How do you increase your trust in Frostpunk 2? Trust is an important element in politics, relationships, and life in general, but perhaps we don’t know the half of it today, you know, in comparison to literally putting your life in the hands of your leader in a frozen wasteland in the 1920s.
In Frostpunk 2, gaining and maintaining the implicit trust of your frostlanders once you’ve unlocked the Frostpunk 2 Council Hall is essential to continuing your rule and completing the story. More importantly, of course, it’s essential to keeping everyone alive and preventing dangerous riots and unruly protests in the city-building game. When it comes to your first whiteout as Steward, you might find you lose it, and fast, so how do you regain the trust fast in Frostpunk 2?
How to increase trust in Frostpunk 2
To find out how to increase trust in Frostpunk 2, hover over the golden bar at the bottom of the screen. This highlights all the ways in which you are currently losing and gaining the trust of each faction. You can then use this information to fix the most pressing matters.
If things are really bad, another good idea is to use the pause function while you assess the situation, ensuring nothing gets worse while you figure out your next move. Now, you can look at all the laws, actions, and faction relations that are dragging you down.
Faction support
Faction support is the most important part of building trust – at the end of the day, it’s their trust we’re talking about. Everything else that affects trust does so because of how it relates to a faction.
It’s tough to keep everyone happy, and while you might want to try, your priority should be your biggest factions – those with the highest percentage of members. From here, you can use your power to sway their trust, either by funding their projects, making a promise to them, or granting an agenda. Click on the individual faction in question to bring up these options.
Making promises
By making a promise to a faction, you must choose between on of three options put before you. These can be anything from passing a specific law, researching a favored project, or constructing a particular building. Naturally, you must keep this promise in order for you trust to rise, and it won’t do so until you keep your promise. Once selected, a timer starts, and you must keep your promise before it runs out.
Don’t forget that some promises will go against actions you’ve already taken or increase fervor in different areas, so choose wisely.
Grant an agenda
Granting an agenda is slightly more risky than making a promise in the sense that you don’t get a choice, it automatically allows the faction to choose the next law brought to council. In some ways, though, this is the better option: trust improves instantly, and the law could fail. You can even help it to do so by negotiating with opposing factions, so, depending on how backhanded your rule, you can use this action to trick factions into trusting you without actually having to do anything for them. Just be careful.
Funding projects
Funding projects is an immediate and simple resolution to slightly increase a faction’s trust, and just requires you giving them an amount of Heatstamps to put towards their own agenda. This doesn’t affect you in any real way aside from the actual cost of heatstamps, but if you fund the same faction too many times, others will start to notice. Find out how to earn more Frostpunk 2 Heatstamps in our separate guide.
Abilities
Abilities refer to things you can do to alter operations, such as implement emergency shifts, that might have negative impact on trust. Another of these is rushed research. Toggling off either of these abilities doesn’t immediately restore trust, but helps after a while.
Later in the game, once you have built Frostpunk 2 colonies in other areas, remember that abilities anywhere effect your overall trust, so emergency shifts in Winterhome, for example, could be turned off as well.
Laws
Finally, there are laws that positively impact your trust and there are laws that negatively impact it, too. Simply, your trust pop up tells you if there’s anything you need to worry about here. If there is, you need to put in the time to reverse them, waiting until the next council meeting and passing the new law. Remember that passing laws can impact certain factions in different ways, though.
This should help you increase your trust in Frostpunk 2, which might come in handy after your first deadly whiteout or a series of terrible decisions in the apocalyptic game. It’s okay, we’ve all been there. As you continue your watch over the area, be sure to have enough Frostland teams to explore.