New Home Survivor Mode

This guide is a little outdated by now. I think that I also used a specific map (there are different variants) that made this particular approach more viable (distance and clustering of ress can make a difference).
I will update it again soon when I find the time for it :)

Hi, just completed the New Home Map in Frostpunk on Survivor Mode and wanted to share what I painstakingly learned to be a good starting build order. On Hard Mode, there are still different ways to get through unharmed and I tried several Tech Rushes and all sorts of labour distributions in SM, but it's way more unstable and simply doesn't forgive mistakes made in the first 15 days. You just die.
But since this map snowballs at some point and gets hard to lose, the start is everything, together with some luck. That's why the main focus in this guide is the early game and the transition into the midgame.
So fire up the coal ovens, roll up in your thin blankets and put the whiny children to work. You are in for a fun ride of frostbite, working extra shifts in dangerous, hard jobs, police power, religious fanaticism and temperatures cold enough to freeze the face of your skull.

General Tips Guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2070919963

Other Survival Mode Guides:
Fall of Winterhome https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1862068205

First Steps

At the very beginning, First get Child Labour (the best kind of Labour) and distribute your Workers. The most reliant distribution I found was:

• All 50 Workers on Wood
  
• All 15 Engineers on steel
  
• All 15 Children collect coal

With the first resources, build your 8 Shelters, a Medic Post and a Workshop and fully staff both. You'll have a minimum of ~5 sick people in the first night. Activate the heat as late as possible, which would be 17:15 (the Reactor takes 45 ingame minutes to reach 1 level of heating) and deactivate it at 8:00 in the morning. Empty houses do not require heating, after all.
This will be viable on the first days where it's -20 degree only. That way the children manage to collect enough coal for you to burn until you can improve your collection rate before it runs dry.

In the first night get Emergency Shift Law and immediately research Faster Gathering (should start shortly after 2 am when timed good). For what Laws and Research to take next, look at bottom sections.

On second day you need to get started on food. Build a Hunters Hood and a Cookhouse. But before you start to prepare meals (2 children are sufficient), get Soup first, which will be your 3rd law. When you don't get this done in time, people will eat your raw food reserves, which will be fatal. Not because people get sick from raw food, but because it's massively inefficient and everyone will starve.
So, the time windows here are short. Your people won't build the Cookhouse before the shift ends, so the cooks won't make soup before Day 3. If the Soup Law isn't in place in time, they will produce normal, less efficient meals and you will most likely still starve.

You can keep trying of course. It might work out if you rush for a 2nd Hunter's Hut (which you'll need soon, anyway) and possibly a 3rd. But since they require an insane amount of manpower that you require for other resources, that will come back around. Even micro managing them can only do so much (Hunter's Hut's work at night, so you can fill them up in the evening and send the workers back to collecting resources the moment they come back from hunting (the circle in the Hut's has to be complete). This redistribution of workers isn't instant, so overall less resources will be collected. It takes hours for them to effectively start working when switching from hunting to gathering. Still, there is a (possible) exploit with placing only a few hunters offset into multiple Huts and filling them up respectively right before the circle is completed, which will increase the amount of food it puts out. That way you can possibly collect the full food capacity of multiple Huts with a fraction of the maximum workforce. Again, it's hard to tell if the effort is worth the gain. Frankly, you don't need it. (Apparently fixed.)

Next Steps

You might need to balance Coal, Steel and Wood with ~5 Workers, so you keep enough coal and have enough wood/steel for research and buildings. Especially since the next thing should be the beacon. One doesn't actually have to rush it, though. Many events are scripted. The most important thing is to go and rush the Automaton (the free one on the map you can pick up with Scouts, not the tech!). Don't go to Gloomy Cave, it's the one with the bear and either way it'll be bad or worse for you. Either your scouts survive and bring back a ♥♥♥♥ ton of hungry people (which will starve you) or they die and you have nothing. If you are lucky you can go to Crash Site, which might have a nice stack of valuable wood. Else do the first couple Main Quest Spots. Just don't go to Manchester, it will trigger The Londoners and you don't want to deal with that for as long as possible.

