no lie: base Efficiency drops to 90% everywhere. (Automatons ignore this) Hope zeros out: better have guard/faith keepers! but you skip the Engineer wanting preferential treatment problem, yay? if you do lie, you really ought to just kill the Engineer who tries to blackmail you. (Requires Guard Station/Faith Keeper) Letting the lie get out ruins Hope, steals a bunch of resources, and has a bunch of people run away unless you stop them with Guard Station/Faith Keeper violence. If you let that Engineer blackmail you, it's either thia or kill 4 Engineers later to prevent the secret getting out. Also, the blackmail results in people whining about preferential treatment. wiki says Engineers demand to be sent early 'a few days' into the evacuation: I'm pretty sure they do this if you haven't sent mamy Engineers yet. Regardless, you should generally take the Hope hit rather than promise to ship out 25 Engineers or all Engineers: you can't repair theGenerator without Engineers, so unless this triggers after the fourth breakdown, you really need them on site. (Especially if you went Order, since you need them for medical care) Stowaways! is one of many pressures to have Guard Stations or Faith Keepers up quickly send all children: +10% base Efficiency (not for Automatons) no engineer automatons for repair station Rest of Repair Station techs unlocked somewhat after finishing diagnosing the Generator repair station low/good/great state is defined by Efficiency, not employee count. Looks like 25% and 90% for 'adeqate' and 'full' engineers wanting to go resulting in Hope drop if ignored is example of factionalism problem weird thing: speed upgrade Outpost Team going from Steel Mine to Freshwater Springs inexplicably get there before their shipment reaches Winterhome. Huh? hate the series of events that have a 'can't pick this nice resolution because morale is bad' option hate handling of digging up survivors first failure=no nerf 5th=final Ah, The Fall of Winterhome, to my surprise my favorite of Frostpunk's scenarios. I like its narrative starting point: the expectation is of course that you played through A New Home and discovered that Winterhome blew up. Between that and its name, you're set up to expect that things are not going to work out: when the game reveals the Generator is irrovocably broken and doomed to fail catastrophically, this isn't a frustrating rugpull changing up the scenario premise on you with no warning, it's 'yeah, I figured something like that was coming'. Doomed ventures in video games often make for obnoxious experiences precisely because they're not open and honest about the premise from the word go, and springing 'you're supposed to lose' on the player is both a violation of the general video game conceit that a skilled player can always win somehow and more importantly is often never actually communicated to the player at all. It's nice that The Fall of Winterhome so smoothly dodges that common video game problem. Its general mechanical framework is also actually a really cool twist that produces a wildly different experience from every scenario,, while largely sticking to the familiar mechanics you know from A New Home; starting with a mostly-built city that was designed horribly and having to scramble to get it into a workable state is a cool twist, and the fact that you ultimately evacuate the city is a great way to reverse a core Frostpunk premise ("You start with 80~ people, and grow to hundreds" becomes "You start with hundreds, and shrink to a few dozen") and wildly changes how you relate to much of the planning process of Frostpunk. Instead of perpetually building with an eye on trying to optimize for when future growth inevitably happens, trying to arrange a clean jump to the next Steam Hub being turned on with its Heat Zone heavily in use immediately, you're perpetually planning out how to best handle deconstruction, seeing if your next shipment of people can come with turning off a new Steam Hub and so on. It's also the last hurrah for the game trying to use Discontent and Hope as pressure on the player, and the most successful one, where you start the scenario with high Discontent and low Hope and have to fix both within a time limit or else lose. It's still not ideal, but this is the only scenario where Hope management tools are something I rate as strongly valuable, and same to a lesser extent with Discontent-reducing tools. My main relatively serious criticism of the scenario is that I unfortunately feel like it's two different interesting ideas I wish had each been their own scenario: the first part of The Fall of Winterhome is "here's a horribly-handled city. Get it functional," while the second part is "Time to dissassemble your fully built city and escape," and while the narrative framework of the scenario loosely connects the two concepts, I would've liked these two ideas to be explored separately. Among other points, though I praised the scenario earlier for 'You're screwed' being an expected aspect of the scenario given the framing and all, the evacuation premise is not revealed to you until you're nearly two weeks into the scenario: for a first-time player, it's easy to be assuming the whole time that you're still going to be ultimately trying to build up the city as well as possible and the Generator will just explode without warning on day 40 or something, and it's frustrating to have the game spring the evacuation premise on you so that you've probably made mistakes because it wasn't communicated at all what was ultimately going to consume the scenario. The Fall of Winterhome is also one of the scenarios where I most acutely feel it's a problem that Frostpunk isn't a roguelike of some kind. I'd love to be able to do procedurally-generated random variations on each aspect of this scenario, fix up a few dozen different messes of cities and do the heroic evacuation with a range of possible exact setups to my population, map, etc, but it's a rigid scenario and the only Official Support for extracting more fun from the scenario is raising the difficulty settings and doing Order and Faith runs. Among other points, its rigid list of pre-signed Laws and pre-researched techs is fine enough for it, but an example of something that could've been more variable to give the scenario more replay value. Though speaking of those. Laws-wise, while the Ruins graphics arounnd Winterhome heavily imply your predecessor committed to Order and got far enough in it to have a Propaganda Center up, you are free and clear on Purpose Laws. Your predecessor also apparently passed few Adaptation Laws, with it being a predictably non-optimal list: both Child Labor Laws, Corpse Disposal, Fighting Arena, and Public House. Yeah, thanks buddy, good job putting the 200~ kids to work but not bothering to get Emergency Shift and Extended Shift. And thanks for not passing any medical Laws, too, jeez. Tech-wise, your predecessor is even more obviously non-optimal. In Exploration and Industry, your predecessor only researched the Beacon plus Outposts: no improvements to either, and no Factory. In Food, Health and Shelter, they researched Bunkhouse, House, Hunters' Gear, and Hothouse. (Yeah, no medical techs) In Resources, they researched Coal Thumper, Coal Mine, Charcoal Kiln, Sawmill, Wall Drill, and the basic Steelworks. Lastly, in Heating your predecessor got Steam Hubs, Heaters, and 2 tiers of Generator Power and Generator Range. Oh, and of course your predecessor has gotten you to tier 3 in general. Yeah, your medical care starts out with absolutely no improvements, your predecessor inefficiently spread across multiple Coal intake sources for no reason, and they pretty broadly ignored passive boosts like 'insulation' techs. It's no surprise their city is a mess. Possibly the meanest, though also funniest, bit of 'gotcha!' stupidity to this whole thing is that your Snow Pit's starting location is within radius 3 of the Generator, which is easy to overlook while trying to make sense of the entire mess you've been left with and only discover by virtue of turning on your Generator covering it with the Heat Zone and the game interrupting everything to tell you that the corpses are going to rot. I'm frustrated by this from a pure gameplay perspective, but I can appreciate the characterization implication, that your predecessor was so bad at planning the city they literally put their Snow Pit in reach of the Generator. Also noteworthy is how your predecessor was obsessed with putting roads everywhere to make pretty patterns, including inane crosshatched road formations that thus block off entire buildings' worth of space for absolutely no possible benefit. This is unfortunately one of the more tedious aspects of The Fall of Winterhome, in that ideally you pause the game immediately and demolish a bunch of bad roads before you do anything else: roads are deleted instantly upon issuing the order, and instantly refund their full Wood price, so this is a way to free up a bunch of Wood for construction tasks instead of needing to wait for the workday to start. Furthermore, you start The Fall of Winterhome with almost no free space to construct buildings in, while having an urgent need to build more Medical Posts, food production, and Gathering Posts, and there are several opportunities to remove roads to clear enough space to immediately fit a building, rather than having to wait for Ruins to be cleared or existing buildings to be demolished. So that's like 5-10 minutes of leaving the game paused you really ought to do -even if you're on Survivor mode where you can't pause time directly, it's still the case that construction and demolition planning pause the game, so you should still immediately click the road demolition button. Probably not as diagetic is that you have a pretty normal Scouting Map situation, where you have a few nodes nearby and none of them are explored except for the Coal Mine you have an Outpost at. Like, everything else about the scenario sells the idea that your predecessor was awful at running the city, and I can buy that this includes that they didn't scout as aggressively as they should've, but one of these 'unexplored' nodes is literally 20 Winterhome scientists hanging out and monitoring the weather. No, that's not unexplored from an in-universe standpoint, come on. Anyway, it should be pointed out that by The Fall of Winterhome the devs seem to have been fully cognizant of how wonky Outpost Team mechanics are, as the scenario is carefully constructed so your 1 Outpost Team (You can't build a second Outpost) can loop through the three Outpost nodes on the scouting map basically for free, and I'm pretty sure the devs fully intend for a savvy player to immediately order the Outpost Team to pack up and loop through all visible nodes to make them 'known' for your Scout Team that you'll eventually deploy. (The Outpost Team will make it to the Coal Mine with a few hours left to wait to be allowed to send the next shipment; having them pseudo-scout is free) Anyway, your initial goal is to get Discontent below 25% and get Hope over 50%, with a 10-day deadline before you get an automatic game over. This of course means first rushing to fix many problems so Discontent can be dragged down to a reasonable level, but you'll also just have to get into Purpose Laws pretty quickly, especially on higher difficulties: on Normal the mood considerations are sufficiently friendly you can potentially just use the scenario's built-in Hope boost opportunities plus abusing getting Discontent to 100% and then back down to 75% to get Hope high enough in time, but certainly not on Extreme. Once you manage that feat, you're told that it's time to investigate the Generator, and you suddenly gain the ability to research: Repair Station Costs 50 Wood and 20 Steel. 8 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 0 Requires: Nothing. Unlocks Repair Station. I appreciate that difficulty doesn't affect this research, and indeed it doesn't affect any of the Repair Station-related researches. Frostpunk's difficulty settings are already a bit too much 'make ALL numbers harsher' for my tastes, with some problematic consequences because there is simply a fundamental difference between eg slowing most resource harvesting rates and slowing food generation in particular. It's nice that this wasn't extended to these researches: all the other effects of difficulty already functionally slow down Repair Station-related researches, for one. This research in particular it's especially appreciated, as you have a relatively tight timetable for unlocking, building, and utilizing the Repair Station before events start getting on your case, and it would be obnoxious if eg Extreme delayed everything so much you would unavoidably get such trouble. The building itself: Repair Station Costs 50 Wood and 20 Steel. Built directly upon the Generator at an arbitrarily-designated point. Manned by up to 60 Engineers at all hours, working two shifts of 30 Engineers. +2 Heat. Initially spends several hours determining the Generator's status, building a progress meter at a speed determined by its current Efficiency value. For the rest of the scenario, the Generator will periodically fail, and the number of Engineers assigned to the Repair Station will determine how much effort will be needed for the Repair Station to then bring the Generator online again. Yeah. 60 Engineers. Note that Winterhome starts with only 60 Engineers in it, and of course you'll need to run at least one Workshop and preferably also medical facilities and also you'll want a Factory at some point. There are two Scouting nodes you can get another 40 from in total -20 from each- but 100 Engineers is your absolute max. Also note that you really should have Scout Teams escort said Engineers home: the game, frustratingly, makes it sound like sending the Engineers back on their own is merely slower than escorting them, but the game secretly is still using its usual routines for Scout node survivers where if they're not escorted they'll lose a small number of people on the way to the city. Your Engineer demands are so incredible it's really not a good idea to unnecessarily lose them. By a similar token, if you're going to abuse Emergency Shift, you should endeavor to ensure its forced death event fires on a Worker workplace, not an Engineer workplace. Anyway, the Repair Station first has to fill up a progress meter to diagnose the Generator. Partway through the meter filling up, an Engineer will heavily imply that it's looking really bad, suggesting that the nearby Dreadnought should be kept in mind, and once the meter fills up the Engineers predictably deliver the news that the Generator is doomed, and by extension Winterhome itself is in trouble. This produces a giant Hope loss and an event where you get to lie and claim there's a city somewhere, restoring all that lost Hope, or not lie and just accept it. Note that the Hope loss is a percentile one, just like the Hope loss from finding Winterhome in A New Home; you can't really buffer against it by getting Hope maxed or the like, and shouldn't try, especially if your intention is to not lie and just accept the Hope hit; in that case, you should instead retain Hope boosters for after the event fires, so you can immediately escape the dangerously low zone. At this point the Evacuation Centre unlocks and- well, we should get to that later. First I should cover the other techs, plus the Generator's deteoriating condition. Yeah, the Generator gets worse over time. Each time it fails, once you get it back online it suffers a permanent penalty: first all Heat Zones will reduce in size by 10%, which, uh, will generally do nothing in actual practice. Then they'll drop by another 10% -as in, to 80% of their original radius- and also the Heat Zone will provide 1 less Heat. Yes, this includes that if you are at the lowest power level, the Heat Zones won't actually increase Heat any. Lastly, all Heat Zones will reduce in size by another 10% and the Heat effect will reduce by another level, so you only get Heat added if you're at power level 3 at least. The radius being at 70% also very reliably cuts out a lot of places; youll actually need to go to radius 2 on the Generator if yuo want it to cover any of the buildings placed directly next to it, and your Steam Hubs firmly lose their outer ring of building support; ideally, you should be trying to assemble Steam Hub clusters so anything you need to remain the whole time (eg Infirmaries) are close to the center, and the edges are occupied by redundant buildings you can later dismantle without issue. As for the rest of the Repair Station techs... Repair Station Efficiency I Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 9 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Repair Station. The Repair Station gains 10% Efficiency. Repair Station Efficiency II Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 11 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Repair Station Efficiency I. The Repair Station gains 10% Efficiency. (For a total of 20% more) Repair Station Efficiency III Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel. 12 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Repair Station Efficiency II. The Repair Station gains 10% Efficiency. (For a total of 30% more) Optimized Shifts Costs 50 Wood and 30 Steel. 