Tips & Tricks

There are many tips & tricks to help you grow your city quicker and more efficiently. Here are some tips & tricks to boost your city building!

1. **Consider buying the Infinite Double Time boost.** Or opt to watch videos every 10-20 minutes.
2. **Consider buying large lots first.** Saving up for them might be a pain, but they're only going to get more expensive if you put them off. With the Land Use Tax upgrade, the large lots will give you way more income. Try using earnings from previous Bank branches and transportation upgrades to get you going until you can afford your first large lot.
3. **Does Zone matter? Yes and No.** Generally you want to have the same amount of each zone. The Auto-zone button is often all you need. Know that if you buy too many buildings in the same zone, that zone will get penalized with decreased earnings (by 10% or 20%). However, there are still some reasons to choose certain zones:
	* Depending on which upgrades you have, some zones might generate more income than others. In a maxed out city the bonuses even out.
	* Certain Missions will ask for specific buildings, so you may want to build a bunch of lots with the right Zone to increase your odds.
4. **Upgrades, Upgrades, Upgrades!** Buy Upgrades as soon as you can. They exponentially make more coins for you and your city.
5. **Don't jump to the next city right away.** A portion of the profits from each city carry over to future cities through the bank, so make sure to spend any money you have left on City Upgrades to maximize your profits before leaving your city behind. This also helps with the Pension Pig.
6. **Zoom way out to find planes.** Boats and planes can give you giant bonuses of both coins and Bux, but are often far from land, especially on the earlier levels.
7. **Lights, Camera, COINS!** When tapping away at all of your cars, planes, and boats to collect those lucrative coin and Bux bonuses, you might find yourself accidentally selecting Lots instead, or even purchasing or upgrading them by mistake. To prevent this, use the camera button to enter Photo Mode, find the perfect zoom level and camera angle, then tap away!
8. **Don't be afraid to Prestige.** As you move through the game, you may find your progress becoming slower and slower, until buying anything requires you to save up for several minutes at a time. If this happens, it is likely best to tap the Prestige button and restart the game. Each time you do this the game gets faster and you can progress further. It will help you eventually make it through all 8 original cities, or even through all 16 cities. There are 2 popular ways to do this:
	* Set yourself a goal on each loop to make it a little farther or increase your keys by a certain amount. For example 30%, then 100%, then 200%, which would get you to 330% speedup on your 4th playthru.
	* *Prestige farming* - You can get 3% prestige fairly quickly by building 4 buildings on each of the first 2 levels, especially if using the Double Time boost. Do this over and over, getting 3% every minute or so (it gets faster!). While it is a bit tedious, you can build prestige fast this way, earning 200% an hour or more.
9. **The "Historical" option is vital for missions.** When you tap on a building, you'll see a "Historical" box that locks the lot to the current building. Whenever you have a mission asking for a certain number of a building, simply mark them as historical as they appear. Otherwise, you'd have to rely on sheer luck to give you all of them at once, and you could be waiting a LONG time for some of the later ones. You can also use the historical option to get your city looking just the way you like it. Special Buildings will automatically be marked as Historical to preserve the extra income. You can still uncheck the box on those buildings if you need the lot for something else.
10. **There's a trick to instantly finish construction.** After beginning construction/upgrading of one or more buildings, force-quit the app. Don't just go back to your home screen, you have to make sure it is no longer running in the background. (On iOS, double-tap the home button to show apps running in the background, swipe up on Bit City to completely close it). When you start up the app again, any buildings that were in the middle of construction will have finished. This will be most effective early on in a city, when you can have all or most of your buildings under construction at once, and can be an easy way to increase your income without spending a single coin. Note that this is likely a bug/exploit, so it may end up getting patched out at some point.
11. **Reduce tapping the upgrade buttons.** Hold down the buttons of upgrades you want to buy to continuously purchase them. You can even hold down multiple buttons at once!
	* Crazy trick - Try tapping the purple "Game Upgrade" tab or the red "Close" button on the bottom of the screen while holding down one or more upgrade buttons. When you return to the City Upgrades, they'll still be held down on their own. You can repeat this process with as many simultaneous upgrades as you want, or "let go" of any of the upgrade buttons by giving them a tap.
12. **Upgrade your bank.** By upgrading your bank you can gain more money when you are NOT playing the game.
13. **Using Bux can make small, incremental speedups.** Earn them by playing, or buy them with real money. Generally, the cheaper Bux upgrades are better when beginning, and the more expensive upgrades aren’t useful until later in the game.
	* If you want to buy Bux, the Pension Pig can be the best deal, if you are patient. Let the Pension Pig grow and gain Bux from it. It costs $2.99 but if you buy it near the beginning of the game it is completely useless. See this spreadsheet created by Reddit user u/MigrantP to calculate how many Bux you need to buy all remaining Game Upgrades and/or Special Buildings, and wait to buy the Pig until you have enough to get everything you want at once.