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 Centre 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 Medium 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.

There's also a pair of frustrating events here whose design I intensely dislike. Early in this phase of the scenario, you'll get an event about a boy's voice being heard in the wreckage, and a Ruin will be marked as a target to dig up to save the kid. Later, this idea repeats, though it's not a kid this time. In both cases you have something like two days to dig them up; if you're slow, they'll be dead when you dig them up, which does in fact add a corpse or corpses to your city and lower Hope, as real deaths normally do, and conversely if you dig them up quickly, both of these events can lead to Hope boosts: it's very important to try to dig these folks up quickly.

I describe these events as frustrating, though, because their mechanics are unique in a janky and unpleasant way, for you see this is the one and only time Frostpunk gestures in the direction of Roguelike randomization to the design. Specifically, contrary to what you'd expect and contrary to how other scenarios are designed, there isn't a pair of specific Ruins that always have the buried people: instead, when one of the events fires, it picks a completely random Ruin to assign itself to, and of course must pick a Ruin that still exists. As such, you can never, ever dig these people up early, before their events acyually fire, RNG has an undue influence on how easy or hard this part of the scenario is (The events are perfectly able to pick a Ruin you're very close to finishing on, and also perfectly able to randomly pick less accessible Ruins and/or Ruins that have a larger resource quantity and so will take longer to deplete), and a player who understands how this actually works can (and probably should) do some pretty strange things, like deliberately getting a bunch of Ruins low but not actually empty so that these can potentially land on one of these nearly-empty ruins and the buried golks rescued basically instantly. It's super-jank!

Also note that the kid is dug up Gravely Ill, so your medical system needs to be ready for that. There's custom event stuff for responding to him ending up as an Amputee, even. The other event is instead digging up some people who were apparently thugs for the prior Generator Tyrant: you can banish them for a Discontent reduction, but I have difficulty imagining this ever being a sensible choice, because saying that they've already paid for their crimes is a Hope boost, and Hope is the much harder thing to get past its threshold.

More benignly, clearing Ruins gives Hope boosts from a few events; seriously, clear the Ruins.

Anyway, once do you manage to get morale under control, 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.

I should also explicitly point out that Engineer Automatons can't sub in for this. It really is just Engineers.

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 in a moment. First I should cover the Generator's deteoriating condition.

Yeah, the Generator gets worse over time. The first time it fails it'll be fine once you fix it, but for the second, third, and fourth shutdowns, 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.

The fifth time the Generator shuts down, that's it, you're done. The Repair Station sets itself to 0/0 employees, and it's only a matter of time until the Generator explodes. You should in fact not bother to have any Engineers on the Repair station after the fourth time you've repaired it, and indeed I'm pretty confused as to why the 0/0 employees thing isn't done at that step, since the fourth repair completing explicitly tells you that the Generator can't be fixed again.

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, and shipments take 24 hours to arrive.

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. Frostpunk sort of suggests they were the intended evacuation transports to the Generators, but it supports this very poorly and that scenario seems a bit silly: we sent out teams to build Generators in the middle of nowhere, each of them a supermassive project that must've cost the empire a great deal to try to build, and we also made supermassive, super-expensive land vehicles to drive out on the frozen sea to reach the Generators?

Regardless, within The Fall of Winterhome, this Dreadnought exists for whatever reason 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 later and there's no in-universe reason why we wouldn't realize that, or why we wouldn't want to get started right away. You're also not allowed to send Children or Workers initially. You are at least allowed to send more Steel and Food Rations than necessary (And more Engineers, I guess), so you won't necessarily waste a large chunk of the shipment potential, but the whole setup is still wonky.

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 Team speed upgrade affects the Evacuation Centre transport's speed, raising it by 20% and so reducing the 24 hour delay between shipments to 20 hours. (Which, incidentally, the fact that the Dreadnought is placed so close to Winterhome feels like a really bad choice: a Scout Team going to the Dreadnought for the first time takes 12 hours. Why does our Steam Train With No Tracks take twice as long as that??)

Do note that an odd, inconvenient side effect of upgrading your Outpost Team speed is that for some reason if you hit up the Steel Mine and then go to the food site, the Outpost Team will reach their destination a little before their shipment reaches Winterhome, even though their destination is farther from the Steel Mine than Winterhome is, forcing you to have them wait a few minutes to send the Raw Food shipment and head to the Coal Mine. Less odd but also inconvenient is that the upgraded Outpost Team will now complete the full loop of hitting its three destinations so fast it has to wait a few hours somewhere in there!

