A lot of the new stuff in Frostpunk 2 can be a bit confusing to learn, though the game does explicitly warn you that failure is inevitable as you are still learning how stuff works. In one of the early chapters, you can potentially unlock the ability to efficiently harvest from virtually infinite resources, and in this guide, we will show you how to utilize the deep melting drill for that purpose.
How to Use Deep Melting Drill
First, in order to actually unlock the Deep Melting Drill, you will need to progress far enough into the story to get the option to either fight or embrace the cold. For the purposes of this guide, you must choose to defeat the frost.
This option will give you the ability to create oil pumps as an upgrade to your generator, and this will let you take advantage of oil as a fuel source. For the Deep Melting Drill, though, you need to do a bit of research first.
NOTE: This mainly only applies to story mode. Basically, if you chose to embrace the cold, you will not have the option to do any of what has been mentioned so far. Supposedly, the sandbox game mode does not limit you this way.
Under the heating research tree, you will find the Melting Deep Deposits after the Generator Upgrade I node. This will unlock the ability to make the drills that can access unlimited resources from nodes that have such modifiers.
Where to Place Them
Deep Melting Drills can be built on either extraction or food districts, and they will drastically increase production efficiency while also slightly bumping up squalor. They are needed to access deep deposits, which are indicated by the infinity symbol in the resource tile’s icon.
You will find a handful of these deposits in New London, and just in case you are unsure if you have built on one of them, just check each district. Under the deposits part of the menu, you should be able to see if the district is housing a deep deposit.
The only other thing you need to keep in mind is the cost of building a single Deep Melting Drill. If you are still working towards unlocking it and want to know the requirements, they need the following resources:
- 300 Workforce
- 80 Heatstamps
- 40 Prefabs
- 1 Core
At first glance, it may not seem like a lot, but there is one huge consideration to be made. Each drill will cost you one core, and if you have made it this far, you will know that these are really hard to stock up on. The game makes a point of this by telling you that they are rare and cannot be made yourself.
Because of that, you will have to figure out what resource you are struggling to gather the most before building one of these. This structure does not increase output, though, so that’s another thing you will need to think about.
Finally, there are also some bugs related to these drills. If you notice that one of them is not working at all, you can try turning it off and on again. This is a common issue at the moment, and the fix might seem a bit silly, but it apparently works for many other players.
