Anno 1800 - The Passage: The best tips & tricks for the Arctic

Dress warmly, it goes to the North Pole. In this guide to the DLC "The Passage" of Anno 1800 you can read:

• How to get to the Arctic quickly in Anno 1800.
• Tips for a successful Arctic settlement.
• How to mine gas and build airships.

The new DLC "The Passage" takes you on an expedition to the Arctic in Anno 1800. There you will be faced with tricky tasks, such as building a settlement in the snow and ice, mining the new resource gas and using airships. We'll give you the right tips on how to master the challenging expansion.

The starting requirements for Anno 1800- The Passage

The basic prerequisite for your trip to the Arctic is the DLC "The Passage" of Anno 1800, which you can buy individually or together in the Season Pass since 10.12.2019. You don 't need to start a new game for the expansion - when loading an old game save, you'll be asked if you want to activate the DLC.

Since the expansion is aimed at advanced players, you need at least the population level Engineers. After that, you will automatically receive a notification from a certain Lady Faithful. The lady is missing her husband, who went missing on an Arctic expedition in search of the Northeast Passage.

The Arctic Expedition

The word expedition is already ringing in the ears of experienced Anno 1800 players. The basic mechanics are already familiar from the main game(our Anno 1800 guide to expeditions) and have only been slightly modified for the Arctic. After you have accepted Lady Faithful's mission, a new expedition appears in the corresponding menu.

The tour has a normal difficulty level - Two Skulls - so it shouldn't present you with too many problems. However, to be on the safe side, take a flagship or battlecruiser and load up on resources and items that strengthen navigation and skill.

With a strong ship and some items & resources that are good for navigation, your expedition to the Arctic is secured.

Afterwards, as in the normal expeditions, you answer random questions at certain intervals about how your crew should behave. What's new here is that you can determine the route of your ship through the ice floes of the Arctic on a small map. You start in the east and should head west until the Arctic region opens up in front of you.

The first steps in Anno 1800 - The Passage

In the Arctic Circle it is understandably bitterly cold, so the most important resource for settling your island is "warmth". Thus your inhabitants, but also all crafts in the Arctic are dependent on the new heating stove. The heating source creates for it like other public buildings an influence area around itself, in which your explorers can survive.

However, the furnaces require coal, and lots of it. So remember to set up at least two charcoal burners at the start, because your residents are very sensitive to cold and coal shortages can be dangerous. Basically, you can use the following rule of thumb: One charcoal burner's hut supplies one heating stove.

The range of the heating furnace is very limited - marked here in red.

If you still have unused coal mines in the old world, you should open them up now at the latest. Due to the lack of space on the polar islands, your charcoal kilns will soon no longer be able to cope with the supply. Therefore, create a trade route to the Arctic and deliver the coal there. Soon you will have to transport more goods on this route.

Settlement planning and Arctic flu

In the Arctic, you will have to completely overthrow your learned settlement planning. Since all craft buildings except for the charcoal burner's hut also depend on heat, it is essential to build residential buildings and farms in a mixed way.

For the first food supply with the meat dish pemmican you need a whaler, a reindeer hunting lodge and a pemmican smokehouse. Since all three buildings produce or process the necessary resources in the same cycle, you need one building each for the goods cycle. A pemmican production chain can supply about 250 - 300 inhabitants, but your inhabitants can manage without one for the time being.

You should not forget the polar watch, which you unlock early. The public building combines a fire station and a hospital. If your explorers freeze, they will fall ill with the Arctic flu. Since you only have the stove for warmth at the beginning, the disease can literally catch you cold and paralyze or even destroy your settlement.

These are the goods you should import

For the other goods your explorers demand - oil lamps, sleeping bags and liquor - you should now expand your trade routes. The warming sleeping bags can be produced completely in the Arctic, but - without special luck - you have to colonize a new island, which requires steel as a building material.

Already for the oil lamps you have to import material, because the production requires brass. In addition, you need more whaling huts at the latest now, since these must now cover two productions. Completely from the old world you have to import the liquor, which should warm the bellies of your explorers. After all, the Arctic is not known for its fertile potato fields.

When building your Arctic settlement, look for functionality rather than beauty. Since production facilities also need to be heated, you have to rethink.

Once you have established a stable import route that can sustain your production of goods in the Arctic, you are ready for the second population stage.

The Technicians

As expected, the technicians are quite a bit more demanding than the explorers and require quite a bit from you to fully supply them.

To mellow them out right away, you can build a post office with 100 technicians already in your settlement. Except for the building materials and the maintenance, this costs you nothing, but provides a small population boost for the technicians.

The technicians' dwellings are built more sturdily and keep out the cold better. At the same time, the second population level naturally expects a better supply.

