BitLife: UPDATED – Top Tips, Walkthrough, Hacks, Cheats, and Strategy Guide

BitLife is the now-famous smash-hit game for the iOS and Android where you manage the lives of characters through nothing but text.

You can age them one year at a time, work on their happiness, health, smarts, and looks, figure out how to make money and what to do with your life, and far more. You can even make them famous and become a social media star.

One of the biggest draws of this game is how much the developers communicate with the fans, and the numerous updates loaded with new features reflect that. Thus, this article stays updated to keep up with the new features in this game.

Read on for some tips and tricks for BitLife!

Making Money in BitLife

One early thing to figure out is how to earn money in the game. Obviously, you won’t be able to earn money except by borrowing it from your parents early on. The parent with more money will give you more but if their generosity is low, they might not give it up.

Thanks to some of the updates, you can now take part-time jobs or freelance gigs before you even get out of high school in order to make money. Of course, you always have to remain cognizant of your stress level so that it doesn’t get too high.

Once you graduate high school (age differs depending on country), you can either get a job or go to college. Once you’re in college, you’ll still be able to work part-time or freelance until you graduate.

Generally, you will earn more money when you go to college for longer periods of time; however, the main exception to this rule is when you go into the entertainment industry. If you want to become a singer, actor, director, or another performing-arts job, it’s better NOT to go to college. And the income ceiling is endless.

Making money without a job

There are a few ways to make money without a job. One is to buy and hold and/or buy and sell real estate. The price goes up every year, so hold until you feel it’s been profitable enough, then sell your house. Real estate is a quick way to become rich even if you aren’t in a rich person’s job.

Dirty money is possible, too, although it’s risky and the reward can often be low. Stealing an expensive car and then selling it can earn you a one-time windfall. So can robbing someone or, in the off-chance that it succeeds, taking a “package” with you when someone offers it.

Then gambling helps too. Playing the lottery is a nice easy way to earn a quick buck if you’re lucky enough to win.

Gambling also works in your favor – all that you have to do is win. Horse racing is one way – this is based on luck alone.

Blackjack can be played at the casino. This is skill-based as much as luck-based. Your best bet is to hit until you reach a minimum of 17, then stop. Your opponent will often bust, thus earning you the winnings.

Stress and Stress Management

Stress is one of the new factors in Bitlife – at least new compared to most of the rest of the game. Your character can now feel stress, thanks to work, school, part-time jobs, freelancing, and more.

Stress can be managed in this game, and managing stress is extremely important. If your stress level gets out of control, your character can start to see health problems, including things such as high blood pressure and death.

To prevent stress, and to decrease stress when it happens, all that you have to do is clear your schedule a bit. If you’re doing too much part time work while you’re in school, quit a job or two or a freelancing gig. Reduce the schedule and you’ll reduce the stress.

Health, Happiness, Intelligence, and Looks

You have have various actions to help you manage your health, happiness, intelligence, and looks, allowing you to keep the healthiest, happiest, handsomest, and most intelligent character possible.

The easiest ways to deal with these are to hit the gym and the library, and to meditate (all of which are under the Mind and Body tab), and to spend time with your parents, children, siblings, spouse/lovers, and other people that you have a relationship with.

Watch out for huge life events that can affect your character in a major way. If a spouse or a child dies, your happiness is gone. If you get into a major car crash, you can lose your life, your car, or all of your stats.

You’re going to need to hit the gym hard, meditate, hit the library, see movies, spend time with those you love, your pet, and more in order to get your happiness and health back. Your intelligence and looks generally will not be affected by such life events.

Actions and Consequences

Everything that you do in the game has some sort of effects and consequences. If you emigrate, for example, and you have grown children, they might not be able to come with you, so you can’t spend time with them unless you move back to your home country.

Don’t spend enough time with people, and the relationship will be affected. Engage in hookups or sleep around or try drugs, and you could end up pregnant or addicted. Buy too expensive of a house or take out college loans that are too high, and you could end up bankrupt.

