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• Frostpunk is a survival city-builder made by 11 bit studios. In the main scenario (A New Home), you are tasked with building the last great city on Steampunk Earth as the temperature plummets during an unexplained natural disaster.
  
• A central feature of the game is moral choice - sometimes the morally good choice is actually the correct/optimal one, so don't assume that you're going to be better off by being an evil dick all of the time. For instance child labor is an easy way to gain a bunch of extra resources early on but those children are your future, and later there will be benefits to putting them in what is essentially a school; these are mutually exclusive options. That said, usually the morally ambiguous or evil choice is the easier one, and eventually ascending to Steam Hitler or Steam Pope removes a lot of the challenge. The game challenges you to not simply take the easiest path all the time, and that's part of the fun
  
• Basically, the world is cold. If people are too cold, they become sick and die. You must balance the need to keep your people warm + content against various moral choices + maintaining basic survival necessities, like food.
  
• Your first order of business is to start gathering resources. You'll have stacks of materials near your generator that you can assign workers and engineers to go gather. For the purposes of gathering, there's no difference between a worker and an engineer. You'll need Coal to power the generator, and Wood and Steel to build stuff, usually with Wood being more often used but easier to find/gather/produce. Early on, you should try to build a Workshop so that you can start researching technologies, and a Cookhouse so that you can start making food.
  
• In the early days, the temperature is warm enough that you don't need gathering posts. As the temperature drops though, assigning workers directly to resource piles will cause them to become sick, as the resource piles will be either Cold or Freezing. Gathering posts provide a bit of extra warmth, and can later be further heated, making them essential. But in the early days they are a waste of resources.
  
• Eventually your resource piles will start to deplete and you'll need to find other sources, via the technology tree.
  
• For wood, you can build sawmills and wall drills. Sawmills are radial gathering building that literally cuts down trees on your map, the latter gets placed next to a wall and basically sucks wood out of one of the huge glaciers along the edge of your map. Wall drills basically never exhaust and produce wood way faster, but require a steam core to be built and are a Tier 2 tech. Sawmills are a nice stopgap since they're easy to research + build, but eventually all of your wood income should come from wall drills, and upgraded sawmills are kind of a trap since you'll literally run out of trees to harvest whereas walldrills can function forever.
  
• For coal, you can build coal thumpers, coal mines, and charcoal kilns. Coal thumpers create coal piles, which you have to either assign people to gather those piles directly (bad) or build gathering posts next to them and put people in those (warm, good). Coal mines are like wall drills, in that they have to be built on specific squares on your map and require a steam core but their rate of production per worker is quite good. Charcoal kilns are interesting in that they convert wood into coal, they're actually quite effective if you have a wood surplus and don't require many workers. There's no right choice here; some maps provide lots of workers in which case coal thumpers are a fantastic choice, since you basically can convert manpower into coal, whereas others really call for kilns or mines (see: the Arks scenario)
  
• For steel, you can build steelworks. That's it. Your map has steel deposits on it, go build steelworks on them.
  
• Early on, your only real options for food are Hunter's Huts to gather raw food and Cookhouses to prepare rations from them. With the right tech choices you can create Hothouses, where a steam core allows plants to be grown and harvested. This is probably the least-effective way of using steam cores unless you're really dedicated to building a vegetarian steampunk society, but if you're short on workers then hothouses provide a good, steady stream of raw food and can also be permanently manned by automatons
  
• In addition to basic resources (wood, steel, coal, food) you must also manage the city's Hope and Discontent; too little hope or too little discontent will cause your people to revolt, and if you can't fix the situation within 2 days then it's game over. It's generally easier to reduce discontent than it is to raise hope, but later in the game you'll gain access to buildings and abilities that allow hope to be better-managed.
  
• If you hover your mouse over the Discontent and Hope bars, the game will show you the currently-active permanent and temporary modifiers to each so that you can course-correct. If people are very mad about unburied corpses, then consider providing a place for bodies to go. Some modifiers, like extended shifts, can be immediately fixed for a quick reduction in discontent; other modifiers will simply require time to pass (such as a recent death or an unpopular law)
  
• If your discontent is too high, then you will become unable to pass certain laws that create temporary discontent until your discontent falls below some threshold. This is something to consider. If you want to start a 24h emergency shift but are about to pass some slightly-unpopular law also, maybe pass the law first before taking the huge discontent hit from the emergency shift.
  
• Most of your interaction with the people of the city is through the resolution of events and the passing of laws. Events may offer one-time or permanent bonuses or detriments. Laws are all permanent effects that may also provide a temporary bonus or detriment. You cannot repeal a law, but sometimes the negative effect of an unpopular law will fade with time.
  
• Your early laws are focused around improving your city's ability to survive, and many of them are part of a binary choice. You can choose to implement ceremonial funerals for the dead, or you can just throw any corpses in a big snow pit. There are serious upsides to a snowpit let me tell you!
  
