Urbek City Builder — starting guide: the first 15,000 citizens, the numbers behind food and work, and the housing ladder

Urbek City Builder (Fridus, formerly Estudios Kremlinois; published by RockGame) is a city builder with no money in it. Every building is paid for with resources and every building then drains resources every cycle to keep running, so the game is really a set of flow balances: food against work, work against energy, coal against steel, and a population that only grows while there is food in the stores.

The twist that catches new players is that you do not place most of your housing. You place empty housing plots and the buildings on them grow into something else depending on what is within a few tiles — a hut becomes a village house, a suburb or a slum, and then a two-storey downtown block, a five-storey tower, a mixed office block, or a villa. Getting the correct services into the correct radii is the whole game.

This guide is the build order plus the maths behind it: what each production building consumes and produces per cycle, what each house tier costs you in food and gives back in work, the population thresholds at which everything unlocks, and the traps that eat a new player's first ten hours. Every number here comes from the game's own data as published on the official wiki; where a second source disagrees, the disagreement is printed instead of smoothed over.

What this is written for, and where the numbers come from

The official wiki is urbek.fandom.com — it is labelled "Official wiki", and its building pages are generated from the game's own data files: each page carries the internal building id (minaCarbon, lotaCarbon3, mixta8), the build cost, the per-cycle resource flow, storage, road distance, tile size and the exact variable requirements with their radii. Those tables are what this guide is built from.

Its hand-written prose pages are a different quality of source and sometimes contradict its own tables. Where that happens this guide follows the generated tables and says so out loud, in the "Where the sources disagree" section at the end. Two further caveats: the wiki has no pages at all for the buildings added by the Wellbeing update (fire station, pharmacy, mental health centre, psychiatric hospital, urban forest) and carries no figures for the Lumbercamp, Lumberjack cabin or Watermill, so those numbers are absent here rather than guessed.

Five rules the game never states outright

1. There is no money. Nothing is bought with cash. Buildings cost resources as a one-off, then consume resources every cycle as upkeep — and an unpaid upkeep stops the building working. The wiki describes both the one-off cost and the per-cycle flow for each building, and this guide keeps them separate: "cost" is one-off, everything in a "per cycle" table is continuous.
2. Housing grows itself. You place a plot (the Wooden hut, 50 work + 10 wood) and the surroundings decide what it becomes. The surroundings are measured in short radii, which the data gives exactly: density is residents, and every other service is counted within 5, 6, 8 or 10 tiles of the plot.
3. Work comes in three tiers — unskilled work, skilled work and high-skilled work — and they are not interchangeable. Low-tier houses produce unskilled work and a little skilled work; only downtown-tier housing produces high-skilled work.
4. Unlocks are not a tech tree. Buildings unlock at population thresholds, or at global variable thresholds (happiness, faith, culture, night life, green areas, sports, self-organization). There is no research to buy. The population table below is the spine of the whole run.
5. The first career Path you satisfy locks you in. The wiki's own words: "You will follow the path of the first condition you satisfy." And an upgraded building does not retroactively satisfy a requirement for its predecessor — 5 Modern Grain Silos do not count as the 5 Grain Silos the Path of Productivity asks for.

Start-of-game settings that change the run

Chosen on the New Game screen (wiki: Making a new game):

The biomes are a progression of their own: Temperate is the tutorial map and your first win unlocks Desert and Archipelago; winning both of those unlocks Valdivian rainforest; winning that unlocks Ruins. Desert has no wood (you quarry stone instead, and food only works with wells and irrigation near rivers); Archipelago has little farmland but excellent fishing and bans bridges, so ferries link the islands; Valdivian rainforest cannot be bulldozed, has no coal and no iron at all, and gets coal only from Charcoal piles (10 wood → 5 coal per cycle).

The eight regions (added July 2023) each give a unique building plus three modifiers:

Eastern Europe doubles all iron and steel output, which is the single biggest economic modifier on the list. The Middle East's "research centres ×2 food" and "Bazaar consumes no food" matter because the Minimarket is normally a 200-food-per-cycle sink.

The two numbers on the HUD: food and work

You start a standard game with roughly 2000 work and 200 food in the stores. Those two numbers alternate: farms turn work into food, houses turn food into population and work, and the population eats the food. A player-community guide states the loop plainly: "when you have much more Food than Work, build Housings to generate more Work; when you have much more Work than Food, build farming buildings."