When you’re shopping for a house, be sure not to buy a place where the maintenance and mortgage fees are so high that your money drops too fast every year. Keep yourself profitable.

Joining the Military

An easy way to go is to join the military, but even if you enlist and make it to E-9 (Chief Master Sergeant, Master Chief Petty Officer, etc. depending on your branch of service), your salary tops out at a certain point, and won’t get any higher.

Keep the military option in mind if you get a degree and then have a rough time finding a job in your field. Or if you make some bad decisions earlier in life that affect your ability to get a good job, the military can give you some stability as well.

If you have a four-year degree, you can apply to join the four branches as an officer, which carries an upside of eventually making General and having an extremely high salary.

You can leave the military by asking for a discharge, or you can go until you hit retirement age (20 years or more). If you want to go AWOL, the only way to do so is to get addicted, then go to rehab without asking for a discharge first.

You can build a big savings by joining the military and retiring eventually (so you get a pension), and either go to grad school or start a career elsewhere. Nothing better than two checks at a relatively young age.

What to know about buying Cars and Real Estate

Cars and Real Estate are your main assets. Cars don’t provide a big expense, so you can drive something expensive and still not fall too far behind. But they depreciate always, so don’t expect to retain any real house value.

Watch out for buying too expensive of a house, though. Look at not just the mortgage but the expenses.

If you buy too much house, your bank account will fall from year to year even with your salary, so sell the house and get into a cheaper house if this happens.

Being risky

Of course, the real fun in this game isn’t living a normal, successful, boring life.

After awhile, that gets boring, and you’re going to want to try something risky. Before you do, make sure that you can handle the consequences.

For example, if you try to propose a threesome with your spouse, make sure that your relationship is strong enough to handle it if he or she rejects you, because your relationship will drop precipitously if you’re rejected.

Social Media

Joining social media involves sharing the game; you can use this to post your progress in the game. Once you sign up for social media, you’ll gather followers gradually. The more you post, the more followers you get, up to a point.

A good bet is to post about 3-5 times per year, every year. Beyond that, it’s diminishing returns. Maximize your looks, health, intelligence, and happiness and your followers will increase, too.

Plastic Surgery and Other Unusual Ways to Improve Looks

Surprisingly, going to the gym does not improve your looks very much year after year; however, going to the plastic surgeon can. If you have a character whose looks rating is next to nothing, this is one of the few ways to improve their looks, but it also runs the risk of going wrong and dropping your stats. It can even kill you if it goes extremely wrong.

The other way is simply to let them age; oftentimes, their looks rating will increase rapidly as they get older. Other times, it won’t improve much at all. It’s mostly down to luck in that category.

Pop-Up Prompts and Instances, and What To Do When You Get One

You have various instances pop up over time, and some answers provide more risk than others. If someone insults you or your spouse or other family, then you can either ignore/forgive them or insult them back, or assault them.

If you assault someone, even if you are justified, be ready for the risk of jail or prison. If you get locked up, you lose your job, and your relationships suffer, as well. But your finances won’t quit draining your money.

Even seemingly innocent instances, such as trying a craft beer or trying something illegal, could put you at risk of addiction, which would then necessitate going to rehab. Becoming addicted to alcohol, or trying a hard drug, also puts you at risk of an early death, or of losing your job and/or all of your money.

So be careful what kind of risky business you try, unless you just want to experiment with your character and see what kind of shenanigans you can get them into without killing them or ruining their lives.

Witch Doctor

You can choose to go to the witch doctor at random times whenever you want to, and they will offer you some weird ingredient to eat, such as a raw Komodo dragon egg. This does nothing unless you have some sort of condition that a doctor can’t heal, such as schizophrenia or infertility.

Even then, going to the witch doctor most often won’t do anything, but you can always give it a try. If they don’t work, your stats could drop hard, or your life could be ended by a poisonous ingredient.

Don’t lose your character to an update

Whenever an update comes out for the game, make sure that you finish out your character’s life, unless you don’t care about losing them. If you lose them, you won’t be able to get them back and will have to start from a new character.

