BitLife Pro Sports Update II Guide: A Look at BitLife Version 1.43 aka The Pro Sports Update Part 2

Is there anything you can’t do in the virtual world of BitLife? Candywriter’s super-popular life simulator game for iOS and Android is two years old and counting, and it’s amazing to think about how the game is now as opposed to how it started out back in 2018. That’s because the company keeps rolling out new updates and adding new features and mechanics, and this month has been all about professional sports. Finally, you can put your achievements in high school or college football, basketball, and baseball (among others) to good use while earning millions of dollars. But as it turns out, the world of virtual sports in the BitLife universe has just gotten even better.

As good as it was, Candywriter followed up this month’s Pro Sports Update with another, smaller one that also focuses on professional sports. But just because it’s smaller doesn’t mean it isn’t packed with tons of new features and improvements. In fact, a couple new sports have been added, pro athletes can now win every major award their sport has to offer (as well as championship rings), and those who have God Mode can now make every edit imaginable to the hundreds of sports teams available in the game.

You can also play dirty if you have (or want to), as game-fixing and doping have also entered the picture in the new update. So without further ado, let’s proceed to our latest BitLife guide, where we walk you through the second Pro Sports Update, or if you want to refer to it by its number, version 1.43.

Athletic Scholarships – A New Way To Study For Free

Previously, the only college scholarships available to Bitizens were the standard ones that you can get for being a good student in high school, or post-graduate scholarships you can qualify for if your grades were excellent in college. Now, you can get an athletic scholarship for your skill in sports, though you will obviously need to make sure you have good grades as well in order to qualify for one!

Given that many of the game’s sports allow you to turn pro right after high school, it appears that most of the time, you can expect to get an athletic scholarship for your achievements as a football player. Most of the time, you’ll still be asked right off the bat if you want to join the pro basketball or baseball draft if you did well in the sport in high school, or offered a contract to play professional soccer if that was your top sport. Still, this is a great way to save on money and avoid the burden of paying those crippling student loan debts!

New Sports Have Been Added

Unfortunately, you still can’t use your martial arts training for more than just bar fights and other physical altercations, and you can’t use your membership in the high school or college wrestling team as a stepping stone to the world of sports entertainment. But while MMA and pro wrestling still aren’t supported in the BitLife universe, two other popular sports have been added in version 1.43, and those are women’s volleyball and men’s rugby.

According to the changelog, women’s volleyball is a “lucrative” sport, and while it won’t pay as much as many of the men’s sports do, this could give your female Bitizens a chance to earn considerably more money than they would earn if they played pro basketball. This is, sadly, a case of art imitating life, considering that real-life WNBA superstars earn far less money than their male counterparts in the NBA. There are 32 teams all in all in the BitLife Volleyball League, which are all based in the United States or Canada.

As for rugby, the sport isn’t half as popular in North America as it is in Europe or Australia, but if you’ve created a character who was born in either one of those continents, this sport makes for a good alternative to American football. The BitLife Rugby League features teams based in Australia and New Zealand, while the BitLife Super League is supposedly an English league, though there are some teams from other countries that would require you to move there if you sign a contract with them.

Aside from the new sports, Candywriter has also introduced a new soccer league — BitLife Campeonato Brasileiro. Makes sense, considering Brazil has produced so many great players through the years and has possibly the most prominent soccer league in South America.

You Can Now Win Individual Awards And Championship Rings

Regardless of the sport you choose when going pro, you can now win any one of several individual awards if you perform well enough in a given season. The first award you can win, of course, is Rookie of the Year, though you’ll probably need to luck out with good starting attributes once you start your professional career. As such, this could favor those who choose to play collegiate sports first rather than going pro straight out of high school, so you may want to consider that option even if you specialize in a sport that allows high school graduates to be drafted right after graduation.

Once you’ve practiced and trained long enough to get your attributes up, you will likely be eligible for the other awards, which include Offensive Player of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year, and Most Valuable Player. Being Offensive Player of the Year is akin to being your sport’s top scorer, or in certain sports where different positions are judged based on different metrics, the most productive offensive player in general. Defensive Player of the Year is likewise self-explanatory — most sports have an award of that exact kind, and in baseball, all positions have their own specific Gold Glove awards.

