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.

Frostpunk, developed by 11 Bit Studios in Poland, blends city-building, crisis management, survival, and society simulation in a grim and frozen apocalypse. It's a tense and harrowing experience that explores just how far you'll go to protect your citizens and give them hope for the only thing more uncertain than the present: the future.

I recently spoke over Skype with Frostpunk lead designer Kuba Stokalski, project lead and lead artist Łukasz Juszczyk, and senior designer Marta Fijak about the game's development, art, the book of laws, and real-world inspirations.

PC Gamer: So I guess I’d like to start with the original idea for the game, the inception of the game. What was the first spark that eventually led to Frostpunk?

Kuba Stokalski: Well, I think it was actually a couple of things coming together. It was on the one hand—This War of Mine was a really big hit, and after it landed and it changed basically the playing field for the company, we knew that we would have to come up with something that… we knew we didn’t want to do a sequel. Because This War of Mine was a special kind of experience, but at the same time we felt that this was something that resonated with the players, the meaningfulness of the themes in the game and the seriousness of the tone, so we were looking for things that would go along these lines.

But at the same time we wanted to make a bigger game and follow up with something on a bigger scale, and basically things converged on merging survival gameplay with city building gameplay, and what we knew from the pretty early days of the project was that we wanted to make a game on a bigger scale, in terms of these serious themes, and that meant going up from the scale of individuals to the levels of societies. So, there’s this concept of society survival and basically asking the questions of the limits of the boundaries that people are willing and unwilling to cross when faced with questions of survival on a societal scale, was what drove the project from the very beginning.

And with all these different elements in it—like you said you’ve got survival, there’s resource management, there’s society management, it has a bit of a strategy feel to it too at times—how was it trying to balance all these different elements so that one doesn’t completely overshadow the others?

Kuba: The trick is that we are not… well, that is actually a staple of 11-Bit Studios in that we aren’t really that concerned with genre, or the specifics of it. We know we want to make a game in the vein of a genre that we have in mind, but what we are really after is an experience, and the feelings and emotions that the player gets out of playing the game, and that’s what drags our decisions.

So whether we are designing a simulation system or content in the tech tree or society decisions in the book of laws or coming up with the art style, we are always asking ourselves whether these things converge on the central themes of the game, like asking the big questions about survival, of the limits of survival and what a society is capable of. So it’s obviously an iterative process and heavily so, and this unique blend comes out of it, in service of the themes of the game, not the other way around.

I found it interesting that, usually from a city-building standpoint where you have citizens, you do kind of get a feel for their happiness. You guys went with two different meters: the hope meter and the discontent meter, and these are influenced by different things—they can both be full and they can both be empty. What made you decide you were going to use these two specific meters for the society's feelings and feedback?

Marta: From the very beginning, we knew that we wanted to have that society aspect, to show the mood of the society. So the discontent came quite naturally, because it comes from citizens' needs and we knew that we wanted to represent the society as a group of individuals that create the whole thing, and not an abstract society model. So the discontent part was quite natural in the process of creation of society.

And about the hope—it actually came from the research. When we did research about survival in harsh conditions, and what drew people, what makes them survive except for the physical capabilities, we found out that the most important thing was hope, because we read stories about mountain climbing [expeditions], about accidents, when people were able to crawl down from high altitudes, almost dying, but they had hope that they would survive.

So this was a theme that was reoccurring when we did the research process. So this is why we put it in the game because our people don’t have to just survive like animals, they need a reason to survive and this is what hope represents, and it played well with the themes that we wanted to show.

Typically with city builders, a lot of them have scenarios where you have a certain situation and you need to get your way out of it, but they typically have an endless, open-ended format. When you were designing Frostpunk, was it always your vision that it would have an ending, that you would have a set period of time to accomplish your goals or did you consider at some point it could be an endless type of game too?

Kuba: Actually, it wasn’t really set in stone for quite a bit of development. We always knew that we wanted to tell a story about survival, so in general you have to survive something in the end, right, if it was about survival? But we weren’t really… well, the decisions about whether it was an open-ended or closed-ended type of experience wasn’t really set in stone, and it actually came out really naturally from the format that we arrived at through iteration. 

