Frostpunk, the city-building survival management game from 11 Bit Studios, puts you in charge of building a city in a frozen crater and keeping a handful of citizens warm, fed, healthy, and hopeful. It's a tricky balancing act and you'll be faced with a lot of tough decisions as you push resources, technology, and your people to their absolute limits.

It's a grim, great, and challenging game—you can read my review of Frostpunk here—and below I've put together some tips to help you get started.

Build multiple workshops early 

When you begin playing, it's hard to look at your collection of hungry, cold, homeless citizens and not want to focus entirely on food and shelter. But you need to think long term if they're going to survive, and unlocking new tech is key to a brighter (sorta) future. You can speed things up by building more than one workshop, and you should do it as soon as possible. For each additional workshop you build (up to four of them), you get a speed bonus to unlocking new tech more quickly. Your citizens will thank you for it (they won't).

Your crater's resources won't last long without mining 

When you first arrive in the frosty crater, there will be resources your miserable citizens can just pick up: piles of coal, old wooden crates, and steel scrap. These collectible resources are easy to harvest but won't last long, so be prepared to start researching buildings like sawmills for cutting up frozen trees and mines for unearthing ore and coal within a few days of your arrival. Even some of those resources won't last: frozen forests will eventually deplete, meaning you'll need to shut down your sawmills and unlock the next tech tier: a drill to dig into crater walls for buried lumber. Plan ahead and be prepared—even a few hours where you're not building your stockpiles can be devastating.

You can turn wood into fuel with a kiln

You need lots of lumber for building and researching new tech, but in a pinch you can use it to generate charcoal which can add to your supply of coal for heat. It's not something you'll want to do constantly—you should always have a good supply of lumber for quick construction—but in a pinch it can help to bolster coal production for a few days if you've got a surplus of wood. Just remember to either shut down the kiln or move the workers to other buildings so you don't burn up your entire supply.

You can't make more of your two most important resources

If Frostpunk spanned decades, you could probably count on two miserable people producing a brand new miserable person, ripe for adding to your workforce once they're old enough to walk. But the game spans only about a month and a half, so if you need more workers and engineers you'll need to find them outside your city. You can't create steam cores, either, which are needed for advanced facilities like certain mines or infirmaries, and automatons. Keep a very close eye on how many steam cores you have left, how many you'll need for certain buildings (some high-tech units require several), and if your scouts come across any, call them right back to the city to deliver them before they continue exploring.

Warmth is key to keeping people healthy 

Illness can be a major hit on a smoothly running city. Not only will sickies miss work, leaving your industrial jobs understaffed, but they'll need medical treatment administered by workers who themselves could be doing other jobs. To avoid a double hit on productivity, make sure their tents or houses are within range of a steam tower. Warmth equals health.

Assign more than one scouting party 

Scouting is of major importance and scouts can supply you with new discoveries and resources. Once you've built a beacon you'll have to peel off five workers to become scouts, and then you should begin research on how to add a second scouting team. It's not easy finding another five workers to peel out of your labor pool, but it'll pay off eventually. When you can spare it, research improved sleds to speed up your scouts' travel time. The second they reach a new destination, explore it and then move them onto something else. There's a lot out there to find, so the more teams you've got looking and the faster they travel, the better.

Some buildings have features you need to manually activate 

Once a structure is built, don't just forget about it. Most buildings have heaters that can encourage productivity, and they need to be manually switched on (or off, if you need to save coal). Some buildings have special abilities, like guard towers that send out patrols for law and order, or foremen (if you've unlocked them) that can speed up production. They won't do these things automatically, you'll need to click the button yourself to make it happen. Make you sure know what all your buildings can do, and how to activate each ability—and then don't forget to do it.

Using automatons to run coal mines is risky

Automatons are big stompy robots that don't complain, which sounds perfect. But in addition to breaking down once in a while, they also have to take breaks to refuel from your generator. This can lead to a big problem: if your robot is running your coal plant, and needs to refuel, it'll stop mining coal and clomp on over to the generator. If you run out of coal before it can refuel, you're doubly screwed: you can't power the bot and there's no one manning the coal plant to dig up more. Even if you immediately add workers, they won't start the plant if it's nighttime (unless you demand an emergency shift, which will piss everyone off), so you could wind up with a long spell with no heat, leading to a cavalcade of other problems.

Build resource depots when you can 

For a while it'll seem unimaginable that your city could ever have too much of something except corpses and snow, but a few technological advancements and some fruitful scouting missions and you might wind up with a major surplus of resources. If you see your resource meters filling up (getting red) and scouts are on their way back with loads more, make sure you have some resource depots built and assigned to the type of resource. Otherwise, you'll lose whatever doesn't fit.

