Alright, it's time for research mechanics, which means I need to cover the Workshop and the general funky research behavior. Workshop Costs 15 Wood and 5 Steel. Size 5x2? Manned by up to 5 Engineers, with a default workday of 8:00 to 18:00. Heat +2. The player must build and man a Workshop to gain access to the technology tree. The first 100% of Workshop labor delivery per hour behaves as one would expect, but if the per-hour labor delivery rises over 100% (Through more Workshops being active or through Efficiency boosts on Workshops), it is subjected to severe stepdown functions: see below. Alright, I've already touched on the stepdown function some, but I'm going to give a much, much simpler and clearer explanation than the wiki's or the in-game summary: What the game does per hour is it tallies up the percent of Efficiency delivery occurring, then does funny stuff if the total rises over 100%. To be clear, it doesn't matter how you get to or above 100%: 5 Workshops with 1 Engineer in each will arrive at the same 100% as 1 Workshop with 5 Engineers in it, and so both behave the way you'd expect. Once you are above 100%, you have the following ranges: 101-200%: Reduce anything added in this range to 30% of itself. 201-300%: Reduce anything added in this range to 20% of itself. 301% and up: Reduce anything added in this range to 10% of itself. The game summarizes this as 'second Workshop adds 30%, thirds 20%, and all future Workshops add 10%', which isn't... wrong exactly, but doesn't at all communicate the part where Efficiency modifiers get directly factored into this. For example, if you have 1 Workshop in the radius of an Agitator and with Foreman active on it, its pre-stepdown delivery is 160%, but the 60% part shaves off 70% of itself and becomes only 18%, so your Workshop is only delivering research 18% faster, not 60% faster; this is exactly the same as if you instead had a second Workshop manned with 3 people and so delivering 60% Efficiency. Since the stepdown function knocks everything added over 300% to be only 10% of itself, more Workshops and more Efficiency boosters rapidly do barely anything. Three fully-manned Workshops is a decent 150% speed, but if you want to go 50% faster from there, you'll need to add 750% base delivery, or 7-and-a-half fully manned Workshops. Unfortunately the game's tally mechanism working on a per-hour basis rather than a per-day basis means manipulating Workshop hours is ludicrously effective at improving research speed. Just running Extended Shifts with a fully manned Workshop is giving you 40% faster research, which is outright better than adding a second fully manned Workshop, and of course Emergency Shift lets you add a further 10 hours per day if abused, leading to what I previously described of two Workshops alternating Emergency Shifts and always running Extended Shift arriving at two Workshops getting to research faster than what would happen if you had 15 fully manned Workshops that stuck to the normal shift at all times. A New Home especially is clearly not built with this type of easy ability to research at over triple speed in mind! It's too bad, because the basic framework is a nice attempt at making it so research progression isn't completely non-interactive but also it's not hyper-optimal to focus on accelerating research: so many games with a research system you can specialize in accelerating end up with oing so being far superior to any strategy that does not do so, and I appreciate when games try to soften this effect. I personally would probably have made the stepdown behavior a little less steep -such as 60/40/20% instead of 30/20/10%- but whatever. Alas, Extended Shift an mrgency Shift throw the whole thing wildly out of whack and it mostly ends up being an unpleasant learning curve issue where a player may be having a much harder time than necessary because their intuition on the mechanics did not suggest that more hours of labor would be ludicrously more effective than more Efficiency value per hour. Anyway, researches themselves have base 'target' hours: this target is how long it would take for the research to finish if exactly 100% Workshop labor delivery was occurring. I list these in the format of #/#/#/#, as your difficulty setting affects this number: I'm listing Easy/Normal/Hard/Extreme research numbers. Said numbers are set arbitrarily by the devs, but they generally try to have researches consistent with each other within a research tier, and Extreme generally places researches as taking 50-100% longer than on Normal. Oh, research tiers. There's six of these. Tier 0 is what's available the instant you have a functioning Workshop. The other 5 tiers are researches displayed on th left, which you must work through in order and which gate access to later researches in addition to any other requirement a research might have. Said tier researches don't do anything else: they're expensive and take forever in an attempt to force the player to actually grab early researches a decent amount instead of, say, beelining for Advanced Steelworks before bothering to grab a second tier 0 tech. Said tier researches are: I Drawing Boards Costs 50 Wood. 6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Requires: Nothing. Unlocks tier 1 technologies. It's kind of funny to me that your jump a tech tier by setting up... drawing boards. I guess regular paper sheets are too small for more advanced technologies to be drawn on them? Actually, don't think about paper. Frostpunk's citizens being able to freely create paper with no need to set up facilities for bleaching wood pulp and so on is one of many topics for ruining your suspension of disbelief. Oh, and I'm just doing an 'I' instead of an image because that's... really all it is in-game. This is in fact a mildly awkward learning curvee issue; in my original run, I sort of figured tier 1 would unlock once I'd researched enough tier 0 techs or something, as the tier techs don't look anything like either art style used for all other technologies. It was only once I researched everything and was hovering my cursor everywhere that I discovered that, oh, the numbers are researches. This, uh, could've been handled better. Anyway, Drawing Boards is, I would argue, the tier tech that is often most worth shifting plans around so you can get it start early, as Frostpunk is generally designed -somewhat foolishly, unfortunatly- so that the first unlock or upgrade in a given sub-category is the single biggest jump in your city's performance. Getting Hothouses online really early can be absolutely massive in eg an Extreme A New Home run, as they're just so massively superior to Hunter's Huts for Food generation. 