Food comes from four branches — farming, fishing, orchards, and (very late) research centres — and the branch you have available depends on biome. The numbers, per cycle, from the wiki's generated tables:

Read that table as a food-per-work curve. A Field feeds 14 food for 5 unskilled work. A Farm House feeds 100 food for no ongoing work at all — that is why it is the first real multiplier and why the wiki calls it "produces a lot of food without the need for work". A Landlord's house feeds 200 food for 100 work, but it also houses 10 residents. By the endgame, the Farm shed turns 250 work and 100 energy into 700 food, and the Food plant turns 600 work, 300 energy and 1 science into 2000 food — a completely different order of cost per food than a field. The wiki's Food page states the same arc: "in the late game it becomes a major exercise in clever planning — fields alone can't support a city of fifty thousand."

Two placement rules bite here. A Farm House cannot be built within 5 tiles of another Farm House (its own table says 0 or fewer within 5), so the food buildings are spread out, not clustered — and the Grain silo and Orchard both require Farm Houses nearby. And Orchards require zero pollution within 6 tiles, while the Sawmill that feeds your wood supply produces 4 pollution and the Warehouse produces 1, so orchards and industry want to be on opposite sides of town.

Work comes from houses, and higher tiers give back less of it

The last column is arithmetic, not a game value, and it is the most useful thing in the table. Your cheapest unskilled work is a wooden hut at one food per work. Every upgrade buys density, skilled work and high-skilled work but pays for them in food per labourer: a poor social building is 2 food per unskilled work, a 12-storey tower is 10. A city of nothing but towers will starve while a city of nothing but huts will never produce high-skilled work. The wiki's Work page puts the same point the other way round: "as your city grows and housing upgrades to higher tiers, work production per building often decreases" — and suggests that keeping some poor districts is a legitimate strategy, noting deliberately keeping poor housing does not have to mean unhappy housing.

The 12-storey building deserves its own warning. It is the biggest high-skilled-work producer in the game (40 per cycle) and houses 120 residents, but it burns 200 food per cycle for only 20 unskilled work — ten times the food per unskilled worker of a hut. High-skilled work cannot be turned back into food until research centres exist at 33,000 population, so for most of the run a district of 12-storeys is a food furnace. The community guide's advice is to suppress them by keeping the city's healthcare below 3 or by building Banks, because a 12-storey needs healthcare 3 within 10 tiles and no bank within 5 — both of which are visible in the game's own requirement list above.

What each house tier actually demands

Density is measured in residents, everything else in service points, and the number after the radius is tiles. These are the exact requirements from the building tables.

Low and medium density

Downtown and high density

Two things follow from that table. First, retail is the hard gate on the high-density mixed buildings — a 5-storey mixed house wants 50 retail within 7 tiles and an 8-storey mixed office wants 90. Retail comes from mixed-use houses themselves (+2 to +5 each) and from the Mall, so the mixed district has to bootstrap itself. Second, offices come only from 8-storey mixed office-commercial buildings (+1 each), and offices are what the late-game research centres require — which is why the Airport at 33,000 population is the real start of the endgame.

Industrial housing is a separate ladder, and it is how you get iron and coal early without building mines into the ground:

Miners' houses are the cheapest iron and coal in the game, and they pay for it in food: a mining district is a food district. The player-guide advice is to ring each Iron mine and Coal mine with street-facing housing as soon as you build it, leave room for road spacing so the miners' houses can appear, and replace them with deep or open-pit mines later only if food becomes the bottleneck.

The population unlock spine

Everything in Urbek unlocks either at a population figure or at a global variable figure. This is the population half, in order, as published in the building tables:

The variable half of the unlock list, which is where the non-population branches live:

The first hour, in order

1. Fields, then huts, then repeat. You begin with about 2000 work and 200 food, and a Field costs 30 work while producing 14 food per cycle for 5 work. Build a batch of fields first — they are the only food source available at zero population — then a batch of Wooden huts (50 work + 10 wood, each housing 6 residents and producing 10 work for 10 food), then more fields. A Field accepts a road up to 5 tiles away, so put the roads in the middle and the fields either side.

2. Lumbercamp and Lumberjack cabin. The lumbercamp is the wood supply; the wiki's Wood page gives it 15 wood per cycle for 20 work, storing 500, no other lumbercamp within 5 tiles, extracting trees up to 5 tiles away. Wood is the one-off cost of nearly every early building and the Desert biome has none at all (stone from quarries replaces it). The Lumberjack cabin is the first energy building — it converts firewood to energy — but the wiki carries no figures for it, only for the Lumberjack house at 600 population (80 work + 10 wood per cycle → 120 energy, stores 350, and needs 4 residents within 2 tiles). Trees are a finite resource: the Overexploitation of timber policy doubles lumbercamp output but triples how fast the forest disappears.

