Time for our final research tab, the one I suspect most people would've placed first: resources! And by extension: talking about how resource collection works!
Before I begin, I should take a moment to explain difficulty modifiers, because the game doesn't explain them, and other internet sources like the wiki technically explain them but in a manner that leaves out key details, such as not bothering to clarify how (in)accurate the in-game tooltips will be at any given difficulty. I'd sort of intended to skip this or put it in its own dedicated page, but in trying to make sense of an oddity with the Charcoal Kiln, I ended up going down an annoying rabbit hole, and I'd rather save readers from a comparable several hours of confusion and frustration.
So! One part of difficulty sliders is the consideration of how effective resource production is: the game itself doesn't clarify this, but for the most part this is a simple multiplier all resource intake rates, specifically of 115%/100%/85%/75%. (For Easy/Medium/Hard/Extreme, respectively) There's a bunch of annoying qualifiers because some things ignore difficulty, and a few things get custom progressions that aren't the same, but these are the default multipliers used by most resource production buildings.
Now, first of all, the game's UI is often lying to you to at least some degree if you're not playing on Medium. The game prefers to summarize how much you'll get from a given building in the form of 'X amount of Y resource per day', and it always uses whole numbers for this: in practice, the game is often fudging numbers, where for example on Extreme the Steam Steelworks informs you that it brings in 52 Steel per day, when it actually brings in 52.5 per day, because it actually brings in 5.25 Steel per hour at 100% Efficiency.
That brings us to a second point of potential confusion: Frostpunk only ever uses whole numbers for the base resource intake values of buildings, and so a player might understandably wonder if it's similarly insistent on such being whole numbers on other difficulties. As I just implied, no, it isn't. Fractions per hour are fine. That said, the game isn't willing to display more than 2 digits past the period when informing you of how swifty a resource is being produced, and I've not bothered to try to concoct some scheme to test how precisely it's willing to track fractions: it's possible some of my numbers are not quite correct to real play because I'm tracking the fraction more rigorously than the game actually does. These should be very, very tiny differences if so, though, hence why I haven't tried to determine how far the game tracks things.
However, the actually large caveat to this that is very unfortunate for certain buildings is that Frostpunk's willingness to track fractions is kind of a lie: a Sawmill does not actually accumulate a partial unit of Wood or something, it simply builds progress on an invisible meter that, when filled, pulls 1 full unit of Wood out of a tree and into your storage. This is all fine and dandy for anything that operates in a very granular way, like the Sawmill, but a handful of structures operate in 'lumps' of multiple units of a resource delivered all at once, such as the previously-covered Hunters Hut: in such cases, the game very clearly truncates, ie it simply chops off part of the number, removing the decimal place and everything past it and using the resulting whole number, hence why Hunters Huts on Extreme give exactly 11 Raw Food when 75% of 15 would be 11.25. This results in these 'lump'-based structures having their relationship to difficulty prone to drifting away from the ostensible difficulty modifiers, and anytime this occurs, they are a bit worse on that given difficulty than they really ough to be. Oops.
The devs maybe picked up on this on their own, as when The Last Autumn came along it added a new 'lump'-based bnuilding but had it ignore difficulty modifiers, and the Hunters Hut was effectively completely reworked. It's only the poor Charcoal Kiln that remained to be hurt by this. Though that's all for later, really.
Anyway, you only have two buildings innately in the Resources building tab, so let's cover them.
Gathering Post
Costs 15 Wood and 5 Steel.
Size 3x2
Can be assigned with up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or Safe Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) Works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, +1 Heat, gathers from all resource piles in a radius around it at a rate that is always superior overall to assigning labor to the resources directly.
The Gathering Post is oddly complicated and also probably the coolest and least janky (but still janky) usage of Frostpunk's 'the worksite controls labor effectiveness' system: for example, building a Gathering Post in range of a single Wood pile collects from it better overall than assigning people to it directly, not only because the Gathering Posts personal gather speed for Wood is higher, but also because the Gathering Post only needs 10 people to reach perfect Efficiency as opposed to the 15 needed if you assigned irectly to the Wood pile. As such, the Gathering Post would be more labor-efficienct even if its gather speeds were technically identical.
The 'oddly complicated' part is that Gathering Posts are the only time the game actually cares about citizens in a per-head way. Specifically, if you have a Gathering Post in range of multiple resource sites, the Gathering Post actually assigns each citizen to a specific resource site within its range. So eg if a Gathering Post is in reach of a Coal Pile, Wood Crates, and Steel Wreckage, and you assign exactly two citizens to the Gathering Post, it will only gather two resource types, not all three. This also means you don't necssarily want to maximize the number of sites in reach of a Gathering Post if you're trying to prioritize specific resources: positioning your Gathering Post to collect Steel and Coal instead of just Steel will result in the Steel coming in more slowly!
This also means that exact gather rates on resources can be pretty confusing when a Gathering Post is in reach of multiple resource types, where eg you have the Gathering Post in reach of 4 resource piles and so two of those piles have 3 citizens on them and the other two piles have 2 citizens on them, and so you might be bringing in Steel faster than Wood even though the base gather speed for Wood is higher than the base gather speed for Steel, because it's not 50% higher. This can similarly result in erratic effects when Illness pulls labor off Gathering Posts, and of course also means that when multiple piles of a resource type are in range of a Gathering Post they will often end up draining at different speeds, potentially very different speeds, with the player having very limited ability to influence all of this.
The specific gather speeds for resources are:
Coal Pile: 12/hour for 100% Efficiency direct assignment, 24/hour for 100% Efficiency with a dedicated Gathering Post. This is 120 and 240 Coal on a 10-hour workday.
Wood Crates: 4/hour for 100% Efficiency direct assignment, 7/hour for 100% Efficiency with a dedicated Gathering Post. This is 40 and 70 Wood on a 10-hour workday.
Wood Ruins: 1.33/hour for 100% Efficiency direct assignment, 7/hour for 100% Efficiency with a dedicated Gathering Post. This is 10.33 amd 70 Wood on a 10-hour workday.
Steel Wreckage: 2.67/hour for 100% Efficiency direct assignment, 5/hour for 100% Efficiency with a dedicated Gathering Post. This is 26.7 and 50 Steel on a 10-hour workday.
Steel Ruins: 0.66/hour for 100% Efficiency direct assignment, 5/hour for 100% Efficiency with a dedicated Gathering Post. This is 6.6 Steel and 50 Steel on a 10-hour workday.
Steam Core Transport: 0.17/hour for 100% Efficiency direct assignment, 0.2/hour for 100% Efficiency with a dedicated Gathering Post. This is 1.7 and 2 Steam Cores on a 10-hour workday. Unaffected by difficulty.
Except for Steam Core Transports, these are all modified by the Resources slider for difficulty in the same way: 115%/100%/85%/75% speed. This doesn't change the ratio of gather speed for direct gathering vs Gathering Post, and the only other comparison you care about is Coal being generated by Charcoal Kilns and/or Coal Mines; I'll get to that when we get to Coal Thumpers.
Anyway, for gather mechanics and speed, I should first note that while the game won't credit you fractional resources, it does in fact invisibly track fractional progress toward each resource increase, and in fact such progress is 'shared' across Gathering Posts and direct assignment, where eg a day of direct gathering followed by de-assigning the direct gathering and relying on a Gathering Post will in fact result in the Gathering Post adding another of the resource that bit faster.