50 Wood is also... pricey for very early in a run, but a plausibl pricey to reach by eg just making 3 fewer Tents for the moment, and it doesn't take forever to research. Next tier! II Drafting Machines Costs 75 Wood and 25 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Requires: Drawing Boards. Unlocks tier 2 technologies. By 'drafting machines', I assume the devs mean something to help draw on those Drawing Boards more swiftly. Drafting Machines is also potentially very, very good to break into early, most crucially because it gates access to the Steam Steelworks. Steel tends to be a big limiter on you in most runs most of the time, and upgrading to a Steam Steelworks is increasing your Steel intake by about 76%; you'll 'pay for' the 25 Steel of Drafting Machines in less than a day, and often it is that Steel cost that is th biggest hump to getting to Drafting Machines. As it also gates access to Infirmaries and these generally solve your medical situation once online, that's another strong rason to consider pushing through Drafting Machines early. Next tier! III Mechanical Calculators Costs 100 Wood and 50 Steel. 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Requires: Drafting Machines. Unlocks tier 3 technologies. Are we breaking out abacuses now? Is that the idea here? In any event, Mechanical Calculators can be worth pushing for early, but between its pretty high price, relatively poor ability to jump your city's quality up (Boosting Coal mining by 50% is its main big trick), and the sheer amount of good value researches sitting in th irst four tiers, I don't often push hard to get it online early. Next tier! IV Difference Engine Costs 125 Wood and 75 Steel 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Requires: Mechanical Calculators. Unlocks tier 4 technologies. A difference engine is a specific 1800s mechanical calculator designed to automatically solve pretty complex math problems. Frostpunk is actually set around 50 years after one was invented, so this makes a reasonable amount of sense, honestly. As this gates access to the Advanced Steelworks, there's a decent argument for heavily prioritizing it, especially in The Fall of Wintrhome, as you'll want a lot of Steel in that scenarip. I also find it useful to rush for House Redesign so I can build Houses exclusively at thir reduced cost. Otherwise, I consider this probably the 'most dead' tier; it unlocks a lot of stuff that's kind of difficult to care about most of the time. The Advanced Steelworks and House Redesign are huge, mind, but if I'm okay with my Steel intake and I'm not in a hurry to build Houses, I tend to dawdle on getting Difference Engine done. Next (and final) tier! V Automatic Prototyping Costs 150 Wood and 100 Steel 10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Requires: Difference Engine. Unlocks tier 5 technologies. The ultimate techs, and kind of... erratic about being worth caring about. As I commented earlier, Frostpunk designs itself so later techs tend to be less of a proportionate jump: going from Hothouses to Industrial Hothouses increases Raw Food production by 150%, whereas tier 5 lets you get a 15% boost to all Hothouses. It's a passive boost, mind, where Industrial Hothouses requires committing build time and additional Stam Cores to get value out of it, but it's still a decent example. I have in fact basically perfected some scenarios on Extreme without bothering to actually research Automatic Prototyping, because it just seemed like a waste of resources. ------------------------------------------- All that out of the way, we'll be covering the Exploration and Industry subsection first -there's 4 research tabs in most sceenarios, and this on is focused on Scouts, Outposts, and Automatons, which is a big part of why I'm starting with it first even though the other tabs are arguably more basic. The other reason is it's one of the less variable tech tabs. Frostpunk actually has most scenarios have custom research lists, with some things missing, other things completely exclusive to a given scenario, etc. I'll... be leaving some of these out of the reseearch pages and covering them instead in their scenario's own page, as a decent amount of such techs are specific to a scnario by virtue of being anchord in some element specific to that scenario that takes a bit to be revealed. Note that in these pages I will be moving from one 'line' to the next. eg in this case, I'll be covering all the scouting and Outpost techs together before moving on to the Factory and its derivatives, even though this means I'll be covering tier 5 techs bfore I get to the Factory in tier 3. First up: Beacon Costs 10 Wood. 5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 0 Requires: Nothing. Unlocks the Beacon building. Alright, what's that building? Beacon Costs 20 Wood and 35 Steel. Size 6x3? Only one can exist at any given moment. Provides access to the Scouting map and causes the UI to display information on groups that are travling to the city, such as time to arrival and contents in the group. A single Scout Team can be deployed by spening 40 Wood and 5 Workers. Scout teams can be disbanded if at the city, and this fully refunds the Wood and Workers. In The Arks scenario, the 5 Worker requiremnt is switche to a 5 Engineer requirement. Alright, time to cover scouting. Like a lot of of Frostpunk's systems, there's a lot of jank, much of it producing counterintuitive and at least somewhat perverse incentives. I'd say Scouting is one of the better systems overall in Frostpunk, but... still a lot of jank. First of all, forming a Scout Team is advantageous in absolutely wild ways. Citizens assigned to a Scout Team are considered to be 'on an expedition': they will still show in your citizen summary panel and will stay claim a housing slot back in the city no matter how many weeks you leave them out their, but their food and health statuses both 'freeze': forming a Scout Team quickly is thus a weird way to make food go farther, as a Scout Team is 5 less mouths to feed each day, and it's also 5 people who can't possibly take up space in a Medical Post, lightening the load on your medical system. The game is also perfectly willing to let you form a Scout Team if 5 Workers are free even if some or all of those Workers are Ill or even Gravely Ill, even though Gravely Ill citizens are not allowed to do most other types of work. As such, you