So the truth is I didn’t care much for Frostpunk 1. Just seemed like a survival city builder with some story elements. I can see why people like it but it didnt exactly wow me.

The secret is to allow light child labour on account of "this is literally the apocalypse you idiots" and then send all the excess engineers that free's up towards other job and ignore all of their pleading for better work conditions since they're too small a faction to do anything about it.

Fascinating theory of automatons you have there, here's a pickaxe.