sane person who lives in the physical world almost certainly assumes that this is controlled by temperature, but no, temperature has zero bearing on snow forming vs melting. Snow simply melts in response to being inside a Heat Zone, and then comes back if the Heat Zone goes away. Ypu can literally have a building where people are losing limbs to frostbite sitting in a Heat Zone, their building cleared of snow, while right next door is a builing where people are sweating from how hot it is but their building is covered in snow because they aren't in a Heat Zone. To be fair, this piece of Heat Zone behavior is actually convenient once you know about it, letting you easily see what is and is not covered by a Heat Zone without having to either jump into the temperature view or manually select buildings and hover over their temperature gauge to see whether it lists Heat Zone in the temperature summary or not. This is in fact the quickest way to eyeball your Heat Zone distributions; the only major qualifier is that an area can also have its snow temporarily removed by citizens moving through the snow and/or by virtue of demolishing buildings, which leaves only uncovered dirt where the building was for a few hours, but these generally don't result in circular areas of missing snow. All this counterintuitiveness is unpleasant for the learning curve, but ultimately my main frustration with all this is that Frostpunk has literally dozens of tutorials, but somehow the true mechanics around heat aren't really part of that list. Did the devs somehow not realize just how bizarre this system, how unlike reality it is in basically every way so real-world experience points you to completely rong expectations? It also just feels... conceptually inconsistent. The need to connect everything to the Generator with Roads, the need to place Steam Hubs on Roads, and the visual design of Roads, where they clearly are mostly made of pipes presumably pumping steam from the Generator into the rest of the city... this all suggests a system where you're not radiating warmth into an area, you're pumping hot water into buildings and concentrating the warmth into the inside of buildings as best you can. What are Steam Hubs even supposed to be doing, from an in-universe standpoint? Reheating water, I guess? In any event, from a raw mechanics standpoint, Steam Hubs are how you support safely expanding your city beyond the Generator's immediate reach, and thus mean as your city grows it costs more and more Coal to make sure people don't get sick or outright lose limbs. A notable part of mastering the game as a whole and of mastering scenarios in specific is getting good at planning out Steam Hub placement, minimizing Heat Zone overlap, maximizing how much buildable space is within Heat Zones, figuring out how to cover more necessary locations with fewer Seam Hubs, and correctly planning out 'work districts' that can shut off when nobody is working and 'housing and health' districts that run at all hours. Steam Hubs will in fact generally constitute the majority of your Coal usage in every run; the only exceptions are The Last Autumn an On The Edge, where you don't have Steam Hubs. Steam Hub Range Upgrade Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Steam Hub. Provides the option for Steam Hubs to be set to have a 50% larger radius, but spend twice as much Coal. Completing this tech instantly sets all current Steam Hubs to this expanded radius, and from now on new Steam Hubs will preview with the expanded radius and default to it upon ccompletion. Ugh! The option itself isn't terrible on paper; a 50% larger radius works out to covering about 225% raw space, and so if you prfectly optmize this you will actually spend less Coal to cover your space. At least, in theory you will; I've not gone through the hoops necessary to test the behavior within the game world. Given Frostpunk's sort-of-square-grid wrangled into a series of circular rings, it's possible the mechanics don't truly work that way. It at least makes sense just looking at the math, though. But the 'convenience features' of it becoming the default and setting all Steam Hubs to it is an anti-convenience feature. Some of your Steam Hubs will almost certainly have no use for the expanded radius, because you put a Steam Hub on a couple of closely-placed resource buildings and only have a Factory or something in that radius and nothing else anywhere nearby. The expanded preview makes it harder to figure out where to put buildings for initial coverage at radius 1; I really wish the two radii had been colored differently and colored affected buildings differently so you could still easily check the inner radius in planning! It's also difficult to plan out your city so that you can in fact immediately shut off some Steam Hubs because the expanded radii of other Steam Hubs cover their buildings now, in part because the expanded radius can't be previewed until the tech is unlocked: if the game just baseline had my 'two colors, one for inner raius and one for outer radius' idea, this whole thing would be much smoother. I honestly would just skip it, except it's required for: Steam Hub Efficiency Upgrade Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Steam Hub Range Upgrade. Steam Hubs burn 33% less Coal per hour. This is one of the most important researches in the game in most runs. Again: Steam Hubs virtually always end up being the majority of your city's Coal expenditure, and not just a little. You can easily have your city needing, say, 2500~ Coal per day where Steam Hubs account for 2000~ of that, and so shaving off 33% of their Coal needs is saving you around 666 Coal per day. It is in fact often one of the best researches to go for to fix your Coal situation in the mi-to-late game, much better than pursuing other Coal consumption reducers