can potentially do nonsense like end up with 5 people Gravely Ill when your medical system can't help them and you're days away from any tools for saving them, and respond to them being deathly ill by giving them backpacks, slapping them on the back, and wishing them luck out in the icepocalypse, only letting them back into the city once you have Infirmaries or whatever, and thus potentially get a fully deathless run by doing a course of action that ought to be sentencing people to death. Second, all movement on the Scouting map is handled based on clicking nodes. This isn't fundamentally jank, but has two wrinkles to it that are janky: the first wrinkle is that the game has the concept of 'traveling a known route', where Scout Teams will reach a destination twice as fast if the node is considered previously visited. This is pretty clearly mostly meant to make Scouts travel back home much faster than thy travel out from home, but it means that anytime you want a Scout to travel to a new node somewhere past or near an old node, you should send them to the previously-explored node, not simply click their final destination. This is an annoying, tedious, janky bit of micromastery that makes most scenarios vastly easier, and I'm pretty sure it's not at all intended. The second bit of jank is around Outpost Teams, which I'll be explaining next, so let's put a pin in that concept for the moment. The Scouting map itself is a bespoke element that is custom to each scenario. Scenarios tend to have a small amount of randomness to this, where some nodes aren't fully consistent in placement, or a node location always exists but its contents have at least two possibilities. Many nodes have resource rewards, and it's pretty clear A New Home was designed with this being the main utility in mind for Scouting; usually, you simply click to explore, get an irrelevant text dump and image, plus get your resource rewards. Such resource rewards are useless until the Scout Team returns to your city: upon arrival, they will dump all that off instantly and the game will pause to inform you of this. Annoyingly, unlike most things that try to grab the player's attention, this won't reset the game speed to the base speed; ideally you set it yourslf whn a Scout Team is a few minutes away from the city. People rewards are different. Generally, finding people at a node will give you 2 or 3 options: leave them there, send them to your city, or escort them to your city. Send them is the option that isn't always available, but if it is available, it will always have them move slowly and the game will kill them off at a slow rate as they travel. (Note that such deaths don't result in bodies in your city: they apparently get left behind in the snow) If you escort them instead, they travel twice as fast and suffer no deaths, but the Scout Team is locked in to traveling to your city; you can't give them other orders, not even to scout a node they literally pass through. If you leav them there... this will either kill them and clear the node, or it will leave them there for later, with you able to come back whnever and grab them then. This is not random, it's custom for each such Scouting event, and the game always clearly tells you whether they will die or just be left to later, but broadly speaking the devs started out defaulting to 'you're abandoning them to their deaths' and switched to 'you'll probably just pick them up later'; in A New Home and The Refugees, leaving them there is basically always death, whereas in The Fall of Winterhome and On The Edge it's always just leaving them for later. I appreciate that shift: it's really frustrating to hit a node, have another node right on top of it, but be forbidden from running over real quick before returning home because the first node I visited happened to have people in it. While most Scouting nodes are just 'we found an interesting sight and grabbed some stuff', some nodes actually have you make a decision, like most events in the city. This unfortunately is a spot Frostpunk tends to fall down on the job with: most such decisions are 'do you want to do the objectively correct thing, or the objectively incorrect thing?', where the only reason you might make the wrong decision is that the presentation of information is opaque. Particularly obnoxious is that Frostpunk has a small number of events where a decision risks the Scout Team's lives: these are always the best possible choice, except for that possibility of your Scout Team vanishing into the ether, as well as any loot they're carrying being lost. You do at least get clearly warned that the decision is dangerous, with a reliable 'exclamation point over the Scout Team symbol' appearing when considering the dangerous decision, but in practice these events boil down to 'memorize which node names will result in such, save beforehand, reload if they die and try again until the game gives you the loot'. If Frostpunk was more of a roguelike sort of game, these dangerous events mmmmight have been design-valid, but in actual Frostpunk they're just... really dumb. But on to Outposts! Outpost Depot Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Beacon Unlocks the Outpost building. Alright, let's cover this building. Outpost Depot Costs 25 Wood and 45 Steel. Size 8x3? Can only be placed at arbitrarily-designated locations specific to each map. These locations are always at the edge of the map. A givn Outpost Depot can support exactly 1 Outpost Team; forming an Outpost Team costs 40 Wood, 20 Steel, and 10 Workers. Outpost Teams function like Scout Teams, but they cannot interact with most nodes; instead, if a Scout Team has previously determined a node is a viable Outpost location, an Outpost Team may then interact with that node, disappearing and becoming an Outpost that will deliver some amount of some resource in shipmnts sent to the city every 24 hours. The Outpost can be dismantled at any time, instantly reverting to a mobile Outpost Team. Outpost Teams can be disbanded if they are at the city, refunding the full cost of forming the team. Like Scout Teams, Outposts and Outpost Teams are another thing with a lot of jank to them, but, like, more so. First of all, Outpost Teams actually don't benefit from that 'traveling a known route' stuff; they will arrive after X hours whn travelling Y distance regardless of whether the node has been visited before are not. This is an innocuous and irrelevant quality if you do what most first-time players probably do of only sending Outpost Teams directly to identified