Immigration
Every day, the game calculates immigration: who, if anyone, moves into your city. The algorithm that makes the call is the bouncer. Each day a few families and single adults show up at the edge of town wanting a place to live, and the bouncer decides who gets in and who gets turned around.
The bouncer at the door
The lazy way to grow a city is to drop a perfect resident into every empty home. It fills the map and it lies: nobody is ever too broke for the rent, nobody is ever turned away, and you only ever meet the people who made it. That is survivorship bias, and it would have you believe, wrongly, that life here is frictionless. The bouncer exists to break it.
So instead the city samples a real would-be arrival, flaws and all, and a bouncer asks one question:
If we let this person in, can they make a life here, or will they wash right back out?
There are three ways to fail:
- Affordability. Can they keep paying the rent?
- Jobs. Is there work for them?
- Class match. Does a home that suits them exist here?
The bouncer never sets how many people show up (your culture points do) or who is out there (the wide world does). It only judges this one applicant. So an empty fancy district is a real signal: the people who could afford it did not come. The game did not forget to fill it.
Culture points: your growth dial
Culture is how the outside world hears about your city, and it is the only thing that sets your daily intake. Every culture building gives off culture aura, counted in points, and your citywide total is how many arrivals knock on the door each day.
City Hall carries one point on its own, so every city grows a little from day one. After that it is on you: museums, the Museum of Modern Art, film studios, a chess club, a techno club. Each one adds points, and a livelier venue is worth more than a quiet one. A cultural_boom event doubles your total while it lasts. Want more people? This is the dial.
Who shows up
Once a day the city rolls would-be arrivals from a realistic distribution. Most have a high school diploma, a good number a degree, a few neither, calibrated to real US immigration data (see Parameters).
That is the supply: everyone who wants in. The city never fudges it and never re-rolls a reject into a handier person, so it stays honest about who arrives. Who actually moves in is the supply after the bouncer, and the two can look very different.
A day at the gate
- How many try today equals your total culture points.
- Best neighborhoods fill first. Open units are lined up by neighborhood quality, nicest first.
- Roll an applicant for the vacancy. A small share arrive as a family: a spouse plus zero to two kids. The spouse is rolled the same way and rides along, no separate check.
- The three checks, all required:
- Affordability. Three months of rent in ready cash (savings plus a month’s pay) for the deposit, then either pay of at least 1.5x the rent or a year’s rent in the bank. The first gets them in; the second keeps them from burning through savings and getting evicted later.
- Jobs. There has to be work they can take. A degree-holder fills a job in their own field if one is open, and otherwise takes whatever does not need a degree and makes do (underemployment, same as real life). Everyone else needs one of those no-degree jobs. And if a graduate has to settle, the rent check above judges them on that smaller paycheck, not the salary their diploma suggests. The wealthy skip this one; they are not here for the work.
- Class match. The wealthy accept only premium housing in a top neighborhood. Everyone else takes any tier they can afford.
- Families also need school seats. A family with more school-age children than open seats does not move in. Build schools before you go courting families.
- Flunk and the door re-rolls, up to eight tries. After that the unit waits for tomorrow.
Why your city looks the way it does
Homes will not fill. Intake is your culture, full stop. With just a City Hall the line is short. Want to grow? Build culture.
Degree-holders in dead-end jobs. A graduate whose field is not hiring still gets in by taking lower work. They keep the credential but earn the job they can get. Build offices, hospitals, and universities so they work in their field.
Who lives in the fancy district? The few genuinely wealthy arrivals, plus anyone who can afford the rent. The rich skew older, since that money is years of saving.
So many without a diploma. Some arrivals are unschooled by design, and city-born kids who age out before a school seat graduate unschooled too. Both earn minimum wage, so build schools early.
Basic-tier homes sit empty. “Basic” is quality, not price: a basic unit in a nice area can outprice a standard one in a rough area, and the rent still has to be covered. An empty tier is priced for wallets that are not showing up.
Player levers
- Build culture to raise intake. Nothing else moves it.
- Build the workplaces you want filled. Degree-holders move in for any open job, but only work in their field, at field pay, if you build the offices, hospitals, and universities that hire them.
- Build schools before kids age out, or the next generation joins the unschooled.
- Mix housing tiers. All-premium fills slowly and grays; all-basic leaves no upper-income tax base.
Parameters
Family ratio
0.08
Probability that an immigrant arrives with family (spouse plus 0-2 children).
Bachelors degree ratio
0.48
Share of arrivals who show up with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Whether they actually work as professionals depends on the workplaces you build; otherwise they move in and take lower work.
High school ratio
0.72
Among immigrants without a bachelor’s degree, the ratio who have at least a high school diploma.
Bootstrap population threshold
100
Below this population the city is in a bootstrap grace period: the immigration bouncer waves every arrival through (no jobs, affordability, or class screening) so a brand-new town can actually grow before it has any jobs. Intake stays throttled by culture aura, so growth is still gradual. At or above it the normal jobs/affordability/class gates resume.
⚠️ Source pending