or grabbing better Coal production. I really wish it wasn't dependent on the radius upgrade. It's kind of a weird error: I'm used to vieo games forcing you to tech through stuff that's only tenuously related to your final goal, but Frostpunk is surprisingly reliable about almost all your upgrades that have dependencies being dependent only on things that make perfect sense to be forced to grab first. This is one of the few cases where a tech requires something that's genuinely a bit mistifying to be forced to grab first. I have... another criticism, but we need to get further in. Next tech! Generator Power Upgrade I Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel 6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 1 Requires: Nothing. Lets you raise the Heat Zone's Heat bonus from +1 to +2 at the Generator, and immediately sets the Generator to this setting. Coal usage of the Generator and all Steam Hubs is raised to 200% of base while this is active (By default: from 6 Coal per hour to 12 Coal per hour for the Generator, and from 3 per hour to 6 per hour for Steam Hubs), stacking multiplicatively with radius cost modifiers. 'Stacking multiplicatively with radius cost modifiers' will be explained... later. Like the Steam Hub radius increase, I don't like the Heat setting automatically being set upon completing the research, but unlike the Steam Hub radius increase you have decent odds of it being a genuine convenience feature, where you intended to immediately apply it yourself and this is saving you some clicking. This is both a fairly straightforward upgrade yet mastering the game involves a pretty nuanced process of figuring out when to prioritize it vs when to put it off. How's your Coal intake and storage doing? Will the next temperature drop disable key buildings you can't afford to have shut off? What are your other options for potentially coping with a temperature drop given your current research and resource and Law situation? Even once you have the upgrade finished, you may find yourself wanting to lower the temperature at times to stretch Coal. But it's still straightorward in that every scenario where you have a Generator is designed so temperature rops will force you to make these researches, or die. (I've heard of people doing challenges that refuse to upgrade the Generator, but I'm unclear how viable this actually is, and regardless my point is the devs clearly intended it to be mandatory) Next tech! Generator Power Upgrade II Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel. 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Generator Power Upgrade I. Lets you raise the Heat Zone's Heat bonus to +3 at the Generator, and immediately sets the Generator to this setting. Coal usage of the Generator and all Steam Hubs is raised to 300% of base while this is active (By default: from 6 Coal per hour to 18 Coal per hour for the Generator, and from 3 per hour to 9 per hour for Steam Hubs), stacking multiplicatively with radius cost modifiers. See previous commentary, except that I'm a bit more annoyed by this tier also forcing the Generator to the new setting: I'm much more prone to getting Upgrade II here fit in well in advance of actual need than its predecessor, and also much more prone to ending up fitting it in when my Coal production can't actually keep up with it. I should also point out that the game does a terrible job of communicating that the Generator's Heat level is not only clone across Steam Hubs but that the Coal cost modification is also cloned. As each Steam Hub effectively uses half the Generator's Coal usage if both are at the same radius, as soon as you have at least 3 Steam Hubs more of your Coal costs are coming from the tiny little Steam Hubs than from the massive Generator, which is not communicated well and is not remotely intuitive. I think it works... okay from a game design standpoint, but they really should've put more effort into conveying that Steam Hub Coal usage scales with the Generator's Heat setting! Generator Power Upgrade III Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel 10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Generator Power Upgrade II Lets you raise the Heat Zone's Heat bonus to +4 at the Generator, and immediately sets the Generator to this setting. Coal usage of the Generator and all Steam Hubs is raised to 400% of base while this is active (By default: from 6 Coal per hour to 24 Coal per hour for the Generator, and from 3 per hour to 12 per hour for Steam Hubs), stacking multiplicatively with radius cost modifiers. See previous commentary, and add eextra emphasis to 'I usually get it before I need it and so it kicking in automatically isn't a convenience feature'. Quick mechanical note: another example of Frostpunk engaging in pseudo-physics-y behavior inconsistently is that the Generator's temperature doesn't actually change instantly in response to pushing the button. It instead takes 45 in-game minutes to increase its temperature by 1 tier and so if eg you have it sitting at Heat 1 and want to raise it to Heat 4 for a big temperaure drop, you should start that process 2 hours and 15 minutes before the temperature spike will actually hit. Also for reference, the world's temperature changes in Frostpunk always occur at exactly 7:00 in the morning. This is actually a stealthy extra benefit to Extended Shifts, as it means you can get an hour of work done at a location before bailing even if the temperature drop makes it unacceptable (or impossible) to keep it manned in the new temperature. Conversely, it means that if the temperature is going to raise, you may need to micromanage buildings so they only start their Extended Shift at 7:00. Also note that the Generator's temperature going down is non-instant, but in an inconsistent and overall unfavorable way. First of all, the