Like any good city-building simulator, players have been testing ways to push Frostpunk 2 to its limit pretty much since launch. We've already seen one player try to outsmart the game by never opting to foster democracy and, therefore, not trigger any of the extremist groups to spawn, but now someone else has done the unthinkable and managed to squeeze one million people into their city.
"I was able to cram 1 million people into the city itself in Frostpunk 2's Utopia mode," Redditor NEF293 says in a thread. "It took many hours to get to this part, as well as utilising all the game-breaking knowledge I and many other members of the 11 bit studios Discord have collected to reach this point, and even then, I wouldn't fully call it stable!"
The secret to this overcrowding crisis seems to be focusing on adaptation and reason cornerstones, which means taking actions to ensure that your city adapts to the cold and also welcomes a new societal order, abandoning old traditions that were only useful in another lifetime that have long since disappeared.
NEF293 also suggests keeping industry within the confines of your city instead of importing resources from colonies or outposts: "The demand for goods in the city was several thousand and would eventually overwhelm potential trade routes. Though it's true that three colonies could sustain this. The industrial districts were also making several other critical goods! Panaceum factories made food and massively reduced disease caused by dense housing, carrion coal liquefactors made the oil necessary to keep the city warm during whiteouts, and two recast buildings were turning oil into the materials necessary to keep the city together."
Other laws like mandatory crowding, dense housing, and crate schemes helped maximise shelter and cause little tension among the population. But even with all of this planning, NEF293's city is still sitting at -3k shelter, which means there's still a lot of people out in the cold.
But if you're wondering, "Should I try to beat all the odds and grow my city to 1 million plus people?" the answer is only if you and your PC are brave enough. One player responded to this thread saying that their PC started to freak out after reaching a population of 350,000, so they dreaded thinking about how long NEF293's save screen lasts.
"They take time, not too much time thanks to the SSD, but the more districts you have, the longer it'll take for it to save," NEF293 explains. "If you go far enough, eventually, the loading screen with the snowflake in the bottom middle of the screen won't move while it's loading! Yet, the Glimmer beta branch seems to have fixed a problem with DX12 that made performance less horrifying. At least, I think that's why I got this far, considering my previous record of 453,000 people in the population after half a dozen crashes. This run only had a single crash! (So far)."
Even without having to deal with your game crashing, sustaining such a large city in Frostpunk 2 is incredibly impressive. I only got to 200,000 people before it all started to go downhill. By trying to make my entire population happy, I ended up making everyone hate my guts, and now I'm too scared to open my save again because I know they're all waiting to shout at me. So, this challenge definitely isn't for the faint of heart.
"This was super fun; I really love this game, and trying to push it to the absolute limit has been super fun for me in many ways," NEF293 says. "Also, if you check the week counter, your eyes aren't deceiving you. This did indeed take me thousands of game weeks to do, and in theory, I can push this even further with the Support Colony if I really want to." This sounds like a pretty ridiculous challenge to me, but even still, it's probably the next logical step for this metropolis.
