Frostpunk is a brutal game that requires a lot of strategic thinking and critical decision making. Since the early game, the play will be faced with numerous challenges that will get harder in difficulty as they progress. That’s why I present to you my top 5 strategies that will help guide your city into prospering and become as efficient as possible.

5. Laws Strategy:

Frostpunk isn't just about managing a community and making sure your society grows. You have to deal with politics and your people going against you. The Book of Laws allows you to control how your people feel and how they live, but no matter which option you choose, someone will be unhappy about it.

Why the Law Strategy is Great:

• These laws are prepared in such a way that you can choose between focusing on the needs of citizens or forcing them to do more things. 
• Some choices in this strategy at first seem to be focused on the needs of citizens, but later have more practical application.
• Nearing the end of the game, before the coming storm, you'll be asked to pick a side. This is another major choice in The Book Of Laws and is entirely up to you. You must decide to either lead your community with Order and Discipline or lead them with Faith and Spiritual Strength. Each side has its strengths and weaknesses. It's possible to win with either.

Law Strategy details:

• You can sign laws before someone even asks for one. This way you're ahead of the game and have already created long-lasting solutions for problems that will soon come and your Hope will remain stable.
• Don’t use the emergency shift law unless ABSOLUTELY necessary. I cannot stress this enough, that law is only useful because after passing it you can pass the extended shift law, which comes in handy when the workload accumulates. But other than that you should keep them both unused because they can cause upheaval in your emerging society.
• How to create a well working health care: 1. Issue child shelters law. 2. Move all children to help in medical posts. 3. Issue radical therapy and care house laws. 4. Additionally you can issue the corpse disposal law instead of the cemetery law. Under no circumstances should you issue a law that enables the people to perform lynches. This will greatly drop the hope indicator. Additionally, it will cause a wave of murders. You will lose up to 30% of citizens who would normally work for you.
• Radical treatment is without a doubt the more meta option. Gravely ill citizens are useless, permanent drains on your economy until you get infirmaries or houses of healing. The only downside is you have to pay 10 steel to heal the 30%, but 10 steel in the midgame is nothing compared to losing a worker for the entire early game. The only reason to choose to sustain life is for ethical reasons, it is not at all optimal.
• Siding either with Faith or with Order can be solutions for different problems. Your specific playstyle will bring about challenges specific to you, so each law will solve a problem you have that another player may not have. If your Discontent is way too high toward this part of the game, you'll want to choose Order. If your Hope has been way too low, you'll want Faith.

4. Scouting Strategy:

In Frostpunk, once you have constructed the Beacon, it will allow you to recon and send scouting parties on different expeditions around you. They explore the area around you, look for bonuses and rewards, and bring them back to you.

Why the Scouting Strategy is Great:

• If you send your people out for exploration, they usually not only search the selected location, but also spot further exploration areas in the distance, to which you can send new scout teams. 
• There are also a lot of resources like coal and steam cores (which are the only way to get automatrons) to extract.
• There are a number of different scouting areas and completing each will give you different rewards as well as unlock new areas and structures for you.
• You can discover useful locations that you may turn into outposts later. These outposts will provide you with valuable resources in the mid-game.

The Scouting Strategy details:

• Once the Beacon is researched, build it immediately in the second ring and then start research on Sawmills. If you don’t you will probably run out of wood crates and your building and research development will be severely hampered until you can get Sawmills built and producing wood.
• Assemble a Scout team as soon as you have the wood and send them out to the Lost Expedition. You’ll need to free up five workers from gathering resources, but since it’s free time you won’t lose any resource gathering as long as you don’t remove them from any of the sites working a 24 hour shift.
• Keep sending your scout to exploration instead of taking them back to your base each time.And if you find the resources and your city can survive without them then don’t take your scout parties back keep them busy in exploring.
• You don’t have to escort any survivors you may find back to your city, that would be a waste of time for your scouting teams. Instead, send the survivors on their own and keep exploring and collecting resources (even if the survivors happen to be a bunch of children).
• Make sure to not drain Tesla City of its resources and keep it as a viable option for an outpost later, as it will produce one steam core a day which will improve the quality of gameplay significantly.

3. Gathering Strategy:

Frostpunk is a game of survival. After the Generator resources are the next most important thing. Without coal your generator will fail, without food people will starve, and without wood and steel buildings can’t be constructed. There are five resources in Frostpunk, six if you include the citizens, coal, wood, steel, food and steam cores.

Why the Gathering Strategy is Great:

• Following this strategy will help you accumulate the highest amount of resources in the shortest span of time, allowing your city to thrive.
• You won’t have to worry about feeding the citizens or keeping them warm because the barest of necessities (coal and food) will be available at all times.
• You will be able to research non-stop, without having to worry about the cost.
• Building costs won’t be a problem, the only thing you need to keep an eye out for is their placement. But worry not, I got you covered in the Layout Strategy.

Gathering Strategy details:

• Rather than have your citizens scrabble around in the ice and snow in the freezing cold, build them Gathering Posts to give them very small protection against the chill. That is, it has one level of heating insulation, which is just enough to keep people healthy for the first few days.
• Gathering posts double worker’s efficiency and help collect the early resources hastily.
• When building a gathering post, there is a circle of influence around it, indicating how far workers will go to gather resources. Players should try to tag as many as possible to maximize efficiency.
• Even after exhausting all the resources there are to collect, you can connect the gathering resources to a Coal Thumper (each Coal Thumper requires 2 gathering resources to work efficiently).
• The fastest and easiest way to gather raw food at the start of the game is with Hunter’s Huts since they are available immediately without any research needed. Until upgraded a Hunter’s Hut takes 15 Workers to be fully staffed and it produces 15 raw food a day from a 12-hour hunt, and the hunts are only done at night. What this boils down to is collecting 15 raw food per day from each Hunter’s Hut.
• However, there is a little workaround you can do to work more efficiently. You can employ the required amount of hunters at night and employ the same people in other posts during the day. This will allow you to work double the effort with half the workforce.