Outpost locations, but it's weird and was a bad decision in context. This is because of point the second: while Outpost Teams can't Do Scouting in the sense of triggering a node's scouting scene, whether a location will be traveled to twice as fast or not by Scout Teams is not determined by 'has a Scout Team interacted with the node to trigger its event', but rather is determined by 'has a Team of either type ever stopped in that node at all'. Outpost Teams can thus 'pre-scout' nodes so that actual Scout Teams can clean them up much faster, especially since... Point third: Outpost Teams travel massively faster than Scout Teams. They will reach a destination in 25% of the time it would take a Scout Team to reach that location: even for a previously-visited location, Outpost Teams still arrive in 50% of the time. As such, sending an Outpost Team and Scout Team to an unexplored destination at the same time will result in the Outpost Team arriving when the Scout Team has traveled 25% of the distance, the location will become known, and so the Scout Team will cover the remaining 75% of the distance twice as fast, and so spend a total of 62.5% of the hours on travel they should've taken. Now, both Team types can upgrade their speed and Scout Teams have greater ability to boost their speed than Outpost Teams, but fully-upgraded Scouts only travel twice as fast as their base, so even a base-speed Outpost Team will reach unexplored locations in 50% the time a Scout Team would take. And if the Outpost Teams have their own spee upgrade, they'll arrive in 33% the time it would take the Scout Team. Now, a reader might object that using this all takes away from Outpost Teams shipping resources and surely this moderate boost to scouting isn't worth that sacrifice, right?... ... but, well, that gets into how counterintuitive and funky Outpost mechanics actually are. See, what happens upon forming an Outpost is that a shipment is immediately sent to the city, and will trudge its way over there. The Outpost is now irrelevant for the next 24 hours; the node is (invisibly) on cooldown, and there's not actually any point to keeping the Outpost Team there. Since Outpost Teams are so absurdly fast, and since the game kindly gives accurate predictions of how long travel will take, you can just walk 12-ish or less hours and then back, very reliably, and actually Outpost Teams can often visit 2-3 locations with little or no lost time, especially if you do grab their speed upgrade. Even more janky and exploitable is that Outpost Teams can 'juggle' multiple Outposts for free; the node goes on a 24-hour cooldown, not the Outpost Team that hit the node. This comes with the caveat that while a shipment is underway, the Outpost Team that produced that shipment can't send a new shipment, but these shipments travel very quickly; this is mostly a notable limitation with some of the A New Home Outposts, as it has Outpost locations that are so incredibly far from the city that eg you wait 17 hours to be allowed to send shipment 2, then wait 16 hours to be allowed to re-send shipment 1, and so you're on a roughly 33-hour cycle for sending those two shipments, rather than each being sent every 24 hours. Outposts probably should have built up an amount of resources available to ship per hour and automatically shipped at 24 huors and just given you the option of shipping early if you liked, or something of that sort; these mechanics are so bizarre and so favorable they contribute heavily to A New Home and to a lesser extent The Refugees being easier than was likely intended. The Fall of Winterhome doesn't suffr this problem, but this is because it builds itself under the assumption you know about all this exploitive Outpost Team nonsense, so if you'r not familiar with this stuff it will be a much more challenging scenario. Jankiest of all is that Outposts are entirely unaffected by difficulty settings. Higher difficulties consistently lower the rate at which resource-intake buildings bring in their particular resource, so climbing up to Hard and Extreme increasingly makes Outposts more appealing since they ignore this. Thankfully, the devs seem to ultimately agree that Outposts are a serious design problem: though I'm putting them here rather than in specific scenario pages, Outposts are actually only in A New Home, The Refugees, and The Fall of Winterhome. The Last Autumn heavily reworks the Scouting Map mechanics, replacing Scout Teams and Outpost Teams entirely, and while On The Edge brings back traditional Scout Teams, it replaces Outposts with the Settlement system. Notably, Endless Mode -which is 'boringly default' in most regards and shares most things that are shared by A New Home, The Refugees, and The Fall of Winterhome- never had Outposts at all, instead using the Settlement system from On The Edge. I assume this means future Frostpunk games are unlikely to return to this exact system, which would be good. Next tech! Faster Outpost Teams Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Outpost Depot Outpost Teams and their shipments will travel 50% faster. Straightforwardly good to have for many reasons. Particularly appreciated in The Fall of Winterhome scenario, as you're intended to juggle 3 Outpost locations with 1 Outpost Team, and they're spaced out so the base speed has a modest amount of wasted hours in that loop. You still aren't perfectly efficient once you do have this upgrade, but the loss is negligible. In A New Home and especially The Refugees, it's less clear how valuable this is. A New Home is so generous with time and resources that even on Extreme you'll probably get it at some point just because you can fit it in without a real cost, but in The Refugees it's more ambiguous whether it's meaningfully helping. That's another reason I'm glad the devs moved away from Outpost Teams, actually; this tech is the kind of design that's at serious risk of being a trap choice if the devs don't go out of their way to make sure the numbers line up correctly for it to matter. Scout Team speed upgrades are at much less risk of this issue due to how Scout Teams work. (And are meant to work) Next tech! More Scouts Costs 20 Wood. 6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 1 Requires: Beacon Raises the Scout Team limit, by default bringing it to 2. This should basically always be a pretty high priority to get online; 5 more people not eating food and not needing medical care, and scouting going twice as fast? That's incredibly valuable, and 20 Wood is easy to cover. I kind of wish it wasn't a technology, through. In general, I think the Scout stuff would probably have been better to shuffle into Aaptation Laws; the way it fits into the research system is funky. Next tech! Additional Scouts Costs 50 Wood and 40 Steel. 