Basically, we had these different episodes of the main story scenario—that the first is focused on the basic survival, the second one was more about the social fractures that sometimes pop up in difficult conditions and how you as a leader can tackle them. And then we had the ultimate test of the storm, and we felt that when you played through such a sequence of events, basically making tough decisions along the way, and after the final storm we had basically, "OK, so the sun comes up and it’s getting warm again and here: go build all these buildings." That was actually anti-climatic, so it was in contrast to the experience of surviving something tough by making tough decisions, and by making sacrifices. This kind of climax didn’t work, so we knew we wanted to end this the way a novel ends, not the way a typical sandbox experience of other city-builders is like.

If we could talk about the book of laws—I found this kind of an interesting system in the game. How did you start coming up with those and how did you pick those particular laws?

Marta: So, from the very beginning of development we knew that we wanted the player to be able to make up some decisions, to decide what to do, which way to go and how to shape this society. But in the early builds, it was coming mostly from your people, so during the playtime, a question would pop up because there was a situation and you as the leader should react and pick which law you want to enact.

And during the iterative process we found out that this is not the best way for the player because there is no player agency. He or she cannot decide when he or she wants to make some laws, so from that point we knew we wanted to address that and started iterating on the book of laws. And what the book of laws gave us, it was an opportunity to put those laws in a sequence, and that was quite important because one of the topics we wanted to cover was creeping normality or the boiling frog syndrome, so that situation is that you are enacting small laws that [don't] change much and are not extremely drastic, but over a longer period of time, you see that the sum of those parts makes something bigger and something more terrifying. And this is a situation that you can observe in life when a couple of total institutions or total situations are born, they are just going through that process of creeping normality.

So this is how we picked the laws, especially in the purpose tree, that all of them are put in order and every player should have a line in their head. We didn’t put it there specifically because we don’t want to charge the player from a moral standpoint that this is a personal measure of belief, but every law should be a little bit more than the previous one.

And for the adaptation tree, most of it came actually from gameplay and through historic research, like with sawdust in food—that was a thing actually done in Russia and it’s still done in many places. The same was for the kids working [in the] Victorian era, so it was only natural to push that kind of law. So this is how we build that adaptation tree, but it also had in mind that little bit of creeping normality factor.

So kind of like a slippery slope situation where I’m making maybe a small compromise that’s against my personal morals or beliefs because I’m hoping it will achieve this goal, but that can lead to bigger and bigger compromises on my part as a leader.

Kuba: Yeah, that’s basically how Totalitarian states are born—what the 20th century showed us and what’s still happening around the world in many places, and this is actually the small steps towards really unpleasant consequences, is what we wanted to show here.

Yeah, at the end of the game I kind of felt myself feeling a little defensive. The game will not really judge you but point out some of these choices that you made and that they weren’t really great ones, but I felt myself feeling I should justify it because, like, “Hey look at this end result, I survived, I saved people’s lives." And it was kind of an interesting feeling to be trying to defend a lot of the pretty awful things I did.

Kuba: Yeah. It’s a really nice thing that you say that, actually! (Laughs) We actually get a lot of feedback now, post-launch, and one of the [comments] was that when you get the end log sequence of the time-lapse of your city, and there’s a commentary on your choices, and there’s a question in one of the versions of the end logs that’s like: "Was the city worth it in the end?" And many people came up with “Well, this seems like a pretty stupid question to ask because well, look: everyone survived, and what’s the other choice?" Actually, that [question] sometimes pops up online, that the question that this game asks is whether there are situations when it's worth surviving at all rather than sacrificing your humanity or your higher values.

But we don’t want to answer that question. Exactly what you just described is what we wanted to basically ask, and make the player think for themselves.

If we can talk some about the art—it’s a really beautiful game in this kind of grim way. I wondered if we could talk about the art, the 1800s kind of setting and the steampunk influences. What drew you to that particular style of art?

Łukasz Juszczyk: You could think that the Victorian era had a major impact in our references but the truth is, we got most of our influences from the industrial structures as a whole, you know? Of course we get some major architectural guidelines from the Victorian era like some characteristics [of the] buildings or specific window shapes or stuff like that. But you can find cool looking steel bridges everywhere there in the world, you know? So yeah, our biggest inspiration was industrial buildings, [from the] industrial era around the world.

