There's a lot to manage in Frostpunk. Late into the game, you may have trouble with New Manchester, an underdeveloped city begging for the help of your scouts and people. Deciding to help them means sending a scout relief team over to New Manchester to perform their due diligence.
Your scouts help you discover new settlements and find more resources around the small world you live in. You'll never rebuild society and survive the New Ice age without people and food. These scouts can be sent on missions to investigate towns and help others, at the cost of your own resources and time. Sending out scouts to build a shelter for New Manchester is different than sending out scouts to explore a cave, so here's how to do it right.
Research And Build A Beacon Using The Workshop
To even have scouts available, you need to craft a beacon. To be able to craft a beacon, you must research it using a workshop. Workshops are buildings you can place in your city that allow you to research many things. These things allow you to craft more buildings or upgrade existing systems in place.
In the skill tree for Technology, the second tab, one of your first options will be researching a beacon. This costs 10 wood and takes seven hours to research. Depending on your level of difficulty, the hours of research time will change. Once the number of hours is complete, the beacon will be available to craft and you can place it from the building mode. Placing a beacon costs 20 wood and 35 steel.
Have Enough Materials To Help New Manchester
Helping out New Manchester will require a lot of your resources. Researching the beacon, placing a beacon down, and actually hiring a scout team or two is costly. And that's beside the preparation needed for the quest to provide shelter for New Manchester. One team of scouts will cost 40 wood and 5 people. You should make sure you have everything you need before starting to recruit scouts and conduct missions.
At this point in the game, you should have built a Coal Thumper, Steelworks, and Wall Drill. Once you've depleted the piles of wood and steel on the ground, there will seemingly be no more materials left to collect. You will need these machines to help you acquire more resources from the mountain walls and the ground. You'll have to research these machines with a workshop first.
There will be a limit to how many resources you can hold, so you must craft a Resource Depot from the Resource tab of building mode. You can store more materials this way. Make sure to collect as much wood and steel as you can and that you have workers available for this relief mission.
The cost for a normal team of scouts versus relief scouts is different. A relief expedition will cost you 600 wood, 600 steel, and one automaton. These items are needed to build the shelter New Manchester requires.
Select Relief Expedition Over The Normal Scouts
So now you have a jaw-dropping amount of materials and a beacon or two in place. When you have the option to create a relief expedition for a quest, it will become available in your beacon's menu. The way to select this expedition is by clicking the arrow to the left or right of the area where you craft a new scout team.
Click through until you read "Relief Expedition". If it's greyed out, this is because you don't have the necessary resources to craft an expedition. The yellow material icons will let you know what you're missing more of. If you need to release an automaton from duty or are low on wood, the icons will be red or grey.
Beacons can only hold around three scout teams. If there's no space for another team, you won't be able to craft a relief expedition team regardless of if you have all the necessary materials. You must disband one scout team to make space.
Selecting Where The Scouts Should Go
In general, the way scouts work is that you craft a team, then zoom out to look at the map. You must click the scout icon on the map and then click the location. Once you click the location you want them to go to, there will be an X or a green arrow. Click the green arrow to confirm that they should go there.
For a relief expedition, things are slightly different. This is for a questline and is not your regular scout exploration. When you launch your expedition, your relief team will automatically go to New Manchester without the need for you to select locations. The biggest hurdle is collecting all the necessary materials. After that, the quest is one click away.