game 'rounds down' for the effect on Heat Zones: if you are sitting at +2 and press to go down to +1, it will take a few minutes for the temperaure level to drop all the way to +1, but the Heat Zone will be reduced to +1 essentially instantly; 99% of the way to +2 means you get +1. Secon, if you run entirely out of Coal, the Generator automatically shuts down, but for some reason this drains its meter much, much more slowly, where if the Generator was at +4 before you ran out of Coal it can spend basically an entire night still providing warmth without you spending Coal. As such, you shouldn't try to turn it on in short order, especially since the Generator instantly eats an hour of Coal for whatever setting you click to. (As in, clicking it to +1 eats 6 Coal, while clicking +4 eats 24 Coal, eeven if it's completely off and you'll run out of Coal before it even reaches +3) This strange, inconsistent system is especially visible in The Fall of Winterhome, where narrative events will forcibly turn the Generator off independent of your Coal supply, and when this happens it uses this slower fall. The whole thing feels like the devs went with something more physics-y, discoveredd that you could 'cheat' Coal costs by alternating between two settings to get the higher Heat without paying its full intended cost, and changed the rules to stop that. I dunno i that's what actually happened, but it's what it sure feels like. Next tech! Generator Efficiency Upgrade Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Generator Power Upgrade I Reduces the Generator's Coal usage by 10% per hour. Just the Generator's personal Coal usage. This seems like it should be great, but it's actually nearly worthless because it counterintuitively only affects the Genrator's personal Coal usage, when you'd really expect it to also affect all your Steam Hubs. If you have the Generator running completely maxed out, this saves you... 9.6 Coal per hour, which, um, no, not significant, not if your city is spending 200+ Coal per hour. (Which is the kind of range it's liable to be in if you have the Generator maxed out) If your numbers are lining up so you're just barely using Coal faster than you're bringing it in and you don't have ready access to anothe way to improve your Coal situation, sure, go ahead, but most of the time this is a waste of Workshop hours. Ugh, next tech. Generator Efficiency Upgrade II Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Generator Efficiency Upgrade. Reduces the Generator's Coal usage by a janky amount that ranges from about 16% total savings to exactly 25% savings, epening on exact temperature and range settings. Just the Generator's personal Coal usage. The math on this is screwball, where apparently for some reason the game shaves the cost to 7/9ths (Which is not a 20% reduction, nor is it shaving off 10% after shaving off 10%), then rounds it even though the previous tier oesn't insist on rounding. For reasons I'll get into in a minute, you should only really care about the Range 1 numbers, so I can easily give you the 4 numbers for exactly that: Heat 1: Base of 6, reduces to 5. (Saves about 16%) Heat 2: Base of 12, reduces to 9. (Saves exactly 25%) Heat 3: Base of 18, reduces to 14. (Saves about 22%) Heat 4: Base of 24, reduces to 19. (Saves about 21%) Yeah, uh, none of that is a 20% reduction. And 90% of 90% is 81%, so none of these match that scenario either. This second upgrade is also kind of galling for how it's actually in the same tier as the Steam Hub efficiency tech, but the Generator's tiny contribution to Coal costs caps out at what's meant to be -20% split across two techs, while Steam Hubs get a superior -33% off one tech while also being vastly more of your Coal usage outside of the extreme early game. It really makes me wonder if, like, some planner person intended these two techs to in fact be global Coal usage reducers, but it didn't get communicated to the coders and then nobody noticed that wasn't the mechanics, because this design so obviously doesn't make sense and isn't even nonsensical in ways humans are prone to naturally doing. It really feels like it has to be some kind of accident. In any event, these are both techs that are easy to justify skipping on higher difficulties where you really to need to focus on the most important and pertinent techs. Their impacts are always tiny, and Coal has a lot of techs for helping get your needs reduced or your intake increased. Next tech! Overdrive Couplings Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Generator Power Upgrade I When using Overdrive, it now raises Heat Zone Heat by +2 instead of +1. Time to explain Overdrive! Overdrive lets you, at will and instantly, raise Heat Zone temperature by 1 at no additional Coal cost. Instead, the Generator builds up 'stress' while Overdrive is active, with stress rising by roughly 4% per hour; you thus can run Ovrdrive for just shy of 25 hours. When Overrive is not active, Stress dissipates much more slowly, at a rate of 2% hour, meaning 99% stress will take 48.5~ hours to recover from; put another way, you can Overdrive for a day every third day, roughly. If stress reaches 100%, there are three possible outcomes. Outcome one is that this is your first time letting that happen: in that case, the game resets stress to 95% and tells you to not do that again. Outcome two is that this is your second time hitting 100%, in which case you can sacrifice a Steam Core or Child (Assuming you have those!), resetting stress to 75%. Outcome 3 is that you already did that and hit 100% stress again: in that case, you instantly game over, the Generator exploding. Altogether, this means optimal play involves regularly running the Overdrive, as this is effectively a free, renewable resource. I, uh, largely don't do that, as it's an annoying nuisance that can be