Then it'll get way colder and you don't want to let your people collect the resources unprotected. Get a Gatherer's Hut on a double pile of coal and to the bottom right double wood + steel a little later. And you should have built and manned a second hunters hut, else it's over soon.
You can get a second workshop and probably want a second medic post if too many are sick.

From there on it's a lot of balancing the economy. The most important thing is to not break promises and to not get to 0 Hope or 100% Discontent. You will have to reset - unless you have a very robust foundation, which wont be the case before days 20-30. In case of high Discontent, it might still be manageable. But 0 Hope is not.
Also, lucky scouting can help. The two most valuable Outposts are by far the Steel and Steam Engine ones, you should get both.
If you have two Sawmills and can get three Coal Mines running, the map is almost won. Be very careful with the Emergency and Extended Shifts. It fills the discontent bar dangerously fast. As soon as you go to Manchester or the forced event happens, you get to choose between Faith and Order. Faith is easier in my opinion. And don't leave the choice screen. You can choose a law there even if "Book of Law" is still on cooldown and you really should pick a law there. Getting the laws to counter the Londoners is crucial here.

When everything is stable and running fine, upgrade to Houses, get automaton tech and pretty much anything, just prioritise to improve your weakest point. Keep your faith skills on cooldown unless there's nothing to 'un'-discontent. Infirmaries are insane and before the storm hits, you might want to build 2-3 Charcoal Kilns and/or 1-2 Coal Thumper.

Very important: Hunters wont need any heating in the entire play through. BUT when the storm hits, you will have to manually remove them from the workplace or deactivate every single hut. For some reason they stay in the building (without any heating), even though the storm prevents them from hunting. They will rapidly get very sick, as it will get too cold even for the huts. The sick ones then fill your medic posts, while healthy, jobless workers automatically fill there spots in the huts, also getting sick. This rather hidden interaction will rotate through your population and mean trouble.

Laws

This is a good order I found:

• Child Labour
  
• Emergency Shift
  
• Soup
  
• Extended Shift
  
• Radical Treatment
  
• Fighting Arena
  
• Dueling Law
  
• Cementary

From there on, choose as required. Keep in mind that Laws have very delayed effects and they are unlikely to safe you from current troubles.

Research

In order:

• Faster gathering
  
• Beacon
  
• Heaters
  
• Hunter's Gear
  
• Sawmill

Then it pretty much depends on your resources. You want T1 early for Generator Range, so all houses get heated. Steam Hubs commit to or ignore them and squeeze all buildings that need Hub heating into the Reactor range. It might not always work out perfectly, but unheated houses will be automatically avoided by the people (if there's a heated place somewhere else). One building that can't heat itself enough on its own is the cookhouse, so be wary of that. If it's too cold, your people can't eat there.
Stick to Coal Mines, they should be enough. Sawmills are enough as well, since you can heat all of these buildings with Heaters. Most of the time the steel will be the bottleneck for your progress, so you'll need the Outpost as soon as you can afford it.

Final Tips

Don't rush for Automatons (the Technology) and use them very late to automate the Mines, Steelworks and Drills, so you don't need to heat them.
Discover every spot except Winchester. It'll give you a lot of time to stabilise your city.
You can pretty much take in everyone easily, but maybe avoid the 35 children. Children just eat and are close to useless, so just like rl (in lategame you don't need them anyways). This might be different should you try the Child Labour All Jobs Law. Even though that sounds like a fun way to occupy the little guys, it'll probably spell more trouble in the comparably short window where you lack workers and automatons. For some reason it causes immediate discontent and new "A Child got badly hurt at the workplace" events that are guaranteed to appear if you appoint them at the respective jobs (Coal Mine, Sawmill, etc). Also, when asked for double rations for working children: Don't, they are monsters and burn through your food. They are half the size, why would they need double the food anyway??
The same goes for Corpse Disposal with several discontent events and Triage, so I avoided these and got House of Pleasure late. Feel free to experiment. Triage might come in handy, but is risky. It can also help in the storm, should your medic posts be filled up. If you have done a very good job, you shouldn't need it, though.
Additionally, keep in mind again that Hunting Huts do not require any heating. So don't waste precious, heated land on them.


