How to Show Economic Overlays in Frostpunk 2

When you start expanding your city with multiple districts in Frostpunk 2, it’ll be hard to keep track of everything that is going on in your town. You’ll constantly check your needs and might even individually check each district to see the problem and how to fix it. One way to find these problems is through the economic overlays, which new players rarely do. Economic overlays show the summary of each category by highlighting all affected buildings. It’ll be easier to check the status of your city, and here’s how to show your economic overlays in Frostpunk 2.

How to Show Status Overlays in Frostpunk 2

Overlays help you read the status of your city. There are six main economic overlays with specific buttons to open them up:

• Heat and Fuels – 4
• Materials – 5
• Food – 6
• Workforce – 7
• District Proximity Effects – 8
• Base Economy – Alt

Heat and fuels show the heat demand of each district, and you can see which districts need something built around them to improve the heating. Since you always want to build districts next to each other to improve heating, everything that isn’t optimized for this will show up in this overlay. When you start researching other heating sources from the Idea Tree, you’ll also start seeing them in this overlay after building them in the districts as upgrades.

Material overlays show the production and demand of each district. When you start running out of Materials, you want to use the overlay and look for districts that eat up your Materials and lower their production rate.

Food overlays show the food supply and demand for Food Districts and Housing Districts. You want to balance these as much as possible and maybe get a decent stockpile for emergencies. Use the overlay to manage food consumption. If you think there isn’t enough food to go around, you might need to research some Ideas regarding food or pass laws that lower the people’s food consumption rate.

Workforce shows the available workforce in the city and all districts that use up your workforce. If you are lacking a workforce, it is best to use this overlay and check if you are really out of the workforce or if you just need to wait a little for your population to grow because you were expanding too quickly.

The district proximity effects overlay shows the benefits you get from placing certain districts close to each other. If you place Housing Districts next to other Housing Districts and Food Districts, you’ll gain some heat bonuses. However, if you place Housing Districts next to Industrial Districts, you’ll increase Squalor, and crime rates could go up. Housing Districts next to Extraction Districts may also increase diseases. The overlay shows you all these effects in just one simple button.

The base economy overlay basically shows you the quick summary of your overall income from Heatstamps. You naturally get Heatstamps from a growing population and even more from supplying Goods to your population.