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: More Scouts. Raises the Scout Team limit, by default bringing it to 3. Unfortunately, Additional Scouts is close to worthless if you're not playing Endless Mode. All 5 scenarios that use the efault Scout mechanics can easily have literally every node checked off just 2 Scouts; difficulty doesn't affect Scout Team speed or anything, so going up to xtrme only indirectly impacts this, by virtue of modestly delaying Extra Scouts. The fact that Additional Scouts is in tier 4 is especially killer. If it was in tier 2 or even 3, what I just said would still apply, but it would be accessible enough that grabbing it would let you get Scouting Map resources scoopedd up fast enough, early enough that you're still desperately hungry for more resources, not to mention letting you get 5 more people offloaded from your food and healthcare systems when you might strongly appreciate such... but it is in tier 4 for some reason, so by the time you gain access to it, you're probably at the point where there's basically nothing for a third Scout Team to do. It holds up better in Endless Mode, since scouting never permanently runs out, and in fact each between-storms segment spawns 3 noes in reach, and I'm not sure it's actually possible to successfully explore every node within a between-storm segment even with all upgrades. You might actually want to somewhat prioritize it. Next tech! Lighter Scout Sleds Costs 30 Wood. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: More Scouts Raises Scout Team speed by 50% of base, by default bringing them to 150% speed. Yes, please. Early in the game, where this is on the table, Scouts getting back to the city in a timely manner is often important, and a 50% speed increase makes it way easier to assure that eg a vital load of Coal arrives before you run out entirely and have the Generator shut down. The nature of Scouting also means this 50% boost carries forward in a huge way: if you did two runs side-by-side, one grabbing Lighter Scout Sleds as soon as feasible and the other never taking it, that latter run would be increasingly multiples days behind on scouting. You should grab this in every run, preferably early. (Except The Last Autumn, as it doesn't technically have this tech) Next tech! Boosted Scout Sleds Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel. 10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Lighter Scout Sleds Raises Scout Team speed by 50% of base, by default bringing them to 200% speed. Given I trashed Additional Scouts, you might think I have a comparably low opinion of Boosted Scout Sleds, but... only in On The Edge. In other scenarios, part of what's going on is that Frostpunk tends to contrive for there to be mostly 2 main directions you can travel at any given moment, where you follow a basically-linear chain of nodes in one direction and then in the opposite direction is another chain of nodes, or a cluster of nodes that isn't as linear.Additional Scouts suffers in part from how low the actual effect on your ovrall scouting spee will be, because Scout Team 3 spends non-trivial stretches of time adding literally nothing, and then maybe lets you save one brief sie-trip on the other Scout Team. It's also the case that late in a run it gets less important for Scout Teams to be sent back 'early', beforee clean out a direction; early in a run, having a Scout Team drop off 2-3 nodes of resources now can easily be a big help, much more so than having them hit all the nodes and come back to drop off food only after people have already died of starvation. By the time you have Aitional Scouts available, you're generally not concerned with timely dropoffs, and so eg having a Scout Team hea back early while a second Scout Team takes over isn't very relevant. You also, unfortunately, can't have Scout Teams pass resources to one another, so you can't have to Scout Teams move together, and then one turns back with all the loot while the other grabs more stuff. Notably, while scenarios are able to spawn new nodes with scripting, and frequently do so at time checkpoints and/or in response to player progress, no scenario has a very late spawning of three widely-separated clusters of nodes. They cap out at two clusters. Boosted Scout Sleds, however, means shaving off 33% of the Time Until Scouting Is Finished, and while tier 5 is even later than Aditional Scouts waiting until tier 4, On The Edge is the only scenario where it's plausible you will actually visit literally all nodes and disband all Scout Teams before Boosted Scout Sleds is in reach. Usually you will be getting scouting finished literally a few entire days earlier; if nothing else, taking away the cognitive load of monitoring and juggling scouting is nice. Note that the game itself doesn't clearly explain the mechanics here, where it's easy to think that final Scout Team speed is 225%, since 150% of 150% is 225%. This is at least a very minor case of lack of clarity; there's... much worse examples of this issue we'll be getting into. ---------------------------------------- That's the 'Exploration' part of the tree covered: time for Industry. It means the Factory and its two products. That's it. Factory Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Nothing. As ever, building time: Factory Costs 30 Wood, 15 Steel, and 1 Steam Core. Size 5x3? Can be manned by up to 5 Engineers. +2 Heat, works 8:00-18:00 by default, does nothing innately. Can queue up Automaton construction or Prosthetic construction, building one copy at a time while manned until the queue runs out. (Or you can set the Factory to always start a new copy upon finishing the current copy) Automatons are available innately and cost 100 Wood, 100 Steel, 50 Coal, an 1 Steam Core by efault, while Prosthetics require the Prosthetic Law is passed and cost 10 Steel per copy by default. The Factory itself is, um, underwhelming. The double-lock on Prosthetic access is problematic, as I covered in Adaptation Laws, most especially in The Fall of Winterhome, while its utility for building Automatons is deeply flawed: since you need a Steam Core for the Factory itself, you need two spare Steam Cores to actually break into Automaton production, and, well... Automatons kind of suck. Let's briefly cover some techs before