How to win at Project Winter | The Ultimate Survival Guide

Project Winter has hit Xbox Series X | S, and Xbox One via Game Pass, and has come out of early access on PC, also entering PC Game Pass, meaning there’s a massive pool of players all coming together to try and win, beating the traitors and escaping the tundra-wilderness the game offers. This is a game very similar to Among Us, but set in a desolate snow-based arctic area, pulling eight players together to try and get rescued and not be murdered or duped by the suspicious traitors.

It’s a tricky game, and despite being “out now” still feels like it’s a little bit early access, with some peculiar proclivities and survival game aspects that make it difficult to master, and with a huge reliance on teamwork, the kindness of strangers can often change the flow of a game, so we’ve put together a surefire way to win the round and beat the scummy traitors. Here’s how to win at Project Winter.

How to win at Project Winter: Team Composition

One of the most important things in Project Winter is communication. Even if someone you know and have joined the game with ends up being a traitor, you can make use of that early on. Set your team up so that someone is gathering resources and crafting, while another is gathering food, all of which can be placed in the storage in your cabin. This way whenever a blizzard hits or even just after a particularly long trek to discover the objectives, you can come back, get warm and get full of food, so you can venture back out into the snow.

Stick together, even if you suspect a traitor

While a few of your teammates are gathering and crafting, make sure a team of at least three people is exploring together: ideally four of you, and there’s two major reasons for this. Firstly, if there’s four of you, at worst if you have somehow grouped up with the two traitors for your exploration mission, you have a good chance of spotting them, and can even fight back if they’re in cahoots. Secondly, being in a group of at least three (again: ideally four!) means you can open almost any bunker cache you come across without wasting time to trek back to the cabin and request help. More than that, if you stick together in large groups, you can root out traitors a little easier as they can’t slink off and sabotage you, or collect their tools of dishonesty.

Get radios for everyone, it’ll damage traitor communication

One of the peculiar issues with the game in its current state is that once you equip a radio, you can’t go back to just speaking to your fellow traitors. In case you didn’t know, the two traitors both start with a walkie-talkie and can communicate silently away from the rest of the team. However, if you craft radios and give one to everyone, it’ll override that initial starting traitor radio, and it will stop them from being able to easily communicate their dastardly deeds. If they refuse a radio? You’ve got a traitor in your midst. If one of the radios you gave to someone suddenly appears in the item box? Who gave up an easy communication method, and why? It’s a surefire way to find the traitor.

There’s of course another main reason to craft a radio and it’s so you can chat when you’re not in proximity to one another. Project Winter is a hard game to win, but relying on proximity chat makes it even harder, so get radios and chat. To craft a radio you need 2 electronic scraps and 2 mechanical scraps, and if you follow our tips and get a good team composition early who will craft and gather, this will come easily. To get the scraps you only need one log and one (stone) ore, both of which are always near the starting position at the cabin. Get communicating!

How to win at Project Winter: Keep your eye on the rabbits

There are random events that occur during a round of Project Winter, and one of these will suddenly turn you all into rabbits. It’s creepy, sure, but it serves a purpose in that it removes the names from people’s avatars, so it provides anonymity. This can turn Project Winter into a sort of visual tracking puzzle because the traitor will almost certainly want to use this moment to take someone out. Keep an eye on someone, even if there are multiple people around you, watch their motions and work out if they are suspicious, because when they return from mass hysteria-induced rabbit-syndrome, you might just have an idea of who that violent murderous traitor is.

Play and understand your roles

When you start a round of Project Winter, you might be given a role and not understand it, but these can be vital so you need to work out what is going on here. For example, if you’re a detective, you can see three of the seven stats of a corpse, giving a bit more of an idea of who might have killed the poor soul. A hacker can use two electronic scraps to open a bunker without aid, while a Scientist can use a lab to revive a dead player, so if you do manage to grab the heart of a dead player, give it to the scientist. A soldier can open the armoury when the first objective has been completed, and the Medic can see the health of other players, and even revive down-but-not-out survivors at the expense of some of his or her own health. However, it’s worth knowing that the traitor can also hold these roles.

Truth Serum: an instant win in Project Winter?

In one of the labs you can find truth serum that, well, it does what it says on the tin. This requires three people to find a switch in the snow and pull all three together. This truth serum can be used on a player and will reveal their role and what team they are on. The kicker is that only the person who uses the serum on someone can see their roles, so it’s not an instant win really. If the traitor uses it, they can lie and get an innocent survivor exiled, so be careful. Once opened, the lab’s truth serum can be grabbed easily, but not until five minutes has passed.

Get the job done: survive!

It’s easy to get caught up on other tasks in Project Winter, but ultimately if you dawdle, the traitors can plan and execute (literally) very quickly. They have access to caches you survivors don’t enabling them to tool up really quickly, so you need to get your objective done and be rescued. The game is currently fairly skewed towards it being easier for traitors to win, so the only way to combat their advantages is to work together and get the job done. It may sound obvious, but get the power station up and running, get that radio working, and call for help. Don’t get distracted, and don’t let cowardly traitors pull you away to other things: focus, focus, FOCUS, and you’ll win at Project Winter quickly and efficiently.

Have you been having fun with Project Winter? Got any tips of your own? Let us know on Twitter, via @GodisaGeek.