Frostpunk is a survival sim about managing a city in a wintry post-apocalypse by rationing resources like heat and food, passing hard-knock laws and, if you're Chris, mandating soup. But the more I talk with Pawel Czaplarski and Rufus Kubica of Polish developer 11 Bit Studios, the more I see that it's also a politically charged game about people. It's different from other city builders in that growth is far from your only goal, and it's different from other survival games in that you're responsible for an entire society, not just yourself. 

"It's not like a never-ending city builder. It's more story-driven," Czaplarski says. "This game is about politics. It is about being a leader. You are responsible for your entire city-state. Whatever you shape will be your society. At the beginning you have a few simple tasks given to you to adapt to the situation. You need to get some coal, you need to start the generator. But ultimately you're supposed to lead your society to safety."

It's easy to make snap decisions when you're by yourself. In games like Don't Starve, you're free to do whatever you want with your resources. Things change when you're thinking about a group. Everyday decisions suddenly become difficult and complicated, and at the same time, some decisions become dangerously easy because you're not the one dealing with the consequences. 

"I strongly believe that different rules apply to morality when it comes to groups," Czaplarski says. "Imagine being appointed leader of a country. Whatever you do, people will disagree, at least some of them. But you should think that, in the long-term, your decisions are right, you foresee the consequences. 

"In Frostpunk, citizens ask for solutions to various situations. For example, when lacking manpower, people may ask you about child labor. Normally you wouldn't be sending children to work, but what happens if you're really on the edge? You may decide that sending children to work is actually the best solution."

As Chris discovered, endorsing child labor often leads to unrest and injuries. Luckily the build me and the devs are playing is fresh out of the oven and includes expanded and never-before-seen features. We opt for child shelters instead of child labor, and as a result, later on down the line we unlock the option to have children serve as medical apprentices, which is much safer work than mining coal or repairing massive generators. It's a long-term strategy, and like most long-term strategies in Frostpunk, it's a gamble. 

"The laws you set are irreversible," Czaplarski says. "However, future laws can amend what you've decided in the past. Like applying radical treatment when people are frostbitten. They may lose their legs, but you still take care of them. They need to get food, they need to be treated, they need to be taken care of. You keep them in your society but they are useless. They are a part of your society that doesn't work. But this is your decision as a leader, and you believe it's humane. Later on, if you develop technology for prosthesis, you can create prosthetic limbs and make those people useful again. It's not a question of treating people as a resource, but making decisions that are good in the long-term for your entire society."

"What's important is that you don't know this at this point," Kubica says, referring to Frostpunk's many branching laws. "You may go for radical treatment but you don't know what comes further. It's the same with child labor. Usually people tend to send children to work because there's an immediate effect. But I prefer to go with child shelters because later on I can use them as medical apprentices. That's a long-term strategy." 

It's especially difficult to resist the allure of immediate, short-term payoffs because you regularly receive requests from citizens. They need homes, they're freezing, they don't have enough food. One of the most interesting requests citizens make is the desire to explore the outside world. Frostpunk is set in an alternate 19th century where the world froze over just after steam engines were invented. Your main city is situated in a frozen crater, and people are curious about the outside world. Is it really as bad as it seems? Are their missing loved ones out there somewhere? Is yours really the last city on Earth? The only way to find out is to send exploration parties into the frozen wasteland, which carries huge risks. 

At any given moment, you can bet that someone in your city is unhappy, and it falls to you to decide when to listen. You can ignore requests and complaints, but that builds discontent, one of Frostpunk's two most important resources, the other being hope. If your discontent bar maxes out, your citizens are liable to riot. Likewise, if you run out of hope, your citizens will likely abandon your city. Both result in you failing the scenario—there's currently one main scenario and two sub scenarios with unique challenges—so you have to at least meet your citizens halfway. For me, that's the most exciting thing about Frostpunk. You're the one in control, but there's no such thing as one-way communication. Your people also talk to you. 

Developer 11 Bit Studios announced today that Frostpunk, the game about humanity's final, desperate bid for survival in a great frozen wasteland, will be out on April 24. To celebrate the launch date announcement, the studio also released a new cinematic teaser offering a gentle reminder of the risks of getting things wrong. 

Frostpunk is set in an alt-history 19th century in which something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong. The world is encased in ice, and humanity stands on the brink of extinction. As the ruler of the last city on Earth, you must build and expand your steam-powered citadel, establish rules and laws, harness resources, push back the cold, and send out expeditions in search of information, supplies, and other survivors. The primacy of survival means hard decisions will have to be made, but there will be consequences—for the city, and for you. 

11 Bit Studios managing director Grzegorz Miechowski said the goal had been to get Frostpunk out earlier this year, but the developers opted to take more time. 

"For us, production value is always the most important thing and a bug-free, carefully-balanced game is crucial to offer gamers the experience we want them to have," he said. "This War of Mine was a unique game about moral choices, and with Frostpunk, we are bringing this to a whole new level." 

Frostpunk will be available on Steam, GOG, and Humble for $30. Physical aficionados can opt for a boxed "Victorian Edition," which will include a hardcover art book, for $35. 

Frostpunk, the game about building and maintaining a society in very undesirable (read: frosty) circumstances, will release in March. But in the meantime, studio 11 Bit has released details about the game's "advanced endgame", which involves keeping your society on the straight and narrow or, if you want, tyrannically beating it into the shape you desire.

In other words, you'll have plenty of freedom regarding how you'd like to evolve and nurture your snow swept community. "You can try to be the noble one and listen to the people, no matter if they're right or wrong," says lead gameplay programmer Aleksander Kauch, "or you can believe that your cold-blooded calculations will prove valid over the course of survival."

One example provided is if you take the "path of Order" which, by the look of it, is basically taking the law and order (or police state) route. It allows you to build guard stations and institute neighbourhood watch and patrol programs. 

More on the meat of the update can be read over here, alternatively there's a video embedded below. On the subject of pricing, the game will cost US$29.99/EU$29.99 when it launches next month. If you want an idea of how it is to spend some time in Frostpunk, Chris played it last year and enjoyed it.

The last time we ventured into the frigid world of Frostpunk, children died, people were eaten, and there was something going on with soup. Five months after that debacle (oh, there was a generator explosion in there, too), developer 11 Bit Studios has revealed a new addition to the Arctic hellscape that surely can't possibly make life even worse for humanity's most desperate dregs. 

Automatons are massive, steam-driven machines that can replace entire manual labor crews, working without rest (except for minor breaks to refuel) and without concern for the harsh environment or many dangers that can result in lost human lives. "They’re an example of pragmatic and authentic steampunk technology, used to endure cold and ensure humanity’s chances of survival," art director Przemyslaw Marszal said. 

It sounds like the helpful machines are all upside, but can it really be that simple? Senior lead designer Jakub Stokalski alludes to some Steampunk Cybernet shenanigans in the teaser, describing automatons as "the pinnacle of human engineering" before going on to hint that maybe—maybe—there's some kind of massive, ugly downside waiting to bite players in the ass. Maybe the only way to refuel them is to have Hattie Ridley's little brother climb onto their backs with a live 240 volt line and a blowtorch?   

The update also includes an assurance that the game is not dead, despite the relative quiet from the developers, and a promise of more news to come this month, "which should shed some light on the premiere date." For now, Frostpunk is on track to come out sometime in the first quarter of the year. 

Once every twelve hours in the Frostpunk demo I've managed to get my hands on, I can open the Book of Laws and issue a new decree. It's all treated very gravely—Frostpunk, from 11 bit Studios, is a tough and gritty game about building and managing a city in a hostile, frozen environment—but it's hard not to laugh a little when my first law involves soup.

I get the gravity of the situation, I really do. My small collection of citizens are starving and freezing and miserable. Resources are in short supply. My generator is barely keeping people warm, many are sick and injured, and night is falling which will bring even colder temperatures. Cooking soup—and only soup—means being able to feed more people with less food, which makes sense.

Still, it's a soup law. It's a law about soup. It's hard to take myself seriously as the leader of the last civilization, one on the brink of doom, when I'm opening a big law book, probably while surrounded by my most trusted advisers, and writing the word 'soup' in it. Maybe in capital letters. SOUP.

That's the first and last laugh I get in the Frostpunk demo, which gives me ten days of in-game time to play. Those are ten incredibly stressful, horrible days full of tough choices and tougher laws. Much tougher than my Law Of Only Soup.

I begin with just a generator and a few dozen cold, hungry survivors. I assign some to collecting coal, wood, and steel from the crater my city sits in, and watch as my tiny workers push their way through chest-high snowdrifts. They all leave grooves in the snow behind them, which fill back in when more snow falls. It's a really nice touch and makes me wish the zoom could push in all the way. I want to see my miserable, soup-sucking civilians up close as they shoulder their way through the frost.

With some resources gathered I can turn on the generator for warmth (the snow around it melts away, another lovely detail) and begin to build the handful of structures available, which will crowd in a circle around my massive generator. At first there are just tents and a shelter, a hunting lodge and cookhouse, but more are added as I slowly progress through the first few days. If I keep the city together through its shaky first week I'll be able to add a building for tech research, a medical building, sawmills for harvesting trees, a coal mine, and other structures.