Second, Ruins: these are specific to The Fall of Winterhome, On The Edge, and Endless Mode with Builders Mode selected, but I'm covering them here both because that's actually decently broad relevancy but also because the game does nothing to communicate these are mechanically distinct from regular resource piles, and specifically Ruins are pathetically slow for direct gathering but are gathered from a Gathering Post just as fast as regular resource piles. As such, you should prefer whenever possible to use Gathering Posts to clear out Ruins, as they clear Wood Ruins over 5 times faster than direct gathering, and clear Steel Ruins almost 8 times faster!
Third: Steam Core Transports are specific to The Refugees, The Last Autumn, and The Rifts map in Endless Mode, and are uniquely unimportant to assign Gathering Posts to. In practice you're liable to do so anyway in The Refugees and The Rifts due to temperature consierations and, in The Refugees, the Steam Core Transports being in the middle of other resource piles, but in The Last Autumn there's really no point to setting up a Gathering Post nearby your one Steam Core Transport.
Otherwise, Gathering Posts are in the vicinity of twice as fast as direct assignment, but better since the citizens use the Gathering Post's Heat value rather than the resource site's and also Gathering Posts don't need so many people assigned. Specifically, Steel Wreckage is collected just about 90% faster than direct gahering, Wood Crates are collected about 70% faster, while Coal Piles are collected exactly twice as fast. Note that this means that when mixing direct assignment and Gathering Post usage, you get the most improvement from assigning Gathering Posts to Coal and Steel, and so may prefer to get Gathering Posts built first for those while Wood remains dominated by direct assignment.
Overall, Gathering Posts are a bit awkward in the design, both fundamentally and through scenario design: except in The Last Autumn, the only resource pile type that can come into existence past the start of a run is Coal Piles from Coal Thumpers, and every scenario (Outside The Last Autumn) has only a small number of resource piles that are themselves low in how much is in each pile. As such, there's a pretty limited window to strongly care about Gathring Posts: by the end of the first week, you usually have all gathering spots cleared, and if you don't intend to use Coal Thumpers you're never going to care about Gathering Posts ever again. In A New Home and The Arks especially, it's easy to end up with a situation where you're arguably better off assigning Automatons directly to resource piles rather than building Gathering Posts nearby them. At default settings, there's a decent argument in A New Home that Gathering Posts are simply a waste of resources, even considering you'll only be out 3 Wood and 1 Steel per Gathering Post once you deconstruct them.
The devs seem to have somewhat recognized that Gathering Posts don't work very well: The Refugees pressures you with immediate cold and a really poor labor situation to start so Gathering Posts being warm and labor-efficient is more valuable, not to mention arranging for 3 tightly-clustered piles to exist so you can easily have each Gathering Post cover a lot of resources. The Fall of Winterhome introduces Ruins, which are so punishing to direct gathering that Gathering Posts are functionally mandatory to get them out of the way in a timely manner. (Which that 'timely manner' part is enforced by a harsh time limit to fix things if you don't want a game over) The Last Autumn heavily reworks things in general, but specifically has the ability for all three main resource types to be delivered in Gathering Post-accessible form and has a couple of absolutely enormous Coal Piles on the map, so the Gathering Post isn't a strictly early-game structure... though On The Edge then seems to kind of give up, just briefly re-using Ruins, and unfortunately The Rifts map isn't actually very heavy on putting resource piles on its islands.
Personally, I kind of wish Scout Teams and/or Outpost Teams had delivered their resources in the form of piles Gathring Posts could collect. That would've given Gathering Posts more longevity, not to mention reduced how swingy the entire Scouting map mechanics are. Though it would've required other changes to be truly smooth...
Regardless, next resource building:
Resource Depot
Costs 40 Wood and 20 Steel
Size 3x2
Can be assigned any of Coal, Wood, Steel, Raw Food, or Food Rations. Instantly increases storage capacity of the selected resource by 300, except for Coal which instead increases by 900.
This is the same storage capacity as the Stockpiles building your run starts with, except the Stockpiles delivers all of these simultanously, whereas a Resource Depot only does one of the five types at any given moment.
Speaking of the Stockpiles!
Stockpiles
Size 5x2
Conceptually where all your initial storage capacity of 900 Coal, 300 Wood, 300 Steel, 300 Raw Food, 300 Food Rations, and 300 Steam Cores comes from. In practice, eats space around the Generator and doesn't really do anything.
I really don't like that the Stockpiles is always preplaced right inside the Generator's basic Heat Zone, while being a building that has no use for Heat and is large enough it blocks off roughly two Tents of space. Couldn't it have been placed somewhere else? Or just been attached to the base of the Generator, not part of the official building grid? This is such a nonsensical, frustrating waste of precious Heat Zone space, and is one of the nore exasperating ways the glorious giant Generator gets heavily overshadowed in actual play by Steam Hubs: you can't even use its full base Heat Zone! For no good reason!
I should also point out that citizens who are assigned to do direct gathering will effectively treat the Stockpiles as if it is a Gathering Post they are assignd to, in the sense that they will visually walk back and forth between the pile and the Stockpiles. This has essentially no mechanical effect, mind, which is one of the earliest experiences a player will have with the game's visuals and mechanics being depressingly divorced much of the time, and honestly it's probably the reason the Stockpiles exist, which is frustrating...
Anyway, storage capacity is itself not really a true upper limit and is pretty funky/gameable. Scout Teams dropping off resources simply ignore the storage limit in its entirety, dumping their resources into your storage even if that takes you 1000 units over a storage limit, and Resource Depots can freely cancel out of their current resource assignment to switch to a new one even if that means your current count of their prior resource will be over the new limit as a result. Only regular resource collection and Outpost delivery teams actually care about your ostensible storage limit.
In general, the storage limit is one of the roughest parts of Frostpunk's design, as the core design doesn't really seem to have an actual purpose in mind to expecting the player to commit space, Wood, and Steel to increasing maximum storage capacity: only Coal and arguably Food Rations are really designed in a manner where the player has any potential to care about their maximum storage on a daily basis, because your Coal storage needs to be able to cover running the city throughout the night, and your city can potentially be burning through over 900 Coal in that period. Food Rations similarly has it more convenient for storage to be at least equal to your population size, so your Cookhouses can simply stockpile that amount before people start wanting to swing by and eat... or Starvation-teleport the food into their stomachs, whatever.
For Wood and especially Steel, though, there's not a clear design-use for increasing storage capacity, and in fact they both resent the need to spend Wood and Steel on such storage capacity.
A New Home does a specific thing to try to make Coal and food storage more important, but it doesn't work very well and the later scenarios don't really return to the point. Resource Depots just end up a hassle you build when your intake is currently exceeding your ability to spend it, so you don't completely waste said input, but this is not an interesting and consequential mechanic. You also have an annoying incentive to do Shenanigans with Outpost delivery teams, where you have a Resource Depot briefly switch to the resource being delivered so the Outpost delivery team will actually drop off their resources and free up the Outpost Team to send a new shipment, and then very possibly switch that Resource Depot right back to whatever it was increasing a moment ago.
I also find it exasperating how much graphical effort was put into Resource Depots with no player-side utility to it. Resource Depots have a dizzying array of possible appearances, far more than any other single building in the game, but it's simply a random assignment at construction: Resource Depots don't have their graphics reflect their current storage type, they don't reflect how much is in storage at the moment, they don't provide any kind of useful information at all. I'd much rather have had exactly five graphics: one for each resource type, so I could easily tell what they're assigned to so I know where to click if I want to reduce my storage of Wood because I just spent several hundred. Why did Resource Depots, of all possible buildings, get a zillion meaningless graphical variations? It's such a bizarre decision.
There's further jank to this whole mess, but that requires getting into techs, so let's do that.
Faster Gathering
Costs 10 Wood.
5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 0
Requires: Nothing.
Increases base gather speed of Coal, Wood, and Steel by 15%, for both direct gathering and for Gathering Posts.
Ugh!
For a first-time player, this probably seems like a reasonable enough tech. At default settings, it even is pretty fair to prefer to grab it as your very first tech.
Up on Hard and Extreme, though, you have to be pickier with your techs and you generally have to prioritize... basically every other tier 0 tech much more, and then prioritize higher-tier techs, where Faster Gathering can't really be fit in until you've probably already cleared out all the resource piles anyway. As such, it's liable to be completely worthless unless you intend to make use of Coal Thumpers, which Frostpunk is... poor at giving you cause to care much about.
In practice, the strongest reason to research Faster Gathering is that it gates access to upgrading Resource Depot capacity, which is perhaps the most frustrating of all the 'tech gated behind something completely unrelated' occurances due to how genuinely crappy Faster Gathering is. It's not even a strong effect.
Next tech!
Gathering Post Insulation
Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel.
7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 2
Requires: Faster Gathering.
Gathering Posts gain +1 Heat, by default bringing them to +2 Heat total.
If you're going to rely on Coal Thumpers, this is pretty much mandatory.
This is in fact part of why I'm down on Coal Thumpers.
This is also by far the most absurd case of the 'insulation' framing. Citizens assigned to a Gathering Post aren't hanging out inside the building itself: it's a drop-off point for the resources they are gathering from nearby piles, and they spend basically no time in the building itself. The warmth they are getting from being assigned to a Gathering Post cannot be blamed on the building being insulated from the weather. The whole situation is absurd in general and I'm not sure why the devs didn't have you build Gathering Posts over resource piles in the same way that Reloading Stations in The Last Autumn are, but if you're going to pretend this makes any in-universe sense, there's better ways of framing it than saying the 'insulation' of the Gathering Post is being improved.
Next tech!
Gathering Post Insulation II
Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel.
9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 4
Requires: Gathering Post Insulation.
Gathering Posts gain +1 Heat, by default bringing them to +3 Heat total.
See previous. Note that this is the last +Heat tech for Gathering Posts; it does admittedly bring them to the +3 Heat of advanced resource-gathering structures with no need to spend additional resources on Gathering Posts themselves, but... said upgrades also always come with significant improvements to the building's ability to bring in resources, with a +50% boost being a low boost from a single tier increase. Gathering Posts having +Heat and +productivity gated behind separate techs is another issue with them, drastically increasing how much research time is needed to cap them out compared to other resource intake buildings. Since researches really don't vary that widely in time needed per-research, and Frostpunk hasn't made an exception here for Gathering Posts, there's a predictable Workshop time sink disadvantage here for Gathering Posts. And even once you have all the upgrades... well...
We need to cover the next tech:
Efficient Gathering
Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel.
9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 3
Requires: Gathering Post Insulation.
Increases base gather speed of Coal, Wood, and Steel by 15%, for both direct gathering and for Gathering Posts. By default, this brings them to 130% of base.
Ugh!
It's Faster Gathering, but higher-tech, more expensive, and inexplicably gated behind 'insulation' improvement. There is zero chance you will care about it unless you're going for Coal Thumpers: your resource piles or Ruins will all be gone. Even on The Fall of Wwinterhome, where you start with several techs pre-researched, this has no chance of mattering, because you don't even have Faster Gathering pre-researched in it! By the time you'd reach Efficient Gathering if you foolishly beelined to it, you'd probably have the Ruins basically fully cleared!
Furthermore, reminder that I said earlier other resource buildings very consistently get at least 50% faster per tier; for a Gathering Post, full investment takes 4 researches (Instead of the 3 of other resource buildings) and nets you only a 30% boost from where you started. I really don't get what the devs were thinking with Efficiency Gathering here...
Ugh, next tech.
Resource Depot upgrade
Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel.
8 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. (All difficulties)
Tier: 1
Requires: Faster Gathering.
Resource Depot storage capacity is increased by 50%, meaning they now add 450 of a chosen resource, or 1350 if increasing Coal.
I don't know why this research doesn't vary its research time with difficulty. Bug? Oversight? Intentional decision that's mystifying simply because many of Frostpunk's intentional decisions are mystifying? The world may never know.
In any event, this is an easy research to justify fitting in, especially up on Hard and Extreme whre it's simply easier to squeeze in than its tier peers in terms of Workshop hours. It costs half a Resource Depot in Wood and Steel, it adds half a Resource Depot in value to every Resource Depot, it thus pays for itself if you have any Resource Depots and want more storage. Even if you count Faster Gathering's cost against it, it's still 100% worth it in cost if you have even two Resource Ddepots. Most scenarios are designed so you'll need at least a couple eventually, so... you'll probably research it at some point. Usually not as an early priority, but eventually.
Next tech!
Large Resource Depot
Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel.
7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 2
Requires: Resource Depot Upgrade.
Unlocks Large Resource Depot.
Oh no.
Well, time to cover this awful building.
Large Resource Depot
Costs 150 Wood and 75 Steel.
Size 6x4
Can be assigned any of Coal, Wood, Steel, Raw Food, or Food Rations. Instantly increases storage capacity of the selected resource by 1800, except for Coal which instead increases by 5400.
If you just compare this directly to a regular Resource Depot, it looks decent. Six times the storage capacity while taking up four times the space (Doubling length and width simultaneously quadruples space consumed) and costing less than four times as much resources? That's good, right?
But, well, no. You have to route through upgrading Resource Depot capacity by 50%, so the Large Resource Dpot only truly stores four times as much as a regular Resource Depot. And you had to spend 30 Wood and 20 Steel to get the Large Resource Depot itself unlocked, so the fact that it saves 10 Wood and 5 Steel compard to building 4 Resource Depots leaves you in the hole unless you expect to build at least 4 Large Resource Depots, preferably more than 4. And it being a huge, square-ish building makes it more uwieldy than the 4 regular Depots would be. And its huge storage increase is only applied to 1 resource at a time, so where 4 regular Depots could cover 4 out of 5 resources that are needing a storage increase, a Large Resource Depot only gives full value if you need a ton of storage increase for just one resource. And frankly its increase is usually massive overkill for everything except Coal.
The only thing that's actually good about it is that it will only need 10 citizens to build one vs needing 40 citizns to build 4 Resource Depots in a comparable timeframe, and that's... basically never strongly important.
The Large Resource Depot genuinely has me wondering what the devs imagined storage capacity's utility would be in Frostpunk. Why id they think this would be appealing?
Also note that it is not an upgrade to a regular depot: you can't build directly over one. This and the Infirrmary are unique for being 'That Other Structure, But Better' and not being upgrade options, so it's worth explicitly pointing out.
Next tech!
Coal Thumper
Costs 10 Wood.
5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 0
Requires: Nothing.
Unlocks Coal Thumper.
Ah, the Coal Thumper. That concept that Frostpunk seems to have completely made up to justify why Coal can be an infinitely renewable resource, when in reality it's an extremely not-renewable resource, and also that thing that seems like evidence they expected Steam Cores to be a lot more precious than they actually made them, as its primary appeal is that it doesn't need Steam Cores.
Building time!
Coal Thumper
Costs 15 Wood.
Size 5x4 or 6x3
Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children (Or 1 Automaton), working by default from 8:00 to 18:00. +1 Heat, generates a Coal Pile at one end of the building, adding 65.52/56/48.496/44.8 Coal per hour at 100% Efficiency. (This is 655.2/560/489.6/448 Coal per day with standard shifts) This Coal Pile will remain if the Coal Thumper is demolished, and is a regular Coal Pile in all respects, able to be gathered directly or by Gathering Posts.
The game will inform you that this is 'enough Coal for 2 Gathering Posts', which is underestimating the Coal Thumper: two unupgraded Gathering Posts will gather 480 of the 560 Coal generated, leaving a surplus of 80 Coal per day. If you have Faster Gathering, it's closer to perfectly correct, as the two Gathering Posts will gather 552 Coal per day, leaving a surplus of only 8 Coal. On higher difficulties, the Coal Thumper also pulls further ahead, as it inexplicably uses a less punishing modifer, being multiplied by 86.6% and 80% for Hard and Extreme as opposed to the usual 85% and 75% modifiers. As such, on Extreme two unupgraded Gathering Posts will gather 360 Coal per day, leaving a surplus of 88 Coal, and if backed by Faster Gathering they'll gather 414 Coal per day and leave a surplus of 34 Coal.
I personally like to put Gathering Posts on Extended Shifts alongside a Coal Thumper that's operating on regular shifts as a way to work around this funkiness, often starting these shifts after the Coal Thumper has reached the maximum size for its Coal Pile, so it will slowly shrink over the course of a few days, at which point I can either end those extended shifts or extend its shift for a while.
Also note that the Coal Pile appears inside the Coal Thumper and so doesn't need to be separarely planned for with building placement, but is meaningfully a separate object from the Coal Thumper: if the Coal Thumper is demolished, the Coal Pile will remain behind, potentially blocking other building construction, and furthermore Gathering Posts need their gather radius to overlap with the Coal Pile's center, not the Coal Thumper's center. This also brings us to a largely-irrelevant feature of Frostpunk: building rotation!
When considering placing a new building, you can click your mouse wheel button to rotate the planned building, with 4 possible facings: toward the Generator, away from the Generator, facing clockwise on the Generator ring, and facing counterclockwise on the Generator ring. For most structures, this choice is purely cosmetic and won't do anything; even though almost no structures are actually square, and large structures like Hothouses will be very blatantly much wider at their far end than their near end if placed close to the Generator, rotation won't change their footprint usage any, it'll just change the way their graphic gets distorted to fit into the space. For a few structures, they're sufficiently longer in one direction that changing the facing will actually alter their footprint (eg Care Houses), and for such structures knowing this can let you cram them in somewhere you'd otherwise not be able to fit them.
For (Steam) Coal Thumpers, rotation is uniquely important to be aware of, because the Coal Pile's placement is different for every facing. So where other structures are unaffected by facing, or treat the 4 facings as functionally 2 meaningful possibilities, for a Coal Thumper all directions are mechanically distinct from one another. Try to make sure the Coal Thumper's Coal Pile will be convenient to wherever you're planning on putting your Gathering Posts. (Or wherever they currently are, if eg you're putting a Coal Thumper near an existing Coal Pile-harvesting operation)
Literally no othere structure cares as much as Coal Thumpers do about facing. (Aside their upgrade, of course) It's weird.
Next tech!
Steam Coal Thumper
Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel.
7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 2
Requires: Coal Thumper.
Unlocks Steam Coal Thumper.
Its building!
Steam Coal Thumper
Costs 15 Wood.
Size 6x4
Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children (Or 1 Automaton), working by default from 8:00 to 18:00. +1 Heat, generates a Coal Pile at one end of the building, adding 131.376/112/96.992/89.6 Coal per hour at 100% Efficiency. (This is 1313.76/1120/969.92/896 Coal per day with standard shifts) This Coal Pile will remain if the Steam Coal Thumper is demolished, and is a regular Coal Pile in all respects, able to be gathered directly or by Gathering Posts. Upgrade of the Coal Thumper.
This is exactly twice as much Coal as a Coal Thumper, for reference. By a similar token, the game informs you this is 'enough for 4 Gathering Posts', and that's pretty incorrect without Faster Gathering and very close to correct with Faster Gathering. If you also have Efficient Gathering, then 4 Gathering Posts will actually exceed its generation by default: they'll gather 1248 Coal per day, 128 more Coal than the Steam Coal Thumper produces per day. On Extreme they will instead take 936 Coal per day, vs the Extreme Steam Coal Thumper generating 896 Coal per day: a slower drain rate, only pulling 40 more Coal per day than is generated, but still more than it generates.
Unless of course you take:
Coal Thumper Injectors
Costs 60 Wood and 35 Steel.
10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 5
Requires: Steam Coal Thumper.
Coal Thumpers and Steam Coal Thumpers gain 15% Efficiency.
At this point, the Medium difficulty Steam Coal Thumper goes back to pulling ahead of the 4 fully upgraded Gathering Posts, generating 1288 Coal per day by default vs 1248 being taken. Barely, though, only gaining 40 Coal per day. (On Extreme, the Steam Coal Thumper will instead gain nearly 100 Coal per day due to Thumpers being hurt less by difficulty than Gathering Posts)
Coal Thumper Injectors is honestly pretty dubious a tech, mind. It at least costs an unusually low amount for a tier 5 tech and is a fully passive bonus, I guess?
But now we must get into why I'm being down on Coal Thumpers:
Coal Mine
Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel.
6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 1
Requires: Nothing.
Unlocks Coal Mines.
Building time!
Coal Mine
Costs 25 Wood, 10 Steel, and 1 Steam Core.
Size 8x4
Can only be constructed at arbitrarily-designated points near Coal Deposits. Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +1 Heat, generates 27.6/24/20.4/18 Coal per hour. (This is 276/240/204/180 Coal per day on a standard 10-hour shift)
For 1 Steam Core, get a Gathering Post of harvesting speed using only 10 citizens of labor, rather than effectively 15. It also demands a lot less Heat Zone space than a Coal Thumper accompanied by a Gathering Post or two and so other work buildings with standard shifts (g Hothouses) can potentially share space more readily, providing a stalthy and difficult-to-quantify Coal efficiency advantage if leveraged, and can potentially be kept adequately warm off a single Heater running, where the Coal Thumper and Gathering Posts will need multiple Heaters, providing another stealthy Coal efficiency advantage.
At this point, this is a pretty mild tip toward the Coal Mine. If labor is plentiful and Steam Cores are not, Coal Mines are probably not worth committing to: of course, if Steam Core supplies are fine and labor is not so plentiful, the Coal Mine gets better. But if these concerns are both more 'in the middle', there's a fair argument for preferring a Coal Thumper and two Gathering Posts to a Coal Mine.
Next tech!
Steam Coal Mine
Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel.
8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 3
Requires: CoaL Mine.
Unlocks Steam Coal Mine.
Building!
Steam Coal Mine
Costs 25 Wood, 40 Steel, and 2 Steam Cores.
Size 8x4
Can only be constructed at arbitrarily-designated points near Coal Deposits. Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +2 Heat, generates 69/60/51/45 Coal per hour. (This is 690/600/510/450 Coal per day on a standard 10-hour shift) Upgrade to the Coal Mine.
Now things are tilting more reliably toward Coal Mines unless you really cannot spare the Steam Cores: a Steam Coal Thumper doubles its maximum throughput but also roughly doubles the needed Gathering Post infastructure, requiring 50 citizens and an enormous amount of space to run it all, whereas a Steam Coal Mine more than doubles its throughput (It's a 150% increase, just like a Hothouse to an Industrial Hothouse) and doesn't increase its citizen load any. Also subtly benefiting the Steam Coal Mine is the research load consideration: in Frostpunk, more advanced buildings are always warmer than their less advanced counterparts, but for the Steam Coal Thumper and its 4 Gathering Posts to get +1 Heat for all relevant citizens, you need not only the Steam Coal Thumper upgrade but also need to upgrade the 'insulation' of the Gathering Posts, which is another tech. And also you had to route through Faster Gathering, which is a third tech, albeit one you're liable to get eventually so you can upgrade Resource Depot capacity.
Regardless, the point is that where a Coal Thumper vs a Coal Mine is a pretty balanced scenarip, a Steam Coal Thumper adds multiple loads to the whole thing while not even giving as much of an increase as going to a Steam Coal Mine does, stacking things way more toards Coal Mines.
Also note that you should of course prefer, if you have two Coal Mines, to break one down and upgrade the other into a Steam Coal Mine, so you get more Coal for your Steam Cores. (And for your labor) Assuming you don't have the spare Steam Cores to just go straight to upgrading one or both without dismantling, of course.
I should also point out that the Steam Coal Mine costs the same Wood as a regular Coal Mine. It's only the Steel and Steam Core costs that go up.
Next tech!
Advanced Coal Mine
Costs 60 Wood and 35 Steel
10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 5
Requires: Steam Coal Mine.
Unlocks Advanced Coal Mine.
Building!!
Advanced Coal Mine
Costs 40 Wood, 80 Steel, and 3 Steam Cores.
Size 8x4
Can only be constructed at arbitrarily-designated points near Coal Deposits. Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +3 Heat, generates 103.5/90/76.5/67.5 Coal per hour. (This is 1035/900/765/675 Coal per day on a standard 10-hour shift) Upgrade to the Steam Coal Mine and Coal Mine.
A 50% increase over a Steam Coal Mine. Note that an Advanced Coal Mine does in fact bring in more Coal than a Steam Coal Mine working alongside a basic Coal Mine: concentrate Steam Cores as much as you can!
As there's no Advanced Coal Thumper or the like, the competition becomes completely lopsided in favor of Coal Mines at this point unless you really cannot spare the Steam Cores and/or have a serious excess of labor. Steam Coal Thumpers can't get above +2 Heat, still demand a huge amount of space and labor, and while Gathering Posts can get to +3 Heat in total, that requires dubious tech choices be made.
And no, Steam Thumper Injections and Efficient Gathering don't help:
Coal Mining Optimization
Costs 30 Wood an 20 Steel.
7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 2
Requires: Coal Mine.
All tiers of Coal Mine gain 10% Efficiency.
That's +24/+60/+90 Coal per day at max labor and 10-hour shifts, for reference.
But wait, there's more!
Coal Mining Rationalisation
Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel.
9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 4
Requires: Coal Mining Optimization.
All tiers of Coal Mine gain 10% Efficiency.
Yeah, 20% Efficiency vs Coal Thumpers getting at most 15%. And you only need 5 techs to max out Coal Mine prouctivity, vs Thumpers needing 7 techs between unlocking and upgrading the Thumpers and maxing out their attendant Gathering Posts.
For reference, a Coal Mining Rationalization Advanced Coal Mine is 1080 Coal per day by default vs a fully upgraded Steam Coal Thumper with 4 Gahering Posts being 1248 Coal per day, while the fully upgraded Advanced Coal Mine took fewer techs to get to, ties up 1/5th the labor, takes up massively less space, costs fewer resources to build (Other than admittedly-precious Steam Cores), is more fully warm, and doesn't eat as much Coal if you need to run Heaters: 5 Heaters on the 10-hour workshift is 100 Coal per day if they're Advanced and Efficient Heaters vs the Advanced Coal Mine only spend 20 Coal per day in that case, reducing the Coal gap from 166 to 86 per day.
Scenario design is also worth pointing out here, in that every scenario has a pretty generous supply of Coal Mine spots compared to your plausible needs in that scenario. (Except the Last Autumn, but that's a whole other topic for a much later page) Space, meanwhile, is at a premium initially in The Fall of Winterhome and quite quickly in The Refugees, while labor capacity is low for a long time in most scenarios, forever in The Arks and On The Edge, and low late in The Fall of Winterhome. I'd say that A New Home is the main scenario that's relatively friendly to Coal Thumpers.
The Rifts map in Endless Mode has more potential for Coal Thumper vs Coal Mine to be a meaningfully interesting decision, at least, but that's for another page.
Next Coal tech!
Yeah, there's a lot of Coal techs.
Charcoal Kiln
Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel.
6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 1
Requires: Nothing.
Unlocks Charcoal Kiln.
Your building:
Charcoal Kiln
Costs 30 Wood and 30 Steel.
Size 5x3
Manned by up to 5 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children (Or 1 Automaton), working from 8:00 to 18:00 by default. +2 Heat, spends 7 Wood per hour to produce 24/21/17/15 Coal at the end at 100%. (This is 240/210/170/150 per day on a 10-hour shift)
The final source of Coal by default, Charcoal Kilns are interesting but I struggle to find a real use for them. At base, a Charcoal Kiln is somewhat worse in output than a base Coal Mine (About 88% of a Coal Mine in productivity), but instead of committing a Steam Core and 10 citizens to the building, you're committing only 5 citizens but also mulching 70 Wood per day. That sounds like a decent trade, and in isolation it maybe would be, but Laws work heavily against it: running Extended Shift on a Coal Mine gives you 40% more Coal per day for essentially free. Running Extended Shift on a Charcoal Kiln gives you 40% more Coal but at the cost of eating 40% more Wood. Same basic idea for leveraging Emergency Shift. And Automatons bring in the same concerns.
If you're penny-pinching on Steam Cores, well, you can just use Coal Thumpers and Gathering Posts instead, and the Laws (And Automatons)point applies there too: a basic Coal Thumper with 2 unupgraded Gathering Posts using Extended Shifts will gather three times as much Coal as a Medium Charcoal Kiln. It'll take 6 times the labor, sure, but dropping to 5 people on the Coal Thumper and 1 Gathering Post will still be 50% more Coal per day than the Charcoal Kiln, and won't devour your Wood supply to fuel it, while being a reasonable 15 citizens on the job. Notably, if you want the Charcoal Kiln working continuously forever, you need at least a basic Wall Drill with at least 6 people assigned to it to cover the Wood cost, so the labor-savings aspect of Charcoal Kiln is deceptive. Child Labor -Safe Jobs also gives the Coal Thumper scenario another edge, since it's not necessarily meaningfully costly in labor to man the Gathering Posts.
Note that Efficiency on the Charcoal Kiln simply affects the speed at which a batch of Wood is converted into a batch of Coal, which is a slightly different angle on the problems I've just covered. It does at least mean an Automaton's horrible internal Efficiency merely results in the Charcoal Kiln converting more slowly rather than worsening the ratio of Wood to Coal, but for the most part I'd class this as another quiet flaw when comparing a Charcoal Kiln to other Coal-producing buildings: putting a Shrine or Agitator next to a Coal Mine or a Thumper/Post cluster is 20% more Coal, simple as that. Putting one next to a Charcoal Kiln is 20% more Coal added but also 20% more Wood spent per day.
I've seen some stuff online claim that Efficiency instead affects the, well, efficiency of Wood to Coal, but I suspect people are being fooled by a mixture of:
1: this is intuitivaly logical for an 'Efficiency' stat to do.
And 2: The game's stats widget doesn't modify its predictions of Wood usage in response to Charcoal Kiln Efficiency, only to the hours your Charcoal Kilns are set to.
Nonetheless, It's easy to test the Efficiency behavior with something like an Emergency Shift on a Charcoal Kiln to run it at night with no Wood intake complicating the process of tracking Wood usage: a high-Efficiency Charcoal Kiln will result in 7 Wood vanishing more often than every hour, while a low-Efficiency Charcoal Kiln (Manned by an Automaton, or by insufficient human labor) will instead result in you losing 7 Wood less than once per hour. So... yeah, it affects tick rate, not Wood-to-Coal conversion efficiency.
I should furthermore point out that higher difficulties are particularly unkind to the Charcoal Kiln. Firstly, it shares with hunting the very clear issue of truncation occurring due to it operating in fixed batches, and the Charcoal Kiln's numbers are hit harder than the Hunters Hut by truncation: the standard modification for Hard would result in 17.85 Coal per batch of Wood spent and for Extreme it would result in 15.75 Coal per batch of Wood spent, so truncating is eating close to a full unit of Coal per conversion batch. Thus, for a 10-hour workday a Hard Charcoal Kiln is dropping to about 81% productivity instead of the 85% it's theoretically supposed to be at, and an Extreme Charcoal Kiln is dropping to slightly over 71% instead of the 75% it's supposed to be getting knocked to. (Easy also gets hit by this, though much less so, losing 1.5 Coal per day to truncation: Hard and Extreme are both losing nearly 10 Coal per day they really ought to have) So yeah, the Charcoal Kiln gets hurt worse than other Coal production by going to higher difficulties, further worsening its already-bad case.
Only it's even worse than all that, because the Charcoal Kiln is unique for converting one resource into another: a Medium Charcoal Kiln nets you 21 Coal for every 7 Wood you feed into it, whereas an Extreme Charcoal Kiln nets you only 15 Coal for every 7 Wood you feed into it. No other resource site deals with this issue: most of them are infinite producers and so lost productivity is lost productivity, but for eg Sawmills, on Extreme you just gather the Wood on the map more slowly than down on Medium, you don't actually have the Sawmills trash 25% of the Wood on the map or something. Thus, feeding Charcoal Kilns gets more expensive on higher difficulties if you want to support the same amount of Coal demand, with this worsened yet again by the fact that your Wood producers are also worsened in the first place. On Medium, 1 basic Wall Drill can support 2 Charcoal Kilns with some Wood left over and you're getting 42 Coal per hour at the cost of 14 Wood per hour. On Extreme, the basic Wall Drill only generates 12 Wood per hour and so can't fully keep up with the needs of those two Charcoal Kilns, and now you're only getting 30 Coal for every 14 Wood you put in: you'll need another Charcoal Kiln and more Wood productivity to be able to meet the Coal needs you were meeting on Medium, which is not a double-whammy that other Coal producing buildings suffer.
Now, Charcoal Kiln does have its own techs...
Charcoal Kiln Thermostat
Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel.
7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 2
Requires: Charcoal Kiln.
Charcoal Kilns have their base Coal generation raised by 1/3rd. (From 24/21/17/15 Coal per batch of 7 Wood to 32/28/22/20 Coal per batch of 7 Wood)
... and hey, a boost to production of 1/3rd (Except on Hard, where it ends up rounding down and so only increasing Coal output by slightly over 30%, not the 33% increase the game says) is pretty good!...
Charcoal Kiln Bellows
Costs 40 Wood and 25 Steel.
8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 3
Requires: Charcoal Kiln Thermostat
Charcoal Kilns 'tick' 33% faster, completing a conversion in 40 minutes instead of an hour. This effectively raises their Coal production speed by 1/3rd per day, but also effectively raises their Wood consumption by 1/3rd.
... but Charcoal Kiln Bellows is a dubious tech, and these are the entirety of Charcoal Kiln's capacity to improve. Charcoal Kilns are also oddly Steel-pricey of a structure, aren't as compact as they really look like it should be, never gets their Heat level any better, and don't really have any esoteric advantages.
The Last Autumn changes things enough it has real potential there, but in most scenarios the Charcoal Kiln feels somewhere from 'straight-up a trap choice' to 'extremely narrow in its potential utility'. Even when Wood is plentiful, it simply doesn't produce enough Coal to compete: I don't get why it doesn't start from 50% higher than a Coal Mine or something. 210 per day is just weirdly low, and while Charcoal Kiln Thermostat is an unusually large bump in effectiveness, it would need to be more like an 80% boost to have a chance of compensating addequately for the weirdly awful base.
If you do want to use the Charcoal Kiln for some reason, do keep in mind you ideally get Charcoal Kiln Thermostat researched first and if possible have a Shrine or Agitator ready beforehand so you're at least maximizing how far the Wood goes.
Speaking of Wood.
Sawmill
Costs 10 Wood.
5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 0
Requires: Nothing.
Unlocks Sawmill.
The building itself:
Sawmill
Costs 10 Wood.
Size 5x3
Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +1 Heat, works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, harvests Frozen Trees from within its radius for Wood at a rate of 9.2/8/6.8/6 per hour. (This works out to 92/80/68/60 Wood per day on a 10-hour shift)
Frozen Trees are themselves handled opaquely, where each individual Frozen Tree is an individual object with a certain amount of Wood in it (75 per tree, according to some sources online, but I haven't tried to confirm this), but you can't select them and in fact the only times the game communicates that they're mechanically objects in the game world is when you're planning a Sawmill placement (In which case any in range of a current Sawmill or your prospective Sawmill will be highlighted in green, and any others highlightedd in white), or when a building you want to build is overlapping with Frozen Trees, in which case the building's preview model will turn yellow and you'll be informed that building here will destroy resources. And indeed, if you click a building where Frozen Trees are, the Frozen Trees are instantly destroyed. This is particularly frustrating when mouse drift causes an attempt to build near Frozen Trees to become an order to build right over them, as the game doesn't do a proper 'are you sure?' in such a case and Frozen Trees are destroyed the very instant a building placement order overlaps with them, not upon it completing or something.
Also note that The Last Autumn and On The Edge have living trees that stand straight up, but these are mchanically basically the same as the trees in other scenarios. I think they have a smaller footprint, but that's probably it. Annoyingly, both scenarios are sloppy about having decorative trees you're not allowed to chop down purely because the devs didn't mark them as real game objects, up to and including putting these trees in locations easily in reach of a potential Sawmill placement and which really ought to be fully accessible by foot for your people from a realistic standpoint. This doesn't haunt the four base-game scenarios, thankfully.
Anyway, the Sawmill is your basic Wood supply source, and, uh, in every scenario except On The Edge it's... really all you need if you're not aggressive about deleting trees with building placements. I think the devs didn't really intend for this to be so? But scenarios consistently put a ton of Wood on the map in the form of trees, plus normally Scouting will bring in Wood here and there, and the scale of population and your other Wood needs tend to simply be covered by all that. Going up in difficulties doesn't change this: as I said earlier, Sawmills work more slowly on Extreme, but the amount of Wood available through them remains the same, and difficulty doesn't affect costs of buildings, researches, or anything else. In fact, since higher difficulties force you to be pickier about your researches, your highest Wood usage will tend to occur on lower difficulties; a Medium run of A New Home can easily cover every single research, for example, whereas an Extreme run is liable to cut a few hundred units of Wood worth of researches from the list of things it bothers to grab.
You basically have to be very serious about Charcoal Kilns (Which, as I just covered, are bafflingly bad), or be severely wasteful in how you go about Wood-related expenses, or be playing On The Edge or maybe The Last Autumn for Sawmills to not be basically just fine for your Wood needs.
I think you're really meant to rely more on Wall Drills in the long haul, but if you're not in Endless Mode... scenarios have finite durations and basically-finite potential Wood needs, so, uh, nope.
On a more narrative note, you might expect me to complain about Sawmill's heating citizens the way I did with Gathering Posts, and, well, yeah. It's much less bad than with Gathering Posts because there are no 'insulation' techs for the Sawmill, but it's still the case that you've got citizens wandering through the snow and taking axes to frozen trees, spending very little time in the building, where it's kind of absurd that working at the Sawmill offers any protection at all beyond 'working hard heats up the human body'. (Which is a concept Frostpunk's mechanics never acknowledge) I'm honestly confused Frostpunk didn't use the Steampunk Magitech to justify the building itself having a crane grabbing trees to feed into the Sawmmill, or some such; among other points, that would better explain why you need to build a Sawmill nearby the trees. As is, it's kind of confusing trees aren't something people can be assigned to more directly, or go after when assigned to a Gathering Post: why do you need a nearby Sawmill, beyond Video Game Design Needs?
Next tech!
Steam Sawmill
Costs 20 Steel.
7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 2
Requires: Sawmill.
Unlocks Steam Sawmill.
The building!
Steam Sawmill
Costs 25 Wood and 40 Steel.
Size 5x3
Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +2 Heat, works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, harvests Frozen Trees from within its radius for Wood at a rate of 13.8/12/10.2/9 per hour. (This works out to 138/120/102/90 Wood per day on a 10-hour shift) Upgrade to Sawmill.
Um, what?
This is a Sawmill that works 50% faster and has +1 Heat, but costs a big chunk of Steel for some reason and also costs more than twice the Wood. Like... why would you want this? If you have spare labor, a second Sawmill is clearly superior for improving Wood intake, and unlike eg Coal Mines, you can in fact build additional Sawmills with functionally no limit. Wood is also consistently much more abundant than Steel: spending a lot of Steel on improving your Wood production is basically always going to be a bad trade. Lastly, trees do in fact run out, at which point the Steel Sawmill tech and any Steel Sawmills you built become duds: that's 20 Steel down the drain from the tech plus 10 Steel per Steam Sawmill you foolishly produced.
Like, if this was another second-tier building that was +150% production speed, I'd probably still just use regular Sawmills and ignore Steam Sawmills, but I'm genuinely baffled by how expensive Steam Sawmills are and how mild a boost they are. This is pretty self-evidently terrible.
I do at least appreciate in principle that the tech breaks usual tech rules and costs only Steel, not Wood. It's not very important in this case given the Steam Sawmill is so bad, but I do like when games try to reduce 'the key is in the safe' situations in their design, and I do like this rule-break's usage more with:
Sawmill Upgrade
Costs 10 Steel.
6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 1
Requires: Sawmill.
Sawmills and Steel Sawmills gain 25% Efficiency.
For some reason, the wiki claims this 'doesn't seem to affect Automatons'. It works just fine for them. Maybe it used to not work, well before I got to the game? Or maybe this is just another Frostpunk Internet Myth caused by the game's complexity and opacity: it has plenty of those.
In any event, this is a good tech, and it's subtly a further strike against Steel Sawmills even though it actually benefits them, as if your Wood intake is a bit poor and your labor situation doesn't let you build more Sawmills just yet, Sawmill Upgrade is a much better choice to take first, being cheaper (Both in the sense of costing less to research and in the sense of its benefits requiring no further costs to leverage) and almost as impactful while not requiring any labor nor Steel be committed to construction. You need to still be Wood-hungry after researching Sawmill Upgrade for Steam Sawmill to be liable to matter. And honestly, just build a Wall Drill if regular Sawmills are insufficient.
Final Sawmill tech!
Sawmill Range Extension
Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel.
9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 4
Requires: Sawmill Upgrade.
Extends Sawmill and Steam Sawmill radius by 50%.
Eeeeeeeh.
This can be appreciated in some scenarios by virtue of some trees being placed in a location that is problematic for trying to get a Sawmill in reach with just their regular radius, and in fact some trees in some scenarios are actually impossible to get access to without the range extension. If you don't mind the Steel cost and Workshop hours, then yeah okay, getting at those trees is a worthwhile payoff.
But in eg A New Home, this is extremely dubious. 'Moving' a Sawmill -dismantling it and building a replacement near the next batch of trees- costs you only 2 Wood each time it happens. Sawmill Range Extension is easy to think of as being Wood-positive if it prevents you from building 5 more Sawmills, but this is incorrect: due to deconstruction refunding 8 out of 10 Wood per Sawmill, it would need to save you 25 Sawmills of construction for it to become Wood neutral. Sawmills also don't scale their drain to the number of trees in reach, and in fact they work roughly like Gatherinng Posts, where the more trees are in their radius, the slower each individual tree will be torn through: in The Refugees and The Fall of Winterhome, space is noticeably at a premium, and so in those cases you'd actually prefer for Sawmills to concentrate their efforts to clear usable space faster, making Sawmill Range Extension a bit ambiguous as upgrades go. As in, 'is this actually a downgrade?'
This probably either should've been rolled in with another tech, or been a different effect entirely.
Next Wood line!
Wall Drill.
Costs 20 Wood and 10 Steel.
6/8/12/14 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 1
Requires: Nothing.
Unlocks Wall Drill.
The building:
Wall Drill.
Costs 20 Wood and 1 Steam Core.
Size 8x5
Can only be placed at arbitrarily-designated locations bordering the map edge, which have no visual marker suggesting they're important. Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +1 Heat, works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, generates 18.4/16/13.6/12 Wood per hour. (This works out to 184/160/136/120 Wood per day on a 10-hour shift)
Notice that this is more Wood per hour than a Steam Sawmill. In fact, it's so much more that even the Sawmill Upgrade still has the Steam Sawmill worse off, bringing in only 15 Wood per hour on Medium vs 16 Wood per hour from a Wall Drill.
Like yeah Steam Cores are finite and I personally often skip Wall Drills entirely, but seriously, if labor is an issue a Wall Drill is a much better investment for getting your Wood up.
Next tech!
Steam Wall Drill
Costs 25 Steel.
8/10/14/16 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 3
Requires: Wall Drill.
Unlocks Steam Wall Drill.
I'm not sure why Wall Drill techs are inconsistent about the 'costing only Steel' thing; the basic Wall Drill's tech costs Wood. Why doesn't this one?
In any event, building time:
Steam Wall Drill
Costs 20 Wood, 40 Steel, and 2 Steam Cores.
Size 8x5
Can only be placed at arbitrarily-designated locations bordering the map edge, which have no visual marker suggesting they're important. Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +2 Heat, works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, generates 23/20/17/15 Wood per hour. (This works out to 230/200/170/150 Wood per day on a 10-hour shift) Upgrade to Wall Drill.
This, however, is a weirdly small bump for a Steam Core-using location-lockedd building, only giving 25% more Wood than a basic Wall Drill: you should prefer building a second Wall Drill to upgrading your existing one, in terms of Steam Core usage, which in turn maks Steam Wall Drill... a bit hard to justify researching. I'm really not sure why the Steam Wall Drill is so low a bump: every other case of jumping a resource building up a tier ranges from 50% higher than what it's upgrading all the way up to a 150% boost. Why so low?
One weird caveat to that 'hard to justify researching' point:
Advanced Wall Drill
Costs 35 Steel.
10/12/16/18 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 5
Requires: Steam Wall Drill.
Unlocks Advanced Wall Drill.
That's a shockingly cheap tier 5 tech (The cheapest in the game!), but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about:
Advanced Wall Drill
Costs 40 Wood, 80 Steel, and 3 Steam Cores.
Size 8x5
Can only be placed at arbitrarily-designated locations bordering the map edge, which have no visual marker suggesting they're important. Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +3 Heat, works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, generates 24 Wood per hour. (This works out to 240 Wood per day on a 10-hour shift) Upgrade to Steam Wall Drill and Wall Drill.
"Hey, Ghoul Tyrant, you forgot to list the variable difficulty impact!"
Nope! This is the weird caveat: for some reason, the Advanced Wall Drill simply ignores difficulty modifiers. As such, while on Medium it's only 50% more Woodd than a Wall Drill and only 20% more Wood than a Steam Wall Drill, on Hard it's instead almost 80% more than a Wall Drill and a little over 40% more Wood than a Steam Wall Drill, while on Extreme it's straight-up double a Wall Drill's output and is exactly 60% more than a Steam Wall Drill's output.
It never reaches a point of being worth more Wood per Steam Core than just building another Wall Drill, unfortunately, but higher difficulties do make it more tempting to pursue it in particular as your Wood source if you can spare the Steam Cores and Workshop hours. It's worth 4 unupgraded Sawmills on Extreme, for example, which is a pretty big deal in terms of labor saved.
I personally have never actually found it to be a strongly appealing thing in any of my Extreme runs, mind, but maybe you're using an unusual strategy or doing an unusual challenge run that gives it more of a place.
Lastly, Steel production!
Steelworks
Costs 10 Wood.
5/7/11/13 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 0
Requires: Nothing.
Unlocks Steelworks.
One of the most serious errors in Frostpunk's tutorialization to me is that the game makes basically no effort to communicate to the player that their supply of gatherable Steel is tiny and Steelworks need to be researched and built if you want any more Steel. As scenarios consistently cap Steel production sources at 1-2 places (Bar technically The Last Autumn), it's vitally important to get Steel flowing pretty quickly so you're not as perpetually bottlenecked down the line by your slow Steel intake.
Look:
Steelworks
Costs 25 Wood.
Size 8x4
Can only be placed at arbitrarily-designated locations near Iron Deposits. Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +1 Heat, works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, produces 4.6/4/3.4/3 Steel per hour at 100% Efficiency. (This works out to 46/40/34/30 Steel per day on a 10-hour shift)
Holy crap, that's half what an unupgraded Sawmill gives. And, again: you normally get only 1-2 of these in a scenario, whereas you can plunk down basically as many Sawmills as you like. And Wall Drills give 4 times in Wood what the Steelworks gives in Steel!
You basically have to build all your possible Steelworks as fast as you can and keep them manned continuously and preferably get them boosted by Extended Shifts, Shrines or Agitators, and so on, if you want to stay on top of your Steel needs reasonably smoothly. The game thankfully does seem to recognize that Steelworks are important: they're the only standard resource building to be location-locked that doesn't cost a Steam Core, so there is no temptation to put off building or upgrading Steelworks in favor of investing Steam Cores elsewhere.
I do find it unfortunate how 'flat' Steel is in its design. The attempts at making other resources versatile, where you have options, don't work as well as I suspect the devs imagined they might, but they do offer some potential for variable strategizing, where one player might prefer to invest Steam Cores into Hothouses while a different player puts them into Wall Drills and shifts would-be Sawmill labor heavily to hunting. Steelworks being your only Steel source, zero proper alternatives... there's that lack of strategic variability, and also since Steel is designed to be so continuously your primary limiter on progression past the very early game, it ends up with a heavily centralizing element where Steelworks and its upgrades are disproportionately important to prioritize basically no matter what you're doing. The only real qualifier to this is that The Last Autumn and On The Edge do away with Steelworks per se, but they just kind of... replace the problem with new names.
That's for later, though. For now: next tech!
Steam Steelworks
Costs 30 Wood.
7/9/13/15 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 2
Requires: Steelworks.
Unlocks Steam Steelorks.
Its building!
Steam Steelworks
Costs 40 Wood and 10 Steel.
Size 8x4
Can only be placed at arbitrarily-designated locations near Iron Deposits. Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +2 Heat, works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, produces 8.05/7/5.95/5.25 Steel per hour at 100% Efficiency. (This works out to 80.5/70/59.5/52.5 Steel per day on a 10-hour shift)
75% more Steel, covering its own Steel cost in less than two hours: there's a fair argument you ought to simply upgrade your Steelworks immediately if the tech finishes during the day, because the Steam Steelworks will cover its own cost and indeed the lost time from the basic Steelworks quite quickly, and building construction (Including upgrading) generally takes less than 2 hours. (Assuming ten citizens arrive basically immediately, but in the case of upgrading a working building, normally the citizens assigned there immediately start building) Thus, having the tech finish at eg 10:00 and immediately upgrading the Steam Steelworks will lose you maybe 8 Steel from a couple hours of building, and then from 12:00 to 18:00 the Steam Steelworks will have added 18 Steel, covering its own cost and the lost labor within the same day.
A good tech you should pretty heavily prioritize, by far my most common reason to break into tier 2 when I do.
Next tech!
Advanced Steelworks
Costs 50 Wood.
9/11/15/17 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%.
Tier: 4
Requires: Steam Steelworks.
Unlocks Advanced Steelworks.
The building!
Advanced Steelworks
Costs 80 Wood and 40 Steel.
Size 8x4
Can only be placed at arbitrarily-designated locations near Iron Deposits. Manned by up to 10 Workers, Engineers, or All Jobs Children. (Or 1 Automaton) +3 Heat, works from 8:00 to 18:00 by default, produces 14.95/13/11.05/9.75 Steel per hour at 100% Efficiency. (This works out to 149.5/130/110.5/97.5 Steel per day on a 10-hour shift)
A further 86% increase in Steel production! It won't so trivially make back its own cost -that'll take 8 hours on Medium, and longer on higher difficulties- but it's still hugely worth prioritizing, and is in fact a bigger proportionate jump than going from the Steelworks to the Steam Steelworks.
As I've alluded to before, the fact that Steelworks are always high-priority and don't cost Steam Cores has the odd implication hat you don't necessarily need to commit as much effort to heating your Steelworks as compared to other buildings, up until fairly late in a run. If you rush out Advanced Steelworks while all your other resource buildings are tier 1, your Steelworks will be 2 tiers up and so may be equally warm to your other buildings even if you don't keep a Heat Zone running on the Steelworks! Or may be warmer!
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Next time, we start covering individual scenarios, starting with A New Home.
See you then.