Question about school capacity

[SamAvery 9]

Hi! I've been getting increasingly into tinkering with my mods and creating edits of vanilla lots to play with. One thing I've been really wanting in my game is small, tiny schoolhouses for small neighborhoods. Tiny neighborhoods are neat for keeping commutes short, you see. So I have oft ended up plopping the vanilla 2x3 elementary school down and just consistently using a tiny fraction of the budget, over and over. it's hard to fine tune the budget using so little of the bar and if I only have 30 students in a school I feel like maybe I should be able to use a bit less space. 2x2 or 1x2.

The problem I run into is that any time I try to set the school capacity lower than 500 in the ilives reader, the school just totally stops working in the game. If the capacity is under 500, no students attend the school at all, regardless of all the unused capacity. Does anyone know why that is? Is there a way for me to get around/ change this? And if not, why is that the case? 

Thanks for anyone's time reading, cheers!

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

When you say it totally stops working, is that because the budget allocated suddenly falls to zero the next month and the capacity also drops to none? I very much suspect you might be creating the Phantom Sliders Bug.  

You could take a look at a tutorial I wrote and use the same concept for your smaller schools.  

If that does solve the problem then I seem to recall there's a similar method by @Ulisse Wolf or @Null 45 or someone that does the same sort of thing, but was chosen as better than my method. (That happened while I was missing for a couple of years so I'm really not quite up to speed on all the newer developments since mid 2022 and after.)

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Hmmm. I've done my own testing. To start, I simply altered the stats of the small elementary school and started in a brand new city tile so there wouldn't be any conflict with previous plopped schools. I set the capacity at 50 students and adjusted the costs accordingly.

I cannot get any students to go there:

 

As such, I no longer suspect the Phantom Slider for your main trouble. I'm trying to recall if any one else ever made mention of this oddity when lowering the capacity?

[SamAvery 9]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Hmmm. I've done my own testing. To start, I simply altered the stats of the small elementary school and started in a brand new city tile so there wouldn't be any conflict with previous plopped schools. I set the capacity at 50 students and adjusted the costs accordingly.

I cannot get any students to go there:

 

As such, I no longer suspect the Phantom Slider for your main trouble. I'm trying to recall if any one else ever made mention of this oddity when lowering the capacity?

Yes! That's exactly what happens in my game. No one goes to the school if the capacity is lowered. The only mention I can recall is someone's rural school cc where they sad they would have set the capacity low but that "500 is as low as it goes" so they didn't. I should find that post, ask them how they know that, I suppose. Let's see if I can find it...... 
 

There it is. I'll ask them how making theirs went and what they know. I'll update if they respond and/or I learn anything. 

  Edited November 8, 2025 by SamAvery  
I misquoted a post (added a number they didn't actually say) that I mentioned and amended the mistake.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

I fixed it!  

Now, I don't know if this'll have repercussions anywhere else in the game so use at your own risk. 

Take a gander in Exemplar 6534284a-e7e2c2db-69189c84 at the property 0xec43826b - School Capacity Chunk Size. The first rep is set at 500 so I dropped that down to 50 and now my school works:

 

Here's the modified file you can play with: Residential Simulator - Override Small School Min Capacity.dat

I suspect those chunks can be matched up to the regular High School, Large Elementary, Large High, Museum and so forth. Keep in mind I have no idea if this'll bork the game in any other way.  

[SamAvery 9]

Oh my goodness, you're incredible! I'll happily go on a lil testing spree to see if this messes with the game in any unforseen ways. I had scrolled through the list of properties I could tinker with in ilives and saw the school capacity chunk size... But I assumed from the description that it was just for showing school info on the data view or something. I don't even know why.... eeeeee I shall go forth with happy testing. 

Thanks so much for your help!

[SamAvery 9]

Also I know that large cities are very exciting, so I get why most cc schools have enhanced capacity rather than lowered. But still, I'm surprised that so few people have wanted to make small school and run into this problem before. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

9 minutes ago, SamAvery said:

I'm surprised that so few people have wanted to make small school and run into this problem before.

I'm very much in favor of smaller schools. I have a plethora of tiny towns like this:

 

And those could certainly use a 1 x 1 tiny schoolhouse with a very small capacity like you envision.

Do you suppose no one did since 500 students in a one room building just feels absurd? (And they didn't find my solution to the the problem so just posted the file and gave up.)

[SamAvery 9]

26 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Do you suppose no one did since 500 students in a one room building just feels absurd? (And they didn't find my solution to the the problem so just posted the file and gave up.)

Perhaps! It is a ridiculous mental image, lol.

Oh I love the tiny town of yours in the photo!! It's so cute!! I see you're also a fan of the easy forest lots! I love those. Those are some of the lots I tinkered with for my own use.. I slightly increased the amount of air pollution they decreased in my game. Not a game breaking amount, just a bit. I thought it would make sense for a plot of forest to clear more pollution than a similarly sized green park, since it has so many more trees, and I plop these down where I otherwise would have put either unzoned land or a grass area that I then manually smothered with trees. I think it's fair to have the manual planting remain more effective than a prepared lot. Each tree planted by the mayor reduces 3 pollution points. So I decided to pretend each tree on the easy forest cleared 1 pollution. Each squared had an average of five trees on it by default so I adjusted the pollution ratings to 5 per square on the lot. iudvhiasruewaeefwaffae anyway uh

I have seen one 1x1 school before. The "Small Hungarian School". 