getting into that, though: Streamlined Prostheses Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Factory. Reduces the cost to queue up a Prosthetic from 10 Steel to 5 Steel. Note that if your run builds fewer than 5 Prosthetics, this is putting you in the hole: it breaks even if you build 5 Prosthetics (You spend 25 Steel on the tech and 25 Steel on the Prosthetics, instead of 50 Steel on thee Prosthetics), and of course actually pulls ahead if you build more than 5 Prosthetics. This unfortunately makes it very shaky in most scenarios, as it's easy to end up never having 5 Amputees across the entire run. The only exceptions are in The Fall of Winterhome and arguably The Last Autumn; the latter point is irrelevant because The Fall of Winterhome uses absolutely none of the techs on this page. In the Fall of Winterhome, however, you have tons of Amputees, get explicitly rewarded in multiple ways by events for fixing them up, and have a ravenous hunger for Steel, so in that scenario it's reliably ideal to gt Stramlined Prostheses online before you start your Prosthetic building spree. This puts it in a better place than... Optimized Prostheses Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Streamlined Prostheses Prosthetics will build in half the time now. ... this amazingly worthless tech. Prosthetics already build extremely quickly: even in The Fall of Winterhome where you need a ton of them, you can easily get thee entire supply out in a couple days all the way up on Extreme, and usually the limiting factor on Prosthetic distribution is the need to spend half a day or more installing it at a medical facility. You can easily have a regular workshift build out Prosthetics, go to sleep, then clock in next morning with Prosthetics still in the resource pile because the Amputees are getting the installation done so slowly. The Factory also has no ability to be overloaded with work; it only builds Prosthetics and Automaons, and The Arks is the only scenario where you have cause to be queueing up large numbers of Automatons... and you expect to have maybe one Amputee in that scenario, who probably doesn't even matter to your labor needs, so you don't urgently need to get a Prosthetic on them. Optimized Prosthetics is thus a newbie trap: a tech you research because surely the devs gave it a legitimate place in th game, but sorry, they didn't, it's a waste of resources and Workshop time. These are the only two Prosthetic techs, thankfully. It could certainly be worse. Next tech! Streamlined Automatons Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel. 8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Factory. Reduces the base cost of Automaton construction by 20 Wood and 20 Steel, by default reducing those costs to 80 apiece. (No effect on the Coal or Steam Core costs) Oh boy. Okay, first let's point out the nice thing: unexpectedly, Frostpunk actually remembers an Automatons original price when dismantling it. Since Automatons refund their entire cost when dismantld (unlike buildings), you can in fact research Stramlined Automatons, then dismantle an subsquently rebuild your existing Automatons to free up 20 Wood and 20 Steel previously tied up in each Automaton. Among other points, this means that even if you've built all the Automatons you ever will build, this tech isn't automatically worthlss; so long as you have at last 2 Automatons, this can be a net benefit. That's all nice and cool and I've played tons and tons of games where I wished they had this behavior, but this particular case is more appreciated in spirit than in practice. A big part of the appeal of Automatons is their ability to work 24 hours a day innately, continuously, and dismantling them and rebuilding them to free up a small amount of resources is putting you in the hole unless you only use Automatons as a 'night shift' and make sure to time the dismantling and rebuilding so each Automaton is only out of commission when you weren't using them for labor anyway. As such, in actuality this is only really worth researching if you expect to build two new Automatons in the future. Next tech! Automaton Redesign Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel. 10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Streamlined Automatons. Reduces the base cost of Automaton construction by 30 Wood and 30 Steel, by default reducing those costs to 50 apiece. (No effect on the Coal or Steam Core costs) Yes, that's the exact same graphic as Streamlined Automatons. Yes, that's how it is in-game. Also: holy crap, no, why?? Again, Automaton dismantling/rebuilting theoretically makes this less horrendously bad, but hat barely helps and Automaton Reesign is so much worse about this than Streamlined Automatons. For starters, you need 3 Automatons leveraging it to get slightly ahead on Steel, 4 to break even on Wood, and 5 to be just cleanly ahead of not researching this, where Streamlined Automatons becomes good value with just 2 Automatons benefiting from it. More importantly, being tier 5 and requiring Streamlined Automatons means you're vastly more likly to be past the point of actually building more Automatons by the time Automaton Redesign is actually reached, exacerbated by needing more Automatons in future to be worth it: if you're still going to get 2 more Steam Cores and build 2 more Automatons, then Automaton Redesign makes no sense to research! To be fair, if you're in Endless Mode and actually intend to play for 100+ days kind of thing, these techs become actually fine, but... they don't exactly become high-priority good-value techs. Next tech! Automaton Integration Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel 8/10/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 3 Requires: Factory Boosts Automaton Efficiency by 10%. (By default raising it from 60% to 70%) First in a series of essentially identical techs, so let's blitz through them real quick: Automaton Integration II Costs 9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Automaton Integration Boosts Automaton Efficiency by 10%. (By default raising it from 70% to 80%) Ugh, next: Automaton Integration III Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel 10/12/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Automaton Integration II Boosts Automaton Efficiency by 10%. (By default raising it from 80% to 90%) Ugh! Okay, okay, time for me to actually explain Automatons, and especially to explain why I say they suck when 99% of Frostpunk's fanmade resources across the internet will present them as axiomatically