Anyway, if you're not going for a perfect victory, you presumably also care about the partial requirements: for every 100 people you ship out, you'll need 1000 Food Rations for the game to not declare that everybody starved after you launched, and you'll also need to build a 'deck' for each batch of 100 people, which inexplicably has an intensifying cost as you build more decks. The first deck requires 300 Steel and 1 Steam Core. The second deck requires 700 Steel and 1 Steam Core. The third deck requires 1500 Steel and 2 Steam Cores. The fourth deck requires 2500 Steel and 2 Steam Cores. The fifth deck requires a whopping 4000 Steel and 4 Steam Cores!

Annoyingly, the game only tells you what your next deck's requirements are, and each deck is represented with a bar of the same size, where there's no way of inferring theat the cost goes up at all, certainly not the insane jump at the end. As a deck isn't considered complete until you have both of its requirements met, I'm sure there's players who were reluctant to ship out Steam Cores aggressively and so had no idea how outrageously the costs were climbing for future decks, just left scratching their head as Steel shipments inexplicably filled later segments more slowly. Also not helping is that the object summary just talks about building 5 decks: there's nowhere upfront to get it communicated to you the amount of Steel and number of Steam Cores you'll need.

Now, one of the counterintuitive elements to this whole thing is that you really ought to ship people out to the Dreadnought aggressively, and not because it takes a minimum of 10 shipments to get 500 people loaded into the Dreadnought. No, I'm saying you ought to do this because, as usual for Frostpunk, the second people step out of the city they stop needing to eat and stop needing medical care. As such, shipping people out aggressively actually makes it easier to meet the Food Rations requirement by reducing how many people are eating what's being made. Furthermore, shipping people out means you get to dismantle housing and other structures, getting back Steel and reducing Coal expenditure as Steam Hubs are dismantled because their structure they were covering are all gone.

You should specifically start with Children, both because they're the least useful laborers, and because you will get an event asking you to ship out the Children to the Dreadnought. If you promise to deliver all the Children and then actually do so, at that point base Efficiency rises by 10% everywhere humans labor. (By which I mean Automatons are not affected by this, presumably because the Efficiency boost is meant to be caused by the improved mood from knowing all the Children are safe) This of course will make things easier all-around, and so is very worth doing.

Note that several of the Children are Amputees, and you will in fact need to fit them with Prosthetics to be allowed to ship them out. As such, you should prioritize getting the Prosthetics Law passed and a Factory built. You might also want to hold onto redundant Medical Posts so you can maximize how quickly Prosthetics are fitted, as eg relying on just a pair of Infirmaries may actually result in you failing your promise to send the Children because the Children don't get automatic priority for Prosthetics and you have more adults needing Prosthetics than kids: this is in fact the only scenario where I'd say the mechanic of it taking time for people to be fitted with Prosthetics is potentially consequential. That said, note that the promise is fulfilled the second the last shipment of Children sets out, not when it arrives, so you have around 24 more hours to fulfill this promise than you might assume.

You should be prioritizing Prosthetics in general actually, as multiple precious Engineers are also tied up in the Amputee state.

Anyway, it's worth pointing out that Hunters Huts are unusually desirable to use in this scenario because they cost only Wood, the intense Worker load isn't an issue initially since you have way too many people for the jobs you need covered, and it's a way to get more food coming in to prepare for the Dreadnought. It's not a high-impact thing, but it's still nice; this is the only scenario I don't view Hunters' Huts as almost purely 'that food source you replace with Hothouses as fast as you can'. That said, Hunters Hangars are dubious to research and build, especially on higher difficulties; they're Steel-intensive, you really don't need them to cover the food situation (I've cleared Extreme without ever building any, once without employing the lie and so having worse Efficiency globally), so they're still left in the lurch as terrible outside the limited caveat of Endless Mode with Events enabled.

Anyway, there's several other events to do with the evacuation I should cover here.

First of all, if you lie about there being a city somewhere, you will fairly quickly have an Engineer approach you and try to blackmail you into sending him and his family (Mechanically: two Engineers, two Children) on the next shipment, or else he'll reveal that you lied. Ideally, you have Faith Keepers or Guard Stations active and elect to immediately kill him: if you don't, either the lie will eventually come out and ruin Hope and potentially get you a game over, or you'll be forced to instead kill 4 Engineers later to keep the secret. So... yeah, just kill him, that's what the game has made perfectly optimal every time.