disastrous if I forget to turn the Overdrive off in time. I'd probably do it if the Overdrive button and stress meter were placed somewhere on the global UI, but they're both only accessible by selecting the Generator directly, aside that if stress is high enough the stress meter will become visible on the Generator itself. Which can still be overlooked if you're busy in other parts of the map on a large map; this is particularly pertinent to some of the insanely huge Endless Mode maps, but for example The Fall of Winterhome is a big map where your attention can easily be focused for long stretches away from the Generator. What I do use it for is to shrug off the 1-day temperature drops that occur at times in scenarios, or as an interim solution until a technology finishes that will help with heating, or if the temperature prediction is stable for a long time and my Coal situation is shaky I'll lower the Generator's temperature and Overdrive it maintain the same heat at less Coal. This is particularly high-impact when you're talking dropping from +2 Heat to the base power level, since you'll halve your Coal usage. (Unless you're running Heaters) Oh, also note that if the Generator is shutting down for any reason, you can't activate Overdrive and in fact it will shut off automatically if you have it on at the time. To be honest, I don't really like Overdrive as a mechanic; it's difficult to imagine what is supposed to be happening from an engineering or physics standpoint to arrive at this behavior, and as a gameplay mechanic it feels to me like it's meant to be a safety net but has mechanics that are broadly abusable instead. As for Overdrive Couplings, I'm... pretty down on it as a research. It's pure benefit to Overrive with no downside, yeah, but Overdrive adding +2 Heat instead of +1 is all kinds of awkward to leverage, and I strongly suspect the game's Illness mechanics don't work in a manner that makes it as good as you'd intuit for keeping sickness rate down. I only really consider it Clearly Nice for two purposes: 1: Letting you smoothly shrug off the 1-day 2-tier temperature drops that are somewhat common on higher difficulties. 2: Once you have Generator Power II, it lets you drop 2 tiers of Coal usage at a time. Next tech! Generator Safety Bypass Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel. 10/12/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Overdrive Couplings. Overdrive's stress rises more slowly and recovers more quickly, dropping from 4% gained per hour to 3% gained per hour, and rising from recovering 2% per hour to recovering 2.5% per hour. Alright then? First let's note this means Overdrive can now be run for slightly over 33 hours and will then recover from 99% stress in about 39.5 hours, and so you can run it more regularly and with more wiggle room to eg run it for a few hours even if you'll need it for a full day in just a bit. ... Overall, I'm unfond of this tech. It leans into the problem that Overdrive seems to be meant as a safety net but is far more generally useful than that, its extrenemely late placement actually severely undermines it as critical Overdrive utility is largely concentrated in the early to middling portion of a run, and the name is a very strange way of explaining this straightforward improvement to Overdrive's mechanics. Bypassing a safety system suggests to me a setup more like 'the Generator automatically shuts off Overdrive at 75% stress, and this tech lifts that limit but risks you reaching 100% stress and exploding'. Overall, I kind of wish this was swapped with Overdrive Couplings, or was a different mechanic entirely, or that Overdrive itself hadn't been a mechanic or had been more properly a safety net mechanic. This whole thing is one of the more low-impact, innocuous bits of Frostpunk's esign tending to be flawed and janky, but somehow it bothers me more than some of the higher-impact bits of jank. Next tech! Generator Range Upgrade Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel 6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 1 Requires: Nothing. Allows the Generator's personal Heat Zone to be extended out another small building's worth of distance, and immediately sets it to that distance upon completing this tech. Coal usage of the Generator is raised to 200% of base while this is active (By default: from 6 Coal per hour to 12 Coal per hour), stacking multiplicatively with power cost modifiers. Ah... ouch. Okay, this is one of those cases where I would probably make the same initial mistake myself, though I like to think I'd have scrutinized things better than the Frostpunk devs did to make sure this actually made any sense to research if I'd been involved in making this game. First of all, let's point out that this exact tech is objectively inferior to simply building more Steam Hubs. I have tested: the ring of space this upgrade adds fits roughly 14 Tents if that's all you build in it, whereas a single Steam Hub can fit around 17~ Tents in its space. And when I say 'around 17', I mean I did a kind of sloppy job assembling my test Steam Hub's layout and you can probably cram in at least a couple more Tents than my lazy, imprecise test managed. Leveraging this Generator radius cost by default cost exactly as much Coal per hour as running two Steam Hubs, yet the space added by it is actually less than one Steam Hub, and I've already been over the Eficiency techs; in the long haul, two Steam Hubs will add less Coal usage to your city than expanding the Generator's radius! I've not tested the two further techs to determine their numbers as of this writing, and they should each add more usable space due to how circles work, but even if I assume they gain like 4 and then 8 Tents worth of space, they'll still be worse than more Stam Hubs just on this layer! Then the tech gets dragged