awesome. So okay, you build an Automaton, it hits the field, you assign it to a workplace: wow! It works the job entirely by itself! And it works 24 hours a day, regardless of the worksite's natural hours! And Automatons don't get sick or eat food or take up beds or otherwise cost ongoing resources to keep functioning! (Which is really weird; shouldn't they eat Coal?) What's kind of easy to overlook is this whole 'Efficiency' thing. Yes, an Automaton works continuously, but each hour of work it delivers is only worth 60% of a human crew's hour of labor by default. You take that and run it thruogh their 24 hour workcycle, and they deliver the equivalent of 14.4 hours of human labor over the entire day; that's good, right? A human crew only works 10 hours, that's more than 40% more! Well, not quite. Humans can be put on Extended Shifts, and frankly you really ought to be using those basically everyhere all the time. Suddenly they work 14 hour days and deliver 14 hours of labor. "That's still less han 14.4 hours," I hear someone reasonably pointing out... ... but workplaces manned by Automatons do not benefit from Shrines or Agitators. Those raise those 14 hours of human labor to the quivalent of 16.8 hours of labor; the Automaton is suddenly behind. This is all passive stuff we're doing, stuff you one-and-done and have online forever afterward with no real cost, and that can easily be ready long before you get your first Factory built, let alone your first Automaton. Human labor can also work 24 hours every other day through Emergency Shift, in which case they'll deliver effectivly 28.8 hours of labor on one day and 16.8 hours on the other, for an average of 22.8 hours of labor each day. You might notice that's hovering barely below the 24 hours that are in a day. What's a fully upgraded Automaton deliver with its 90% Efficiency? Well... effectively 21.6 hours of labor. So, uh, still flatly worse. Now, you might argue that spamming Emergency Shifts everywhere isn't viable, and you'd be right. But this still means eg when you desperately need to maximize Steel production in The Fall of Winterhome, it's better to focus human labor with Emergency Shifts on that prouction, not to just set Automatons on it and forget about it. This is also kind of glossing over the part where Automaton Integration I/II/III cost resources, are late in the research tree, take a while to research, and are competing with higher-impact researches: if you desperately need more Coal, you'll get more value out of unlocking the next tier of Coal Mine than out of assigning an Automaton and starting on an Automaton Integration research. Indeed, Automaton Integration researches only give decent value if you're running a lot of Automatons, and, well, you probably shouldn't be running tons of Automatons except in exactly and specifically The Arks. Scenario design really drags down Automaton viability on a reliable basis. In the very, very early game, you have more jobs than you have people to task on those jobs, those jobs are invariably in the cold, your medical system sucks, you don't yet have all the Laws that skew things toward human labor... if I could scrape together an Automaton on the second day of The Refugees by just saving up enough resources, this is a thing I would do! It would be amazing! And, well, I suspect this pretty neatly explains why so much of the Frostpunk community hypes Automatons so heavily: A New Home gets you an Automaton very early through Scouting, with it arriving in the city well before you would normally have a chance of getting a Factory online, not to mention you aren't having to actually spend resources and Engineer labor on building it. That free Automaton really is nice and you absolutely should take full advantage... ... but in The Refugees and Endless Mode you generally have more labor than you really need by the time you can unlock and fit in Automaton construction, in The Fall of Winterhome you start with that labor oversupply and really cannot spare more than maybe one or two Steam Cores on Automatons, in A New Home you also get that labor oversupply by the time you're reaching the ability to build new Automatons, while Automatons are (infuriatingly) simply unavailable in The Last Autumn, and technically available but borderline unusable in On The Edge. Crucially, Steam Cores are limited in availability and generally give much better value when spent into Infirmaries, Coal Mines, Hothouses, and Wall Drills, and improving technology directly undermines what I'd argue is actually the Automaton's biggest advantage: that they can work in freezing cold without issue. After all, every building that has higher tiers to it has those higher tiers warmer than the lower tiers: upgrading your Coal Mine to a Steam Coal Mine not only increases its Coal production by 50%, but also raises its Heat by 1 level, directly reducing the rate at which people get sick; this is a better solution to 'I need more Coal and my Coal Mine isn't supe-warm' than assigning an Automaton to it is. Another layer to this is that Steel production is usually your biggest bottleneck, and the Steelworks is the only 'infinite resource from fixed location' building line to not cost Steam Cores. Prioritizing Steelworks inevitably keeps them ahead of the temperaure curve entirely incidentally. Similarly, Coal Mines can directly justify the Coal cost of running Heaters for a human crew on Emergency Shift because they will provide net more Coal than an Automaton that's getting to skip the Heater cost. It's mostly Sawmills and Wall Drills where I find it genuinely nice to be able to assign Automatons to the task and not bother with heating, and that's in part commentary on how Wood largely tends to not be the limiting resource, it's usually Steel, so bringing Wood in kind of slowly is usually fine. If you're willing to micromanage Automaton usage, they can also add actual value by virtue of de-assigning the human crew from 20:01 to 5:59 and having the Automaton work the night shift. I wish the game gave some official, straightforward support to this: I personally largely can't be bothered to jump through those hoops every single night and then morning (I've done it for Coal Mines and Hothouses temporarily a few times to get through a lean period for Coal/Raw Food), and this is the main way to use Automatons where it's genuinely all-advantage... Anyway, I also feel the need to note that the wiki's page on Automatons says some things that range from 'simply false' to 'technically true, but wildly misleading'. For