• Some law choices unlock additional laws; Child Labor unlocks Even More Child Labor, whereas Child Shelters allow you to set up apprenticeships, allowing kids to help out in your workshops or in your medical infrastructure as candystripers or whatever (which provide a small but pretty nice efficiency boost to these workplaces)
  
• Some of your most important early laws are Emergency and Extended shifts. These are abilities attached to any workplace that either force them to operate for 24h (once) or add several hours to the start+end of its operational hours (can be toggled on/off). Emergency shifts create a lot of discontent all at once and may cause deaths from overwork or carelessness, extended shifts cause a slow buildup of discontent over time that can be wiped out by simply untoggling the extended shift in each building. Extended shifts are extremely good, emergency shifts should be used sparingly (personally I only ever use them 1-2 times per game, once early on to gain breathing room and maybe later in the event of a true emergency)
  
• Exploration is the single most resource-profitable thing you can do. You unlock exploration by researching and then building a Beacon and then creating an exploration team with some wood + workers. The world map is littered with valuable resources, and a common Survivor Mode strategy is to rush-build a Beacon with emergency shifts because of the sheer resource advantages an exploration team can provide. There's also a lot of story content out there in the frozen wilderness, so get some people out there! This is true of every map.
  
• Some workplaces, such as Beacons and Hunter's Huts, do not require heating. Generally any workplace where the workers are leaving the city for their job do not require heat. You can place these on the outskirts of your city
  
• Some workplaces, such as Cookhouses, must be chilly or warmer during working hours in order to function
  
• Importantly, Cookhouses must also be staffed in order for people to eat there. Having a ton of rations is not enough; you need people in the Cookhouse serving them out
  
• When people become sick, the workplace they work in loses a corresponding amount of efficiency. A workplace at 0% efficiency is not functioning. Importantly, sometimes people make the mistake of just putting 1 worker in a cookhouse. But if that worker becomes sick, then suddenly a bunch of people aren't able to eat. Usually 2-3 workers is good enough for the early game
  
• Since sick workers don't work, it is essential to pay attention to your medical infrastructure. Sick people need medical beds in order to get better. Sick people without a bed don't get better and will quickly become gravely ill, and the gravely ill can't normally be treated in mere medical posts. So it's better to have enough beds for everyone in the first place. Overcrowding is a law that doubles the capacity of all medical infrastructure, which is ludicrously powerful for a relatively small discontent hit. The alternative, which lets you dole out extra rations to the sick, is nice but not nearly as strong. Red health icons are sick people not in bed, Grey health icons are sick people who are in bed and getting better.
  
• Residences and medical infrastructure must be kept warm at all times. Do not let these places dip below Chilly; medical infrastructure will stop running, and people living in Cold or Freezing homes will become frostbitten and die.
  
• In the early game, steam hubs are a more efficient use of coal than expanding the range of your generator. In the later game, the opposite is true.
  
• People are split up between Engineers, Workers, and Children. Certain jobs, like workshops or medical posts, can only employ engineers. Most jobs can be performed by any engineer or worker. The child labor law allows children to work safe jobs (cookhouses, gathering, etc) and a second law allows children to also work dangerous jobs (pass this and children can be employed anywhere that a normal worker can be employed)
  
• All research is performed by engineers working in workshop. You can increase your rate of research by building more workshops with more engineers, but this has diminishing returns. I never build more than 4 workshops and manage to research literally every technology.
  
• Eventually you'll be offered new law trees between Order and Faith. There's not really a wrong choice here. Order is slightly better at reducing discontent, but its basic structures require workers to function. Faith is slightly better at increasing hope, and its basic structure (the church) does not require heat or workers. One or the other could be better for your particular game, depending on what's going on. Faith uniquely provides a type of medical building that functions like an infirmary but A) without costing a steam core and B) can be staffed by literally anyone, including children if you have child labor, so if you're finding yourself with a lot of sick people and not enough engineers to treat them then maybe consider that.
  
• Eventually you'll gain the ability to build automatons, which cost some resources + 1 steam core and basically let you automate any 1 workplace per automaton. Automatons are less effective than people (60% efficiency before upgrades, vs 100% for a fully-staffed workplace) but they also operate 24 hours/day and don't require any heating, so they're great for harvesting coal out of a lonely mine in some out-of-the-way corner of the map with no heat infrastructure.
  
• Each of the scenarios follows many of the same basic rules with some twist. A New Home, the first scenario that came with the game and which should be played first, is considered The Main Game. The other scenarios are some shorter variation on it. For instance The Arks provides you with only a handful of engineers, and you must keep certain mission-critical structures above some minimum temperature, so gameplay is focused on heavy use of automatons and worker-efficient structures. Refugees is the opposite of that; you have very many people, but not a lot of space or resources. Winterhome gives you a lot of people and resources but starts you off with a badly-designed, mostly-destroyed city; you need to figure out what parts are recoverable and what parts need to be scrapped entirely. The Last Autumn is actually about building a generator and take places before the cold, so it's more about rallying a scared, superstitious workforce into completing a monumental, dangerous task on a tight schedule
  
• You do not need to buy any DLC in order to fully enjoy the game; DLC adds additional scenarios and does not alter the main game/scenarios