How did minor settlements survive the great storm?

[CrabNicholson]

The temperatures are friggin -120 degrees celsius. For reference, the freezing point of carbon dioxide (dry ice) is -80 degrees celsius. The breath would literally freeze in your lungs. Your eyes would instantly freeze shut. Your lungs would be scarred from breathing and you would probably die in a matter of minutes if you left your shelter.

We've been building up all game to have a super-powered generator, to have insulated houses, and heaters, and all sorts of things to survive it, and even then, we expect like half of the settlement to be sick by the end of it.

Then in the expansions we go out and find some random guys in a hut or in a mine, complaining they have no coal, no insulation for their shelters, no medical facilities, etc.

How did they survive their lungs being frozen solid in the great storm without even basic necessities for survival?

[Bobywan]

The thermal spring guys had a thermal spring to warm them up.
The coal mine kids had coal.
The lasts guys had ... I don't know, it's just magic !

[Amanoob105]

Originally posted by Bobywan:

The thermal spring guys had a thermal spring to warm them up.
The coal mine kids had coal.
The lasts guys had ... I don't know, it's just magic !

To add to this.

-The thermal spring guys also seemed to be in a valley, offering shelter and making it so what heat they had didn't have to cover that large an area.
-The coal mine was built partly within said mine and also what seems to be in a steep sided canyon the mine was located in making for a great deal of shelter.
-The last guys, the shipwreck camp, have a giant ass ship, with an equally big boiler and easy access to lots of wood (and due to the nature of the ship in question, likely started the storm with a fairly high population compared to the other two).

[CrabNicholson]

Would fires even start in -120 degrees? Certainly not wood fires

[Amanoob105]

Originally posted by CrabNicholson:

Would fires even start in -120 degrees? Certainly not wood fires

If that's the case, then the generators themselves are out of luck as they kinda require an active fire in order to work.

I'm not going to claim they're perfect explanations free of any plotholes. I mean, the entire game is set in a steampunk universe, there's a LOT of areas that don't make any sense the more you think about them .

So I guess in this case the best answer we have to your question is, yes, apparently you can keep an already lit (assuming they got the fire going before it got that cold and kept it going for the duration) fire going at such low temperatures. At least when done in a steampunk world.

How much weight can your suspension bridge of disbelief hold?

[Ceejay]

Originally posted by CrabNicholson:

Would fires even start in -120 degrees? Certainly not wood fires

I would not think so, however its most likely the fires would already have been lit even in a +5 condition, after all who wants to be cold when you have source of heat. Then its just the case of keep feeding the fire.

[Silhouette Fleur]

Reality vs something cool, it comes down to the compromise of world building.

The blunt answer is those settlements are well and truly dead, realistically.
Carbon monoxide build up, lack of food and nutrition, being snowed under, etc.

Instead of installing wildly inefficient steam towers which radiate most of their heat upwards where no one benefits from it, realistically people should have just used the building pits to put houses underground where everything is naturally insulated.. But we'd have less of an aesthetically pleasing game.

I've got questions on how they even took foreign land to build on, no nation is that altruistic.
But again, the answer is compromise.

[Amanoob105]

Originally posted by Silhouette Fleur:

Reality vs something cool, it comes down to the compromise of world building.

The blunt answer is those settlements are well and truly dead, realistically.
Carbon monoxide build up, lack of food and nutrition, being snowed under, etc.

Instead of installing wildly inefficient steam towers which radiate most of their heat upwards where no one benefits from it, realistically people should have just used the building pits to put houses underground where everything is naturally insulated.. But we'd have less of an aesthetically pleasing game.

Yeah, pretty much. The plotholes in this game are larger than the ones we have our cities in. But without them we wouldn't have just an amazing game.

Originally posted by Silhouette Fleur:

I've got questions on how they even took foreign land to build on, no nation is that altruistic.
But again, the answer is compromise.

There is mentions of Britain selling off all sorts of things (crown jewels) to finance the generators.
Some of which was possibly land grabs. Though not a lot I'd guess.

However for the rest? Most steampunk settings are in around the equivalent of our 19th-century. So most of the land is basically ours anyway .
And for what isn't? Our military still works (there's mentions of such in game) and most of the places it seems we built these things in wouldn't have had a lot of people already there to try to make a claim, let alone hold it.
And for the rest, we already owned it.

[CrabNicholson]

I always head-canoned that the generators kept houses heated through plumbing networks carrying superheated steam throughout the city, and radiating the heat into the houses through the plumbing. When you build roads, you do see pipes being laid alongside the roads. But game mechanics wise it certainly does seem like they simply radiate the heat into the atmosphere.

Also I am not a big lore buff, but I think the story takes place on the north pole, or something, because whatever cataclysm caused the temperatures to fall, originated from the south. Maybe the planet was tilted onto a different axis or something.

[Carrthesixth]

Some places would get more of the heart of the storm then others. The mountain range I think protected shipwreck cove peoples a good deal. Places deep deep underground like the core/metal cash On The Edge would have some insulation from the storm, same with deep natural cave systems. Finally you could get lucky and live on a geothermal hot spring.
Otherwise burn everything and pray.
the real question isn't how humanity survived, its how animals did. Hunting should not be possible after that storm.

[CloudSeeker]

First of all. Carbon Dioxide freeze at -78.5 C and not -80.

Second. We already have people who survive that kind of enviorment already. They exist on the pools and are called researchers. They just need to be sheltered.

Third. Your breath should not freeze in your lungs because your lungs will not have a internal temperature of -80C. Your breath is actually hot when you breath it out. It will freeze quickly after you breath it out yes, but that does not mean you will freeze solid alive. You will die from frostbite long before your lungs freeze over.

Fourth. I have to give you that the temperatures in the game are inhuman. They have never been recorded to happen on this planet. However the lowest temperature recorded was -82.8 C and happened on 23 June 1982 on the South Pole.

Fifth. You can start fires in cold temperatures. Not from scratch no. But if it is already hot, you can still start new fires. Remember that the tempetaure shown in the game is not the temperature shown in every workplace or home. It is the outside tempertaure and the heat tower pumps heat into everything else. If you do not have enough heating to start a fire when it hits -120 C. I believe you are already dead at that point as the heat tower have most likely stopped working.

[Amanoob105]

I forgot something. To the question of how Hot Springs survived the great storm? It's a moot point, as there was no one there to need to when it happened .

When first meeting them they mention that they came there after the storm, from another city/generator. One that was helped survive by people from another generator location.
Most take this to mean that in The Arks scenario the version where you also help that other city survive is the cannon ending.

[Awayward]

Originally posted by CrabNicholson:

I always head-canoned that the generators kept houses heated through plumbing networks carrying superheated steam throughout the city, and radiating the heat into the houses through the plumbing. When you build roads, you do see pipes being laid alongside the roads. But game mechanics wise it certainly does seem like they simply radiate the heat into the atmosphere.

Also I am not a big lore buff, but I think the story takes place on the north pole, or something, because whatever cataclysm caused the temperatures to fall, originated from the south. Maybe the planet was tilted onto a different axis or something.

i dont even think you need head canon, as you extend roads with houses they have visible pipes.