Aside from shelters, buildings need to be staffed with workers who are pulled from gathering duty, which means fewer resources. All the while, there are two meters at the bottom of the screen: discontent and hope. They fill and empty depending on the current circumstances and my decisions. One of those meters, like the bellies of my citizens, is always just about empty.

I regularly get to open my Book of Laws and make a decision, like about how to care for the ill, how to dispose of the dead (build a cemetery or just dump 'em in the snow), and whether or not children should be given jobs. Well, forced into jobs. Safe jobs! But still, jobs.

I do have one bright moment amid the grim and cold days. When I finish researching scouting, a balloon slowly lifts from the city which I can use to examine the surrounding map. It's small beacon of hope (for me, at least, as I'm too busy watching the balloon to notice if it lifts the spirits of my citizens as well). Having spied a few new locations in the world from the balloon, I can send small scouting parties out.

This results in more decisions. First, which workforce do I draw from to create my scouts in the first place? Every person I reassign from a task leaves me short-handed. My scouts, once I've assigned and dispatched them, find other survivors on the map, who I need for my labor pool but who will also deplete my meager soup reserves and take up space in the shelters. I also have to choose if I should have my scouts accompany them back (thus costing my scouts some valuable time) or hope the survivors can find my city on their own (thus risking some of them dying along the way). Every choice has a downside.

As my city slowly grows, more decisions crop up. Should I enact a law that says I can force people to work at night during an emergency? Yes, definitely, though mainly because I'm frustrated when the work stops at night anyway, especially when my latest tech research is 94% complete. I know, you're all tired and cold and hungry, but things need doing and the longer things take to do the more of you will die and the even longer things will take. To do. So do 'em.

I find that forcing children into labor is a pretty easy decision. This comes after noticing that one kid's status is that he is on his way to play. Play? In a frozen city of death? Trust me, kid, you can make a game out of gathering rusty, jagged steel from a snowbank. It'll be fun! A little later, I'm asked to decide if kids should perform more dangerous jobs. Um... yes, but let's not issue a press release on this one, fellas. I'm beginning to feel like a pretty terrible person.

I've already had to pull staff from the medical building to gather more coal, and this is with my sick numbering so high I've run out of beds and they're lying on the floors. I can't afford the resources for a more advanced medical building so I've told my doctors to start cutting off limbs (their patients' limbs, not their own) if it's more efficient than longer, kinder treatments. 

Meanwhile, the consequences of my terrible decisions begin arriving like snowfall. The people whose legs I've been sawing off can't work, but they sure can still eat. One kid I've forced to work hurt himself, and I'm torn between giving him a day off (he is a kid, after all) or reprimanding him (look, I can't have other kids deliberately hurting themselves to get out of coal duty, right?).

As I approach day 7 of the 10-day demo, things really begin falling apart. I haven't built enough housing for everyone and half my population is homeless. My hunters aren't gathering enough food and the cookhouse is empty. People are sick and cold and dying. Research on new tech is happening too slowly. Every person who dies means fewer resources that can be gathered, but not enough of them are dying to solve my housing shortage. I'm mulling over a decision to make cannibalism a city-sanctioned activity (should spice up the soup, at least) when I'm told my generator, which I've been running on overdrive for more warmth to combat dropping temperatures, has gone critical and needs to be repaired.

I'm told the only one who can fix it is someone small enough to crawl inside. Yes, yet another child whose life I've ruined is my city's only hope. I send her in, and she fixes the generator, dying in the process. Little Hattie Ridley, you will be remembered as a hero, because I stuffed you into a generator hatch and crossed my fingers. And then probably ate someone else's fingers.

We don't yet know Frostpunk's release date, but boy I hope it's soon. Those ten days (well, eight—my generator wound up exploding the next day anyway) were filled with challenging decisions and grim stories, and it's a gorgeous looking game to boot. The demo, as far as I know, isn't available to everyone, but if that changes I'll be sure to let you know.

Frostpunk is part city-builder and part survival game, and we've already seen some of the tough moral choices you may encounter as leader of the last society on a frozen Earth. Forcing children into labor and letting the dead freeze where they fall is the price of survival in this harsh world, and your miserable citizens may need to indulge in a few morally questionable activities just to cope with the stress.

Evan spoke to Pawel Miechowski of 11 Bit Studios about Frostpunk at PAX West, who said that building brothels and fighting pits for your citizens might not the best moral choice but could let your miserable population blow off a little steam from time to time. Clearly, Frostpunk isn't your typical cheery and relaxing "society simulator," as Miechowski describes it, and I don't think we'll see gladiator pits coming to Cities: Skylines anytime soon.

Watch the full interview above, and follow our continuing coverage of PAX West 2017 here.