Can you change the difficulty in Frostpunk 2?

You want an easy way out?

An industrial city with red smoke around it in Frostpunk 2
Image via 11 bit studios

Frostpunk 2 can be challenging if you ignore people’s needs. If you feel like you overestimated yourself when selecting a difficulty, here’s everything you need to know about changing it.

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Can you change the difficulty in Frostpunk 2?

Everything's frozen in Frostpunk 2
Cold waits for no one. Screenshot by Dot Esports

You can’t change the difficulty once you start a playthrough in Frostpunk 2. The difficulty setting you choose heavily affects the flow of the game and every move you make, especially when it comes to planning and dealing with problems in the city. This is why difficulty isn’t something you can change on the go.

All difficulties in Frostpunk 2, explained

Frostpunk 2 difficulty settings menu
Choose your difficulty. Screenshot by Dot Esports

Since you can’t change the difficulty during the playthrough, make sure to select a difficulty that suits your playstyle best when starting a new game. For your first playthrough, I recommend sticking with the lowest difficulty, Citizen. It provides a decent level of challenge despite being the lowest while leaving you with more room to explore different things you can do in the game and make mistakes.

The higher the difficulty, the less room you have for mistakes. Here are all the difficulties in Frostpunk 2:

  • Citizen: Moderate challenge but with a margin for error and room to make mistakes.
  • Officer: A challenging endeavor, still with a margin for error, but otherwise demanding focus and planning.
  • Steward: A demanding challenge with little room for error, requiring meticulous planning and the ability to manage concurrent crises.
  • Captain: Extreme challenge with almost no room for error, requiring perfect planning and ability to deal with mounting catastrophe when plans inevitably fail.

For a personalized experience, you can create a custom difficulty preset by adjusting one or more of the following four difficulty elements:

  • Economy: Determines how many resources the people need and how many are available in the city. The higher the economy difficulty is, the faster the problems in the city pile up.
  • Weather: Determines the frequency and strength of colder seasons and Whiteouts.
  • Frostland: Determines how many people and resources are available in the Frostland.
  • Society: Dictates people’s reactions to problems and failures (including failing promises). The higher the difficulty, the harder it is to pass laws.

If you want an extra challenge and level of realism, you can turn on the Survivor mode. There’s no active pause in the Survivor mode, and you can only save your progress by exiting the game.

Author
Image of Edward Strazd
Edward Strazd
Freelance News and SEO Writer for Dot Esports, covering everything from live service games like Destiny 2 and Fortnite to new releases. Writing about games since 2021. When he's not writing, he's probably grinding for loot in Destiny 2.