I think it's adorable but was frightfully overpowered for my personal tastes. (wanting to keep as much of a vanilla flavored feel as possible)

I'm actually using it as the base I was testing my school idea on. I've never made a BAT before but I'm thinking about diving in and a tiny schoolhouse sounds like a fun goal for my first file upload here. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

20 hours ago, SamAvery said:

Oh I love the tiny town of yours in the photo!! It's so cute!!

Yay! Thanks for that. 

 

20 hours ago, SamAvery said:

I see you're also a fan of the easy forest lots! I love those.

Prolly very similar to those, but the ones in my pic are from a fillers project CB and I worked on long ago. (I created a complete set of diagonal farm field transition textures with soft blends between them and accounting for every variation of texture appearance and tweaking three of the Maxis crops for better alignment and coloration. Then CB lotted them all. We used a ton of SPOT pieces (which really help with the complex options), but in later testing we found that was too much and a single large city tile with mostly farms and edge decorations (including forest style lots) wound up making the city save size like 46 mb or something crazy.)

But, more to the point you are making: Yes, they are a wonderful concept and I really like how good the wind breaks look between fields using them. ( What I didn't like quite so well is that the darker green looks like black spots when zoomed farther out.  )

 

20 hours ago, SamAvery said:

So I decided to pretend each tree on the easy forest cleared 1 pollution. Each squared had an average of five trees on it by default so I adjusted the pollution ratings to 5 per square on the lot.

I completely agree with your reasoning and that sounds fair. It's not cheating at all.  

 

20 hours ago, SamAvery said:

iudvhiasruewaeefwaffae

I don't have a cat to walk across my keyboard, but if i did it might say: aSDFghjkl;;;;;;p0oiuytREWq   zzzzzxcvbnnnnmM back to you.  

 

20 hours ago, SamAvery said:

I've never made a BAT before but I'm thinking about diving in and a tiny schoolhouse sounds like a fun goal for my first file upload here.

GFI.  

I lotted a wee little bit and I enjoyed it. (I didn't continue on tho because CB has a knack for it and he enjoyed creating things for me and that let me do more code style stuff leaving the prettification to him.)

 

21 hours ago, SamAvery said:

I'll happily go on a lil testing spree to see if this messes with the game in any unforseen ways.

Yay! I'll stay tuned to this channel.  

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

On 11/7/2025 at 10:14 PM, CorinaMarie said:

I fixed it!

Turns out I'm not the first.  

Yes, I did figure this out independently, but CB did some searching and found @RobertaME's work: Education Modding: The Devil's in the Details. Search for "chunk" on that page. I see I reacted to it so it could've been in the back of my mind when I searched all exemplars for "school" and found the chunk size property.

That'll give you the names of which buildings the other 6 reps are for.

[Kel9509 1,363]

On 11/8/2025 at 11:57 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Yes, I did figure this out independently, but CB did some searching and found @RobertaME's work: Education Modding: The Devil's in the Details. Search for "chunk" on that page. I see I reacted to it so it could've been in the back of my mind when I searched all exemplars for "school" and found the chunk size property.

That is an interesting link.  It's all the more reason why I think school properties should be separated from the New Properties.XML file for building purposes.  There are a ton of schools out there and I don't think all of them are going to be revised to reflect a particular Education Mod.  As it is, I've been busy and haven't had a chance yet to see if it's even possible to install an Education Mod into an existing region (understanding that all schools will need to be bulldozed and re-plopped, and custom schools I downloaded will need to have their properties recalculated).

Inertia from existing regions is the biggest drag against these sort of things.  No one wants to abandon their regions.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

52 minutes ago, Kel9509 said:

(understanding that all schools will need to be bulldozed and re-plopped, and custom schools I downloaded will need to have their properties recalculated)

Updates can be made which hide the originals from the menu, but let them continue to function in one's cities and be bulldozed or not while the new versions can be plopped anytime. (I did pioneer the idea and wrote a tutorial for it, but I believe the DLLers found an even better method which accomplishes the same thing.)

[Kel9509 1,363]

On 11/10/2025 at 8:23 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Updates can be made which hide the originals from the menu, but let them continue to function in one's cities and be bulldozed or not while the new versions can be plopped anytime. (I did pioneer the idea and wrote a tutorial for it, but I believe the DLLers found an even better method which accomplishes the same thing.)

Yes I know you did that for the police stations.  I don't know if there's a DLL mod out there that does the same thing.  But I don't mind over-writing the default schools and bulldozing them if needed.  The issue is that if I use an education mod, I'll need to go through hundreds of downloads and re-compute every school and college (and possibly even the Opera House fixes you did as well).  That's the thing holding me back.  I think that there's some value in these education mods because it is awfully easy to maintain a 160+ EQ in a city with merely a library and a decent high/elementary school.  I haven't really found it necessary to plop a college at all, for instance.  

It does seem odd overall that there's even a setting for a minimum school capacity.  I'm not sure what value that'd hold.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

I haven't really found it necessary to plop a college at all, for instance.  

Agreed. The whole system needs a makeover and Roberta's might be the answer. (I don't know as I can't test it anytime soon.) And yes, I also showed long ago how excellent health and a museum with a super steady population can reach a high EQ in time and maintain it.

 

2 hours ago, Kel9509 said:

It does seem odd overall that there's even a setting for a minimum school capacity.  I'm not sure what value that'd hold.

Perhaps it allows other calculations to deal with the info as one block of data rather than having to account for every single Sim? Like if you go shopping and stock up on beer it's easier to handle by the case rather than getting 24 loose cans.