Hope this guide can help you a little :)
Remember, have fun and try your own strategies first! Work yourself up the ladder of difficulty. But be reminded, that even 'Hard' is significantly more forgiving and plays out differently than 'Survivor Mode'. For comparison: I used to rush 'Wall Drill' into 'Coal Mining' directly after 'Beacon', completely dodging the hassle with Sawmills and Gatherer's Huts. That still worked on 'Hard', but proved to be impossible in SM (can't be a coincidence that that's the acronym).
By the way, the F in FUN stands for 'Frostpunk'. (The U is for 'U die' and the N for 'No god! Please no! Noooo!')

Here a screenshot from my playthrough. As you can see, one can easily have a ton of resources.

If there's interest in a even more detailed guide or you have specific questions, just comment and i'll do my best to help you. :)

Edit: I added some more details and explained a bit more.
PS: The 'Seed Arc' campaign might be easier to do in SM than this one. So try it first, if you like.

[AI Language Model]

@Wrathgarr care to share what did you do?

[Bluebottle]

maybe i just got lucky but i finally got the achievement after following the tips in this guide, tho i did get overcrowding instead of fighting arena and drawing boards+wall drill instead of sawmill

[Wrathgarr]

Not to be rude, but I have no idea how you beat the game with this build order. I followed it to the letter for three playthroughs, and it just doesn't work. I've been doing it very differently, and it's been working a lot better. I wonder if maybe there have been some changes to the game since you wrote this! It might be worth revisiting

[(>♡.♡)>]

This guide doesnt work at all. Not even freaking close. Day 5 I have no wood, no food, 50 sick people, and hit max discontent. Day 7 im thrown out of power.

[Wakko]

2/2

A good use for children is to use the Coal Thumper and chuck the kids in gathering posts around them. I had 3 thumpers running at some point, with somewhere around 12 or more gathering posts. That would keep 120 kids busy, in addition to some kids in hothouse and cookhouse, you'll be able to make use of them. Don't let those shits sit on their asses!
At least until you get automatons running all your mines, which is what I transitioned into just before the storm.

Also, steam hubs are great, and often cheaper than heaters, if you can cover enough buildings with it (like say, 12 gathering posts).

- Wakko

[Wakko]

1/2

Great guide, though! Learned some things that might improve my next survivor run (only did a run on extreme so far).

Had some thoughts I wanted to share, however;

Corpse Disposal is great, because it leads to Organ Transplants, which is amazing!
20% increase on all medical facilities, regardless if you have any corpses. This is huge, and the discontent hits from the events are negligible because discontent is trivial to handle, compared to hope.

On my extreme run, I abused the shit out of emergency shifts and extended shifts and any troublesome events I didn't wanna deal with, to the point that my people wanted to throw my ass out 3 times. Every time I was able to drop below 75% with ease. Letting the arena do it's thing, solving some issue like cold homes, disabling extended shifts or using abilities from Order/Faith buildings.

[Wakko]

"Discover every spot except Winchester."
Is this supposed to be Winterhome again, or some other location? :P

[Wakko]

"Just don't go to Manchester"
"As soon as you go to Manchester"

Surely you mean Winterhome? Manchester is from the The Arks scenario...

[Peeblybingus]

Main thing I think should be prioritized is letting as few people as possible get sick. Also coal thumpers are god. Definitely a nice guide Sun

[Peeblybingus]

15. Getting the steam hub range is honestly pretty useless. The efficiency after that is helpfulish but by that point you should be having no problems with your coal economy if you've built enough gathering huts and coal thumpers even without the coal mines. It's a waste of time and careful position of regular steam hubs is probably more helpful.
16. I only got sawmills cuz I didn't have the steam cores to make a drill and only use it for like 2-3 days. Maybe you can find a way to work around but for me it was necessary to build things.

Do it right and you won't even need the house of pleasure, child labor, or even need to cross the line in the faith law tree. I made mistakes and got a handful of people killed but I'm sure that number could be reduced to close to 0.