Education is not just a radius
Most services in BuildCity are a circle: build the station, and every residential cell inside its radius is covered. Education looks like that on the surface, but underneath it is a capacity system with two age groups, two kinds of institution, a bus network that stretches the circle, and a second job that most players never notice: it is what lets factories grow. This article explains how a school decides who it teaches, how classrooms and buses change that, what the university does differently, and why an industrial district stalls when the schools are full.
Who needs a school
Every residential building has an age distribution. Teenagers are roughly 10 to 20 percent of its residents and young adults roughly 17 to 33 percent, with the exact split varying building by building. Teenagers are the high school's problem; young adults are the university's. A 2x2 level 3 building with 400 residents therefore holds something like 60 teenagers and 100 young adults, and a street of them adds up fast.
The high school teaches teenagers within 12 tiles, but only up to its capacity. A fresh school has 200 seats. When the game calculates coverage, it walks through every residential building with teenagers, finds the schools whose radius reaches it, and fills seats nearest school first. Once a school's 200 seats are taken, the next building in range is simply not educated, even though it sits inside the circle. This is the part that confuses people: the education overlay can show a building squarely inside a school radius and still mark its teenagers as unschooled, because the school ran out of room before it got to them.
| Building | Footprint | Who it serves | Capacity | Reach | Construction | Upkeep per hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High School | 3x2 | Teenagers | 200 seats | 12 tiles | 6,000 | 100 |
| Library | 2x2 | Teenagers | 100 seats | 10 tiles | 8,000 | 80 |
| University | 3x2 | Young adults | 500 seats | City-wide | 20,000 | 300 |
The land value side is worth stating because it is easy to forget: the high school adds +180 to residential land value within its radius, the library +150, and the university +300 city-wide. A school is the strongest early land value tool that also does something else.
Classrooms, the bus garage, and the football court
A school can be extended with three kinds of add-on, each built on a tile next to the school. They are how you scale a single school instead of building a second one.
| Add-on | Footprint | Maximum per school | Effect | Construction | Upkeep per hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Classroom Extension | 1x1 | 5 | +100 seats each | 2,000 | 30 |
| School Bus Garage | 2x3 | 1 | Enables bus service; school reaches students at bus stops | 5,000 | 50 |
| Football Court | 2x3 | 1 | Reduces crime and disease within the school's range | 4,000 | 20 |
The arithmetic favors classrooms heavily. Five classrooms add 500 seats for 10,000 and 150 per hour; a second school adds 200 seats for 6,000 and 100 per hour and needs a 3x2 plot in the right place. Build the second school when you need a second radius, not when you need more seats. Since the 1.4.5 update, add-ons placed against a rotated school keep their occupied tiles and road-facing direction aligned, so a school turned to fit a corridor can still be extended on the sides you expect.
How the school bus extends coverage
The bus garage changes the coverage rule. Once a school has one, any residential building that is outside the school's 12-tile walk but within 8 tiles of a school bus stop can send its teenagers to that school, seats permitting. Bus stops are placed on road tiles for 500 with upkeep of 10, so a garage plus a handful of stops is the cheapest way to pull an outlying neighborhood into an existing school's catchment. Coverage is calculated in two passes: first every building tries to fill seats at a school it can walk to, then any remaining teenagers near a bus stop are assigned to the nearest school that has a garage and seats left.
The buses you see on the road are the visible half of that rule. They run during game-clock commute windows, 7 to 9 in the morning and 15 to 17 in the afternoon, visiting up to four stops per trip with a short pause at each one while up to four children board, and waiting about fifteen seconds between trips. Children walk from the stop to the school after alighting. None of this animation affects the coverage calculation; the seats are assigned whether or not a bus has physically arrived. The schedule exists so that a school district looks like one, and so that an empty bus stop tells you something: either the stop is more than 8 tiles from any teenagers, or the schools with garages have no seats left.
The university is a different machine
The university does not have a radius. Every university adds 500 seats to a single city-wide pool, and every young adult in the city draws from that pool at the same rate. If your city has 2,000 young adults and one university, 25 percent of the young adults in every building are educated, regardless of where the building is. A second university raises that to 50 percent everywhere. This is why the university is the one education building whose placement is purely about land value: put it where its +300 bonus does the most good, because its teaching reaches the whole map anyway.
It is also gated differently. Besides the Small City rank, the university requires the Education Department in City Hall, which itself adds 30 percent to school range, 20 percent to land value, and 15 percent to commerce city-wide. Cities that plan to run heavy industry or a nuclear plant should take that department early; the city rank article covers how department slots open.
Why factories care about schools
Residential buildings upgrade through land value. Industrial buildings do not; they upgrade through education. Every factory has an education level from 1 to 3, and its density cannot pass 150 until it reaches level 2 or pass 300 until it reaches level 3. Level 2 requires high-school-educated workers, level 3 requires university-educated workers, and in both cases the count has to match the factory's workforce: 5 workers for a 1x1 factory, 15 for a 2x2, scaled by area for larger footprints.
The supply side is the same school capacity described above, counted city-wide. Each operational high school contributes its 200 seats plus 100 per classroom, and each operational university contributes 500, as a pool of educated workers that factories draw from. A school without power contributes nothing. When the pool is smaller than the demand, factories that want to grow show the graduation-cap icon for a missing high school supply or the columned-building icon for a missing university supply, and their popup explains which level they are stuck at.
The practical consequence is that an industrial district has an education budget. A block of ten 2x2 factories at level 2 needs 150 high-school-educated workers in the pool, on top of whatever your residential teenagers are using, and taking those same factories to level 3 needs 150 university seats, which is a third of one university. Players who build a big industrial zone and no schools find their factories permanently stuck at level 1 and conclude that industry is weak. It is not weak; it is uneducated.
Reading the education icons
- School icon on a residential building: no school radius reaches it at all. Build or extend coverage.
- Graduation cap on a factory: it is ready to grow but the high-school-educated worker pool is empty. Add classrooms or a school.
- Columned building on a factory: it is at level 2 and needs university-educated workers for level 3. Build a university, which requires the Education Department.
- Education overlay: the data view draws per-building bars of educated versus unschooled teenagers and, separately, educated versus unschooled young adults. A building inside a radius with a red bar is a seats problem, not a placement problem.
An education build order
- At Small City, place one high school where its 12-tile radius covers the densest housing and overlaps the hospital. Its +180 land value is doing double duty.
- Add classrooms before a second school. Watch the overlay; when red bars appear inside the radius, you are out of seats, not range.
- When a neighborhood grows beyond the walk radius, add the bus garage and two or three stops on its streets rather than a new school.
- Add the football court once the district is dense; it quietly lowers crime and disease pressure across the whole school range.
- Before zoning a large industrial district, count its workforce and make sure the school pool can cover level 2. Take the Education Department and build the university before you expect level 3 factories.
- Use the library as a land value and overflow tool in residential blocks that are just short of a density threshold.
The happiness and land value guide covers the residential side of the same decisions, and the buildings reference lists every education building and add-on with its footprint and upkeep.