Getting enough heatstamps in Frostpunk 2 can be a bit of a challenge. This new resource represents a currency grounded in heat—that's right, things have gotten so bad in the eternal winter that New London has started monetising warmth and exchanging it for goods and services. You'll need heatstamps to do just about anything; from building a district to researching new tech in the ideas tree.
Unlike prefabs, there are a very limited number of ways to get them, however, and most of these revolve around Frostpunk 2's faction mechanics. Apart from workforce, getting enough heatstamps is your most significant challenge in terms of expanding the city and making progress in resolving its many problems.
How to get heatstamps in Frostpunk 2
There are a few different ways to acquire or optimise heatstamp production in Frostpunk 2, but most of them revolve around interacting with the game's political factions. You can:
- Tax it from your population: You'll passively gain a heatstamp income per week from your population, and this will be higher if you're producing enough of the goods resource to meet their desires. To produce goods, build an industrial district, then make sure to toggle its produced resource from prefabs to goods in the building menu. As you expand and acquire more settlements, they'll contribute heatstamps too provided their goods desires are also met.
- Use the Raise Funds action with factions: You can periodically use the Raise Funds action with each faction in your city—it seems like 40 weeks is the cooldown. Depending on their size, they'll contribute a lump sum of heatstamps, but this will impact your relations with them negatively. It's a good idea to periodically harvest heatstamps from all the factions in your city if you want to grow fast; just make sure to appease them in other ways so they don't get too upset.
- Use the Demand Funds action with factions: If you don't care about upsetting factions, on the other hand, you can use the Demand Funds action to take the heatstamps by force. To do this, you'll need guard squads, which you can get by researching and building watchtowers in districts, or by using the Stalwart faction's mobilise enforcers action, which gives you some for free.
- Ask for them from a rallying faction: If a faction likes you enough they'll start rallying in the city and will offer to contribute to your cause. If you pick the heatstamp contribution option from them, you'll get a big lump sum that you can spend on the city.
- Pass laws that increase heatstamp per capita: While this won't give you heatstamps directly, passing certain laws like Paid Essentials will increase the number of heatstamps you regularly acquire from the population of the city. If you want to gain the most you can, be careful when passing laws or researching ideas that reduces heatstamp per capita.