down by various other decisions Frostpunk makes. For example, Fighting Arenas and Faith's Houses of Prayer are buildings you want placed near housing but not actually inside Heat Zones: a Steam Hub cluster of housing smoothly enables that behavior, and when you expand your city you can eg place another Steam Hub so it's close enough to cover housing in the raius of those buildings without wastefully covering those builings. The Generator's own radius being expanded doesn't mesh with this; if you build housing all around the Generator in its two rings of Heat Zone and place your chilly buildings on the outside, further expaning the radius will unavoidably wastefully cover your chilly buildings and there simply isn't a way to avoid this waste while covering the innermost housing with support building auras. Only medical buildings, Watch Towers, Guard Stations, the Propaganda Center, the Prison, and the Faith Keepers can be placed in the Generator's inner Heat Zone rings while both avoiding this jank and being 24 hour buildings. (Plus your Workshops if you assume you're going to be constantly alternating Emergency Shifts on them and so might as well treat them as 24 hour builings for planning purposes) You might be wondering why I'm focusing on 24 hour buildings. This is because another flaw with increasing the Generator's radius instead of building Steam Hubs is that Steam Hubs can be smoothly used for 'work districts' where the Coal is only spent during work hours. Even if you're using Extended Shifts everywhere, that's still shaving off a hair over 40% of potential Coal usage, and for regular shifts it shaves off about 58% of the potential Coal usage, making Steam Hubs hugely superior for supporting work districts without devastating your Coal supply. You can sort of approximate this with the Generator if you're willing to just only buil work builings in whatever will be your outermost Generator ring and you are willing to change the radius back and forth every single day, but it's not remotely sensible (Not to mention it would be extremely tedious to actually do), especially since Agitators/Shrines encourage trying to cluster work buildings together in a circle, which building in the outer ring of the Generator's Heat Zone is absolutely not that. Then there's the aggravating breaking of a mental shorthand: if your Generator is sitting at raius 1, you can chck its current Coal usage as an easy reminder of how much a Steam Hub will cost to run per hour. Simply halve the Generator's usage and there you go. The radius increases change this, where one radius increase makes a Steam Hub only use 25% of the Generator's own usage, two radius increass make a Steam Hub only use 1/6th of the Generator's own usage, and with max radius a Steam Hub is now 1/8th of the Generator's own usage. Since the game is absolutely terrible at providing feedback on what a Steam Hub's expected usage is when you're just considering placing one or the like, this is genuinely problematic for planning things out as you play! I'm most sympathetic to the part where the math is ill-considered. It certainly feels logical for the Heat increase an raius incrase to multiply off each other, but it really hurts the game; if the radius increase was instead simply +6 Coal per hour per radius increase, it would still be terrible at base power but would gain in functional efficiency as you went up in power level... ... though I guess I should explain that math point. For power level and radius, cost is essentially a 1/2/3/4 type system if you look at them internally: you're just adding the base price each time, which gets less proportionally impactful as you go up. However, if you raise radius and power level at the same time, the result is that eg going from radius 1 to radius 2 doubles your Coal usage no matter what the power level is sitting at. This means that power 4 and radius 4 together brings your expenses to sixteen times the base cost for running the Generator. If they instead each just added the base 6 Coal per hour for each step you went up, you'd start from 6, add 6 another 6 times, and end up at 42 per hour; in the actual game, you end up at 96 per hour, or just shy of 230% of that 42 scenario. Now, as noted earlier, in the long haul Steam Hubs are invariably the majority of your Coal usage, not the Generator, so in the end this high multiplier issue isn't really that impactful on the design. Even if the Generator's cost increases weren't multiplie off each other, the radius increases would still be hampered by the other issues: frankly, I think the only good fix in the current design would be to make Gnerator radius increases cost no Coal at all, so they entirely sidestep the issue of Steam Hubs being better. This does, however, touch on the fact that I think the cost increases shouldn't have worked in the 1/2/3/4 format in the first place: Frostpunk's early game tends to be where the majority of tension in a run sits, and there's a bunch of reasons why, but this is one of the jankier elements contributing to that tendency, where going from +1 Heat to +2 Heat is a very difficult and demanding jump since it demands you roughly double your Coal intake to handle it, but the next two jumps are much easier to make: going from +2 to +3 only needs 50% more Coal, and going from +3 to +4 only needs 33% more Coal. I think the game probably should instead have had each Heat increase demand more of a proportionste Coal increase than the last, or be designed so the proportion of increase is the same from one tier to the next, probably reducing the impact per tier. eg if going up a step was always 50% more Coal than the previous tier, that woul be straightforward (Though the final costs would be a bit lower: 337.5% instead of 400%. A chained 60% increase would be closer to the current final value, ending up just shy of 410% total), or it could instead have been more like needing 30% of base Coal to jump to +2, then 60% of base Coal to jump from there to +3, and finally 90% of base Coal to jump from there to +4, so there's less pressure early on but more pressure later on. To be fair, I'm not 100% sure the engine could execute some of the exact numbers I'm suggesting, but even if for some reason it's only feasible to move in whole numbers (Even though the first Efficiency upgrade doesn't), just going to +3 per hour/+6 per hour/+9 per hour (ie +50%/+100%/+150%) would arrive at the same total (400% Coal usage at max power), stay in whole numbers, but accomplish the 'less pressure earlier, more pressure later' goal. Next tech! Generator Range Upgrade II Costs 60 Wood and 40 Coal. 