Getting into the Kerrow Basin studio, keeping evidence, and submitting the weekly record.
Before the first road#
The course share has two folders: SLOP2418 / Materials / Week NN for issued work, and SLOP2418 / Submissions / your student ID / Week NN for uploads. Assessed work goes in Submissions / your student ID / A1, A2 or A3; retain the upload receipt and the exact submitted save. A3’s Friday memo goes in A3 / Jury copy, and Monday’s bundle in A3 / Final.
Marisol Quaye sends enrolled students their share invitation and Monday lecture-room notice by 15 February 2027, a week before teaching. If access has not arrived, contact the convenor before Week 1; lab technicians handle account and licence problems. Your tutor can accept a timestamped email attachment if the share is unavailable. The policies set the upload clocks and adjustments.
Software and issued checkpoints#
Use the Cities: Skylines II build installed in the design lab. Technicians publish its exact version, map checksum and required assets in Materials / Setup before the invitation goes out. Match that manifest before opening a reference save; retain the lab build for the semester and ask technicians before updating. No simulation-altering mods, unlimited money or unlock-all. The untouched Kerrow Basin map and a lab-machine booking are available with the invitation, before the first session.
If you are installing on your own machine rather than booking the lab, the floor the technicians support is a six-core CPU, 8 GB of system RAM, a 6 GB discrete GPU and an SSD — roughly a 2020 mid-range desktop. Below that the simulation still runs, but the day-night and weather passes the later weeks depend on will not hold a readable frame rate at full district extent, and you will end up booking a lab machine for the evidence anyway. Technicians publish the current floor alongside the version manifest; ask them before buying anything.
Week folders open seven days before each studio. They contain the named kerrow-ref-* checkpoints, version manifest, captions and evidence sheets. Week 6 includes before/three-week/six-week branches; Week 7 overload/water-upgrade/treatment-upgrade branches; Week 8 the allocation sheet and three closure branches. Week 9 supplies the fine-weather state, fixed camera and polygon. Week 11 supplies the address sample and land-value normalization sheet. Keep each issued branch separate from your personal weekly save.
On the reference figures: every fixed outcome quoted on this site — the travel times, the land-value scores, the monthly balances — is a worked hypothetical prepared for teaching, not a measurement captured from a supplied save. They are there so the studio has a common set of numbers to argue against, and the worksheets below are usable against your own district today. Before you quote a reference figure as a reading, match the version and map checksum the technicians publish; before you claim you reproduced one, say which save and which build you got it from. A figure whose provenance you cannot name is not evidence, however plausible it looks.
Evidence sheet you can copy#
| Field | Record |
|---|---|
| Identity | Student ID, week, personal save or exact reference branch, game build |
| Observation | In-game day, 08:00 unless the exercise specifies otherwise, panel or method |
| Value | Number, unit, numerator and denominator; blank means missing, not zero |
| Provenance | Direct readout, manual observation, derived worksheet measure, or worked hypothetical |
| Comparison | Same extent, route, time and settings; name any mismatch |
| Claim | What changed, what may explain it, and what the evidence cannot establish |
For the Week 9 manual count, fix the camera and mark a polygon on a screenshot before counting. Count people inside it during one in-game minute at 19:00 in the issued fine-weather state. Record camera position, polygon corners, weather, day and count. Without the issued geometry, label a self-defined observation as personal, not reference-comparable.
For Week 11, give every sampled address a stable ID and retain its location across weeks. Use the issued normalization consistently, recording raw value and divisor. Empty Week 1 land has no resident cohort: compare populated Week 4 with Week 11 for household composition. Aggregate counts cannot identify who moved away or changed wealth category.
Worked Week 8 allocation#
These invented monthly district allocations demonstrate the arithmetic. They are not native district controls or a forecast of your save. Eligible outlay excludes the protected utility increments, tax moves and capital works.
| Eligible line | Before (₡/month) | Cut | After |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transit | 4,800 | 1,200 | 3,600 |
| Education | 8,000 | 2,000 | 6,000 |
| Healthcare | 5,000 | 800 | 4,200 |
| Parks and recreation | 2,200 | 400 | 1,800 |
| Total eligible | 20,000 | 4,400 | 15,600 |
₡4,400 / ₡20,000 = 22%. Outside that denominator, protect water production ₡6,800/month and treatment ₡5,100/month: total allocated spending falls from ₡31,900 to ₡27,500. Adding the Week 9 plaza and trees costs another ₡2,540/month, so name that much additional discretionary saving or evidenced surplus. The protected treatment line is not available to pay for it.
The bus example uses a 24-minute round trip: four buses give 6 minutes; three give 8 minutes. A measured 10-minute headway needs a longer observed round trip, not a different answer to the same division.
Worked utility chronology#
| Checkpoint | Demand (u) | Installed capacity (u) | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline | 1,104 | 1,200 | 96 u headroom |
| First completion | 1,142 | 1,200 | 58 u headroom; 95.2% utilization, not failure |
| Second completion | 1,340 | 1,200 | 140 u shortfall after another 198 u of demand |
Here u is an illustrative capacity unit, not a claim about a particular game-build label. Read actual units from your panel. A shortfall establishes insufficient total capacity; it does not establish pipe pressure, which district fails first, or that an upstream intake is exposed to a downstream plume.
Capstone comparison sheet#
Record monthly balance in ₡/month, each travel time against the same route and observation window, and land value under one normalization. Keep reference and personal series separate. Transit share (reference 17%) and walk share (reference 31%) have separately sampled denominators and must not be added.
The reference reserve of ₡186,000 is a capital stock. The cross-town link’s staging and operating costs belong in a year-by-year forecast alongside it; a monthly surplus alone does not prove year-fifteen solvency. Complete both alternatives and finalize your position before the Friday 21 May memo deadline.