You can skip this particular event chain by just not lying in the first place, of course, but if you don't lie you will instead have Hope completely zero out and forever after labor under a -10% of base Efficiency penalty everywhere humans work. (By which I, once again, mean that Automatons ignore this change; if you're inclined to not lie, Automatons are slightly more appealing) Shipping out all the Children will at least rebalance you back to normal Efficiency, but that still puts you behind lying and then shipping out all the Children. Overall, I would argue that the game has pretty clearly made the Objectively Optimal Choice here to be 'lie that there's a city, then kill the blackmailing Engineer', which I'm pretty bleh on as a design decision. I tend to be down on Big Moral Decisions in games relying on fixed scenarios like this precisely because the context so often squashes out real morality and reduces it to Solving The Mechanics; would I, as a real person, be inclined to lie here? Dunno, doesn't matter, the actual question isn't 'what feels right to you?', it's 'what do you think the game will reward?' Which if you're into replaying -or just looking up guides and the like- can in fact be trivially identified as being a specific decision chain.

Anyway, other events;

Second, regardless of whether you lie or not, if you send few to no Engineers to the Dreadnought past the initial batch, eventually the Engineers will approach and inform you that you really ought to send a bunch of them over to make sure everything will be okay. While you might cynically assume this is just them utilizing a self-serving narrative to get priority on the Dreadnought, if you do in fact launch the Dreadnought with a low count of Engineers, the text at the end will heavily imply things ended badly as a result; the game seems to intend this to simply be the truth. Regardless, they went you to send over all of them or 25 of them, both of which are pretty nuts, especially 'all of them', as by default that means you can't fix the Generator. 25 of them is very doable in a Faith run by relying on Houses of Healing for your medical needs, and 'all of them' can potentially be 'cheated' by holding off on bringing back the 40 Engineers on the Scouting Map until after you've shipped out the current batch of Engineers so you'll still have a serviceable 40 Engineers, but frankly I normally just blow them off and only ship out Engineers sometime after the fourth time the Generator fails and is repaired. You suffer a Discontent and Hope hit, but if you lied this is probably ignorable. (And frankly it's really bizarre it does cause a Hope hit: fine, those Engineers are unhappy, but given everything, I'd expect the Workers to be glad to see the Engineers weren't given preferential treatment. This is a Frostpunk problem I'll discuss more another time, though)

Third, you have a somewhat exasperating event chain where a father will say his son is on the Dreadnought and he wants to be shipped out. If you agree to this and ship out a Worker with the next batch, that counts... and then you'll get another event with people causing trouble because they resent the preferential treatment. (Note that this second event also fires if you give in to the Engineer blackmail: seriously, just murder the guy) If you refuse to send him, you'll get another event where he decides to just walk to the Dreadnought, which apparently works out fine for him (???) unless you order your guards to beat him up and make him stay home... and if you don't beat him up, peeople will inexplicably treat that as also being 'preferential treatment'. Huh?

Fourth and most infuriating is an event chain where people stow away to sneak on the Dreadnought and increasingly get very brazen about stealing supplies and trying to run off on their own. I call this 'most infuriating' because they always have an option to peacefully resolve the situation by talking people down... but in all my runs of The Fall of Winterhome, I always either had these events fail to fire, or they fired and every single one of them wouldn't let me use that option because 'Discontent is too high or Hope is too low'. (Even if Hope was over 50% and Discontent was under 25%, which, uh, what?) So I strongly suspect these events are only allowed to fire if morale is bad enough that the talking-them-down option will be barred from you, which if so would make this an asinine taunting of the player. The only other options are always 'let them go' (Which steals resources, has random people leave for the Dreadnought, and causes morale to worsen) and 'beat them up to make them stay'. (Which requires an active Guard Station or Faith Keepers, and makes several people Ill or Gravely Ill)

I can broadly see what the game is going for with 'desperation to survive, limited evacuation slots, too many people to fit' resulting in drama, but ugh, the actual details are handled so poorly.

Anyway, I should return to the Repair Station topic, as a while after you finish diagnosing it, you'll have several new techs related to it be revealed:


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.

Hey, remember how I said earlier that the number of Engineers on the Repair Station at the moment it goes offline determines how quickly the Generator can be repaired? Sorry, that was kind of a lie: the game actually runs this 'staffing' logic off Efficiency. If the Repair Station's Efficiency is over 90%, that's considered to be 'fully staffed', and you'll get the shortest repair time. If it's less than 90% but over 25% (I think), that's considered to be 'adequately staffed', and you'll get a somewhat longer needed repair time. If it's under 25%, but still over 0%, that's even worse. And of course if absolutely nobody is on it, then that's 'no staff' and you'll get the longest possible repair time.