11 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 4 Requires: Repair Station Efficiency I. The Repair Station's maximum Engineer requirement is reduced from 60 to 50, and by extension each shift switches from 30 Engineers to 25 Engineers. This is actually my favorite employee-count-modifying tech in all of Frostpunk: The Fall of Winterhome is set up so actually tying up a full 60 Engineers in the Repair Station leaves you with barely anybody to spare on Workshops and medical facilities and will evetually almost certainly become impossible to do outright, so it's a clearly nice thing to reduce its demands and in turn increase the impact of what Engineers you do have on it. Its high base requirement also means that the jankier parts of employee-reduction techs have minimal impact on it: one of 25 Engineers getting sick is a higher reduction to effectiveness than one of 30 Engineers getting sick, but the former is 4% lost while the latter is 3.33% lost, a very tiny difference you are extremely unlikely to care about. Emergency Repair Costs 30 Wood and 20 Steel. 9 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 2 Requires: Repair Station. Unlocks the Emergency Repair ability at the Repair Station. If the Generator is currently malfunctioning, Emergency Repair may be used, spending 200 Wood and 50 Steel to instantly add 10% progress to its repair. 4 hour cooldown. Emergency Repair II Costs 120 Wood and 80 Steel. 9 hours needed with 1 Workshop at 100%. Tier: 5 Requires: Emergency Repair. Emergency Repair's progress addition is increased from 10% to 20%. ------------------------------------------ So anyway, once you've determined the Generator is doomed, it's time to build: Evacuation Centre Costs: 25 Wood and 45 Steel Size N/A Built at an arbitrarily-designated location that otherwise cannot be built in, next to the starting Outpost Depot. Shipments are assigned through and launched from the Evacuation Centre, but it otherwise is not mechanically significant. A new shipment cannot be sent while one is underway to the Dreadnought. You'll first be instructed to send 25 (Extreme?) Engineers to the Land Dreadnought- -actually, I should talk about the Dreadnought, as this is one of those things Frostpunk never really explains, is pretry weird in the final game's framework, and is only intuitively obvious if you know about some of the development history. Thing is, there was a point in development where Frostpunk wasn't running with these built-on-site Generators that couldn't be moved, but instead had supermassive vehicles that drove out to a place and then deployed into being a Generator. The Dreadnoughts are, in the final form of Frostpunk, a relic of that development concept, where the idea exists because at some point it made sense, but the final product can't offer a satisfactory answer to why these things exist or what they were for because that original concept no longer applies. Regardless, within The Fall of Winterhome, this Dreadnought exists and your goal is to first assess it with that initial batch of Engineers. Then once you've done that, it's time to ship out 250 Food Rations, 300 Steel, and 1 Steam Core. Annoyingly, you're not allowed to ship out Coal until you've finished this, even though you're going to have to ship out Coal. Once that's done, you gain the ability to ship out Coal, and in fact must ship out 5000 Coal to be allowed to launch the Dreadnought. If you're fine with 'technically winning' but extremely minimally so, you are then free to launch the Dreadnought at any time; so long as you make sure that your Food Rations and 'decks' are adequate for your citizen count on the Dreadnought, the game will give an ambigously positive ending that suggests that mmmmaybe the evacuees found a viable place to live somewhere. If, however, you want to challenge yourself and get the best possible ending, you will need to ultimately ship out: -That prior 5000 Coal. -5000 Food Rations. -500 people. Preferably including a non-trivial number of Engineers, and preferably including all Children. -10 Steam Cores. -9000 Steel. Yes, 9000. Yeah, that's a lot. Also note that each shipment can carry at most 50 citizens and 2500 resources. To be clear, resource type doesn't affect space usage: 1 Steam Core is the same as 1 Coal. Also note that the Outpost speed upgrades affect the Evacuation Centre transport's speed, raising it by 20% and so reducing the 24 hour delay between shipments to 20 hours. 300/700/1500/2500/4000 steel per deck level 1/1/2/2/4 cores per deck level 1000 food and 100 people per deck level extreme: medicine. basically have to immediately slightly lower Discontent and then pass Radical Treatment or Sustain Life (if you want no deaths) and run +2 Heat/radius 1 to avoid having 150+ Ill on night 1, and I think getting Overcrowding second is basically mandatory if you don't want to be overwhelmed by Illness in general Then in short order you need Hope up, pretty much demanding you switch to Purpose by no later than 5~ days in I think Order basically has to abuse the Watch Tower/Guard Station stacking to meet the Hope goal in time, up on Extreme People enter/exit roughly at Outpost Depot: yay! oddly prone to citizens bugging out permanently; happens almost every time I do a full run