Life in Frostpunk 2 is never great for most people, taking place in a frozen hellhole thirty years after a massive blizzard turned Earth into permanent tundra. Keeping warm is a real struggle, but it has to be a little easier when a million people are crammed into a single city.
News in brief
- Player used a combination of Utopia mode and several key features to achieve one million citizens
- The sheer number of people made the game very unstable
- It's a further push of Frostpunk 2's limits
A million is a large number, and it's even larger when you consider how tough it can be to keep a city of any amount of people running in Frostpunk 2. Anyone who's spent any time in Frostpunk 2 is likely to be impressed by Redditor NEF293's feat. It required using the game's sandbox Utopia mode, but also an intricate series of choices and events to force the game's engine into accepting such a large amount of people.
Key to the feat was leaning hard into adaptation and reason cornerstones, which allow your people to throw off old traditions and ways of thinking that are no longer useful during the post-apocalypse. Keeping industry within the city walls and minimizing trade routes also helped to keep the city viable, as did passing laws which, unsurprisingly, allowed for massive overcrowding.
How did the game cope? Well, not that well. ""It took many hours to get to this part, as well as utilising all the game-breaking knowledge I and many other members of the 11 bit studios Discord have collected to reach this point, and even then, I wouldn't fully call it stable!" NEF293 said. It also took patience, with thousands of in-game weeks passing before the landmark population was hit.
Other players are considering trying to exceed that score, now, though it's worth keeping in mind that such high numbers do take a serious toll on your PC's hardware, so it's only for the bravest players and most powerful rigs. One player on Reddit noted that their computer started to act up after hitting a population of 350,000.
