Whiteout Survival is a mobile RTS where you try to rebuild civilization while battling both extreme cold and ferocious beasts. To do this, you need a lot of resources and a strong army, and you must also ensure that the survivors who take refuge in your city remain happy. All of this requires the efficient use of the different mechanics the game offers, and that’s why we’ve prepared this guide: below, we’ll talk about the most important things you need to know to build a civilization on solid foundations.

Keep in mind that this guide will cover the basic mechanics of the game and is aimed at beginners: if you want advanced information, you can check out our other guides. For example, we have a tier list for the best pets and articles where we share detailed information on how to use experts.

Basic Mechanics: City Management

Your main goal in Whiteout Survival is to build and grow your city in an ice-covered, extremely cold environment. In the center of your small city sits a Furnace: this is the essential structure that provides heat to other buildings and prevents survivors from freezing to death. Your Furnace uses coal to operate, and its energy meter shows how much heat it provides.

The most important thing to remember about this building is to only activate the “Max Power” setting when an extreme cold warning is issued. Otherwise, you will burn too much coal and have to dedicate all your other resources to collecting coal.

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Keeping the happiness of your survivors in your city at 90% or above will grant you additional resources. The easiest way to do this is to keep them warm – max power can instantly raise their mood above 90%. However, doing this can also cause the furnace to be unable to find the coal it needs in extremely cold weather, so use this trick with caution.

The Furnace is your main building, and all other buildings are connected to it. For the same reason, you should upgrade it as soon as you have enough resources. The higher your Furnace level, the more other buildings in your city can be upgraded.

Speaking of buildings, every structure you build in your city produces a resource, and they can be upgraded to produce more resources. Similarly, you can make most buildings work more efficiently by assigning a survivor to them. Each upgrade requires the use of a specific type and amount of resources, and some may require other connected buildings to be upgraded first.

In any case, throughout the game you will need to grow your city, construct new buildings, and continue to gather the resources needed for all of this. However, you cannot use only the resources produced by buildings because they will become insufficient even before reaching the mid-game stage. So, where will you find additional resources?

World Map Resource Gathering

You can access the world map by clicking the globe button in the bottom right corner of the main screen. On this map, you’ll see places you can loot, such as abandoned buildings, wild animals, and mines. Each of these places can provide you with the resources you need to further grow your city.

Choose one and click the Gather button: your workers will go to that location and begin looting. Remember that each gathering takes a certain amount of time, and during this time you may be subject to attacks: another player may decide to loot the same place.

Therefore, start with the places closest to you so you can quickly return to the city when needed, and only truly begin exploring the world map after you have built a strong army. As you progress through the game, you will increasingly need to gather resources from the world map.

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Some gathering buffs can give you a bonus to your loot speed – consider taking advantage of them in high-risk areas. You can send your troops to a series of world map areas before exiting the game to start looting: resources will be waiting for you when you return. Also, to protect them from raiders, only take resources out of your backpack when you’re going to use them.

Combat and Heroes

Eventually, you’ll have to fight NPCs or other players. You can do this in a controlled environment in “Exploration” mode or in an uncontrolled environment on the world map. In any case, combat will primarily require the use of heroes.

Combat itself isn’t difficult at all because it’s almost entirely automated. You win if your combat power is greater than the enemy’s; otherwise, you lose. For example, in the scenario below, our combat power is only 139,225, while the enemy’s is 147,513. We will most likely lose this battle.

To increase your combat power, you need heroes, and more importantly, rare and powerful heroes. You’ll get some for free as you progress through the game, but the most powerful ones only join your city through “recruitment” (summoning). You can recruit once a day for free, but if you want more, you must use gold and silver keys as currency.

The results of summoning are randomly determined, and you won’t always get strong and rare heroes, meaning your roster will quickly fill with dozens of characters, but only a few will be worth upgrading. Like your buildings, your heroes can be upgraded, and this costs resources. For the same reason, you should choose 3-5 core heroes and focus on them to use your resources.

Heroes you can obtain for free, like Molly, Bahiti, and Sergey, can be extremely useful until almost the final stages of the game: if you can’t get better ones, use your resources to upgrade them. Also, when deciding which ones to upgrade, focus not only on attack and defense stats but also on health and lethality stats: the latter is especially important for marksman-type heroes.

Keep gathering resources, grow your city, and collect and upgrade your heroes: the basic game cycle revolves around these three mechanics. And, as always, remember to play Whiteout Survival on your PC or Mac with BlueStacks, so you can get a smoother and more enjoyable experience. Use your keyboard & mouse or gamepad to control the game and navigate the interface!