Even with 2019 ending in just a few weeks from now, Candywriter’s BitLife is still a massive hit on both iOS and Android platforms, a popular download more than one year removed from its debut, and a game that keeps getting better and better (for the most part) with each succeeding update. Candywriter truly changed the game with this title, which allows you to control the life of a virtual person, or a Bitizen, making numerous decisions from the cradle to the grave — it’s all up to you whether you want your Bitizen to live a long, prosperous life by doing the right thing or to waste it through the questionable choices you make! That is, of course, not to mention that there are always a few random events that could improve — or worsen — a Bitizen’s life.
Unlike with previous updates, Candywriter employed a different strategy when they rolled out version 1.27 toward the end of November. Instead of explaining in great detail what features players could expect, the company chose to “leave it to your own exploratory delight” and keep the new additions a mystery, save for one key feature — the ability to have “unlimited” Bitizens’ lives going at the same time through multiple save slots.
So what can you expect from BitLife version 1.27? How do the multiple save slots work, and how do the other new features add new twists and turns to the virtual lives of your Bitizens? Read on, as we’ve unlocked the mystery of this new update and taken the effort to detail every new feature we’ve noticed so far.
Multiple Save Game Slots — What They Can And Cannot Do
For some players, simply choosing one Bitizen’s life to control at a time could be an inconvenience. What if you, for instance, want to compare different Bitizens and see how certain decisions impact their lives? And for paid players, what if you wanted to compare different legacies from generation to generation? Allowing only one saved game to be active at a time limited things quite a bit, but with BitLife version 1.27, you can now have multiple Bitizens’ lives saved simultaneously. This appears to be the main addition, as it’s the one with the most functionality, as well as the one Candywriter specifically mentioned when discussing the mystery update.
Bored with the life you’re making one character live, but not exactly willing to start from scratch? That’s no longer a problem either, as you can toggle from one Bitizen to the next and, if need be, delete your previous saved Bitizens. Characters can be saved assuming you’ve aged them at least one year, so make sure you hit that big green Age button before exiting out of a life if you want it to be saved, with the option to go back at any time.
Related: BitLife Office Update Guide: A Complete Look at BitLife Version 1.26 aka The Office Update
Sadly, the game still does not offer the ability to duplicate an existing life so that you can play as the same character in multiple save games, seeing how varying life decisions impact the same Bitizen over time. We probably understand why — this could arguably be seen by some as cheating, and furthermore, the game comes with the Time Machine feature, where you can pay a dollar to go back to various points in your life. As an aside, we should mention that Time Machine now allows you to go as far back as 20 years (the available increments are now 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, and 20 years), only for $1 or its equivalent in local currency, regardless of how far back in time you go.
Circumcision Is Now An Option For Firstborn Males
Anybody who’s been playing for a while knows that when a Bitizen has their first child, you’ll be given the option to choose whether you want the baby vaccinated or not. The differences are subtle, but babies who aren’t vaccinated in the game tend to become sicklier adults than most. Now, there’s a new scenario that will come up when your first in-game children (males, to be specific) are born — do you want to circumcise your son or not?
In multiple playthroughs, we haven’t seen any clear benefit or disadvantage to having oldest sons (and therefore, all other sons born to a Bitizen) circumcised. It doesn’t seem to have any bearing in the world of dating — NPC dates don’t appear to care whether a male Bitizen has his foreskin cut off or not.
Neither does it have any visible effect on their general health. But your choice of whether to circumcise your character’s first son may show up on their tombstone once everything’s said and done, with a short note commenting on how friends knew the Bitizen as someone who opted (or chose not to opt) for the procedure. This may show up if the Bitizen didn’t do anything noteworthy in their lives, but we’d like to assume its effects are similar to what they are in real life — a reduced chance of acquiring STDs when having unprotected sex with NPC flings.
Doctors Come With Their Own Reputations
In previous versions of BitLife, going to the doctor was a bit of a crapshoot. All you saw was their name and the consultation fee (for countries without free healthcare), and you would only get an idea of how good (or how incompetent) the doctor would be upon seeing the fee for treating the illness itself. For example, you’d essentially be throwing $80 down the drain to treat high blood pressure, but far more likely to recover if the doctor would charge, say, more than a thousand bucks. The new update, thankfully, removes all this guesswork.