Interestingly, it seems that Candywriter switched things up by accident — in the game’s equivalent of the majors, the Gold Glove goes to the best hitter per position, while the Silver Slugger goes to the best fielder! We’d venture a guess to say this may be patched in a subsequent update — unless it was a deliberate switcheroo to avoid getting in trouble with the real-life MLB.

You can also win a Cy Young Award in baseball for being the best pitcher in the league, as well as Most Improved Player in most sports for posting the biggest improvement in stats from the previous year.

Lastly, you’ve got the MVP award, which recognizes excellence on both offense and defense, thus making it the hardest one to win. You’ll want to keep winning more of these awards in order to improve your chances of making the Hall of Fame, which we shall be explaining in the next tip.

In addition to the individual awards we mentioned, you can also earn championship rings if your team win a title in your chosen sport. These rings can either be accepted, refused, or pawned once offered to you, and once you accept them, you can treat them like any other piece of jewelry or heirloom, meaning you have the option to hang on to them or to refurbish them or sell them, among others. The game says you can pass these rings down to the next generation, which is true, though they will unfortunately have to be auctioned off if the person who’s getting 100 percent of your fortune is a minor.

Getting Inducted Into The Hall Of Fame

Thanks to the new update, you could end up getting inducted into your sport’s BitLife Hall of Fame if you have a standout career, preferably from start to finish! There are, however, a few imperfections to this new feature that we’ve noticed, though we’re confident these will eventually be fixed in subsequent updates. For one, it appears that it’s quite hard to get inducted into a Hall of Fame if your career ends due to old age, i.e. you reach your early 40s and no one wants to give you a tryout no matter how well you played in the last season.

We’ve noticed this even in characters who had accumulated multiple championship rings and individual awards through the years. Induction, however, appears to be more likely after five to ten years if you voluntarily retire from your sport. This probably makes sense, since most great athletes in the real world make a big deal about retirement announcements, but it seems a bit off that it’s so difficult to get inducted if you had a great career but quietly hung it up due to age/lack of interest from any of your pro league’s teams.

Another quirk we’ve noticed with Hall of Fame induction is that it doesn’t seem to have much of an impact, if any at all, on your Fame. In many, if not all cases, Hall of Famers in a given sport are essentially guaranteed celebrity status for life, or at least until a few decades pass from their retirement and/or induction.

But then again, BitLife has always had a mechanic in which you need to keep starring in commercials, doing shoots for magazines, etc., in order to remain relevant once you’ve retired from your celebrity career, so this might be less likely to be patched than the former issue.

Getting Bribed To Throw A Game – Should You Do It?

In the real world, there have been numerous scandals involving point-shaving, betting on games, and other types of game fixing. With the new update, BitLife has introduced this seedy element to its world of sports, as you can now be offered large amounts of money from unscrupulous individuals to throw a game. You will then have three choices — take the money, turn a blind eye to the shenanigans, or refuse the offer outright and report them to the proper authorities. Which is the best option to choose?

If you’re trying to get your Respect up among your fellow players, your fans, and league officials, you will likely want to refuse the offer and let the powers that be know that someone’s paying you big money to fix a game. Sometimes, this won’t result in anything other than your Respect bar going up a bit, but in most instances we’ve observed, the game fixers will react to this by beating you up! Most of the time, you don’t need to worry — you’ll only lose a bit of Health and you won’t need to miss any games or see your performance decline. However, that risk remains, and there’s a very small chance (as far as we’ve seen) that you’ll lose a whole lot of Health.

Now you can also choose to accept the bribe and throw a game in exchange for millions of dollars. You may not see much use in doing this, considering most athletic careers pay you millions per year. But if you choose to accept the bribe, you’ll need to take account of a few things — one, you may lose a good deal of Respect for throwing a game at the behest of the fixers. Two, you may eventually get caught if you throw multiple games or matches and accept multiple bribes!

Once that happens, that will trigger the usual arrest scenario, where you can run from the cops, offer a bribe, flirt with the officers, or simply cooperate with them — the jail sentence for match fixing is four years, and we’ve noticed there’s a better chance than usual of getting convicted! As it seems, this isn’t one of those crimes that you can get away from if you’ve got the right lawyers. (Or more accurately, can afford the right lawyers.)

