If there’s one reason to keep playing BitLife while waiting for the next big update (or who knows, maybe even version 2) to arrive, it’s the weekly challenges that give players little more than a week and a half to complete certain tasks or requirements based on a given theme.
This feature has been around for over a year and a half now, and is available for iOS and Android players alike, and as any experienced player will tell you, challenges can be based on anything and everything under the sun, from current events to pop culture to general facts of life — such as the fact there are millions of fathers around the world who can’t be bothered to do their duties as such.
Last week, Candywriter invited players to create a female character and make her the worst, or least responsible mother in the in-game universe through the Manic Mother Challenge. Now how about a male version of that challenge, with a bit of redemption story toward the end before your character goes back on-brand once again?
BitLife’s Deadbeat Dad Challenge is now live, and this is your chance to do one worse than the likes of Al Bundy, Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, and other irresponsible TV dads. So if you’re ready to avoid paying for your house or for child support and ready to be the laziest bum in your side of town, check out our BitLife mini-strategy guide for the week, where we show you how to complete the Deadbeat Dad Challenge as quickly as possible.
Starting Out – Don’t Attend College, Work Two Part-Time Jobs Eventually
Obviously, in order for you to be eligible for BitLife’s Deadbeat Dad Challenge, you need to be controlling a male character from anywhere around the world. His stats at birth don’t matter one iota, as you wouldn’t even need to graduate high school or qualify for a full-time job.
In fact, that’s the very first requirement of the game, and one that is automatically checked — as the world’s most irresponsible father, at least at first, you should never hold a full-time job of any kind until the challenge is completed. You will, however, need to hold down a part-time job so that you can complete the other requirements in the challenge.
Although there will be a point (as seen below) where you’ll need to be jobless for a few years, you should generally take two part-time jobs, preferably those that pay the most. That way, you should eventually have enough money to apply for a mortgage and, several years down the line, gamble that money away in the most spectacular fashion.
There’s no real consequence if you quit a part-time job for a few years — you can be rehired later down the line as you try to complete the other requirements of the Deadbeat Dad Challenge. But if you want to maximize your earning potential while dealing with the least stress possible, two part-time jobs should be ideal.
Stop Working For A Few Years To Default On Your Mortgage
The next requirement in the Deadbeat Dad Challenge is to have your house repossessed after you default on your mortgage payments. This may sound very easy, and it is, although to guarantee that your house gets repossessed by the bank, you’ll want to quit your part-time job (or jobs) for a couple of years. That way, no income will be coming in for you to make your payments, ensuring that you will no longer have a house over your head (or one that you legally own) sooner rather than later.
Even with a part-time income, it shouldn’t be hard finding houses in the $20,000-$30,000 range to buy on a mortgage — we suggest sticking to this price point for best chances of your mortgage getting approved. Once it is, you can resign from your work and let the Age button take care of everything else.
It’s Surprisingly Easy To Reconnect With A Child You Abandoned
Becoming a father and having two children or more to abandon are both very easy requirements to fulfill in the Deadbeat Dad Challenge. It doesn’t matter if you’re dating someone or if you’re already married or if you met the baby mama via random hookup.
Just as long as you father at least two children, tap on their profiles under Relationship, and choose Abandon, you should be good, and doing so should help you save up enough money for the final requirement in the challenge. That will immediately cause your relationship bar with your child to go empty. But as long as you abandon them during infancy, it shouldn’t be too hard to reconnect with at least one of them.
The trick here is to keep using the Spend Time with All feature of BitLife — based on our experience, we didn’t get a moment where our test character’s abandoned children didn’t want to spend time with him. If you want things to move along a bit faster, you can give them inexpensive, yet thoughtful gifts.
But what you want here is for your relationship bar to return to a full 100 percent. Once you’ve gotten there, you can tap on the kid’s profile and scroll down to the Reconnect option. You should have a good chance of successfully reconnecting with one of them as the Deadbeat Dad Challenge asks you to do.
How Much Money Should You Gamble Away?
As is usually the case with these challenges, Candywriter did not specify how much money you have to lose while gambling in order to complete the final requirement. At first, we tried $10,000, then $50,000, but when those didn’t do the trick, we waited until our test character had enough in his bank account to bet $100,000.
It did help that his mother (his only parent at the start of the game) died and left him with about $500,000, but assuming you don’t buy another house after the first one is repossessed and don’t buy a car, it should be easy to save up around $100,000 by your mid-30s.
The easiest and most guaranteed way to gamble away money in BitLife is to deliberately lose at blackjack — just keep hitting until you bust, or go over 21. If, by some fluke, you win the game despite your deliberate attempts to lose money, that’s okay — this won’t count against you as long as you make a huge bet and lose it at the casino or at the track.
And once you’ve “successfully” gambled away at least $100,000, that should complete the Deadbeat Dad challenge and allow you to unlock a new accessory (a hat or eyewear, as always) by opening a prize chest.