How to Reduce Tension in Your City in Frostpunk 2

Frostpunk 2 has way too many things to look after. Constantly checking your supplies, crime rates, Squalor, heating, and faction relationships is too daunting. However, there is one metric that gives you an overall “score” of how things are going in your city. This metric is the tension bubble at the bottom of your UI in-game. Here’s what tension means and how to reduce it in your city in Frostpunk 2.

How to Lower Tension in Your City in Frostpunk 2

To quickly explain tension mechanics, here’s what it means: Your people feel tension when bad things happen to the city or when things look bleak. When tension rises among the people, it snowballs into worse things for the community and could lead to the death of the city or your exile. Since tension is an overall “score” of your city, you want to pay attention to each need to reduce the tension in your city. Here are the basic things to avoid to reduce tension:

• Cold
• Hunger
• Disease
• Squalor
• Crime

As you can see, these are all the major things you want to avoid overall in the game. The most common cause of tension is when your people are feeling cold. Usually, you can fix this properly by building your districts close to each other, but there are occasions when it becomes difficult because the temperature may drop drastically at random times.

You always want to stockpile enough food to avoid hunger, and when your population is about to grow, you should consider this when building your Food Districts.

Disease is easily avoidable when you deal with the first two problems properly. However, there are some cases where you can cause diseases through decision-making (laws and ideas) and clumping up Housing Districts with Industrial or Extraction Districts.

Squalor and crime are basically solved when you have enough security or guards and enough Goods to keep your people entertained.

The best way to reduce tension is to keep a balance of everything. You don’t want to overproduce something to solve an issue, as it may lead to other problems. You also don’t want to underproduce as you may burn through your stockpile without realizing it, leading to more problems. Frostpunk 2 is an extremely difficult game, and it is what makes the game so unique from different RTS games.