As such, Repair Station Efficiency I not only has the obvious benefit of increasing the speed of repairs once the Generator does break down, but the less obvious benefit of potentially letting you shorten the needed repair time by virtue of getting a better staffing rating. Given how wide the 'adequately staffed' range is, this mostly tends to mean it's more plausible to reach 'fully staffed' even if you don't have enough Engineers to reach that naturally, but hey, maybe you're doing challenge run things?

I should also point out the very janky point that this staffing consideration only matters at the exact moment the Generator shuts down, which itself is always at 1:00 at night. Strictly speaking, it's optimal to have zero Engineers on the Repair Station until the Generator is going to break, and then funnel a pile of Engineers not too long before 1:00. I'm... not a fan of this, especially since it reliably breaks on specific days with no variability, and so you can be even more nonsensically optimal by just ignoring the Generator entirely until the night it will actually break. I really wish the Repair Station's affect on needed repair time behavior had been something more granular: something like invisibly building a meter that reduces the starting repair time, so you ideally actually would keep it as staffed as you can as consistently as you can.

Regardless, this is a decent tech. I wouldn't call it an ultra-high priority, but it's nice enough, gates access to more useful Repair Station techs, and on higher difficulties it can be slipped in more easily than most techs.

Next tech!


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)

See previous tech commentary.

Next tech!


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)

Yep. 130% Efficiency is a pretty big deal.

Next tech!


Optimised 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, as for one thing the high base employee requirement for the Repair Station 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.

Furthermore, The Fall of Winterhome is set up so thay it's very difficult to fully man the Repair Station -especially if you go Order- since you start with 50 Engineers, can only pick up 40 from Scout nodes and one of those batches means losing the weather preview, you have to send 25 to the Dreadnaught immediately, and of course you want them manning a Workshop or two and some amount of medical facilities. Plus if you lie you will definately lose at minimum 1 Engineer. So normally you simply don't have 60 Engineers on the Repair Station; as such, it's overall more useful to think of this tech as an esoteric Efficiency boost, from which perspective it's effectively about a 20% Efficiency increase: if you have exactly 50 Engineers on the Repair Station, you're getting the same result as if you had two of the Repair Efficiency techs. But better than that, since it multiplies with them!

As such, you should always prefer this to Repair Station Efficiency II. (Unless you're really abusing Faith to let you heavily reduce your Engineer requirements and also have two Automatons running the Workshops, I guess)

Next tech!


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.

That's '10% progress' as in '32% will jump to 42% progress': it's basic addition.

Ideally you don't use this too much given how in-demand Steel is, but the inexplicably high Wood cost is surprisingly bearable: you don't need Wood for the Dreadnought, there's plenty of Wood on the map, and you'll increasingly be demolishing structures as the scenario progresses, gaining even more Wood as you go. It's easy to be sitting on 2000~ Wood late in the scenario with basically nothing to spennd it on.

That said, you should prefer to get:


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%.

That way, your expenditures go twice as far.

Emergency Repair II is pretty worth getting: the Steel cost is not ideal, but the Generator's breakdowns last longer each time they happen, and the scenario's temperature does drop as time goes on. The first couple of breakdowns are shrugged off pretty easily all-around, but the last two fixable breakdowns last quite a while if you don't hurry them, and the temperature will be low enough at that point that it's probably problematic to not have the heat running. (Especially if you haven't been prioritizing passive Heat boosts to buildings) The last one especially lasts so long you can easily fit in two +20% Emergency Repairs and have wasted none of their effect.

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As I said earlier, The Fall of Winterhome is probably my favorite Frostpunk scenario. It still has faults, like how awful the 'people buried in Ruins' events are, and it's unfortunately one of the worse scenarios about just fastforwarding a lot through the last few days, but it presents a cool inversion of many core gameplay assumptions, a high challenge that's nonetheless very doable, and it's the only scenario where Hope and Discontent are both decently consequential meters. (Albeit mostly for the initial phase of the scenario)

It even has your citizens entering and exiting from a sane location on the map: the little tunnel thing at the south where the Outpost Depot and Evacuation Centre go. Nice!

