Despite having a wacky sense of humor, Two Point Campus is a surprisingly deep management sim that provides a breadth of options for building, and ultimately running, your dream school. Though Two Point Studios does a great job with the game’s tutorials (among many other aspects), there’s still a ton to learn and a lot of systems to juggle all at once. Your first day at university can be a hectic one.
With that in mind, this Two Point Campus tips and tricks guide compiles a handful of useful tips to get you started on your academic journey.
Always Place Vending Machines and Seating
Early on, you’ll learn that managing students’ happiness in Two Point Campus is essential. Our first tip is that unhappy students won’t pay tuition fees, which means no income, no matter what money-making tricks you use. There are several ways to increase happiness, such as building dormitories, student unions, and bathrooms, but one of the simplest ways is by making sure two essential needs are met: food and friendship.
Make sure you have vending machines in every building; they’ll keep your students and staff satisfied and can even earn you a bit of extra pocket change. It’s also a good idea to put some benches or tables near those vending machines, as it allows students to meet, talk, and form friendships. Relationships and romances are incredibly important to student happiness, and they can even help undergrads of all levels get better XP bonuses, resulting in more money and higher university prestige.
Lean Heavily into New Mechanics Introduced in Each Level
Each new location in Two Point Campus has different requirements to earn stars, and most of these introduce a new mechanic or room. Another good tip to remember is to put most of your efforts into whatever the level has introduced, and don’t bog yourself down with unnecessary buildings or additional academic programs.
For example, Spiffinmore introduces wizarding courses and the pastoral care room, which functions like a therapy office. This level constantly bombards your campus with hexes and meteors, imparting huge emotional strain on students. So, for Spiffenmore, you’ll want plenty of pastoral care offices to deal with those effects, and that same idea holds true for whatever new mechanics are introduced in each level.
Raise Tuition for Extra Cash
Keep your coffers full in Two Point Campus can be a constant struggle, but there are a few tricks you can use to get some extra cash. One strategy that’s not really pointed out is the fact you can actually raise tuition fees, helping you to bring in more money each month from students.
At the end of each year, you can put points into each of your courses, increasing its education level and the number of students able to enroll in that specific track. If you click on the gear icon in the top left of each course in this end-of-year menu, you can adjust tuition rates.
Charging less will increase student happiness but result in fewer funds, while increasing tuition will have a negative effect on happiness but increase funds. Don’t be afraid to experiment with charging more if you want to make some big upgrades to your campus.
Don’t be Afraid to Hire Staff
Your staff is the bread and butter of your institution, and you’ll constantly need an influx of teachers, assistants, and janitors to keep up with your overall growth. Hiring staff increases your monthly fees, but it’s absolutely essential to keep the cogs of higher education turning.
Too few janitors will decrease the attractiveness and cleanliness of your university, possibly even leading to sickness that spreads across your campus. Meanwhile, not having enough assistants means some of your services, like the library or hot dog stand, will be unstaffed, which can drastically affect students’ learning ability or happiness.
Each prospective teacher, janitor, or assistant has at least one skill and a number of traits. Certain skills help these staff members move faster/complete tasks faster, while others directly contribute to student happiness with their quirky jokes. Further, some employees have traits that directly decrease cleanliness or make them take more frequent breaks. Don’t be afraid to hire staff members — and hire ones that have higher skill levels if possible — but always keep an eye on these to maximize efficiency and expenditure.
Constantly Research and Train
After the first couple of levels in Two Point Campus, you’ll unlock the research room and the training room. The first lets you unlock upgrades for a variety of items, like the lectern in the lecture hall. The second room lets you level up the skills of your teachers and staff, which is incredibly useful.
In each level, it’s good strategy to establish both of these rooms early on and make sure they’re constantly working. For the research room, you’ll need to assign a teacher to work there, but for the training room, you can simply pay for upgrades, and staff will train whenever they have the time. Make sure you have a few different training courses queued up at any given time, so you’re constantly improving your overall campus.
Visualizations are a Huge Help
Another trick the game doesn’t tell you involves overlays. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a little icon that looks like an eye, which holds one of your most useful tools in the game: visualizations. By expanding this menu, you can select a number of different visualizations that put filters over the screen to show how a variety of factors are affecting campus life. Essentially, you can see a heat map of things like attractiveness, temperature, student happiness, and more. It’s the perfect tool for finding out if you have any gaps in your campus planning, and luckily, it’s super easy to use.
With those basics in your planner, you should be set to build the best school possible in Two Point Campus. Make sure to check for more study materials here on GameSkinny.