That’s right — just as we had previously teased, BitLife version 1.27 now gives doctors their own reputation bars, and that applies to the medical doctors, as well as the plastic surgeons richer Bitizens may opt to visit in adulthood. These reputation bars essentially tell you their level of expertise — are they skilled professionals or incompetent quacks? A full green bar, of course, means you’ll be dealing with the former, but that also means you’ll likely have to pay more. Meanwhile, an orange or red-colored bar suggests that the doctor probably got their degree from the internet — expect cheap and ineffective treatments with these individuals, or a botched facelift/nose lift/gender reassignment/etc.
In fact, you can probably say that looking for a competent doctor in the BitLife world is far easier than it is to find one in the real world. Take full advantage of this if you want your Bitizens to live happy, healthy, and long lives!
Drugs Are Dumb – A New Way To Get The Elusive ‘Stupid’ Ribbon
Prior to the new update, it was rather hard to get the Stupid ribbon. And it didn’t matter much if your Bitizen lived — and died — with a very low Smarts stat, i.e. 10 or below. Typically, this required staying unemployed for as long as possible — bouncing from one menial job to another usually resulted in a Mediocre ribbon, regardless of Smarts, so refusing to get a job was one way in which players had a chance at their Bitizen being called “Stupid” in death. Petting wild animals was also recommended as a strategy for getting the ribbon, but as any experienced player will tell you, these scenarios are still quite rare in the game.
Making questionable life decisions — choosing not to vaccinate your child, for instance — likewise helped a bit, but definitely did not guarantee the ribbon. Version 1.27, however, makes it considerably easier to earn a Stupid ribbon and add it to your collection. So how, pray tell, can this be achieved?
As we’ve observed in a few playthroughs, dying of a drug overdose could now result in a Stupid ribbon. It doesn’t matter how much Smarts your Bitizen may have — if he or she overdoses on a deadly drug like heroin, cocaine, meth, or oxycodone, their tombstone will have a Stupid ribbon draped on it, just as long as they haven’t earned enough money to be considered Rich or Loaded or haven’t become celebrities in order to be considered Famous. We guess this is Candywriter’s way of telling players that drugs are bad, but in any case, this simplifies what used to be one of the most complicated, luck-based goals in the game.
Funeral Planning – Burial, Cremation, Or Taxidermy?
Previously, the only thing you needed to decide in the event of a family member’s death was whether to attend or skip the funeral — attend it if your Bitizen is a good, responsible son or daughter, skip it if they’re estranged from their folks, or pretty much “abject and detestable” individuals. BitLife version 1.27 changes that, as you will now be tasked to plan a dead relative’s funeral and make a few additional decisions depending on a number of factors.
When parents, siblings, children, grandchildren, or nephews/nieces die, you will automatically be assigned funeral planning duties the first time it happens, and may or may not be assigned for subsequent deaths — assuming you’ve already reached adulthood. Your first choice would be whether to plan it, have someone else handle the duties, or skip the funeral. If you choose to plan the funeral, you can choose between cremation, burial, or taxidermy — this is in order of price, from lowest to highest — though you may want to disregard the cost and honor whatever your deceased relative had wanted.
You can also donate their remains to science, for no cost at all. (In most cases, the game will specify the option the dead relative wanted.) We haven’t experienced any consequences of refusing to honor a dead relative’s wishes in terms of burial options, but we’re guessing that it will increase the chances of those relatives haunting you in the event you (or your descendants, for paid players) purchase a haunted house.
In the event you opt for cremation, the game will also ask you whether you want to keep the relative’s ashes, or whether you want to sprinkle them somewhere. This doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on the game, though this could lead to some hilarious scenarios — we’ve seen playthroughs where the relative’s ashes are scattered at the location where they lost their virginity, for instance.
In addition to the above options, you now have the option to fly to your birth country if you’ve emigrated without some (or all) relatives and one of those relatives passes away — or in any circumstance where the dead relative lives in another country. This is certainly a more realistic touch, and even more so as this would naturally cost you some money in plane tickets to fly to the funeral and back home.
More New Family-Friendly (Or Unfriendly) Features
Candywriter may have released an in-depth family update a while ago, but that doesn’t mean they’re through adding family-related scenarios in BitLife. In fact, they seem to have added a few scenarios in version 1.27 that are worth noting.
The first scenario we’ve observed in our playthroughs is that it’s now possible for family members, friends, and even partners to steal from you — we’ve included an image where our Bitizen’s partner stole over $500 from him so that she and her friends could attend a concert. Yes, it’s true — these things happen in real life, and in the in-game world, we’d guess the chances of these events happening would depend on certain stats, such as a sibling’s Petulance, a parent’s Kindness (or lack thereof, to be more accurate), or a partner’s Craziness. Once this happens, you will have the option to ask the loved one not to steal again (fat chance if their Craziness is high), ask them to return the money (again, not likely if Craziness/Petulance is at red levels), or choose to keep your relationship bar intact at the expense of your Happiness by saying that it doesn’t bother you. Other options, such as breaking up with a partner, may be available, depending on the type of loved one who did the dastardly act.
