Last week’s BitLife challenge was probably the easiest one in the history of the popular, long-running feature, and it simply required players to download DogLife. But don’t let that be a sign that the challenges will be crossing over to Candywriter’s latest life simulator, because they’re still going strong in the original game, regardless whether you play it on an iOS or Android device. With the year wrapping up, the company’s got more specially themed, limited-time challenges, and this one happens to be a very timely challenge in the lead-up to Christmas.
In the spirit of the holiday season, Candywriter’s latest challenge pays tribute to a modern-day classic among Christmas films, and that film is none other than the 2003 Will Ferrell movie Elf. In this challenge, you will be recreating some of Buddy’s most notable accomplishments in the most BitLife way possible, and compared to most recent challenges, we’d say this is one of the easier ones we’ve completed so far.
Still, there may be a bit of rework and grinding involved, which is why in this BitLife mini-strategy guide, we shall be showing you how to complete the Elf Challenge with as little wasted time as possible.
Getting Started – Start Taking Voice Lessons At 8
The first requirement of the Elf Challenge is the most simple of them all, and it involves Buddy the Elf’s backstory as a human born in New York City — that means you should create a male Bitizen born in NYC. No need to ensure any stats are at a certain level, just create a male character, set birthplace as New York City in the United States, and you’re good.
The next step is to have at least 50 voice lessons, preferably from the age of 8 onward, which is when the option first becomes available under Activities/Mind and Body. The only potential roadblock here is having a parent with low Generosity who doesn’t want to shell out money for lessons — at this point, you can either restart the challenge with a new character (being that you’ll likely still be in the early goings), edit your parents’ Generosity stats if you have God Mode, or wait till you turn 18 and working to pay for voice lessons, which cost $500 each.
Either way you choose, you can keep grinding by having multiple voice lessons in a year — we recommend three per year if you want sustained improvement, but since becoming a famous singer is not among the requirements in this challenge, you don’t need to worry too much about your Buddy proxy’s vocal abilities, just as long as you complete those lessons.
Start Giving Gifts Early, And Get A Part-Time Job To Pay For Them
The voice lessons should be easy, as long as you complete most of them before you turn 18. However, it may be slightly tricky at some points to complete the next requirement in the Elf Challenge, which is to give gifts to at least 30 different people. Be very careful here — it’s 30 people, and not 30 gifts, so don’t make the mistake of spamming gifts to your family members and friends.
As gifts cost money, the best time to start here would be in your early teens — you can start taking part-time jobs at the age of 14, and it wouldn’t hurt if you work such a job for a year or two, thus allowing you enough finances to purchase those gifts. A perfect opportunity here would be to give gifts to your classmates and teachers, though the latter may cost you some Popularity.
Aside from giving gifts to friends, family, and classmates, you can also give gifts to people you have flings with — just go to the Exes section under Relationships and you can start giving gifts to the people you’ve previously dated. Just be careful here, as you may be served a restraining order if the Relationship bar is too low! You can also give gifts to your co-workers and supervisor, though this one also has some risks involved, as we’ll be explaining in the next tip.
Be Thoughtful And Careful When Giving Gifts!
Although the temptation will always be there to give the first gift that pops up in the dropdown box or to give the cheapest gift available, both methods are not really recommended if you’re trying to complete the Elf Challenge with as little trouble as possible.
Cheap or useless gifts (like the $8 clown nose) or worse, insulting gifts like wilted flowers may be rejected by the person you’re giving them to, and if their Appreciation bar is red or orange, that could affect your Relationship with the person.
What you want to focus on is an ideal combination of affordability and usefulness — granted, there are variables that could affect the appreciation of the NPCs you’re giving gifts to, but as you can see in the example above, the soccer ball would be an ideal gift in terms of price and utility for an adolescent best friend.
Another thing you should be on the lookout for is the possibility of HR launching an investigation if you give too many gifts to your co-workers — that’s why we advised earlier that it may be better to get a part-time job while in school and give gifts to your classmates.
While your gifts may be appreciated by most people you interact with in the workplace, other people may find this creepy and unnatural, and if HR launches an investigation, that could affect your Performance at work and affect your chances of completing the final requirement in the Elf Challenge.
That said, by following this tip and the one above, you shouldn’t have too much of a problem giving gifts to at least 30 people and checking the box for that requirement.
Keep Working Harder And Maintain High Performance To Become A Famous Author
Those who watched Elf should recall the film’s ending, which, in part, saw Buddy become a bestselling author when he wrote his autobiography. In BitLife’s Elf Challenge, you don’t need to publish any books, as all you need to do to complete what should be the final requirement in the challenge is to literally become famous as a Writer.
This should be very easy, but the slightly time-consuming part here consists of quitting the game and restarting it until you see Writer among the available jobs. Much like we observed in previous challenges that required getting a specific job, it seems that Candywriter made Writer appear much less frequently among the options, but once you see that job available, it all boils down to giving the most sensible answer of the four.
You don’t need to be a college graduate to become a Writer in the BitLife universe, but attending college and joining a fraternity does help by allowing you to bypass the interview process in most cases. (In other words, if the hiring manager is one of your fraternity brothers.)
Once you’ve gotten the Writer job, just keep using the Work Harder option and avoid getting into conflicts with your co-workers so that you can maintain a perfect Performance bar for several years. Typically, it takes seven to ten years from hiring for Writers to become Famous as long as their Performance is excellent from year 3-4 onward, so this should be a walk in the park.
And, once this requirement is completed, that should wrap up the Elf Challenge and allow you to pick a prize chest and get a new hat or eyewear — the accessories don’t seem to be Christmas-themed this time around, but it’s always good to unlock new accessories once a challenge is completed!