example, it insists that Automatons that assign themselves to building construction or demolition start the task instantly, no need to arrive, and this is completely incorrect: Automatons are actually terrible at building construction and demolition, as they move extremely slowly and even once they reach the building they have to go through a pretty lengthy 'attaching' animation before they start actually making progress. Having Automatons idling in your city is actually a great way to have them block building construction because they tend to assign themselves before human citizens, regardless of how far the Automaton might be. Making this worse is that idle Automatons prefer to select a random location away from existing buildings to sit at, which is a routine basically optimized for ensuring they won't be close to places you're liable to want to build at. It similarly makes direct, explicit claims about Automatons being superior to human labor once fully upgraded with no attempt to back this up with math, which is unsurprising given I've laid out how the math says the exact opposite, and as for 'wildly misleaing' it claims Automaton movement seems 'purely cosmetic', which is kind of sort of true but is assigning to Automatons in particular what is actually a broader bit of Frospunk's secretly kind of insane mechanics. So let's explain that jank before we get back to talking about More Automaton Stuff! See, Frostpunk's citizens who are visible on the ground walk all over the place. You can follow a citizen through a day and see them walk to their worksite, walk to the Cookhouse and vanish inside it when they get hungry, walk to a Medical Post and vanish inside when they get sick, walk to building construction and demolition sites and animate as working on them while there, walk from gather sites o the Stockpiles to drop off resources, walk to around the Generator to sleep if they don't have a home or to their home to vanish in there for a few hours, walk outside the city to go hunting if they're at the Hunter's Hut or walk outside the city if they get assigned to a Scout Team or Outpost Team or a Construction Team in On The Edge... ... basically anything a citizen can be assigned to do will involve them actually walking around. For most of these, this has the intuitive implication: a building will not get built until citizens reach it, a sick citizen won't start medical treatment until they actually arrive at a medical building, a hungry citizen won't get less hungry if they don't make it to the Cookhouse... ... but for a small list of tasks, their animation is irrelevant to the actual activity. And by 'a small list', I mean 'literally all tasks the player assigns through selecting worksites and adding people to them'. Click a pile of Coal and assign 15 Children to it? The Coal starts telporting into the Stockpiles moments later: the kids will eventually arrive and animate as carrying the stuff to the Stocckpiles, but this is irrelevant to the Coal intake. Decide you don't actually want those kids picking Coal out of the snow and reassign them to a couple of Hothouses on the other side of the city now that they've trudged to the Coal Pile? Whatever, Raw Food will immediately start ripping itslf out of the soil and into your Food Stores: your citizens are long-range telekinetics for any job that's inside a building or is a resource pile, and them walking over there is just because I guess the Generator Tyrant looks askance upon working from home for some reason. Automatons are extra-visible about this, but mostly because they lack access to most of the human tasks that care about the location of one's body. There is also one unique task Automatons do have that does care about their body's location, but the game will cheat for Automatons on this: specifically, Automatons have to 'refuel' every 12 hours, spending an hour either hovering over a Steam Hub or docking with the Generator. If an Automaton is currently assigned to a worksites when this need kicks in, then the worksite will keep progressing anyway, the Automaton apparently remembering its own telekinesis... but if you remove the Automaton from its jobsite while it is on its way to refeul or is in the midle of refeuling, it will behave just like a team of humans on their way to the Cookhouse: the worksite sits at 0% Efficiency, no work happening, until the assigned laborer(s) gets its fill, at which point the worksite suddenly starts working no matter how far the laborer(s) might physically be from the worksite's location. Notably, since Automatons are so horribly slow at walking, you can lose a shocking number of hours of their labor to this if eg your Automaton is assigned to a Wall Drill that's really far from your Generator and you don't have any Steam Hubs much closer to it and you try to switch it to a new task right after it detaches itself from the Wall Drill. Even if you immediately reassign it to its prior worksite, you still get zero use out of it until it finishes refueling! Which, incidentally, is another reason I'm down on Automatons, as this is a headache that's easy to stumble into and get completely screwed by, as Automaton refueling doesn't occur at an externally predictable schedule: you have to know when they last finished their personal refueling to be able to predict when they'll next need to refuel, and there's zero tools for directly checking their fuel status. You can't select them to see a fuel gauge or the like. Also, Automatons have some events associated with them. Firstly, if you have any Automatons in your city, you have a very low chance on an ongoing basis for an event to fire in which a ranom citizen is instantly turned into an Amputee, where the idea is that an Automaton stepped on them and instantly removed a limb with its weight. You get two options: you can accept a Discontent increase, or you can accept a permanent -10% to Automaton base Efficiency to ensure no further Automaton-caused injuries will occur. Hey, remember how bad all those calcs I gave were? Notice they can be even worse?... Costs /// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs /// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs /// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs //// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs //// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs //// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs //// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: Costs //// hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: Requires: