Welcome to dCity! We assume at this point you already have a HIVE account and HIVE Keychain. You are interested in what is dCity and how to get started! Well you have come to the right place.
dCity has a layered token economy starting with SIM, the main token and including all the various NFTs of various types making up a 'city'. Each NFT in dCity comes with stats, and these stats have effects. When we are getting started we only really need to worry about a few things, SIM Power, Popularity, and the Population mechanics - all of which we will discuss today.
Since you are just getting started, you probably do not necessarily have a beautiful city like the once shown above. But the first thing we should learn is about SIM. SIM is the main token in the game, and your city can produce it in a few ways. Cards can be burnt for SIM as well as new NFTs can be minted for 800 SIM each. We will do this in a moment.
SIM Power is a 30-day average of your SIM holdings at the time of snapshot, and if you have at least 8k SIM Power, you will start earning holding rewards, HIVE rewards dripped into your wallet each day:
Your SIM Power number is also the number of Votes you get in Governance, which may be interesting and important one day when you know more about the game and its politics.
Okay, lets get to getting started. I am going to be working on a new account, assuming you haven't played before. First we are going to go to BeeSwap and swap our Swap.HIVE into SIM. BeeSwap can also be used to exchange HIVE and SWAP.HIVE at a discounted rate.
So I am going to be using an account that has a small bit of SIM already here, which is okay even if yours might not and I am putting in 160 HIVE in this example, I was thinking to do it with 200 HIVE but this is what I have on hand and I think we can still make a really good example with this amount of how to get started. The price might change over time, try to get at least 500,000 SIM to get started.
Then head to dCity.io and log in with keychain.
From here we are going to click on the BUY button on top. Then, we will click over to SIM, and it should change from green to orange. I am going to buy 500 cards of 3rd edition, and what we are most hoping for is popularity, but whatever we get we can smooth out in the market. I wish you luck in this part!
Then, we wait. This is probably a good time to consider that what we have just purchased are verifiably-owned NFTs on the HIVE blockchain. They will be minted to our accounts shortly and transparently into the blocks of the chain. Several seconds will need to pass, with 500 NFTs will probably need several blocks to fill out the order.
Even as I am typing this, NFTs start to appear in the city:
And finally, the results:
Well, so far so good. We now have a city, and we can see that it says 1425 popularity, which is a lot better than zero. We will dig into this later, but first we must touch on the Population Mechanics to get a handle on our city.
Some buildings need workers, some buildings and also citizens provide population. Total population is also changed by the popularity multiplier, click here for a great simple illustration of the concept.
The Red Population box with a red 3142 indicated to us that we are lacking 3142 'people' to work in our buildings. The good news is that there are some easy cards to get rid of for a nice profit, first let's check for Military Bases by clicking on DASHBOARD:
Within the Dashboard we can see that we got 3 Military bases, and can see their stats, requiring 100 workers each and giving a -30 popularity. Other good cards to get rid of fast are Ruins, Graveyards and Powerlines.
Let's click on the Market tab up top:
By searching for 'military' on the left, I am able to quickly spot the Military Base market, and click the plus on the right side to add it to the market menu. Clicking on 'Military Base' up in the menu leads to the market screen:
There is much to learn about the market, which is complete with many exotic functionalities such as multi-currency NFT trading. But in general the most frequented markets for these NFTs are in SIM, and so for the purposes of this guide we will focus here.
There is a robust ask and offer market for most cards, but some of the rare ones have very large spreads. I generally prefer listing to dumping, so I have chosen to list the 3 military bases for 10% under the lowest price to hopefully sell them. Then I can click "Add to Cart".
When I click on the cart it takes me here:
You must finally click in cart 'ACCEPT' and sign the keychain transaction that pops up for it to be finalized.
In the User Panel in the upper left, you can see all of the asks and offers you have listed on the market, and adjust or cancel them as need be. Here is mine after listing all of the negative popularity buildings and some offices on the market:
In the meantime, our city has changed! Just by getting rid of these cards, we have reduced the lack of workers by over 1200, and increased our popularity to over 1800. But we are still going to need 1800 more people if we are going to make this work, even if technically we should already be good to go for citizen mining (more on this down below!)
Buying and selling different cards is part of the fun. If you want to work faster, you can dump the cards on the market, but if you are patient, your funds will go further.
The next thing we are going to do is buy some population in the form of Basic Homes, some of our offices have sold in the meantime so we are going to try buying 100 basic homes off the market in the meantime and see how it looks.
So I head back to the market tab, search 'basic' and find in the list the basic home NFTs I am looking for; I click the plus sign on the right to add them to the menu, so I can click it in the menu to open it up.
I am also going to buy 40 park, this card has good popularity and some population too, and should help to alleviate the issue. The results? Well, we are still short, but much less so now:
Oh, we can't forget the Law Firm! This is an essential card that every city must buy, because if its unique property to affect the taxes, they lower your effective tax rate by 10%! Let's see the difference in our city after spending 3777 SIM on a Law Firm card:
Our effective tax rate is lower than 100% now and our SIM income is green for the very first time! This all depends on the changing conditions - we don't need to be too worried about that for the time being, but instead on Citizen Mining.
But we still want to add a few more people, and we have a bit of extra SIM on hand even though our Military Bases haven't sold yet. So I will go ahead and buy 100 more Basic Home cards.
Now we are really getting close. Part of this game will be analyzing the market, but another part will also be making tests. I want to know if adding Farm NFTs will fix or worsen my population problems, for this we can use the SIMULATION tab:
We see here that at this level of popularity we are at now, farms will be able to cover their own worker needs, but they won't producing any extra to cover our defecit. How about Art Galleries?
Art galleries at this level are even worse, increasing our needed workers by one for every gallery we add. The SIMULATION tab will be important to experiment with going forward.
I bought 40 more park to close the gap, and then spent 3 days without internet! Let's see how our city has done in the meantime:
We have managed to sell some graveyard since, and we are receiving small amounts of SIM each day. Our goal is to watch for Homeless, Immigrants, Young Citizens and Students entering our city, and use the market to convert them into SIM and slowly build out our city.
I likely will slightly adjust downward our listings until they sell, especially the military bases, as we have a large part of our capital tied up in those cards.
This is just Part One, after a month or more I will come back and do update, beginner guide part two and we can see some of the results and strategies we are using as citizen miners!
Questions? Ask below or in the dCity Discord.