And the choice of the engine used for this game, do you feel like that would work most for the art style or was it chosen for different reasons?

Łukasz: Yes, we work on our in-house engine, and it was a blessing because we did so many tricks, so many smoke and mirror things—for example, building on the [circular map] or maybe if you notice some of the buildings are bending, some are squeezing to fit their construction grid, and that was only possible on our engine. We’ve got specific tools for our specific needs.

What kind of lessons did you learn from This War of Mine that maybe shaped or influenced Frostpunk the most, would you say?

Kuba: Well, I’d say that both games were about survival but the scale was much different. Coming into Frostpunk we knew that we made one really successful game about serious themes in the general survival type of genre, so we tried to use the same mindsets. But the difference of scale between having three people in your shelter and having 80 people to start with and ending up with hundreds was actually a whole other ball game.

And we really had to do a lot of adapting from that, so I’d say that what we knew thanks to making This War of Mine was general concepts like focusing on the experience, focusing on the themes that permeate the game rather than any particular implementation of a mechanic or whatever there is, right? 

So we had the specific type of mindset that we had from This War of Mine that allowed us to, in the end, make this really weird connection of survival city-building scenario type narrative-driven society survival thing that Frostpunk is right now. And because of the mindset that we have thanks to This War of Mine, the experience itself and the themes that we wanted to convey are the guiding lights for us, and not any particular low level decision that we have to make millions of along the whole project.

In terms of the general feeling of both of these games, there’s so much misery, these are not happy people or happy experiences. I found Frostpunk to be incredibly tense and I was very stressed—

Kuba: Sorry! (Laughs)

Ha! No, but, there’s a real appeal in that, in some way to have an experience that is unhappy and miserable and upsetting at times. What do you think the draw is for players to want to immerse themselves in a really horrible situation?

Kuba: Well, you know it’s been said sometimes about games, that games really are just power fantasies, that you end up being this powerful person or whatever doing unimaginable things, and obviously… we obviously are opposed to that, making the games that we make. But I think there is some truth to that in that in the sense that games allow you to live through scenarios that are, thankfully, impossible in real life. But they actually let you play and interact with situations that you would never think of otherwise. And actually pulling through in a difficult scenario like this and having done this yourself against adversity [but] still achieving the goal, I think is actually a powerful experience in and of itself.

But actually the more deeper meaning is, what I personally find fulfilling in making these types of games is that I really believe that these games can ask you… or make you think of things other than “What level did you grind today?” or “What cool new bonus stat on your gun you got?” They can actually make you think about things like what really is worthwhile in life, or what is the line that you wouldn’t cross in any given situation, [or] moral dilemmas, and showcase these difficult situations and ask you basically: “How would you behave?”

Actually, one of the design tenets for the game that we have is actually that—obviously, games are often framed as a series of interesting choices, but what makes a choice interesting? And one of the ways we really like by making choices interesting is asking you whether you’re willing to sacrifice some of your morals, your ideals, or making this one step [over] the line, in exchange for a better outcome, goal-wise, [for] your scenario in the mechanics and in your situation within the game. 

So these are the types of questions and dynamics that are impossible in other media and we think that are possible here in gaming, and are actually the way forward if we want to talk about games being meaningful entertainment. So basically, things that are worth your time and making you look at the world in a different light.

Yeah, and I think Frostpunk touches on some current real-world concerns. In probably two or three of the scenarios refugees are really a major issue, in fact one of the scenarios is a real challenge with the amount of refugees coming to the city. I think obviously there’s climate change themes… were you hoping to maybe give people something to think about in respect to these current world topics?

Kuba: Yeah, definitely. The inspirations are all around us and basically what we think makes for interesting choices is whether these choices are relevant to you as a person, and one of the ways of making them relevant is actually making them contemporary in a way. It’s not necessarily the fact that it’s a fantasy scenario in a fictional world, but the same types of dynamics… we really want to make the game about people and dynamics of societies and communities and what happens when you try to lead in one way versus the other, and this is basically the way for us to comment… well, not comment but make you, the player, comment through the choices you make in the game on contemporary problems in today’s world.

