In Frostpunk 2, it’s been 30 years since the apocalypse - what comes next?

You’ve survived the end of the world. So, what’s next? That’s the question developer 11 Bit Studios is asking in Frostpunk 2, the follow-up to its hugely successful survival city-builder set on an earth that’s been permanently covered in arctic temperatures. Frostpunk 2 broadens the scope of the first game, and while it will allow players to build much larger settlements, they’ll also have to contend with the complex politics that emerge any time you have fewer positions of power than people wanting to fill them.

As Frostpunk 2 opens, it’s been thirty years since the Great Storm, the destructive natural event that served as the main challenge in the original Frostpunk. In that time, the remnants of human society have settled into an uneasy new normal. The cities built in the first game are now districts in much larger metropolises. Instead of individual buildings, players can paint entire areas to zone them for a specific purpose. The timescale has also expanded: where Frostpunk focused on days and weeks, Frostpunk 2 has weeks, months, and years flipping by before your eyes.

The developers said they’ve also built a new economic system for Frostpunk 2. Each district you build—for housing, industry, resource extraction, food production, and more—produces a resource of some kind, but also has input requirements that need to be met. It’s a system of supply and demand, and 11 Bit Studios says it’s important to keep an eye on the balance between production and consumption, particularly in the early stages of the game, when survival is still uncertain.

Frostpunk 2’s cities are clearly frontier towns built to be functional rather than beautiful, but they have a satisfying organic character to them. Each one is arranged around a central generator that sends a column of black smoke into the wintry sky, and component neighborhoods grow out from there like rays or flower petals. Along the roads, the lamps of travelers can be seen, stretched into long paths of light like in long-exposure cityscapes.

One of the most interesting new developments in Frostpunk 2 is in the way the game handles important decisions about technology and policy. Your city and its districts aren’t just made of buildings and roads; they’re also composed of the people who live there, as well as the communities those people form. At the outset, cities have groups sorted into “Engineers” and “Foragers,” and these communities have different ideas about how to approach basic questions like how to find food and ensure everyone has housing.

The engineers are the descendants of the groups that built the first settlements in the wake of the Great Storm. They tend to favor technological solutions to problems; for instance, they might want to look for a chemical process that increases the efficiency of available soil to increase crop yields. The foragers, whose parents spent years surviving in the harsh conditions outside cities, are resistant to anything that would make them dependent on technology. They might prefer something like recycling human waste into fertilizer—a method that’s been tried and tested over thousands of years.

You’ll be able to see the effects of your decisions in the city itself, but also in the thoughts of your citizens, which you can check in on at will. Because the imminent threat of death from the hostile environment has lifted in the decades since the Great Storm, the people expect to have some say in their government. Each city has a council, where communities send delegates to hash out not only the policies and technologies your city pursues, but also what kind of society they want to become.

As a player, you’ll be able to propose ideas for laws, but you’ll need the support of a majority in order to actually implement anything. Each community in your settlement will have different opinions about proposed laws, and it’s possible to bargain with these groups to gain their support.

Maybe you want to get a bill passed that mandates school for children, and about half of the council supports it. You could leave it to chance and let the votes fall as they may, or you could reach out to one of the groups represented in the council and see if you can give them something in exchange for their support. Rolling back a law they didn’t like might help, or you could shore up a few more votes by promising them something in the future.

It’s an impressively sophisticated take on politics, especially when you consider that the groups that make up the city council remember how you’ve treated them and will become easier or harder to work with based on the choices you make. Not only that, but new communities will gradually form based on the way your city’s zeitgeist develops. Hard-line offshoots of the engineers and foragers may emerge, and these radicals are much less willing to tolerate ideas that favor other ideologies or approaches. They may be unreasonable, but you ignore them at your peril: If their demands aren’t met, they may decide to head out into your districts and drum up support, and you may eventually face a rebellion or coup.

It’s here where Frostpunk 2 players will face their greatest existential threats. With the danger posed from the harsh environment largely managed, the biggest hazards to maturing cities will come from within: from the unwillingness of certain groups to budge on key issues, or from the hubris of leaders unwilling to bend and adapt to their citizens’ demands.

When Frostpunk 2 launches next year, you’ll be able to play in both a more guided story mode, as well as in the “Utopia Builder” sandbox mode. 11 Bit says that, like its other games, this one will be a stiff challenge—but it’s a challenge we’re definitely eager to take on for ourselves.