Bit City Ultimate Guide: 19 Tips, Tricks & Cheats for Earning Big Money While Running a Thriving City

NimbleBit’s Bit City is a city management game that’s just been released for Android and iOS devices. So what’s there to learn about this new game, aside from how it’s becoming quite a big hit on both major platforms? You’ll be starting out with a small town, and it’s your job to grow that tiny town into a thriving metropolis. And while there are many city building and management games out there, this one happens to be a clicker game, making this game rather unique in the genre, though not entirely unusual.

You can fill your city up with buildings, cars, planes, and ships, set up landmarks to further customize your city and keep your citizens happy, and as is the case with these clicker games, restart everything from scratch as you proceed to go through things at a faster pace.

Anyone who knows city building and clicker games (both genres, that is) should find this game much to their liking, but there’s a lot of things you will need to learn when it comes to building and managing your city. So join us now as we bring you our Bit City ultimate guide, which covers everything – and we mean everything – you need to learn, and caters to all experience levels. Whether you’re a new player or a more experienced one, you’re likely to learn something new with these tips and tricks.

1. How To Choose The Right Number Of Buildings

Any time you’re on an empty lot and unsure of what building you should work on first, you should check the demand showing below each type of building – that’s the indicator that says “low demand” or “high demand.” Working on too many buildings of one type would cause demand to go down – it’s the law of supply and demand at work. And when you see a type in low demand, that’s going to do a number on your earnings for all buildings of that type, while buildings in high demand will naturally earn you more money.

To be more specific, any areas that have low demand will earn 10 percent less money than usual. That means all the buildings of a given type, and not just one building. And high demand units, conversely, will earn you 10 percent more.

It’s important to maintain the balance between supply and demand, which would mean building about as many low-demand as high-demand buildings in your city. While you can prioritize those high-demand buildings for the most part, it’s still better to keep things as similar as possible, especially if you’re just starting out in the game and learning the proverbial ropes.

2. Complete The In-Game Missions

Bit City will ask you to complete in-game missions, and you will be given one of them at a time, with no option to re-roll or skip the missions. Completing these missions earns you premium currency, which we will be talking about later, and the amount of premium currency you can earn would all depend on the difficulty level of the mission.

Harder ones, of course, will earn you more Bux, so be patient and work toward completing those missions, no matter how hard they may seem to be.

3. Car Bonuses And The Importance Of Being Active

If you’re trying to make a ton of dough in Bit City, one thing you would have to do is to upgrade stuff. But among all the things you should upgrade, it’s the car bonuses that should be given higher priority than most, if not all others. This might seem a bit counterintuitive, as your car bonuses won’t be anything to write home about at first. But these bonuses will add up over time, and you’ll soon be relying on them to earn tons of cash quickly.

That actually brings us to one important point about this game – you’ll notice that we did not refer to the game as an idle clicker. While it is, in its truest form, that exact type of game, there are some reasons why it’s better to be active than idle. You can only collect car bonuses by being active and tapping on the cars, and you might end up earning yourself some Bux, which is Bit City’s premium form of currency. As cars tend to give you Bux quite often, you’re going to need to do a lot of car-tapping together with your building-tapping, with more taps needed for more unlocked cars.

Aside from cars, you can also unlock airplanes and boats, which serve the same purpose by earning you coins and Bux, may they be earned through active means (tapping on them) or by passive means (while you’re away from the game).

4. Before Moving To The Next City, Upgrade Your Bank First

Once your city has reached its target population, you’re free to continue onward to the next city, which is similar to prestiging, but not the exact same thing. We’re going to talk about prestiging in greater depth later on, but since we want to start with the bare essentials, you should keep in mind that you’ll practically be starting from scratch. But as is the case when you’d prestige in other clicker games, you’ll still be keeping your game upgrades. These upgrades are established early on as being permanent, so don’t worry about losing them one bit.

Your bank upgrades will also remain, and as a reminder, these are the upgrades that allow you to earn money while you’re not playing, as well as regional profits, which represent the combined collection rate for all banks. So before you continue on to a new city, you should be spending whatever coins you have at that point on bank upgrades. As you’re going to lose those coins upon moving to a new city, there’s no use fretting over such a large purchase.

5. Increase Property Taxes Upon Moving To A New City

Upon moving to a new city, the first thing you should do is to increase the property taxes. This is the most affordable of all the upgrades you’ll have available at the beginning, but if you’re able to max out the property taxes, you’ll get a 500 percent bonus to all building earnings – taxing people exorbitantly might not be a very good idea in the real world, but in this game, it’s a surefire way to earn a ton of coins per second.

