

An early game constant sees you investigating wood missing from storage, only to find the camp’s children have been stealing it to build a treehouse. Those story events will occasionally pop up in your colony too, unprompted. Yep – it’s as thrilling as it sounds, though admittedly that’s a small complaint considering how rarely combat occurs. When violence does occur, you’ll watch some numbers growl angrily at each other, ticking down until one of them reads 0. Clutches of survivors willing to join you, and bandits demanding tribute on threat of violence. An eccentric trader adorned with a saucepan hat and brandishing a golf-club walking stick. The same gate that grants your colony freedom to explore the world outside your ramshackle tenements and makeshift hunting cabins also invites guests to come visit. Early game construction of a gate allows these specialists to venture out, scavenging for vital resources, establishing outposts, or advancing the main story. You can set them about gathering berries or other chump work, If you’re feeling especially insulting, their unique talents are better applied to exploring the world map. While most of their work/sleep routines are automated – with some control over which jobs to prioritise through buildings – you have direct control of a few specific, unique survivors. You might soon find your most important resource is your colonists themselves. Resource stockpiles to repair buildings when the mercurial sky decides to periodically vomit fire. Guard towers to deal with aggressive creatures. Burners for winter, and food reserves to compensate once fishing lakes freeze over. Like a Two Point Hospital outbreak or (to be generous to Aftermath) a Frostpunkcold snap, these events compel you to manage with one eye to the future. Such pandemics are one of a few different disasters that Aftermath will periodically jam in your clockwork colony to keep you on your frostbitten, possibly irradiated toes.
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When we finally saw the end of it, the colony welcomed a baby girl into this strange new world we found ourselves in. Scorched and dry, our water reserves dwindled.

A few months later, we were hit by a blistering heatwave.
#FROSTPUNK STORY PATCH#
After my first experience of a devastating pandemic that left a chunk of my population dying of thirst, I got paranoid and started dedicating a sizable patch of real estate to clean water storage. That’s not to say Aftermath’s rusty gears don’t occasionally churn out some procedural magic. It’s that same fug you’ll need to wade through to get to the interesting parts. But, like all celestial bodies plummeting to meet the earth, these fragments are eventually dulled, their fiery manes reduced to a grey-brown fug. A brilliant hue that mirrors the hints of brilliance in the game at large. Those comets are engulfed in a purple glow that gestures at a greater mystery behind the game’s otherwise rote post-apocalypse.