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Generator Range Upgrade. Allows the Generator's personal Heat Zone to be extended out another small building's worth of distance, and immediately sets it to that distance upon completing this tech. Coal usage of the Generator is raised to 200% of base while this is active (By default: from 6 Coal per hour to 18 Coal per hour), stacking multiplicatively with power cost modifiers. I have not currently tested exactly how many Tents you can fit into this ring, so I don't know precisely how it compares to More Stam Hubs, but it's probably still inferior mathematically and is certainly burdened by all the other issues I've covered. So let's instead take a moment to talk about a different Generator mechanic: the homeless freezing to death if the Generator is offline overnight. I hate this mechanic's implementation so much. I think the devs might have realized how deeply stupid it is, fortunately; The Last Autumn, On The Edge, and Builders Mode in Endless Mode all replace what I'm about to describe with a low rate of illness for sleeping on the ground. You can argue that's out of necessity since you don't have a Generator in any of those scenarios, but the devs could have insisted on forcing in some replacement protection, so that's not the whole story. In any event: if you have the Generator off and anybody is unhoused, then in the evening you will be warned that it's cold an you should turn on the Generator. If you ignore this warning and leave the Generator off for the night, you will have at least one person die. The probability of this happening is unrelated to the current temperature: it can be so warm outside your citizens would have zero risk of illness if they were sitting in a building that had no innate Heat increase, but sorry, the cold straight-up murders a sleeping person if the big bad scary Generator isn't growling to ward off the Frost Things. This is crazy. Even being in the -4 or -5 ranges only carries a risk of becoming an Amputee; the cold is not allowed to kill your citizns except in this case and with specific Scouting map mechanics that are for later and don't matter to this point. Why do they skip right to being ad no matter the temperature?? It's also one of the many examples of the Heat Zone feeling conceptually inconsistent. This is another time the game seems to be running with the Generator as a radiant heat source, where simply basking in its presence is a meaningful amount of heat... ... except actually it isn't that at all! If you select a person who is homeless, their displayed 'home' will be the Generator and their displayed home temperature will not be 'subtract outside temperature, add Heat Zone modification', it will instead be just he outside temperature with no modifiers, and their illness rates do in fact seem to match to this implication, where homeless citizens can be in danger of frostbite if outside temperatures are -3 even if the Generator is currently adding +6 an so their overall temperaure should be 1 over the red zone that is Completely Safe! Now, one might argue that windchill is a thing, being outside on the ground is different from being indoors, in a bed, presumably wrapped in a blanket, and that's not untrue, but for one thing the game doesn't apply a similar logic to worksites. Sleeping outside ignores the Heat Zone, but people walking directly to a Coal pile sitting in the snow and walking back and forth through the snow does respect whether a Heat Zone is covering the Coal pile. For that matter, a technically-housed citizen running around all night builing builings in the ark Okay, but laying directly on the ground does sap a lot of heat out of you, and activity generates more heat too, and the body temperaure just plain drops while sleeping, and nighttime is cooler tthan daytime... ... but given that a single temperature drop in Frostpunk is 10 degrees celsius, I'd really expect that to be, like, a single tier of temperature drop in the calculations. Maybe two. (And frankly it mildly frustrates me that the game doesn't have nighttime temperatures mechanically lower than daytime temperatures) Not 'skip past normal cold consequences and kill someone, ostensibly using a mechanic that otherwise doesn't kill people in this game'. It's also frustrating in a manner somewhat common to Frostpunk: the mechanics here aren't intuitive or organic. Instead, there is a speciic range of time in which the game pays attention to whether the Generator is active or not to decide whther to kill people or not. I think it starts from 2:00 and ends at either 4:00 or 6:00, but the point is that the warning to turn on the Generator kicks in several hours before the point at which the game will actually punish you for not turning it on, and the mechanics aren't, like, modeling citizen body temperatures and killing anyone who falls too low. It's one giant learning curve issue where something doesn't work in a realistically logical way, doesn't work in a typical Vieo Game Logic way, isn't set up in a manner you can clearly