A major inspiration for us was the 19th Century. It was a period of social stratification with masses of the workers, the Luddites rebellion against the machines, and what happens today with artificial intelligence taking jobs, basically. These are really contemporary topics and we enjoyed exploring them because we think they are worthwhile, they are important, and to get people to think about them through our game, that’s really a cool thing for them and for us.

Frostpunk isn’t just about building a city to survive the icy, steampunk apocalypse. After you reach the 20-day mark in the game’s main campaign, you’ll unlock two very different scenarios with added wrinkles that make this grim world that much harder to survive.

Below I've put together some strategies and tips for Frostpunk's two supplemental scenarios: The Arks and The Refugees. We've also got a guide to Frostpunk's main game here.

Scenario: The Arks

The Arks only offers a skeleton crew of workers—forcing you to rely on constructing a fleet of mechanical spiders to keep four special structures warm throughout the game. These arks contain the world's supply of seeds and seedlings which must be protected from freezing in the falling temperatures at all costs.

Research heaters or steam hubs first and quickly 

This is a short, but important note. The Arks’ main objective isn’t just to run a city, but to keep the titular buildings at a level of "chilly" or above. Doing so will require either the heaters or steam hubs upgrades early on to protect the arks from sudden temperature drops.

Resource gathering is very different 

Besides having a very small number of human laborers, forcing you to rely on coal-chugging service mechs, the Arks scenario is completely devoid of worker class citizens. This significantly alters the usual flow of resource gathering. Hunter’s huts are totally nonexistent, for instance, so you should hit research level two as quickly as possible in order to build a couple hothouses—your only ongoing source of rations in this campaign. An early cookhouse and one of the food upgrade laws will help stretch your starting supplies until then.

In the meantime, you can use the veritable army of mechs you’ll receive and build during The Arks to work resource nodes outside your typical heat zones. Robots don’t catch pneumonia, after all.

Don’t Recall Your Scouts Too Early 

Once you send out your first scouting team, there’s a natural impulse to call them back immediately if they find something. After all, you’re likely struggling for supplies in the early days of a Frostpunk campaign—supplies your scouting teams can bring back free of charge. In this scenario, however, resist that urge until you at least reach the Lost Dreadnought node on the overworld map.

You lose nothing by letting a scouting party soak up resources from multiple nodes, but save a lot of travel time by not returning them to your city between each find. Moreover, The Arks scenario won’t let you research factory technology—which allows you to build those all-important mechs—normally. You only get the blueprints for the building by reaching the Lost Dreadnought. So try to hold off on recalling the party before that important story beat.

Scenario: The Refugees

The Refugees scenario, meanwhile, floods your city with wave after wave of sickly citizens that must be kept alive. This can cause a crisis not only in terms of elements such as housing and food supplies, but also in the attitudes of your current residents toward their new and largely unwelcome neighbors.

Sign a Purpose law sooner than normal 

In the main game and Arks scenario, Purpose laws aren’t available at the start. That the Refugees storyline opens them up to you immediately should be your first clue that you’ll want one of their unrest-quelling upgrades early. That’s because this campaign sports so, so many more people. More people mean more complaints. More complaints mean more crises—like demanding food, heating, and health care. You’ll likely have a much harder time fulfilling all of these, but churches and/or town hall meetings will help assuage the discontent and despair that result from failure.

Prioritize your heat zones 

Heat is health in Frostpunk and, since it’s your job to save most of an already-ill flood of emigrants in the Refugees scenario, you’ll need to sharply prioritize that precious warmth. You can start by keeping Medical Posts and housing as close to the central generator as possible. Homes are some of the only structures you can’t cozy up with the Heaters upgrade, so they rely on heat zones produced by the genny and Steam Hubs to keep their occupants healthy. 

Medical Posts are a bit more versatile, but since they’re the chokepoint for healing those sniffling citizens, they should be kept as toasty as possible. By contrast, workplaces often start with higher base heat levels and can even be upgraded more-or-less for free with better insulation. Feel free to set those out farther from the city’s center.

Continue to check and maximize efficiency 

No matter how well you manage your heat, people are going to get sick. The bad news that this applies to working citizens as much as the unemployed. The worse news is that this causes efficiency at the convalescing employee’s workplace to drop and, Frostpunk wont automatically move a healthy worker in to take their place. 

