How to stop losing heat

Three separate problems wearing one name

Players lose runs because they treat “cold” as one meter. Official framing splits it into at least three distinct pressures, and each one has a different answer:

• Frostbite — the accumulated consequence of exposure. Answered by clothing and by ending exposure.
• Storms — timing events. Answered by route planning and by having somewhere to wait.
• Creeping chill — the slow pressure that punishes standing still as much as moving badly. Answered by keeping moving with a purpose, or by being inside.

See the cold & frostbite system page for the mechanic breakdown, and warmth & shelter for the counter-system.

Shelter geometry: the inside of the inside

Heat is lost through the perimeter. So the shelter plan that works is concentric: generators and life support at the core, storage and workspace in the middle ring, entrance and buffer space at the edge. Every metre between your heat source and the outside wall is doing work for you.

The second half of that idea is the warm room — a small, heavily insulated space you retreat into during a whiteout. Heating a small room hard beats heating a whole shelter softly, and it converts your fuel from a constant drain into a burst expense.

Exposure is a budget, not a status effect

Because exposure accumulates, every trip has a budget: warmth out, warmth back, and a margin for the thing that goes wrong. Clothing raises the budget; shelters along the route let you reset it; the dog and your route choice reduce how much of it you spend.

That is why the honest answer to “how far can I go” is not a distance. It is: how many warm checkpoints are between here and there.

Biome changes the arithmetic

The four biomes differ mainly in how much cover they offer, and cover is what lets you reset exposure mid-trip:

• Frozen tundra — almost no cover, so the budget is the whole trip.
• Glacier — vertical terrain, where a slip costs you more than the cold does.
• Ice forest — natural windbreaks, but short sightlines put wildlife encounters at close range.
• Frozen city — the best salvage and the most indoor exposure time.

A worked exposure budget

Thinking in budgets only helps if you can actually fill one in. Here is the shape, using placeholders you will replace with real numbers on launch day:

The budget that kills players is not the one with a big outbound leg — it is the one with no contingency margin and no credit. A route with two warm checkpoints and a 30% reserve is survivable even if you misjudge the cold. A route that is exactly affordable is a route that ends the moment anything goes wrong.

Clothing is a range extender, not a shield

The instinct with cold-weather gear is to treat insulation as protection: more layers, safer. Official guidance — repurposed industrial gear reinforced with hides and furs — points at something more useful. Insulation is what converts clothing into time, and time is what converts into range.

That reframing changes what you upgrade and when:

• Upgrade before you need to travel further, not after. An upgrade you buy while already at your limit buys you nothing; the trip that needed it already happened.
• Weight is part of the insulation decision. Heavier gear that slows the return leg can net out worse than lighter gear plus a closer shelter.
• Hides and furs come from hunting, so hunting is a clothing activity. Players who treat hunting as a food activity under-invest in the upgrade path that decides whether long routes are possible at all.

The cold survival estimator exists for exactly this trade-off: it publishes its coefficients, takes your exposure budget, and ranks which single change buys you the most additional time outside. Use it before you commit materials to an upgrade.

Whiteout playbook: when the weather turns mid-trip

Storms are described as timing events, which means they are not damage to tank — they are a decision point. What you do in the first thirty seconds of a whiteout matters more than what you were doing before it started.

1. Stop and commit. The worst outcome is a half-committed return: you burn exposure time walking and still end up outside. Decide — nearest warm point, or shelter in place — and move.
2. Pick the nearer warm point, not the better one. The good shelter three minutes further is worse than the ruined shed one minute away.
3. If there is no warm point, make one before your hands stop working. A fire built while you still have dexterity is a fire. A fire built after is not.
4. Do not travel to "wait it out". Waiting outside in a storm spends the same budget as walking, with none of the progress.
5. Afterwards, re-plan the route rather than repeating it. A route that failed once in a storm will fail again; add a checkpoint instead of hoping for better weather.

Co-op changes it again

Co-op does not make the world warmer — official wording is explicit that it “doesn’t simplify the world”. What it does is let you parallelise: one player hunting hides, one scavenging generator parts, one running life support. The heat economy is unchanged; the labour cost of feeding it drops.

Sizing matters here. A hub built for four and occupied by two is still paying four players’ worth of heated volume. See the co-op guide.

How to measure the cold yourself on 9 October

Until the build is playable, every exposure number on this site is deliberately blank. That is a choice, not a gap — a wiki that publishes plausible-looking warmth values before launch is a wiki you cannot trust after launch. Here is the 20-minute routine that fills the table in:

1. Stand outside in starting gear and time the first warning. That is your baseline exposure budget.
2. Repeat in each biome you can reach. The spread between them tells you whether biome is a multiplier or a flat penalty.
3. Add one clothing layer and re-time. One data point tells you whether insulation is worth grinding; the shape of the curve tells you whether to stack layers or chase a single better item.
4. Time a storm from first warning to unplayable. That number is your maximum safe distance from a warm point.
5. Log fuel consumed by one heat source across one night. Fuel economy, not layout, decides whether a shelter is affordable.

Those five measurements turn this page from principles into arithmetic. They get recorded on the changelog with the build number, and the cold & frostbite system page is updated to match.

What is still unmeasured

• Warmth drain rate per biome and per weather state
• Generator fuel type and burn rate
• Insulation value of building pieces
• Whether storm intensity scales with progression

These are the four values that turn this guide from principles into arithmetic. They get measured against the Early Access build on 9 October 2026 and logged on the changelog.