3. Farm House at 200 population. This is the first big step: 300 work buys a building that makes 100 food every cycle with no ongoing work at all. Remember the spacing rule — no other Farm House within 5 tiles.

4. The Neighbourhood council at 700 population (100 work + 100 wood). It unlocks the first tier of Policies, which is where the cheap happiness comes from. A City council at 5100 and a City hall at 25000 unlock the higher tiers; each also unlocks the tiers below it, so the City hall alone is enough once you have it.

5. School at 1800 population (1000 work + 100 iron + 100 wood). Schools do not produce skilled work — they store it: the School adds 1000 skilled work of storage and 200 unskilled work of storage, and creates 1 education within its radius. Skilled work appears when housing upgrades to Suburb house tier, and a house needs 1 education within 8 tiles to become a Suburb house at all. The High school at 5500 does the same job for high-skilled work (1000 storage, 5 education within its radius) and is the gate to the entire downtown tier.

6. Iron at 1700, coal at 2600. Both mines are cheap to build (Iron mine 1000 work; Coal mine 500 work + 100 skilled work + 50 iron) and both are supposed to be surrounded with housing so the miners' houses appear. The Iron mine needs iron ore tiles nearby: the wiki's Iron page says at least 3 Iron Ore within 5 tiles for the mine to start harvesting, which is why the placement is not free.

Energy: wood first, coal for the whole middle game, nuclear at the end

The heavy coal plant is 3.4× more coal-efficient than the basic coal plant (67.5 vs 20 energy per coal), which is why the mid game is all about coal supply. A single heavy coal plant eats 40 coal per cycle: that is four Coal mines (10 each) plus their Coal miners' houses (+1 each), or one Coal stockpile (50 coal for 150/80/10 work, needs logistics 8 within 4, a coal mine within 2 and no other stockpile within 6).

Note the two placement traps hidden in that table. A heavy coal plant needs 8 residents within 4 tiles as well as logistics 8 — industry in Urbek wants housing next to it, but it also produces 12 pollution, and pollution within 5 tiles of housing turns that housing into shantytowns. And a wind turbine needs zero residents within 2 tiles, so it cannot go in the city at all.

The wiki's Energy page prose mislabels several of these inputs (it calls the wind turbine's steel "Energy", and the solar transformer's steel and science "Wood" and "Iron"); the table above follows the generated building data.

Iron, steel, goods: the industrial chain and its ratios

The chain ratios, all arithmetic on the table above:

• One Steel works needs 10 iron per cycle, which is two Iron mines (5 each) — or one Heavy iron mine (50), which alone can feed five Steel works.
• A Heavy steelworks turns 20 iron into 60 steel — 1.5× the steel per iron of the basic works (3.0 vs 2.0), at five times the pollution.
• A Goods factory eats 10 iron and 30 energy per cycle to make 50 goods, and goods are what every mid-tier and high-tier house upgrade wants (a night-life neighborhood consumes 1 goods per cycle, a Supermarket 20, a Hardware shop 5).
• Both the Steel works and the Goods factory demand 8 warehouses within 4 tiles and 8 residents within 4 tiles. Logistics comes only from Warehouses (1 point each), so that is a cluster of eight 1×1 or 2×2 warehouses around every steel and goods building, each one costing resources per cycle and adding 1 pollution. This single requirement is why industrial parks in Urbek look like rings of sheds.

The 5,500 wall: the downtown push and the parking-lot trap

At 5,500 population the Downtown house unlocks, and your existing top-tier housing starts converting into it — but only if the plot has 15 residents within 4 tiles, a food service and a tool within 10, 5 education within 10, 3 leisure within 5, 4 connectivity within 5, and no pollution within 5 tiles.

Connectivity is the one that bites. 4 connectivity within 5 tiles comes from Bus stops (200 skilled work to build, 10 skilled work per cycle to run, +4 connectivity each). A Downtown house has 12 residents, so a downtown district needs bus stops on every other street.

And what happens if it does not get them is the most infamous trap in the game. The Parking lot unlocks at the same 5,500 population. Its condition is "3 or fewer connectivity within 5 tiles", and it provides 1 connectivity itself. So a suburb house that is short of connectivity does not stay a suburb house — it demolishes itself into a parking lot, which houses nobody and produces no work at all. A district-wide conversion to parking lots is an instant labour collapse, and because you cannot build anything without work, it can deadlock the city. The wiki's own Connectivity page describes it as something that "wastes housing space and is generally horrifically problematic to get rid of."