Next, work on upgrading your car/DMV fees, but you’ll need to first make sure that your new city has some cars on the streets.

6. How To Deal With The Larger Tiles

It’s a basic rule of thumb in Bit City – the larger the real estate tiles are, the more money they’re going to cost you. And those costs can increase rapidly as you develop your city further. With that in mind, it’s a good idea to buy the larger tiles while they’re still priced rather affordably, provided you’ve got enough cash on hand to afford the purchase. Developing all the smaller tiles then working your way up isn’t exactly recommended, as that’s going to drive the price of the larger tiles substantially. As you can see, that’s not really a very economically-sound situation you could potentially get into.

One good strategy to employ here would be to build a large lot before anything else, as you’ll be able to afford it right from the get-go. You can then move on to three to four small lots, build another large lot, and just rinse and repeat as you go along. You can opt to build two large lots consecutively to break the cycle if you can afford it, but generally speaking, it’s best to go with one large, 3-4 small, and another large one for the most part.

In addition, it’s important that you build the right type of buildings on your large lots. We would be referring to service buildings, which earn you the most income due to the connected City Hall upgrades. After service buildings, work next on the business zones. Do not build residential buildings on your large lots, unless it’s one of the requirements for a given mission. Focus on services and businesses, and you’ll be making the most money possible from your large lots, and while playing Bit City in general.

7. Why Should You Have Historical Buildings?

Tapping on a building will show you a complete list of statistics, with a “Historical” check box next to it. Buildings that have been designated as Historical will keep their design even if you level up.

And while this may seem like something that may only help in an aesthetic sense, you will eventually encounter some missions where you need to have more than a few of a certain building at a given time. One example would be the Drought Relief mission, which requires that you have two water towers present at the same time.

8. Upgrade Within Your City Hall

We mentioned the City Hall earlier, and it may sound like a no-brainer, because your City Hall is essentially your city’s ground zero, the most important building. Upgrade whatever is available to upgrade in this building – it’s as simple as that, though you also have to remember your vehicle upgrades, which are better to work on if you regularly play the game, thus allowing you your fair share of chances to tap on them and collect more currency.

9. What Is The Pension Pig?

If you should make any in-app purchases with your real-life money, you should definitely buy the Pension Pig. You can buy this for $2.99 US or its equivalent, and it works by refilling your premium currency automatically. Take note, though, that Pension Pig will reset to zero when you restock your Bux.

10. When Should You Prestige?

Prestiging, for the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with this old standby of clicker games, is the process of restarting your game from square one within the same game, but getting to keep a few perks that allow you to complete that succeeding run a bit faster, with more rewards to be earned and re-earned along the way. When talking about prestiging in Bit City, it’s all up to you as to when you will be doing this, but once you do, that’s going to take you back to the very first city.

Once again, though, you’ll be keeping your game upgrade and the Pension Pig’s stored bonus, as well as any Bux and keys you have earned. You will earn keys as you play the game normally, and all keys earned after the prestiging process will reward you with a 1 percent earning bonus. So if you’ve got 15 keys prior to prestiging, you’ll get a 15 percent earnings bonus for each of your next runs – a permanent one, might we add. So with that in mind, you’ll want to have as many keys as possible before prestiging to maximize things to the fullest.

Typically, prestiging is done every 24 to 48 hours in this game, though that’s going to depend on how active you are, and how long you keep the game on. And speaking of things like that, it’s always a good idea to keep the game long for as long as possible (try leaving it on while you’ve got your phone charged) so you can maximize your income.

11. How Many Keys Is Enough, Really?

Your mileage may vary, but one thing is certain when it comes to timing your prestige in Bit City – don’t do it WAY too early, like anywhere below 25 to 30 keys! You will notice some improvements in the speed of your progress, but you won’t really see the effects. In other words, they may be solid, but ultimately unspectacular. Keeping this in mind, it’s probably best that you make sure you’ve got at least 50 keys before you pull off your first prestige in the game.

As for your second prestige onward, some have suggested doubling the number of keys before prestige as you go along. So if your threshold is 50 for the first prestige, you should make it 100 for the second, 200 for the third, and so on. You’re going to have to be patient, so don’t get too frustrated if you aren’t progressing as quickly as you’d hoped. And if doubling things all the time is too inconvenient for you, with collecting keys proving to be harder than you thought, you could change things up on your fourth prestige onward; with the above example, you can prestige at 350 keys for your fourth, 600 for your fifth, and so on.

