Frostpunk 2 players manage to cram in 1 million citizens and only suffer half a dozen crashes. 'I wouldn’t fully call it unstable!'

Since its launch, players have been pushing Frostpunk 2 as far as they can. One player tried to outsmart Frostpunk 2 by not fostering democracy, and therefore, not triggering any of the extremists groups to spawn. But now, another player has managed to squeeze a million people into his city.

Redditor NEF293 wrote in a thread that he was able "to cram one million people in the city itself" in Frostpunk 2 Utopia mode. "It took me many hours and a lot of game-breaking knowledge that I and other members of 11 bit studios Discord had accumulated to get to this point. And even then, it's not stable."

The key to solving this crisis is to focus on adaptation and rational cornerstones. This means taking action to ensure your city adapts and welcomes a brand new social order. It also means abandoning old customs that were useful in a previous lifetime and have long disappeared.

NEF293 suggests that you keep your industry within the boundaries of your city, rather than importing resources from outposts or colonies: "The city's demand for goods was several thousand, and would eventually overwhelm any potential trade routes. It's true, three colonies could support this. The industrial districts also produced other essential goods! The Panaceum factories produced food and reduced the disease caused by dense housing. Carrion coal liquefactors produced the oil needed to keep the town warm during whiteouts. Two recast buildings turned oil into materials that kept the city together.

Other laws such as mandatory crowding, dense dwelling, and crate scheme helped maximise shelter while causing little tension amongst the population. Even with all this planning, NEF293’s city still has a shelter rating of -3k, which means that there are still many people in the cold.

If you're asking yourself, "Should i try to beat the odds and grow my town to 1 million people or more?" The answer is yes, but only if both you and your computer are brave enough. One player replied to this thread, saying that his PC began to freak out when it reached a population of over 350,000. He dreaded the thought of how long NEF293’s save screen would last.

NEF293 explains that "they take time. Not too much time because of the SSD. But the more districts you've got, the longer it will take to save." "If you push it far enough, the loading screen will eventually stop moving. The snowflake at the bottom of the screen will not move. The Glimmer beta branch appears to have fixed the DX12 problem that was causing performance issues. At least, that's what I think is the reason I made it this far, compared to my previous record, which was 453,000 people in population after a half dozen crashes. This run had only one crash! (So far)."

Even without having to worry about your game crashing is incredible. I only reached 200,000 people before things started to go south. I made everyone hate me by trying to make the entire population happy. Now I'm afraid to open my save because I know that they're all ready to shout at you. This challenge is not for the weak-hearted.

NEF293 says, "This was super-fun; I love this game and pushing it to the limit has been super-fun for me in many different ways." "If you look at the week counter you are not deceiving yourself. It took me thousands of weeks to complete this task, and I could theoretically push it even further with a Support Colony, if I wanted to. This sounds like an absurd challenge to me. But it's still the next logical step in the development of this metropolis.