On another note, we’ve seen a few instances, regardless of the Bitizen’s nationality, where parents may disapprove of their partners. This is not to be confused with arranged marriages in certain countries, but since parents all over the world have one reason or another to give pause when it comes to their child’s relationships, you may encounter scenarios where your mother or father may express concern about age difference, your partner’s work or financial status, or other hang-ups — some of them valid, some of them outright ridiculous.
Regardless, you can argue with your parent, listen to their advice but keep on dating your partner, or break up with your partner. The first two options may damage your relationship with the objecting parent, while the third will improve it, albeit result in a significant decline in Happiness.
This also appears to be a brand new scenario we’ve seen on version 1.27 — you may be asked whether you want to perform the Heimlich maneuver, call emergency services, or just sit back and watch as a relative chokes during a family dinner. The first two options can definitely help save a life and successfully performing the Heimlich could be useful in helping you earn the Hero ribbon, but neither are not guaranteed to work 100 percent of the time. Sitting back and watching, however, would invariably result in the relative choking to death, and you wouldn’t want that deceased relative haunting your house because you chose to be a horrible human being!
Finally, the game now allows you to visit relatives after you emigrate to another country. Prior to the new update, emigrating back to your birth country was the only way to reunite with any family members who didn’t join you after emigrating. This suggested much more permanency in your travels, uprooting your family and forcing you to start from the bottom at a new job.
However, you can now tap on any family member who’s not living in the same country as you are, and choose the Visit option — you will then be directed to a dialog box that includes the price of two-way tickets to and from the country where the relative is currently located. This is a good way to improve that Relationship bar, because you definitely won’t be able to choose the Spend Time option with anyone who’s living thousands of miles away from you!
A New, Slightly Tweaked Adoption Mechanic
Adoption may not be one of the more frequently-used features in BitLife, but it is nonetheless an option you should consider if, for instance, you’ve got a Bitizen who’s too old to have kids of their own, or in the case of same-sex couples. Version 1.27 added a couple new wrinkles to the adoption mechanic, so let’s look at what’s changed in the latest version of the game.
The first, and probably more obvious change is the ability to see a child’s appearance before you adopt them. Aside from viewing their Health, Smarts, and Looks, as well as their name and age, you’ll now see an avatar next to the word Adoption, thus giving you all the pertinent information you need before adopting a child.
The second change is the option to adopt the children of a family member in the event they pass away unexpectedly or are unable to care for them in any way. This will certainly take a toll on your finances as your family member’s kids will be grouped together with yours, but it’s another much-welcome touch of realism that makes sure any underage kids are taken care of if something bad happens to a relative.
Odds And Ends
As for the miscellaneous features Candywriter added with version 1.27, we have, for starters, seen a few changes with the virginity mechanics. On the cosmetic side of things, virginity-related scenarios now fittingly have a cherry icon on top of the dialog box. Not much has changed in terms of the actual gameplay, but we’ve heard of random events where Bitizens may lose their virginity, even if you, as the player, may want to keep them chaste until marriage, or want them to remain celibate because they’ve entered the priesthood or become a nun or a monk.
Likewise, we haven’t experienced it either, but we’ve seen quite a few Reddit members report instances where their characters got struck by lightning. Now you may be thinking that this would result in a freak, unexpected death. However, it appears that getting struck by lightning will mainly do one of two things — one, it may reset all your stats to zero, or two, you may end up with perfect 100s across the board. It’s a classic boom-or-bust scenario, and it could happen to anyone in the game.
Given how close it is to the end of 2019, we’ve seen Candywriter reference BitLife’s success as the year’s No. 5 most popular game on the Apple App Store. As that’s three spots ahead of Fortnite, which finished at No. 8, you will be asked in one scenario to choose which Fortnite dance you should perform in order to cheer up (we’d say more like troll) your friend who’s upset the latter game lost out to the former.
Just as usual, Candywriter has added a variety of new names, scenarios, and textual tweaks across the board, so you can expect to see more characters with unusual, double entendre-laden surnames, as well as one pun that particularly made us chuckle — are you down for a game of “call of booty” with that fling you met at the local club? You can also expect to lose a fair bit of Smarts if the 5-year-old child of your friend calls you a “sausage shark” and you respond with the very same insult — a classic case of the game punishing immature actions like it should.