The third and last option is to turn a blind eye, and that, too, could affect your Respect in an adverse way. As you may know by now, low Respect could see you getting traded multiple times, or even getting cut without anyone showing interest in you afterward! However, this is arguably the safest choice of the three, so all in all, you can alternate between reporting the fixers or ignoring them — accepting the money is too risky and probably not worth the extra millions you can earn under the table!

New Ways To Cheat – Get Juiced At Your Own Risk

In the changelog for Version 1.43, Candywriter noted that there are “new ways to cheat” if you’re a professional athlete. The company didn’t get into the specifics, but if you look closely at your pro athlete menu, you will see that a new option has been added with the new update, and that’s Performance Enhancer.

To put it bluntly, that option gives you the choice of whether you want to take some steroids or not, and if you choose to do so, that’s going to result in some big gains to your Fitness, which, in turn, allows you to improve your individual attributes faster once you train them. Once the game asks you if you’re sure you want to use a banned performance enhancer, choose Yes, and you’re all set — you may see something such as “Strength +3” pop up in the next dialog box to confirm that you’ve successfully gotten juiced.

As any sports fan should know, the use of performance enhancing drugs is banned from just about every pro sport not just because it’s a form of cheating. It could also lead to some health issues, as well as “roid rage,” and as you’ll notice after a few years of getting yourself juiced in BitLife, you’ll see that “oh, dear” emoji pop up quite often with an accompanying dialog box right after taking the drugs.

That could mean you’ve come down with a case of something as simple as acne, or worse, perhaps a case of high blood pressure or erectile dysfunction. The high-blood pressure is easy to treat with most doctors (if quite costly), but that doesn’t apply to ED — as we’ve observed, this is one of the in-game diseases that might require a trip to the Witch Doctor and risking your life until you take the potion that works.

Aside from the health risks of taking steroids, there’s also a chance you may get a scenario where the media will ask you if you’ve been taking PEDs to get bigger or get better at your chosen sport — you can either admit the rumors (bad idea), try to debunk them, ignore them, or outright refute the allegations. Such scenarios are easy to handle, but things could get more complicated when it comes to the random drug tests that pop up from time to time — you can either refuse to take the test, switch your pee with a random person, or bite the bullet and take the test.

Refusing to take a drug test results in an automatic three-year ban, and while switching oftentimes works — you may have to try this three to four times in most cases before someone agrees to help you cheat — you may run out of people to ask and have no choice but to take the drug test. Of course, there’s a small chance that you might test negative for PEDs even if you’ve been using, but in every instance so far, a positive test has resulted in a five-year ban from all sports in the BitLife universe. There’s no three-strike rule in this virtual example of drug testing, so if you choose to cheat by using PEDs as a pro athlete, be prepared for the possible consequences!

The consequences we mentioned are not the only ones we should warn you about — we’ve noticed that right after a random drug test, the options to earn money through commercials and books won’t yield any opportunities. You can still earn money through photoshoots, though as you should know by now, certain relatives might not be too crazy to see you bare all for a magazine cover. It also seems that PED use could also greatly reduce your chances of Hall of Fame induction — this seems to negatively affect your Greatness bar, and it goes without saying that frequently doping is no way to improve your Respect as a professional athlete.

You Can Now Edit All The Team Names In God Mode

Not happy with Arizona’s football team getting called the Arizona Cardigans or Cardi B’s? Thinking perhaps of changing all the team names to those of their real-life equivalents? Or maybe you want to change a team’s colors to match your personal preference, or possibly move them to another city, much like the New Jersey Nets became the Brooklyn Nets a few years ago. You can now do all that thanks to version 1.43, and you can do this even if you aren’t, or aren’t yet a professional athlete. The catch, however, is that you need to have God Mode enabled, which costs a small fee to purchase but is definitely worth it.

Simply tap on the main menu button on the upper left of your screen, then scroll down to Edit Sports Teams. There, you will find all of the supported leagues for men and women, and you can get started by tapping on the league of your choice and then on the team you wish to edit. From there, you can change the team’s full name, e.g. “Carolina Painters” can be changed to “Carolina Panthers” quite easily, as well as the home city, primary color, and secondary color.

Be careful, though, when changing team names and other information — as we’ve noticed, the name you choose will apply to all future characters you create and lives you play out! For example, the BitLife Basketball Association team “San Antonio Duncans” (an obvious reference to Tim Duncan) was in place for all our test Bitizens after we changed the name to that.