That said, there's a few bits I couldn't fit snmoothly in earlier:

Firstly, for reasons unclear to me, this scenario is really, really prone to having citizens get into bugged states where they aren't moving and they eventually starve to death if I can't fix it. Sometimes I'm able to get them moving again by figuring out what task they're stuck on and somehow breaking it, but not always; if you're wanting to do a Truly Deathless run of The Fall of Winterhome, prepare for frustration as people randomly get in a bugged state. I'm really not sure why The Fall of Winterhome is so bad about this; I've only seen this behavior happen in it and sometimes in Endless Mode, never in any of the other 5 scenarios. (And when I've seen it in Endless, the citizens tend to be useless immortals, refusing to die of starvation or illness for days unending) My best guess is it has something to do with the legion of dead bodies you start the scenario with, as the most common version I've seen is for someone to get trapped 'disposing of a body', where they seem to be trying to retrieve a body but I guess can't find it?

And to be clear, when I say 'really, really prone', I mean that I'm not sure I've ever done a full run without 1-2 citizens bugging out. I've done zero-deaths runs by virtue of managing to break them out of the bugged state, but getting through without it happening in the first place? I don't think I have: it really is very common.

Second, one thing I do find unfortunate about this scenario is that Extreme difficulty feels like there's a pretty rigid chain of actions you need to do to get through the first few days. You have to very quickly pass Sustain Life or Radical Treatment so the Gravely Ill people you start with don't die and drag Hope down further, which in practice requires turning on the heat and manning the Public House and waiting just long enough for the warmth to reduce Discontent just enough to pass your chosen Law. You also really need to run the Generator at +2 Heat to avoid ending up with 150+ Ill people the first proper night, and I suspect Overcrowding is really mandatory to avoid being overwhelmed by Illness in general.

Then you have a limited window to fit in other Laws before it's basically mandatory to pivot to a Purpose Law so you can get started on getting Hope up. If you're not getting started on this by about day 5, you're probably not going to get Hope up enough.

I think Order might also just plain need to abuse the thing where Watch Towers and Guard Stations actually stack their Hope boost? It's what I ended up needing to do in my first Extreme Order run, at least.

Once you do get through that first phase, though, the rest of the scenario is more open. You've obviously got to prioritize Steel production and all, but there's not nearly so much a vibe of The One Truth Path To Victory.

Anyway, thirdly, this scenario exasperatingly returns to the idea of 'Scout Team randomly dying to a node', unfortunately. Specifically, there's a very distant node where you can get either 1 Steam Core or 3 Steam Cores, with getting 3 Steam Cores risking killing the Scout Team. You can at least pick to put off the choice for now and come back later, for one thing making it way easier to savescum than eg the bear cave in A New Home, but The Fall of Winterhome is also very tight on Steam Cores if you're going for a perfect success: I really don't like this event putting Steam Cores behind a death check. Come on Frostpunk, quit it...

Fourth, one thing that's kind of a mean trap is a callback to A New Home: in A New Home, the freebie Automaton you can get for scouting is specifically sweeping a bridge of snow, and there's an Automaton doing that here! But in this case, instead of being a freebie Automaron, you're choosing between having an extra Automaton or having access to the Steel Mine, as sending the Automaton home makes the Steel Mine node no longer function for some reason. I call this a 'mean trap' because you can't undo the decision, and frankly you need the Steel Mine way more than you need another Automaton: on Extreme especially, I'm genuinely not sure it's possible to reach the 9000 Steel target if you give up on the 200 Steel per day the Steel Mine represents. As such, the smart choice here is to just leave the Automaton there, at least up until very, very close to launch time. Which is I guess appropriate given this is effectively a prequel to A New Home and the Automaton is sweeping the bridge there: it's frankly kind of odd The Fall of Winterhome doesn't try to come up with some justification for ensuring you're definately leaving the Automaton there.

Fifth, I mentioned two Scout nodes with 20 Engineers apiece. These both Do Things for leaving the Engineers in them: the closer one monitors the weather unless you pull the Engineers off of it, so you disable your weather prediction by grabbing them: for a first-time run you might want to leave them there a while just so you don't get caught off guard by temperature drops. The other group, uh... I said they Do Things, but that's not really true. If you leave them there and then visit them very, very late in the scenario, you can get vague bits gesturing in the direction of the idea that the New London folks might be on approach. That's it. Unless you want to see that narrative bit yourself (Or work around the 'send all the Engineers' promise), this second group of Engineers really ought to just be grabbed as soon as you can. And I should emphasize that if you send them with no escort, in both cases they'll suffer deaths on the way, even though the game does nothing to indicate this is a risk to that decision. Nnnnot ideal design here.

Still. I do enjoy The Fall of Winterhome, overall.

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Next time, we start on talking about DLC, starting with an intro on The Last Autumn.

See you then.