The fix is engineering, not reaction: have steel production running before 5,000 population, build the Bus stops early, and remember the parking lot upgrades back into a Downtown 2-storey house once the connectivity arrives. Metro hubs (27000 population, 300 skilled work, 10 connectivity) and Subway stations (27000, 200 skilled work, needs a Metro hub in the city and another Subway station within 10) are the late-game replacement at +10 connectivity each.

What the late game actually costs: science and offices

Science is the most expensive resource in the game and it is spent continuously, not once.

The industry-facing policies also charge in science: Bigger heat exchangers and Catalysts for coal each add 20 science consumption to heavy coal plants, and the whole transgenics/forestry/fruit-grafting/intensive-agriculture family of food policies is paid for by cutting science output.

Offices are the other late gate. Only the 8-storey mixed office-commercial building produces offices (+1 each), and the late research centres — the buildings that make 9000 food in a two-tile footprint — need offices nearby. The route to them runs through the mixed-use ladder: Downtown houses → Mixed use commercial-residential (11,000) → 5-storey mixed (17,500) → 8-storey mixed office-commercial (33,000, needs an Airport and Runway, 90 retail within 7 tiles, 10 connectivity within 5).

The three Paths and what they demand

Winning a map means completing all eight levels of one career Path. The Path is locked in the moment you satisfy the first condition of any of them, so decide before you build.

Path of Wealth is the cheapest to complete because the later levels are things a well-built downtown does anyway — its real gate is the Airport at 33,000 population. Path of Leisure is middle difficulty but asks for buildings nobody builds by accident (10 Chapels, 3 Museums). Path of Productivity is the hardest despite being the one the tutorial walks you through: it wants 50,000 population and 30,000 food production, and food at that scale means research centres and offices.

Policies worth taking

Three policy buildings gate the three groups. The Neighbourhood council (700 population, 100 work + 100 wood) opens the first group, the City council (5100 population, 100 skilled work + 10 iron + 100 wood + 50 steel) opens the group the wiki files under City Council, and the City hall (25000 population, 200 skilled + 200 high-skilled work + 200 iron + 100 steel) opens the City hall group. A community guide states that each higher building also unlocks the lower tiers, so the City hall alone is enough once it exists. Most policies trade one variable for another; the community rule of thumb is to trade happiness for food or energy on the wealth and production paths, food or unskilled labour for happiness on the leisure path, and never to trade science away.

The wiki's policy pages label their own tier inconsistently (the Watermill technicians page says it "requires City council" and calls itself level 2, while the Policies page lists it under City hall), so the table above follows the Policies page's grouping by policy building.

Traps that cost the first ten hours

1. The parking-lot trap (see above). Have steel and Bus stops ready before 5,000 population.
2. Path lock-in. The first Path condition you satisfy decides the rest of the run. Check the table before you build your 20th park.
3. Upgrades do not count backwards. A Path that asks for 5 Grain silos is not satisfied by Modern grain silos.
4. Any pollution within 5 tiles of housing turns it into a Shanty town, and shanty towns tank happiness and spawn Rebel houses. Industrial buildings that need residents nearby (steel works, goods factory, heavy coal plant all need 8 residents within 4) have to be ringed with miners' houses or social buildings, which tolerate pollution.
5. The Minimarket eats 200 food per cycle to provide 1 food service. A district of minimarkets can out-eat a farm. The Supermarket costs 10 work and 20 goods per cycle instead.
6. The Landlord's house consumes 100 work per cycle — a food building that is also a labour drain.
7. Do not let 12-storey buildings sprawl. 200 food per cycle for 20 unskilled work. Keep healthcare below 3 city-wide or build Banks next to the residential districts.
8. Trees are finite and Overexploitation of timber triples the cutting rate. On island and archipelago maps you can deforest yourself out of wood entirely.
9. Desert has no wood (quarries give stone) and Valdivian rainforest has no coal and no iron — its only coal is the Charcoal pile, 10 wood → 5 coal per cycle.
10. Orchards need zero pollution within 6 tiles, and Sawmills (4 pollution) and Warehouses (1 pollution) are the obvious neighbours. Keep them apart.
11. Industry needs residents and logistics in the same radius — 8 residents and 8 warehouses within 4 tiles of a steel works or goods factory. Plan the industrial park around the warehouses, not the other way round.
12. Open pit mines and the Coal stockpile accept roads only at distance 1 — they must touch the road network, unlike fields (5 tiles) and normal buildings (3).
13. Farm Houses cannot be within 5 tiles of each other, but Grain silos need 2 Farm Houses within 6 and Orchards need 1. Spread the farm houses and pack the silos around them.
14. The Dock must be on natural water — a river or the sea, never an artificial pond — and Fisherman houses need it within 6 tiles with no pollution within 5.
15. Wind turbines need zero residents within 2 tiles, and no other turbine within 1 tile, so they cannot be urban.
16. Science is a running cost, not a purchase. A nuclear plant alone consumes 45 science per cycle; a University consumes 800 unskilled, 800 skilled and 500 high-skilled work to make 30.