relate to the game's design needs, and where the game's own attempts to eucate you on things don't really point you toward the actual mechanics of the thing. The final result is you get punished not for poor system mastey, but because of the game communicating itself extremely poorly and then killing someone when you don't readily guess what it wants out of you. Ugh, back to techs. Generator Range Upgrade III Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel. 10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Generator Range Upgrade II. Allows the Generator's personal Heat Zone to be extended out another small building's worth of distance, and immediately sets it to that distance upon completing this tech. Coal usage of the Generator is raised to 400% of base while this is active (By default: from 6 Coal per hour to 24 Coal per hour), stacking multiplicatively with power cost modifiers. Again, as of this writing I haven't tested to determine how many Tents of space this is worth, but I doubt it's a good amount. This also sufers from being tier 5, and so you can certainly get the Steam Hub Efficiency Upgrade, so even if this actually gives good value compared to unupgraded Steam Hubs, it's supremely unlikely to give value compared to unupgraded Steam Hubs, even if I assume you have both Generaor Efficiency Upgrades. It also suffers from being stacked atop the prior two upgrades in both tech and in Generator usage. The fact that the first range upgrade is worse than a single Steam Hub means that the next two upgrades would need to not only each give value equal to 2 Steam Hubs to justiy themslves directly, but in fact give so much value to make up for how the first upgrade costs 2 Steam Hubs of Coal while giving less than 1 Steam Hub of value. As an aside, you might have noticed the list of buildings that are fine to put in the Generator's own Heat Zone was heavy on Order buildings. While the Generator range boosts are terrible in general, if you want to make them feel not completely horrible, Order is thus better than Faith to run. This is especially funny to me given Faith has those 'Generator worship' bits to it, but mechanically isn't really incentivized to crowd around the Generator and instead its counterpart that lacks such undertones does have such incentives. Next tech! Heaters Costs 10 Wood. 5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 0 Requires: Nothing. Enables the Heater ability at almost all building-based worksites, as well as at Care Houses, Child Shelters, and in The Arks also the Seeling Ark buildings. (Hunters Huts and Flying Hunters do not get this ability) RRunning Heaters drains 1 Coal per hour to raise the Heat level of that building by +1. In the case of worksite buildings, Heaters only have their effects have people are currently working at the builing, while for Care Houses, Child Shelters, and Seedling Arks an activated Heater runs at all hours. Heaters are great! Especially for inconveniently-placed worksites that are widely-separated from anything of interest: a Steam Hub adding 1 Heat will cost 3 Coal per hour vs a Heater costing 1 per hour, so anytime you can't cover at least 3 worksite buildings with a Steam Hub, Heaters are superior Coal efficiency. (Assuming equal tech investment between the two) They also provide a wide safety net for uneven technological distributions; a resource chain you prioritize upgrading will end up warmer than one you neglect by default, but you can potentially use Heaters to make up the difference if you don't want to or outright can't get that other resource builing chain improve. They do unfortunately contribute to the learning curve confusion regarding how heat mechanics work, since you can in fact fully stack them with Heat Zone boosts and the game doesn't really try to explain that whole thing. They also unfortunately get leaned on by the game for keeping most Law-unlocked buildings Aequately Warm, which I feel is particularly a mistake when it comes to Child Shelters and Watch Towers/Guard Stations since it quietly adds a Coal load to picking those options rather than the directly competing option that doesn't involve a warmth-needing building and the game clearly didn't balance these Law choices with that in mind, but is a bit janky even with the Public House and Care House. The only exception to this point is Faith's House of Healing, which has the same base warmth as an Infirmary and actually benefits from technology for improving the warmth of medical buildings. Lastly, they have a really unfortunate bit of mechanics insanity with Gathering Posts, Sawmills, Factories, and a large number of The Last Autumn buildings. Specifically, if a resource-gathering building has nothing to gather in its radius, or a building with a production queue has nothing in said production queue, citizens assigned to that building will not be considered to be working at the building for Heater purposes, so a currently-enabled Heater won't raise the temperature at the worksite, but the game will still make temperarure checks based on this worksite that they aren't truly working at. This can result in cases where citizens become Amputees unexpectedly because their building ran out of resources or emptied its build queue even though they were safely at maximum warmth or merely -1 or -2 while they were working, where no frostbite risk existed. The Gathering Post bit is thankfully often irrelevant since most Gathering Post usage should occur in the very early portion of a run, and any further Gathering Post usage will be for Coal Thumpers and doesn't necessarily run out of resources at any point, but for Sawmills this can be really unfortunate, especially since most scenarios give you an absurd number of trees to work through where you can be building, using up, then tearing down and building new Sawmills until