How to make money playing dCity

3 years ago

Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.

A look at setting up your dCity to mine citizens in order to make money playing the game.

Yes I’m wired a little differently to your average crypto gamer, but it’s the tokenomics of the dCity SIM token and wider game economy that I’m drawn to.

I’ve previously talked about the best Hive defi Diesel Pool being the SWAP.HIVE:SIM LP and even tried my hand at dCity human trafficking (lol, or flipping dCity NFTs for profit).

But not often do I talk about actually setting up a city and playing the game itself.

Unitil today!

This blog takes a look at how to make money playing dCity with a focus on using smaller starter cities to mine citizens.

Using a smaller city to mine citizens

If you listen to or read the opinions of regular gamers however, they will tell you that dCity is garbage.

That the game is all but dead because of high in-game taxes making it hard for your city to make an income.

Blah blah blah, cry cry cry.

The thing about dCity however, is that there are so many different layers to the game.

Just like there is more than one way to skin a cat (apparently… I mean I’ve never actually skinned one), there is more than one way to make money playing dCity.

The “income” that your city earns in the form of SIM itself, is just a tiny part of what your city can produce.

With the right setup, your city can be optimised to also produce NFTs.

NFTs that if you so please, can easily then be sold on the market for SIM.

The best proponent of this strategy who I have to first give a shout out to here, is gun dCity player @ecoinstant.

Eco has been sharing his dCity citizen mining strategy with the community for a while now and his latest nuclear powered citizen mining facility is the particular route that I’ve chosen.

But as you can see from the alternative citizen mining approach that @senstless has taken, there are profitable variations you can apply.

Nuclear powered citizen mining city

Eco will happily sell you a ready made nuclear powered citizen mining city, but I took the el cheapo option and bought the cards to my city individually by making lowball bids.

I managed to buy the city for:

Park: 75 x 225 SIM = 16,875 SIM
Art Gallery: 13 x 620 SIM = 8,060 SIM
Police Station: 1 x 1,331 SIM = 1,331 SIM
Cold Fusion: 1 x 38 SIM = 38 SIM
Nuclear Plant: 4 x 862 SIM = 3,448 SIM

Total city cost = 29,752 SIM

Using ask prices as a guide, Eco is charging 35,925 SIM for the same city.

So I’m pretty happy with my savvy little dCity NFT pickups.

As you can see on the screenshot above, this city has a 30% chance of

Let’s go ahead and assume that we will still be able to sell Homeless cards for 100 SIM, Immigrant cards for 200 SIM and like in Eco’s model, that we can land a citizen card on 75% of days.

The math becomes:

0.75 *365 * (200+100)/2 = 41,062.5 SIM per year

Which is at least 132% APR.

Even better if you use the same tactics as me and show the patience required to buy your city off the market.

Not a bad ROI, right?

All with a city that doesn’t even bother to worry about incomes being affected by the high tax rates required to keep the SIM price stable.

Scaling a citizen mining city

As you can see, it is most definitely possible to make money playing dCity.

But just for shits and giggles as I wrap up, let’s consider how to scale this citizen mining operation.

While Eco talks about using your profits to expand your city’s future earning potential in other areas, you can also just keep duplicating your city onto new accounts.

Using the math above, 41,062.5 SIM per year works out to be roughly $20 USD.

So in order to make a $50,000 per year income from playing dCity, we will need 2,500 of these cities.

Hilariously, that will require 2,500 separate Hive accounts (each containing 15 HP in order to transact) and a grand total of 187,500 Parks!

Better get buying.

Best of probabilities to you.