Academia: School Simulator – Starter Guide

This guide will help you to get your school off to a good start and hope it will teach you some of its features.

Guide to Good Start

All credit goes to MGMax!

Introduction

You can start by either choosing Easy, Normal, Hard or Hardcore/Insane. I would recommend Easy or Normal at first until you get the hang of things. Alot of the achievements are progressive over each school you design so you can always start a new game whenever you want to. The difficulty effects how much starting money you have and other costs.

Your main source of income will be for each student you have in your school. Dont rush it as you can lose students and get penalties for students who cause trouble, go on sick or even leave for a rival school!

You have to gradually build up you school so that you can cope with demand and this guide is here to help you get started with a successful and profitable school.

Your starting money will also come from effective use of the grants. You have to plan ahead so that you can build all the necessary facilities in a certain order so that you do not run out of money.

If you do run out of money (- negative income), you will get a 10k government grant at the end of the day. however, if you run out of money for a second day, it will be game over. 

Planning and Construction

At the start of every year you are put into the build stage. There is no need to rush here as you seem to have unlimited days until you are ready to open the school. There will be no students and no daily expenses until you choose to ‘start the school year’ so wait until you are very sure you are ready.

The first thing you want is to have a school entrance. I would keep the garbage and delivery zones as they are and build around them.

Use the blueprint tool to plan ahead as to how you want your school to look. I usually like to put my staff buildings to the left of the school and the classrooms to the right with outdoor activities further to the right with cafeteria and common room near the middle.

I put walls around the entrance and worker areas to guide staff away from the grass which cause dirt. You could replace these with fences and gates later after some research.

Ideally you want a staff door that leads to the worker zones for quicker access and where students wont enter.

Remember that eventually you can expand your school size at the top and to the right but the left part of the school stays as it is.

Always plan ahead and gradually complete each grant:

Principals Office

Before you can research anything you must place a Principals Office. This is also the first grant that you have that is auto chosen for you.

The suggested size is a 5 x 5 office room which I think you should just stick with.

All you do is place the 5 x 5 office and put in your principal and done, you will automatically get the grant money and can move on.

When your students are caught by a monitor for doing something naughty (IE- bullying, smoking etc) they will be taken to the principals office to be told off/scolded. They will not be properly punished until the relevant research is done to either have them clean, have detention or get councillors help.

Classrooms

The main part of the game is getting students in your school. You will therefore need to plan your classrooms accordingly.

The optimal classroom size i’ve found is: 9 x 6 – which will give enough room for student desks from 15 to 30, a chalk board and teacher desk with some small room for movement.

You could theoretically use different sizes and design them how you want to but i’d advise sticking with this way for now.

You will first need 4 classrooms – 1 for each year (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior & Senior).

There are 6 subjects – Language, Maths, Science, Art, History & PE (Sports).

You will need 1 Teacher for each of the subjects to start. I try to look for those with 30+ skill in the chosen subject with No negative traits (See more in the Teachers and Traits Section).

Teachers and Traits

You have to be very careful when hiring new teachers as they can be very expensive. You are best choosing lower skilled teachers at first (around 25-30 skill in the chosen subject) and with no negative traits but this isnt always possible.

Late Game

As you progress, you will want better teachers. After certain research you will get Special Teachers who are the best skilled with 100 and have a Silver star on them:

You can also train a 1 star teacher up to a 3 star teacher but the Special teachers are unique.

Traits

Traits can have a small or big effect on the teach and is symbolised with a white + symbol.

The traits you want to look for are:

The negative traits you should avoid are:

Teaching Bonus Effect

Here’s a quick snippet from the games wiki to help you understand classroom sizes and teacher bonuses:

So basically, having a teacher with 100 stat in a specific subject and researching Teacher training will allow you to have a class of 30 students with perfect exam scores.

Toilets

I usually change room size each for a male and female toilet according to what fits. Here I have used 5 x 6.

Its up to you to decide how many you can afford / need but I usually have around 5-7 toilet, 3-4 sinks and 1 or 2 sanitizers. I believe its about 1 toilet to 3 students and 1 sink per 5 students. If you can plan the schedule to have only one class of 15 out of the classroom you can use less than if all 60 students were out at the same time.

Be aware that if there arent enough toilets then students will pee outside in the bushes. Also, keep in mind that each utility has a daily cost.

Cafeteria & Kitchen

I usually keep the Cafeteria relatively small at first with room to expand it later. Each table & 2 bench can offer room for 8 seats (Staff and students) and I usually have 4 tables to start (32 seats) so theres plenty of room if you stagger the schedule to only allow a class to have lunch at a time with space for a few staff members.

How to change ingredients quality after researching it?

You click ‘Reports’ on the right of the screen, then click Kitchen on the left then look for ingredients and click the arrows to change from Regular, Superior, or Inferior. Each will have different costs and health effects.

Staff Numbers

The Year ends after day 9. For the first year I would stick with the initial 5 workers and have 2 cooks, 2 or 3 Janitors, 1 monitor and 0 nurses (if on Easy or normal) and 1 Teacher for each subject.

As your school gets bigger you will obviously want more and remember that if staff are patrolling routes they are not available to freeroam – IE if 3 of the 5 workers are assigned to routes, only 2 will be available to build new structures.

Year 1 Final Overview

This is an example of how my school looks for the first year. I have removed the clinic for now as I dont usually get sick students for a while if the cleanliness is good and on lower difficulties.

This gives you enough room to expand and while keeping this as a base. The grey/black walls are there to give a guide of how to expand further while making sure staff or students dont go onto the grass thus causing them to tread dirt all over.

End of Year Review

At the end of the 9th day (Month?), You will have an End of Year Review where it shows you your scores for Passing Rate, Cleanliness, Delinquency, Graduate Pedigree and you will be ranked with other schools.

Year 2 and Beyond

Now you made it through the first year and have a good base structure of a school it is up to you how you want to proceed.

Once you continue, your students will move up a year (ie Freshmen will become Sophomore, Seniors will leave) and you will be able to choose more students to come to your school if you wish. You must have atleast 1 student for each of the 4 years (Year 1 – Freshmen, Year 2 – Sophomore, Year 3 – Junior, Year 4 – Senior).

Research

The Research that I found most useful (especially for automation) are:

• Worker Routes – Set workers on routes to repair items so you dont have to.
• Principals Perogative – Automatically send deliquants to the specified punishment.
• Goon Removal – Your monitors will now automatically remove goons from the school.

Other Money making

• You can make a little extra money from Vending machines and Recycling, however it doesnt seem alot and is rather unreliable.
• You can also build Solar panels and Wind turbines etc later that earn you some money but again, seems like a waste of time as once you get to that stage, you should already have a healthy budget.

…and this is how far I got on easy mode after over 30 hours as the number 1 school.