Surviving in the harsh and unrelenting cold of Whiteout Survival can be quite challenging, especially if you don’t know how to get started. This is mostly because, while the game does have a nice tutorial to get you initiated with the game’s world, it also puts a lot of pressure on you in the form of recurring snowstorms, which can cause a lot of damage and casualties if you’re unprepared. Luckily, in this Whiteout Survival beginner’s guide, we’re going to go over the most basic mechanics in the game, so that you can start off your journey on the right track.

Table of Contents

  1. Play on BlueStacks to Get the Best Experience
  2. Your Furnace: The Heart of Your Settlement
  3. Your Survivors and Their Basic Needs
  4. Buildings and Upgrades
  5. Exploration and Expeditions

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

Play on BlueStacks to Get the Best Experience

We can’t start our guide about everything you need to know to get a good start in this game without mentioning the best way to actually play this game, which is by playing Whiteout Survival on PC with BlueStacks. Our Android app player can give you the best experience by offering the best graphics at a silky smooth 60 FPS, while also letting you play on a much larger screen and with the best keyboard and mouse controls. In short, BlueStacks offers the definitive way to enjoy this game, without any of the drawbacks of playing on your phone.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

If you’re interested in learning more about how to get started, check out our Whiteout Survival PC setup guide. Alternatively, if you’ve already installed this game on your computer and want to learn how to properly use some of our BlueStacks tools to enhance your gameplay experience, feel free to read our BlueStacks usage guide for Whiteout Survival.

Your Furnace: The Heart of Your Settlement

It’s difficult to list a more important element for your settlement than your Furnace. This building is arguably the most important part of your town, mainly because it’s what’s keeping your survivors alive, even through the harshest snowstorms. Sure, while lack of food will definitely spell disaster for your small civilization, what good would it do to have your storehouses packed with food if the lack of warmth is going to make them ill or even freeze them to death.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

One of the leading causes of death and failure in Whiteout Survival is having a weak furnace—while this will pretty much keep you warm under normal circumstances, it will not be powerful enough to heat up your town at night, and much less during a snowstorm, which is when the cold is cranked up to 11.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

Every upgrade and enhancement you make to your town should, in a way, work towards upgrading your Furnace. Not only do you need the warmth to prevent disease and survive, but it’s also the main way to expand your town and unlock new features. This is because, as your Furnace burns hotter, it covers more territory, allowing you to explore further into the frozen wastes, and gain access to more buildings. For instance, upgrading your Furnace to level 7 will give you access to the Lighthouse, which is the building through which you can launch Exploration missions.

Your Survivors and Their Basic Needs

While the Furnace is hugely important for the development of your town, all the work and heavy lifting is actually done by your survivors, which makes them into another of your priorities when it comes to surviving in Whiteout Survival.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

Survivors are basically your workers in Whiteout Survival. They are the ones who you can assign to each building in order to produce a variety of goods. In other words, a building without workers won’t produce anything until you actually assign it some personnel. Additionally, the productivity of your workers will rely heavily on whether or not their basic needs are fulfilled, which is an important aspect of keeping a healthy and thriving town.

To start caring for your Survivors, however, you first need to recruit a few of these to your town. The best way to go about this is simply by constructing and upgrading Shelter buildings, which is where your Survivors will rest when they’re not working. As such, the bigger your Shelters, the more Survivors will show up at your doorstep to join your cause, which you can see whenever the “New Survivors” notification pops up on the top left of the screen. By clicking this notification, you can choose to welcome these new Survivors to your town.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

However, even if you have lots of Survivors, these won’t be effective if you don’t tend to their needs and keep them safe. The basic needs of your survivors can be divided into two main categories: Health, and Happiness.

The Health stat is a measure of how healthy your Survivors are in terms of warmth, fullness, and sleep. In other words, these are your basic necessities that, if left unchecked, can lead to illness and death. Luckily, keeping your Health up is as easy as having an upgraded Furnace to keep them warm; a large Cookhouse to keep them fed, and enough upgraded Shelters so everyone has a place to sleep.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

Meanwhile, the Happiness stat is a bit more complex, since it’s not directly related to any basic necessities, but rather to extra elements that can make your Survivors’ existences a little better. One of the ways in which you can increase your Survivor’s happiness is by constructing amenities in their Shelters. Moreover, by having enough beds in your Shelters (which is also a basic health necessity), your Survivors will be much more comfortable in your town, which also contributes to their Happiness.

While it’s more important to fulfill your Survivors’ basic needs, since failure to do so can eventually lead to death, it’s also important to keep them happy since this will bump up their productivity considerably.

Buildings and Upgrades

Whiteout Survival is not like your typical base building game, in that you don’t decide where to place your buildings, but rather that you click on predetermined slots in your settlement to build the structures that are already assigned to those lots. This makes building considerably simpler than other games, at the cost of your creative freedom when designing the layout of your settlement.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

As you can probably imagine, each building has a specific function within your base: Whether it’s producing food like the Hunter’s Hut, generating wood like the Sawmill, or heating up your town and its surroundings like the Furnace, constructing and upgrading your structures is one of the most important aspects of growing in Whiteout Survival.

When it comes to actually upgrading your buildings, the process is just as straightforward as building them: just click on them, and you’ll find a list of facilities and upgrades on the lower panel. In order to level up your buildings, you’ll need to construct and upgrade enough of these sub-facilities to fill up the progress bar of the building up to 100%, after which you can click on the new “upgrade” button that will appear where the progress bar was originally. 

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

This upgrade process is relevant for most structures in your settlement, except for special exceptions like the Furnace, which you can upgrade directly, but only once you’ve fulfilled the necessary prerequisites, which often revolve around upgrading other buildings to certain levels.

Exploration and Expeditions

What is the point of all these upgrades and improvements, if you’re just going to sit behind your walls and never engage in any challenging content? Well, that’s exactly what the Explorations and Expeditions are all about, as these are some of the main ways in which you’ll engage in combat in this game, both in PvP and PvE formats. And in return for winning fights and surviving encounters, you’ll receive lots of different rewards and prizes, some of which will be pivotal for continuing your development in Whiteout Survival.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

Explorations are your main form of combat content from very early on in the game, revolving around stage-based missions in which your heroes personally march on the battlefield and engage against the groups of enemies that stand in their way. These fights play out in real-time, and while your heroes fight mostly automatically, you can choose when to use their special skills as soon as they’re charged up and you have enough special gauge.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

Expeditions are a different type of content, which is not always necessarily based on combat, and is similar to exploring the world map in other types of games. Only instead of directly engaging in combat, you can perform a variety of actions, such as searching for resource points, finding and hunting wild animals for resources, completing intel missions, and engaging in both PvP and PvE. However, before you can actually engage in these activities, you’ll need to upgrade your Furnace to level 7 to unlock the building from which you can launch these expeditions.

In both types of content, you’ll receive lots of rewards for your troubles. And while the Exploration missions will often be too hard for you to complete until you actually upgrade your heroes, you can engage in Expeditions at any moment to boost your resource production by collecting them directly from the world, or to attack other players to steal their materials, among other things.

Whiteout Survival Beginner’s Guide - The Basic of Survival and City Building

And with that, you should now know most of the important things you’ll need to know in order to get a good start in Whiteout Survival. Feel free to share your own tips and thoughts in the comments below!