Other ways to lose a life

Also, if you start a new character in the middle of your current character’s life, you’ll lose your current character. You can also consciously end the life of your current character at any time you want, and you’ll get the full gravestone and cause of death treatment with them.

Bizarrely, you can even do this with infants. If you want the full death treatment, choose the “End life” option, but if you want to skip all of that, then simply pick the “Start a New Life” option instead.

What to do if you get dealt a bad hand with looks and intelligence

Being smart and having good looks take a really long time to achieve if you are not born with them. If you’re not smart, tap “school” and study harder, and go to the library and gym often to increase your smarts.

If you’re not good looking, then gym (minor differences) and plastic surgery (major differences) are your best bet. Smarts affect school and jobs, and looks affect jobs, job interviews, and quality of spouse.

Preparing for a CEO job or other top job early on

Start preparing for college and career before you even get to middle school if you want that high paying job. Make decisions that will pay off down the line, even if your smarts and other stats are sky-high. Study once every year (doing it multiple times a year does nothing).

The effects won’t show up immediately, but these will help you get scholarships after high school is done and get accepted to your college of choice, and studying hard in college will help you get more jobs that you interview for.

Similarly, keep doing all of the forms of self-improvement that are available to you – namely, all of the mind and body stuff. Going to the gym and the library increases your chances of landing that scholarship or that job. Meditation increases your chances of staying in good mental health, or avoiding ailments such as schizophrenia.

Emigration

If you are going to emigrate, then make sure your finances can handle it. You’re going to have to quit your job, and it’ll be a crapshoot whether or not a job in a similar field will be available.

If your job is not transferable to another job (I.E. high ranking enlisted military), emigration will be far more difficult than it would be if you have an easily transferable job, such as a nurse or computer programmer.

Student Loan Crisis

Sometimes, you’ll get a character to adulthood, get them a high-paying career, then realize that you still aren’t getting ahead. Their financial outflow is sky high for seemingly no reason.

Sometimes it’s due to student loans, while other times it’s simply due to randomness. If this happens, your best bet is to simply start over with a new character. Student loans essentially last forever.

How to win the lottery

Play the lottery often. The lottery is a surprisingly easy way to get rich quickly because the chances of winning are far higher than they are in real life, and if you play often (ten tickets a year or so), you’ll get a win once every four or five characters, which is a significant winning percentage. Play when there is a big jackpot, especially, as there is a giant chance of winning.

Gay, Straight, Bi, Etc.

If you want to be a certain sexuality, then you can. Most character will have “strong heterosexual tendencies” in my experiences, but no matter what their tendencies are, you can make them either straight, gay, or bisexual. From then on you can have the relationship with the guy, or girl, of your choice.

Ups and downs of the Casino

Hit the actions menu to go to the casino, where you can go to gamble. Blackjack is the first game to show up. To be victorious in blackjack, your best bet is to hit if you’re under 17 on the first two cards, and stay if you’re over 17. Your dealer will often bust, and you’ll often win if you play right.

You can get a gambling addiction which can severely goof up your relationships, your job, and more, but you can also earn a ton of money with a combination of luck and skill, and you won’t even have to advance years in order to do it, so theoretically you can earn unlimited amounts of money.

Put your gambling winnings into real estate to watch the value increase over time, just like with your job earnings.

Lengthen the family tree

Not only can you have kids, but you can now have grandkids. All that you have to do is get with someone (married or long-term partner) and have kids, and the more kids that you have, and the longer that you live, the more likely it is that you will have grandkids.

If you live long enough, you might even see your grandkids have kids, giving you great grandkids. Make sure to keep spending time with your kids the whole way through. If you neglect time with your kids and you forget to check the status of your relationship, you could forget about the relationship with a kid and the relationship rating could fall to zero.

If you do end up stuck in a dead relationship with a kid, check back with their relationship rating every year, and (if applicable) spend time with their kid (your grandkid) once per year.

Ribbons and more

You have ribbons that you can earn at the end of every life that you live in the game. Once your character dies, they will be assigned one ribbon – for example, a lot of money earns the “rich” ribbon.