It becomes more critical with the two imported goods that are demanded by the technicians. Canned meat and coffee are already heavily used in the old world, so one more recipient can upset your entire island world. Therefore, make sure your factories have enough capacity or set aside a suitable island in the old world entirely for the production of Arctic resources.

The last two needs - parkas and dog sleds - you must again satisfy entirely in the Arctic. After your whale oil production already has to withstand a double burden, the seal hunters now follow. For the warm parkas and the dog sleds you need seal pelts. Although the seal hunting stations are fast in production, you should ensure sufficient supplies here, otherwise you will quickly run into problems.

The advantages of the technicians

The Arctic DLC "The Passage" of Anno 1800 doesn't only want to trie you, but also rewards you for your efforts. Starting with the technician population level, you get additional buildings that increase your raw material production. Thus, you can build hunting lodges and gold mines that deliver more than twice as much as their normal counterparts.

One of the advantages of the Arctic is the Deep Gold Mine, which produces more than twice as much

Also very tempting is the gas you can extract in the Arctic. There are gas deposits waiting for you on huge ice floes, which you can use to produce electricity in the old world, among other things. This is terribly practical because gas-fired power plants don't need a rail connection. But you'll have to take to the skies to do it.

How to get airships in Anno 1800 - The Passage

Once you have reached the technician level, a new monumental building awaits you - the airship hangar. It's nowhere near as extensive as the World's Fair in Anno 1800, but it gives you access to the new and coveted airships.

The flying fortresses have some advantages in their luggage. For example, they are much faster than ships, since they can simply fly over islands. Besides, they are invulnerable from the ground, which makes them immune to pirates or war enemies. Thus, you can maintain your trade routes even in times of crisis.

"The Passage" also brings a new monumental building: the airship hangar. Not as huge as the World's Fair, but still challenging.

What you need for the Airship Hangar

In case you want to prepare or can't see it yet, we've put together an overview of what you'll need for the monumental build here.

Once the airship hangar is completed, you can construct zeppelins there. As with shipbuilding, you will of course need building materials. Therefore, keep a good supply of canvas and steam engines on hand.

In the airship hangar you can build your own zeppelin armada.

The third building material you will need is gas. You will be provided with a sufficient amount for your first two airships, but for further extraction you will need to colonize the second type of island in the Arctic.

Mining Gas & Arctic Plateau

If you've been moving on solid rock so far, you'll have to say goodbye to it for gas extraction. The Arctic DLC of Anno 1800 brings yet another island type into the game - The Arctic Plateau.

The basic requirement to gain a foothold on the massive piece of ice is airships. You can build two of them by following the course of the Arctic Quest. To settle one of the floes, load up steel beams and wood and head to one of the ice blocks.

The Arctic plateau is a desolate chunk of ice to colonize.

Once you've settled an Arctic plateau, you'll have to build a settlement there for the gas production plant with at least 250 technicians. The tricky part is that the ice floe has no resources or fertility except for the gas. This means that you will have to supply your plateau entirely from the air - normal ships cannot dock.

Therefore, before settling the Arctic plateau, you should have several well-equipped polar settlements that generously overproduce end products. Also, build a gas production facility as soon as possible so you can produce more airships. Once you've done that, it will make it much easier to supply the plateau, as well as your other islands.

The production chains in "The Passage

To help you efficiently create all the production chains of the new Arctic DLC of Anno 1800, we list them here in table form. Please note that we only list the new production chains here. All existing lines can be found in our big guide to the production chains in Anno 1800.

Read the tables as follows: The path to the final product is divided into numbered production steps. Step 2 should only be tackled after you have fulfilled the building requirements for step 1, and so on. Under the production steps you will find the buildings you need for this step as well as the optimal number of buildings and the production time.

The Arctic in Anno 1800 also radiates its icy charm at night.

Our production chain tables are sorted by population level and whether the end product is a basic need, a material or a luxury good. On your smartphone, be sure to turn it sideways to keep the formatting clear.

Discoverers

You wouldn't want to trade places with the explorers, after all, they are the first to spend the night with their tents in the bitterly cold Arctic of Anno 1800 - The Passage. To help them climb the ranks quickly, you can find the production chains of their Arctic needs here.

Technician

Technician is informed - The second population level of "The Passage" knows quite a bit about airships, but has some tricky needs in return.

Note: Online commodity calculators help with scaling up. You can find two of them from fan hand by nihoel and by schwubbe.

We hope this guide helps you to survive better in the Arctic of Anno 1800 - The Passage.

More guides for Anno 1800

• Anno 1800: Electricity - How to electrify your island
• Anno 1800: Waging war - the best tactics
• Anno 1800: Diplomacy - the best tips & tricks
• Anno 1800: Strategy guide for a successful new world
• Anno 1800: The right tips & tricks for beginners

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