the very end of the scenario. This bit of jank is one of the main ways I appeciate Automaton usage, as assigning an Automaton to a Sawmill evades this problem entirely. Otherwise, though, Heaters work fine and I largely consider them one of the better-designed parts of Frostpunk, with most of my most significant frustrations connecting to them being things like 'it's counterintuitive and explained nowhere that a building getting +3 Heat from a Heater won't remove snow from its roof whereas even +1 Heat from a Heat Zone will de-snow everything in that area', where it's a broadly-applicable jank Heaters are caught up in, not a problem with Heater design per se. Next tech! Improved Heaters Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Heaters Heaters now provide +2 Heat, but spend 1 more Coal per hour. (For a default total of 2 Coal per hour) I have mixed feelings about this being an uncontrolled tradeoff, where you can't run some places at +2 and other places at +1. Workshops, for example, are unusually warm buildings I almost always place in Heat Zones, and which do important enough work I am oten willing to pay the Coal price to bring them from -1 to -0 Heat to ensure their workplace doesn't make them ill. Improved Heaters results in the Workshops bearing the full Coal cost increase for no further benefit, which is a bit frustrating. On the other hand, it contributes to the mastery aspect of the game in that when to research Improve Heaters is not necessarily 'as soon as possible'; I often try to time it to finish shortly before a temperature drop, to maximize the gains and minimize the flaw. Alternativly, I will wait if possible until tier 3, so I can research it and then immediately research Heater Efficiency Upgrade, canceling out the cost increase and making it all advantage in less than a day. Adding multiple Heater settings would make the upgrade better, but I'm not sure it would make for a better game. Aside that wrinkle, this is a straightforward positive most runs will want eventually. Next tech! Advanced Heaters Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Improved Heaters. Heaters now provide +3 Heat, but spend 1 more Coal per hour. (For a default total of 3 Coal per hour) See prior commentary, mostly. Unlike Improved Heaters, you can't knock the Coal cost down after this to get back to 1 Coal per hour, so that's a strategy unavailable to it. On the other hand, you're a lot more likely to have Coal pretty firmly solved by the time you can get Advanced Heaters than with Improved Heaters, so its tradeoff is often pretty ignorable in practice. One thing that's kind of funky with it in particular is that whether it really adds anything is dependent in part on what the scenario did with weather. This is difficulty-dependent in addition to scenario-dependent, but the devs have also put themselves in a bit of an awkward place in terms of various design decisions intersecting: housing caps out at a maximum of +4 Heat, workplaces generally cap out at +3 Heat, and the game can't do 'local' temperature adjustments. You can't have a Steelworks sitting in the shadow of your city's cliffs such that the game decides that area is 1 Heat level lower than the central area around the Generator. This matters, because housing+Heat Zone max temperature mandates a floor the game can't drop temperatures below without it becoming unfair: if the temperature is allowed to go so far own that even a maxed-out power level covered upgraded Houses results in frostbite risk, what is the player supposed to o to cope with that? Since almost all workplaces can get to +3 innate Heat, they actually only need the basic Heater to reach the same floor as housing. Since Heaters can't reach +4, you can't simply use Heaters to completely replace Steam Hubs if temperatures get really far down: you have to cover them with Steam Hubs. The Improved Heater's early placement means it actually has a real possibility of displacing Steam Hub usage for individual buildings, and also means there's just generally Strategy Stuff you can do, like prioritizing Improved Heaters and Bunkhouses in place of grabbing the first power upgrade as a way to get +1 Heat everywhere with less crushing of a Coal usage increase, but for Advanced Heaters they can easily be something you grab and then find you just increased your Coal usage for nothing. They probably should've had a +4 Heater tier, or raised housing's passive heating potential to +6, or made workplaces not get extra Heat out of upgrading the building. The current state has them having designed themselves into a corner that's not easily fixed. Indiviual scenarios make attempts -such as On The Edge having a key worksite structure that simply ignores Heat Zones and so isn't haunted by this issue- but overall... awkward. Next tech! Heater Efficiency Upgrade Costs 60 Wood and 40 Steel. 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Improved Heaters. Reduces the Coal cost per hour by 1. (Resulting in Improved Heaters spending 1 per hour, or Advanced Heaters spending 2 per hour) Yes, this is lower-tier than Advanced Heaters, but costs more Wood and Steel. This is uncommon, but it oes happen here and there in the tech trees. Also, something I've wondered about: in A New Home, you can get techs for free from Scouting very late in the scenario, and they're randomized, try to be things you don't already have, and can 'skip' past tech requirements. So is it possible to get this while you still have basic Heaters? Do they just become free Heat? Or does the game wig out and not like that, or does Heater Efficiency just not affect basic Heaters in that scenario? In any event, you shoul certainly get this eventually, it's just a question of how soon. -------------------------- Next time, we cover a third technology tab: Food, Health, and Shelter. See you then.