Dear Citizens!

Some time ago due to your unyielding interest we asked you to share your questions about the world of Frostpunk 1. We received a couple thousand questions in total! This video contains the answers to the most popular ones from Jakub Stokalski who was the Lead Designer of Frostpunk 1 and is currently the Game Director and Design Director at Frostpunk 2. Enjoy!

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Below you can find the questions and answers in the written form!

What happened to the rest of the world? Has the entire planet gone permanently cold?
You can reasonably assume that while the story focused on London and England the calamity was global and different countries saw it coming in different ways. It just goes without saying that some would try to adapt in different ways. We even hint at this at The Last Autumn and other points of the scenario. So you might reasonably expect different areas of the world to have some strategies of survival which we do not depict in the game. What they are specifically, how many survived or maybe all of them are gone we kind of want to keep under wraps.

What happened to the British Royal Family and other powerful people of the era?
We did not want to focus too much on establishing, you know, lots of backstory which is not the point of the game experience itself. However as the lore grew we knew that what actually enveloped Great Britain and the world in principle as The Great Freeze was progressing was all the social pressure to the point of civilization crumbling. The old social order started being under extreme duress and many violent happenings occured all around the world. The ultimate fate of the social structure of this time is something that we want to keep open.

Where and how many generator sites were there?
We did not specify and we do not want to specify how many generator sites were there, apart from the fact that there were multiple. Basically throughout all of the content you saw in Frostpunk you saw multiple generator sites as well as some failed sites so it goes without saying that the whole generator project was a big effort by the British Empire to try to save civilization.

Are there any technologies other than the generators used to survive the cold?
Even as we established in The Last Autumn different countries and different powers at the time saw the freeze coming and tried to adapt in their own ways. A few examples would be the French in The Last Autumn building this mysterious railway thingy. In the last expansion On The Edge we showed different settlements kind of trying to eke out a living even after The Great Storm. But definitely the generators were something big that was meant to uphold civilization and society in its structure.
Would the other methods of survival allow this large-scale human settlement, large-scale social structures to survive? This we don't want to define at this time.

Where did the people of Winterhome end up? Is the city of New Manchester indeed the survivors of Winterhome?
Well, New Manchester is a story of its own so it was not never intended actually for them to be survivors of Winterhome. But the fate of the people of Winterhome is intentionally left vague and we will have to see if we can revisit them maybe at some point.

Why do our people travel North with their generators? Wouldn't it make more sense to go closer to the equator?
That's the one we actually get quite a lot also internally in the team but the backstory here is this. The Great Freeze that was happening in the 19th century was actually enveloping the whole world. So it was not the fact that it was getting colder everywhere but a bit warmer on the equator. Actually, the temperatures were falling to a single global minimum all around the world. And if you would imagine the places that were least adapted and least prone to succeeding as a cohering civilizational hub to such a dramatic process it would actually be the areas which are least adapted to cold to begin with. So in the lore that we established the actual equatorial area of the world and the colonies of the British Empire, other countries and indigenous people there were simply least prepared for what was coming. So as soon as it started happening the biggest social upheaval, the biggest social problems, the biggest tumult and turmoil was happening actually in areas where it was the warmest. So if you think about it, if you wanted to do something like a top secret Arc-like project of building the generators you probably wouldn't want to place it in an area which is already in upheaval. So that was the reason to go north to try to maintain secrecy for the huge effort that was the construction process of building multiple generator sites and trying to do it in a secret manner. As well as for the abundance of resources and the fact that the fauna and flora and the whole ecosystem in the north was best adapted to the cold from the very beginning.

What exactly is a steamcore?
While it's not magical and it certainly doesn't do what it wants it is a bit of this steampunk fantasy element of the world building that we did alongside with automatons and, you could argue, the generator itself. While we were building the game and building up the lore, what we truly wanted to focus on is the story of survival and what society is capable of when pushed to the limits. So we did not want to focus too much on your typical science fiction steampunk doodads of the world. However it is a steampunk world and actually the steampunk being the heat source as well as power source makes a lot of sense to use the genre in the setting that we built. And there are certain areas like the automatons, like the generators, like the steam cores where we allowed ourselves to be a bit more loose with the interpretation to build up this “steampunkness” of the world, I would say. So yeah, the steam core is a power source and it's definitely steam based as the name suggests but I would leave it at this.

Some backstory of Tesla City?
It was an effort by Nikola Tesla to build up the city which went wrong for social reasons and basically collapsed. And as we were building it and developing Frostpunk 1 this was a bit of a cautionary tale and foreshadowing of what could happen to your city if you didn't do a good job as the captain, similarly to Winterhome which triggered the big crisis of the Londoners in the main scenario. We did not want to dwell too much into the backstory of Tesla City again for similar reasons. It's there to build up the core conflict of the player's city in the base game.

Why didn't the government take control of the generators? What was the military doing?
The governments and the military and all of the structures of the society were crumbling down so they simply weren't as much in power as they used to be as the frost was progressing. And we've established this in different backgrounds of our cities like for instance Winterhome has been established by a sort of a military outpost which grew into a city. It wasn't as simple as the military staying in power and in control because as the world is ending it is fair to say that you know, nobody is really in control.

Thank you for reading!

Take care,
11 bit studios

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