The good news, however, is that there’s an easy solution to this in the Refugees. Any area not working at full capacity will be marked on you map with a bright, yellow bar that’s only filled up halfway. If you see this and have the spare bodies, just go to the building to manage its workers. A couple quick clicks will let you reduce its employee count to zero and then max it back out again. The structure will automatically refill with healthy workers from the available pool while your unproductive patients heal.

Both scenarios: pull citizens off useless structures

Efficiency requires micromanagement. Put simply, you should never have worker sitting idly in nonfunctional workplaces if there’s something better for them to do. Here are some of the most common examples across all scenarios. 

Don’t work the cookhouse if there’s no raw food. Converting raw meat into delicious, thin gruel is important, but only works until your hunters’ haul from the previous night has been fully converted. Once you research hothouses that provide food during the day, this is less of an issue.

Don’t keep engineers in the workshop when there’s nothing to research (or, more likely, while you’re saving up resources). Whatever the reason, if you need to stop researching, put those eggheads to work in the mines for a bit.

Likewise, don't keep engineers in the medical buildings if nobody is sick. This is an exceptionally unlikely scenario, but it can happen—especially during The Arks scenario. No sick people means doctors aren’t necessary. 

Finally, don’t collect resources you’re almost out of room to store. If you find yourself with too much of one and too little of another, consider turning lumberjacks into steelworkers, or vice versa. Although it might better to build a Storage Depot and keep drawing a surplus. It’s guaranteed you’ll need more of everything later, anyway.

The masterful misery simulator Frostpunk has already sold 250,000 copies, developer 11 Bit Studios said today, meaning that it's already covered its development and marketing costs and is now sailing the warm blue seas of profitability. It also means that expansion content, including free updates, is now guaranteed to happen. 

"We plan to polish some rough edges of the original game—you're reporting some issues with difficulty balance, with minor bugs and such. We want to fix that! We also plan to add more modes and scenarios to the game," the studio wrote in a Steam update. "It's too early to announce [specific plans]—but you should be excited. And yes—a sandbox/endless mode is on our mind as well. Frostpunk is going to grow - all you have to do right now is to wait a little bit. We do plan to release a roadmap for our development plans as soon as we're ready." 

Fan suggestions for new features are welcomed, but don't feel bad if yours doesn't make it: "Remember that we also have our ideas and our plans - so we can't promise that your particular idea can be implemented in any way in Frostpunk," 11 Bit wrote. 

For now it sounds like squishing bugs is the priority, and the developers are currently working on a patch to address reported technical issues. It's also released a "support guide" that should help correct most of the problems players encounter. 

Something else you should probably do if you're just getting into Frostpunk is consult with our list of the nine things you should know before taking the charge of humanity's last hope. It could help prevent a lot of citizens becoming popsicles. 

There's a new GeForce driver release available, version 397.31, which delivers optimized graphics support for BattleTech and Frostpunk. Both of those games landed on PC yesterday, and we have reviews up for each one (BattleTech here and Frostpunk here).

Beyond the game optimizations, the release notes (PDF) also mention developer support for Nvidia's RTX ray tracing technology for DirectX 12. Unfortunately this doesn't mean you can enable ray tracing in games, but it does allow developers to start messing around with DirectX ray tracing applications accelerated by RTX, provided they're running a Volta GPU. It also requires Windows 10 Redstone 4, otherwise known (unofficially) as the Spring Creators Update or April Update, which is only available to Windows Insiders at the moment.

Beyond those bits, there are a handful of fixed issues to note. They include:

• [GeForce GTX 1080 Ti][Doom]: The game crashes due to the driver reverting to OpenGL 1.1 when HDR is enabled.
• [GeForce GTX 1060][Far Cry 5]: The game crashes after a few minutes of game play.
• NvfbcPluginWindow temporarily prevents Windows from shutting down after launching a Steam game.
• [Firefox]: Driver TDR error may occur when using Firefox.
• [GeForce GTX 1060][Rise of Tomb Raider]: Flickering/corruption occurs when opening the in-game options UI.
• [NVIDIA Control Panel][SLI][Diablo III]: With V-Sync on and SLI enabled, the game freezes after switching windows (ALT+TAB) a few times. 

You can install the new driver through GeForce Experience, or download and install it manually here.

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.