Where the sources disagree

• Goods factory inputs and pollution. The generated building table says 10 iron + 50 work + 50 skilled work + 30 energy → 50 goods, at 1 pollution; the wiki's Pollution page lists the goods factory at 2. Its hand-written Steel page says it "consumes 3 steel and 5 wood per cycle, produces 15 goods" and the Goods page says 10 steel. The table's figures are used above apart from the pollution value; treat the goods factory's inputs as unsettled.
• Coal miners' house output. The building table and the Houses evolution chart both give +1 coal; the Coal resource page's source list says +2. +1 is used above.
• Downtown house healthcare. The building table requires no healthcare for a Downtown house; a widely-read community guide lists "1 Healthcare in a 10 sq. radius". The 8000-population Downtown 2-storey house does require healthcare 1 within 10 in both.
• The Energy page's prose mislabels inputs — it calls the wind turbine's steel "Energy" and the solar transformer's steel and science "Wood" and "Iron". The generated tables are used above.
• Local market and Fish market share one internal id (mercadoPescados), so at least one of the two wiki pages carries the other's figures. Neither is quoted above.
• Fisherman house dock radius: the Houses evolution chart says a Dock within 6 tiles, the Food page says within 8.
• Numbers the official wiki does not carry at all: the Lumbercamp's own table is empty (its Wood page prose gives 15 wood for 20 work per cycle — prose, not data), and the Lumberjack cabin's and Watermill's tables are empty, so no rates for them appear in this guide. Buildings added by the Wellbeing update (fire station, pharmacy, mental health centre, psychiatric hospital, urban forest) have no wiki pages and are likewise absent.
• Social building population: the building table lists 48 residents; a community guide says one social building houses 192 with the UI showing 48. The table's 48 is used.

Sources

All read on 30 September 2026.

• Urbek City Builder Wiki (official), https://urbek.fandom.com — building data pages pulled as raw wikitext through the MediaWiki API, including Coal_mine, Iron_mine, Steel_works, Goods_factory, Coal_plant, Heavy_coal_plant, Nuclear_power plant, Wind_turbine, Solar_plant, Solar_transformer, Coal_stockpile, Farm, Farm_house, Grain_silo, Modern_grain_silo, Orchard, Farm_shed, Fruit_processor, Food_plant, Tenant_farmer, Landlord's_house, Pumpkin_field, Scarecrows, Warehouse, Warehouses, Factory, Minimarket, Supermarket, Hardware_shop, Repair_shop, School, High_school, University, Library, Museum, Sculpture, Chapel, Church, Police_station, Dock, Fisherman_house, Neighbourhood_council, City_council, City_hall, Bus_stop, Metro_hub, Subway_station, Parking_lot, and every house tier from Wooden_hut to 12-storey_building.
• Same wiki, overview pages: Houses (the evolution chart), Food, Work, High_skilled_work, Energy, Iron, Coal, Steel, Goods, Wood, Biomass, Pollution, Logistics, Connectivity, Retail, Offices, Banking, Green_areas, Night_life, Leisure, Culture, Faith, Happiness, Self-organization, Education, Healthcare, Economic and cultural exchange, Policies, Game_Path_Achievements, Making_a_new_game, Biome, Buildings, Steam_Achievements, Urbek_City_Builder.
• Steam store page, https://store.steampowered.com/app/1411740/Urbek_City_Builder/ (no money, 30+ resources, developer and release data).
• Steam news API for app 1411740 (ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp), read for the version history and the 1.9.2 patch notes of 7 May 2025, the Wellbeing update of 24 April 2024 and the Regional Features update of 18 July 2023.
• Steam Community guide "Urbek City Builder General Gameplay Guide" by eightroomsofelixir, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails?id=2972486768 — player-written; used for the starting stores (~2000 work / 200 food), the food-work loop wording, the 12-storey avoidance advice, the region bonus list, the parking-lot trap description and the Path summaries. Where it disagrees with the wiki's data tables, the tables win and the disagreement is noted above.
• TheGamer, "How To Win The Archipelago Map In Urbek City Builder" — player guide; used only for the stilt-house food figures on the Archipelago map.

Written for Urbek City Builder 1.9.2 (7 May 2025). The wiki's data tables do not yet cover the buildings added by the Wellbeing update, so treat anything newer than 1.9.2 as outside this guide's scope.