12. Other Considerations When Prestiging

The number of keys is certainly the number one thing you want to take into account when prestiging in Bit City. But you also have to take other things into consideration, such as the number of Bitizens (residents) you have.

For example, it’s not a good idea to prestige when you’re so close to reaching your population goal – don’t prestige if you’re just a couple thousands away from reaching your goal (for example) of 20,000.

13. Keep Leveling Up Your Buildings

Now that we’re pretty much done with prestiging, let’s talk about coins. We already mentioned some ways you can earn them, but aside from cars and other vehicles, you can earn coins through your properties.

These properties earn passive income while you’re not playing, but you should also remember that leveling up one building alone doesn’t give you significant increases in that area. You have to level up all of your buildings several times in order to feel the impact of your level-ups.

14. Hire A Contractor For Your Buildings To Earn More Coins

Unlocking Tier 3 upgrades will allow you to access Builder Bots. That’s an upgrade that would allow one of your available builders and have them work in your city. As this only happens occasionally, you should be upgrading your Builder Bots and maxing them out.

If you’ve got your game open, your builders will pretty much be working automatically, thus making it almost unnecessary to tap, and freeing you up to tap on the cars and other vehicles, just as we mentioned several tips ago.

15. Make Good Use Of Double Time

If you’re playing the game actively as we suggested above, we would suggest using Double Time regularly, and taking full advantage of this feature. By this, we mean topping up the feature, which doubles your income for a limited – ten minutes – period of time.

You can only access Double Time by watching ad videos, so if you want to top this feature up, watch as many videos as possible so you could double your income for more than a few minutes, but maybe for more than a few hours, depending on how long you’ve got Bit City open.

16. Don’t Upgrade Willy-Nilly

Although it may be tempting to hit on the upgrade button like crazy, you should also employ some strategy and not just hit on upgrade for the sake of making more money. You should be absolutely sure that you’ll be getting the best possible outcome, the best return on investment.

Look at the income figures when clicking the upgrade button, and if you see that the figure is substantially higher, then go ahead with the upgrade! Go with those profitable upgrades, and move on to the others once you’ve got more than enough spare money on you.

17. How To Earn More Bux – The Basics

When trying to earn more Bux in the game, you should, for starters, focus on completing more missions, especially the harder ones. Missions that ask you to hit a certain population or have a certain number of cars available won’t earn you much, but those that ask you to have so many buildings of a certain type would earn you much more.

Tapping on vehicles, as mentioned, can sometimes earn you Bux if you tap on them, and to this end, you’ll want to unlock as many vehicles as possible in the game. More cars means more chances to earn Bux, and the same would apply to your planes and boats that become available as you unlock new cities.

18. Upgrades That Can Earn You More Bux

There are certain upgrades that would improve your chances of earning more Bux in the game. Road to Riches reduces the waiting time in between vehicles spawning bonus items (Bux included), Meter Maids ups the chances of “big” bonus items (including tons of Bux, and not just one), Auto Pilot is the Meter Maids upgrade for planes, Sunken Treasure is Meter Maid for boats, and Auto Sale, Aerospace Research, and Dry Dock are the price cut upgrades for cars, planes, and boats respectively. They won’t make you earn Bux directly, but rather allow you to save on money and improve your chances of earning premium currency in the game.

19. Use Your Bux On Game Upgrades And Hidden Buildings

When talking about where you should spend your Bux on, you should start with the game upgrades, as they work better than special buildings at first in the early goings of the game. We would suggest getting a Day Trading upgrade or two for your passive earnings while you’re offline. Work your way on to the Car and Plane price cuts, Smart Grid, and Road to Riches, preferably in that order. And when prestiging, don’t do so too early, meaning don’t prestige when you’re at a point where you haven’t unlocked the boats and planes.

We would also recommend spending them on unlocking hidden buildings. These premium, exclusive buildings run the gamut – you could build yourself a Sky Burger joint, as you may remember from some Nimblebit titles, or build impressive castles. These buildings can do really well in spiffing up the appearance of your city, but beyond their obvious aesthetic benefits, they could also earn you some nice cash bonuses on top of all that.

This wraps up our exclusive guide for Bit City. We hope you’ve enjoyed this set of tips and tricks! In case you know additional hints for the game, feel free to leave us a message in the comment section!