Endgame Survival Guide

Here are some suggestions for surviving the endgame your very first time. You should absolutely read this ***before*** hitting the endgame. There are some very mild spoilers inside.

Endgame Preppers: What you need to do

Hey all, this is my first guide, hope you like it!

So the game dumps some crazy requirements on you with 24 hours notice in the endgame. I found this unfair, so I figured I'd give a little guidance and advance notice to those inclined to use this guide!

Endgame goals:

1. Stockpile a week's worth of food for each citizen. In most cases that's over 3,000 food rations. That's a lot of food rations. You can still win without this, but it becomes very touch and go as your citizens will get super pissed and want to overthrow you. Make sure you have upgraded industrial hothouses and lots of storage well in advance of the final endgame (about 40 days in).

2. Keep your citizens warm and have the requisite tech research (I think it's generator power 3 and capacity overcharge). Also a tall order. The temperature of the endgame reaches -120 degrees and your food buildings shut off, hence the need for a week's worth of rations. How do you keep your citizens alive in such conditions? Lots of medical posts/infirmaries, houses and micromanaging the generator overcharge ability. You have to keep your citizens on this side of freezing for a week.

3. Recall all outposts and scouts. By far the easiest.

Things to bear in mind: Your mines will start to break apart from the cold. Don't let them. Send people into the shafts to die rather than letting your coal mines be destroyed. Coal is warmth, and warmth is life. Make sure you have your coal mines manned by automatons by the time the endgame rolls around. The mines will be too cold for people to work in. Again, coal is life.

People will get sick. A lot of people will get sick. Like, if you have 600 people, 300 of them will be sick. This is due to the extreme cold making every single building cold or worse. If you don't have a lot of medical posts and infirmaries by your generator, your entire city will be dead before the week is out.

Discontent is a very real thing in the final week. The discontent bar will fill all the way up. Be ready for that and have ways to deal with it. As order, use patrols, propaganda, mass imprisonment etc. Do whatever you can to lower discontent when you need to. It will shoot back up, but all you have to do is stall people exiling you for 4 or so days (it will be close).

I think this goes without saying, but make sure you've gotten rid of the hope bar by the time the endgame rolls around. You don't need to be distracted with that in addition to all of your citizen's other needs. You accomplish this by acquiring the final order law in the lawbook. I assume something similar happens in the faith tree.

The game will reprimand you, saying you crossed the line blah blah, but just remember as order, you're doing what you have to to save children's lives! So you tell the game not to be so judgy!

[Spanker]

Actually, once you get the hang of which tech to research first, it's quite easy. I have over 4k of rations, 3k of raw food, and almost 30k coals, and pretty much research everything i needed. Didn't bother researching Coal Thumpers nor Hothouses. A few days after the storm strikes, dismantle all the flying hunter huts and replace them with Med tents, Care houses, or Healing houses, I only have 2 cooking huts. My factories churned about 16 automatons, so I pretty much fast forwarded the whole week of blizzard.

[V4D4RS F1ST]

idk why but i did not struggle on my first successful playthough. I was very compassionate and took every survivor i found. Ended with over 600. I had so many people finding jobs for them became difficult so i spammed research and flying hunter huts. Even let my mines fail as i had enough of everything stockpiled to ignore them and enough automatons to run the thumpers anyway buying me a pretty good length of time.

[robin2u]

Beanzoboy Apr 30, 2018 @ 10:27pm
You mean that I can't just store food as raw food to be cooked later, but actually have to store the rations themselves? That's a huge pain in the ass.
Well, you could stockpile all your needed rations then take workers out of the cookhouse so that your raw food would then build up to whatever quantity you have in storage (I think, I haven't tried this).

[AturUwU]

you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ monster,you send people to death even though you could have only build Coal Thumpers

[AturUwU]

Wow this must be hard if you dont choose anything from the purpose tree

[AironCel]

Don't dismantle all your cookhouses!! People will need them to get their rations. They will not eat if you don't have at least one working cookhouse.

Also, I think you can prevent the mines freezing over event if you put steam hubs next to them. I might be wrong here, it might be random, but I didn't get the event in my game where I heated the mines.

[Beanzoboy]

Tips: It's highly advantageous to build houses AROUND the fighting arena. Each house (or care house) built around it gives a permanent decrease to despair. I did the child shelters way early, which wound up helping a bit with research in the long term, and if you build enough child shelters for all the children, there's a Despair reduction for that, too. Also, guard towers are WAY important, and using the guard patrol greatly reduces despair and increases hope. (Try to use them as often as possible, to increase the Hope bar, or after a setback to reduce despair).

Keep exploring until you physically can't anymore. My scouts found several research upgrades (house insulation!!!) without having to research them. Saves lots of time and resources. Also, the storm doesn't hit all at once, but creeps in slowly. Make sure you keep an eye on that and get people out of the bases closest to the storm.

[Beanzoboy]

Update: I beat the game! No prisons and no dictatorship! Shoop teh whoop. I got LOTS of achievements in my first run. Never built tents so took 4 days to reasearch bunkhouses. Also, I accepted everyone that came to my shelter and all the people I found in the area. Had over 680 people at the end.

[Beanzoboy]

Also, there is an achievement for winning the game without building any shelters higher than the tents, so there has to be a way to do it. I'm going to have automatons mining everything, but will I be able to get the gathering depots to work during the storm? Even with maxed heat? I don't think I'll be able to save enough coal for a whole week, what with my furnace burning 2500+ per day. I do hate the scripted Hope losses and Discontent rises. The hope has been over 90% for a vast majority of the game, and because it's in the script suddenly everyone's pissed at me.

[Beanzoboy]

You mean that I can't just store food as raw food to be cooked later, but actually have to store the rations themselves? That's a huge pain in the ass.

Also, I don't want to go all out dictator in my game. I haven't even built the prison. Only had 1 Londoner leave (six were left, but my hope was so high that I convinced most of them to stay) and I keep my Hope maxed out if I can. I have guard towers all around my living areas, and I'll tear down my Hunter Huts once I get my food and I'll have all my homes as houses soon. I've got quite a few care houses, so the very ill are actually going to be an advantage during this week as they gather in fewer buildings to save heat and eat half as much food.