2.  Research Strategy:

Research in Frostpunk is what enables you to survive the storm and efficiently researching technology is a must for survival. Some branches can even be safely ignored in order to speed up gains in other areas. Initially, you only have a few buildings available - on top of that, some of them are rather inefficient. That's why you need the Workshop ASAP. 

Why the Research Strategy is Great:

• This strategy helps the player get an advantage over the cold through providing the required preparations to survive the weather.
• It provides access to a tech tree and different upgrades.
• Doing Research at an early stage can help you a lot for how to start frostpunk like a pro. By building a workshop first you can research the skills and buildings. And help you a lot in surviving the first week.
• You want your BEACON up ASAP to get scouts to find more survivors. 

The Research Strategy details:

• To efficiently research in Frostpunk you need to get the necessities out of the way first. Once at least one Workshop is built the best item to start research on is the Beacon. You should be able to build and staff two Workshops at the very beginning of the game, which gives you a research speed of 130%, which is what my recommendation is.
• Research Beacon first, and find more recruits.Researching the Beacon takes 7 Hours at 100% research rate but having the second Workshop means it will be finished in just under 5 hours. The best reason for this to be the first item to research is twofold, more people, including Engineers, and more resources that can be gathered and brought home by the Scout Teams, including Steam Cores.
• Start researching building upgrades as soon as possible: the faster you can upgrade and insulate your buildings, the less heat you’ll need to generate, and the less coal you’ll need to consume
• don't feel that you need to research everything on the Technology Tree; just research the things you need, and feel free to skip to the next tier of research, if necessary.For example, research into Bunkhouses and Houses can be totally ignored as long as you take the extra steps to make sure no one freezes to death, like turning the Generator on more frequently and for longer periods of time. Another area that can be ignored is Hothouses. They come too late in the research tree and with enough Hunters you can provide more than enough food for the city. 
• Heat technology is the area I like to focus on to offset that disadvantage, and it should be fully researched prior to the Storm anyway.
• If the coal piles run out before you can build a coal mine and there is a lack of steam cores, then researching Coal Thumpers makes sense, but again, it’s inefficient to research both Coal Mines and Coal Thumpers and the first level of Coal Thumpers is probably all that needs to be researched, Coal Mines will supply more than enough coal, especially if supplemented by a Coal Mine Outpost.

1. Layout Strategy:

Layout optimization is an important factor in the game as it may be the one deciding whether or not the city survives. Seeing that you’re running on very limited supplies, you need to make the best use of space and heating through calculated placement of buildings and factories. 

Why the Layout Strategy is Great:

• It helps the player significantly increase their odds of survival since the start of the game tends to be harsh and many cities do not survive their first days.
• This strategy evades any kind of relocation problems that might pop up later during the gameplay. The player won’t have to demolish buildings and rebuild for any reason whatsoever.
• As the player advances through the game, they are introduced to new mechanics and buildings. This optimal layout takes into account every aspect of the game and integrates it efficiently.
• Not only does a good layout strategy help the player get a headstart in the early game, it also aids their attempts at surviving the last days of the endgame.

The Layout Strategy details:

• At the beginning of the game, pull a road from the right side of the stockpile, this would be your backbone to the whole build. 
• The first district you would make is the research district, because duh, day 1 workshop is the way to go. Place your first workshop exactly 4 houses away from the generator (this would the one and only counting you need with this layout). The final generator range upgrade ends here, so build accordingly. 
• That being said, the first 4 rows of the generator shouldn't be filled with anything but houses, guards, and a fighting arena. Any building you need to place must be placed on the outer ring where the first workshop is placed. This would be the outer backbone of this layout.
• Steam hubs research should be done before the second -40C temperature drop occurs. The first steam hub will be placed in the research district, make sure you put it in the middle of the district so it can cover all of the workshops that you will place eventually.(Pro tip : Compared to the heater economy, you will be using less coal if you have more than 6 workshops heated). 
• On row 1, early on the game, Build 8 houses and 2 medical posts to start. Later, dismantle the medical posts and replace with infirmary, you should be able to establish an infirmary district by then On row 2, all houses.
• No other building On row 3, This is where the accommodation lies, Repeat this layout until it encompasses the third row. There is one caveat however, it doesn't fit perfectly, so nearing the end of the circle, you need to compromise a single house to be skipped to allow 100% coverage. On row 4, all houses. No other building
• The next and subsequent district will be made on the left or right side of the workshop. I usually go with a cookhouse touching the left side of the workshop because of the wood economy, and it allows me to build a sawmill nearby. Make sure to put a similar sized / the same building to make it not only symmetrical ,but also manageable. The next district would be built the same way as the backbone (workshop).
• Any district could be anything you want it to be, you want a Care house district, or a care house/child shelter combo. Or an unheated hunter's district, or a cookhouse, pub combo, or even an extra housing district. 
• What this build is all about is a steam hub heating a group of similar sized buildings. The other coal saving is that you can group a steam hub to use the same setting. For example, the workshop district uses a 10/14 steam hub config, since all of my engineers rest at the same time, no heating would be needed in that district. Contrast to my infirmary district which runs 24 hour a day.
• The left side of the map is for anything you want it to be actually, But In my opinion this side of the map is perfect for storage, since there is little to none permanent site. This could be just another area so your district can expand to. But if you have nothing else to build, there is no pain in storing a ridiculous amount of coal.

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