For the iron-willed survivalists among you who think that Frostpunk's "hard" mode is too damn easy, today's 1.10 update introduces the new Survivor Mode promised last month. The mode, which I assume is named ironically, ratchets up the challenge by eliminating the ability to pause the game unless you open a menu, and only saving progress when you exit. 

The core difficulty is also cranked up in Survivor Mode: Developer 11 Bit Studios didn't get into the details but said that "meeting the people's needs or balancing the delicate economy of your city will be even harder." The good news is that all the innocent people who will inevitably suffer slow, grim deaths because of your insistence on playing this way won't have died in vain, thanks to the addition of new Survivor Mode achievements. 

On the technical side of things, Frostpunk now supports Nvidia's Ansel, which enables—among other things—"super cool high-resolution screenshots like this one." (That's 12672 × 6432, by the way.) There's also a new quicksave/quickload option (F5 and F9 by default), and multiple other changes and fixes that you can dive into below. And if you haven't already picked it up, Frostpunk is also currently on sale on Steam for 15 percent off, taking it to $26/£21/€26 until June 21. Read the patch notes below.

 Smaller changes and balancing: 

• Constructed streets now more easily connect to already existing street net
• Rebalanced amount of starting resources and resources on frostland for Refugees and The Arks scenarios in easy and hard difficulty setting
• Hunters will now have to rest for a few hours after coming back from the hunt. It will no longer be possible to send them to other work immediately
• Added blocking other panels by in-game menu Changed extraction rate value for all pickable resources - replaced potential value with all employees by actual value based on efficiency
• It is now possible to bind keyboard shortcuts to “Fast speed” and “Very fast speed” commands
• Increased precision of the gathered Steam Cores amount to 2 digits after comma
• Added emergency shift trackers to pickable resources

 Fixes:

• Fixed certain endlog variations that didn’t display properly when Cannibalism law was passed
• Fixed overlapping trackers on frostland (sites, expeditions, transports, survivors)
• Fixed missing recurring consequences of Emergency Shifts. Watch out when you exert your workforce!
• Fixed showing tutorials after loading save
• Fixed a bug causing snow caps to accumulate on buildings that were just built inside heat zone
• Fixed scrollbars in all expedition building selection panels
• Fixed some translations
• Fixed many UI show/hide animations
• Fixed closing notifications on pause
• Enabled notifications visibility on Frostland
• Fixed queuing unlocked resources on resource bar
• Fixed texts serializations - all texts will be in current language, even after changing language in main menu and loading save
• Fixed calculating average discontent for expeditions
• Fixed states (selected, pressed) for many buttons in selection panel
• Fixed current research description text on workshop selection panel
• Fixed displaying prohibited citizen groups on population panel
• Fixed disabled people outside care house count
• Fixed two crashes that occurred in rare circumstances
• Fixed a bug causing upgraded buildings to overlap adjacent streets

Frostpunk's good, ain't it? Chris called it a grim and engrossing city-builder in his review, and I was already engrossed after talking to developer 11 Bit Studios earlier this year. Today, 11 Bit announced a slew of free content which will be added to the frosty society sim throughout the year, starting with a tough new survivor mode arriving next month. Frostpunk is plenty hard already, so I shudder to think what challenges survivor mode's "new, special modifiers" will bring. 

Additionally, another mode called 'endurance' is in the works. 11 Bit describes endurance mode as a direct response to mounting demand for an endless or sandbox mode, but in a Steam blog post, the studio said "it's gonna be our distinctive take on this feature." A new scenario called The Builders, said to be "the most substantial update for 2018," is also on its way, but 11 Bit is keeping details close to its chest for now. 

Outside of new modes and challenges, a few quality of life features are planned for the year. Customization options for citizens, both human and automaton, are perhaps the most interesting. It will just be names at first but more options are planned for the future, and as Chris said in his review, anything that helps you connect with your citizens is a plus. 

Finally, a photo mode will let you capture better shots of Frostpunk's gorgeous wintry landscapes. Smaller patches loaded with tweaks and fixes will arrive between these more sizable updates, and 11 Bit says new content will continue to roll out well into 2019. 

Frostpunk is the best game I've played this year (my review is here), a blend of city-building, survival, and society simulation. After a recent chat with 11 Bit Studios, the developers of the tense survival sim, I was sent some lovely concept art for the game's characters, buildings, and setting, which you can see below. To enlarge the images, click the upper right hand corner. I've also provided links to full size images.

Inside the factory

In Frostpunk you get to construct all sorts of buildings—houses, factories, workshops, temples, and other facilities—but you never get to see inside them. That's why I love this artist's rendering of the inside of a factory. You can see automatons being built—automatons being towering coal-powered robots that can take the place of a team of human workers, and can even be put in charge of operating the factories themselves.

See if full size here.

Scouting party

Not all of Frostpunk takes place in your city. You can (and in fact must) send out teams of explorers to scout the frozen world for additional resources, other survivors, and scraps of information about what has happened to the world—and what will happen next. This image depicts a scouting team making a discovery (of some sort) in a frozen cave. Hopefully, whatever they've found is good news, though I wouldn't bet on it.

See it full size here.

A frozen world

This conceptual image doesn't look all that much like the final game, but the mood and feeling is certainly there. The frozen tundra, gray skies, and the workers headed out into the snow with pickaxes. These might be the massive vehicles used to reach the ultimate location of the city—we don't see them in the game but can re-discover their locations during scouting missions in some scenarios.

See it full size here.

The hunter

The hunters play a vital role early on, heading out for long hours to gather food while you wait anxiously, watching your citizens growing more and more hungry. It's nice to see such a finely detailed image of the hunters, since they spend precious little time actually inside your city.

See it full size here.

The worker

Yes, that's about the expression I'd expect to see if I could zoom in close on my workers faces. Long work hours—sometimes around the clock—and dangerous if not deadly conditions, followed by a meal of questionable origins and a night spent sleeping in a freezing house or visiting a fighting pit. This is about as close to a smile as you may ever see in Frostpunk.

See it full size here.

The workshop

Ultimately the most important building for the survival of your citizens is the workshop. It's where your engineers can develop new technology, everything from better mining equipment to improvements in heating to more advanced medical facilities. The final design of the workshop doesn't look much like this concept art—they wound up much narrower, probably so you can cram them into tight spots between other buildings—but I love all the fine detail in this image, from the icicles to the smears of rust to the little fellow standing outside, which gives it some scale.

See it full size here.