All of you surely know 
In case you pretend not to know - SIM is a Hive-Engine token used in dCity town-simulation game that borders on DeFi running a reward pools worth over 100k in current USD value - 
Unsurprisingly, Nathan bought a little over 8k. He did not state the amount because a $9 volume transaction might be considered untweetable by mainstream. I peeked. I smiled. The dCity crowd have met the figure before, though.
Everyone buys 8k SIM. You know why? Haven't heard of it yet? When you hold 8k SIM, you get some HIVE everyday!
Well, it is not exactly true, but whatever. Repeat it thousand times and it becomes the new truth. I have heard it close to hundred times myself.
Fineprint time. You get some HIVE from 
Or you can decide to shake your head and actually use your new 8k SIM the way they were intended. That is buying a few dCity cards - preferably specific cards on the market rather than random new cards so that you can go tell everyone you did it the right way. I mean, invest small trying to be smart, make your mistakes cheap, learn the mechanics, then up the exposure.
The mainstream advice is to forget about most game mechanics (there are a few and I agree it is better to learn one at a time) and focus solely on the fundamental one - generating SIM tokens. Well, for 8000 SIM initial investment you can produce roughly 20 SIM a day (varies depending on actual conditions) so you only have to wait a few weeks to accumulate enough SIM for a meaningful building purchase as your first achievement. Sounds fun? Not to me.
My recommendation would be to pick one different mechanics to focus on. Generating citizen cards. They are not as valuable as buildings but unlike SIM income that is uncapped, an account can produce maximum one citizen daily. Do not compete with the whales for SIM efficiency (you can do that when you decide to invest in the game), pick a playground where size doesn't matter.
Citizens are mined with popularity and Art Gallery is great for that. Let us build a sample city:
City 1: 4 Art Galleries, 13 Parks.
Looks good for a retirement? Whatever, it works for the homeless/immigrants crowd in dCity. You have 52% probability of getting one of those cards each day and these sell in the 40-80 SIM range. To get the buildings from the market, you should be spending less than half of the 8k budget. Earning 30 SIM a day on average on less than 4k SIM investment beats the SIM producing strategy (at the current conditions). If you got this far, you can probably roughly compute the APR yourself, please do not make me print it. That might summon weird characters.
On a buying spree? Getting more?
City 2*: 8 Art Galleries, 26 Parks.
Hold your horses. This city would have 75 population but only 66 jobs which means unemployment. Not a big deal for this city, so I am not really discussing it right now. Let's just note that for 8 Art Galleries, you only need 22 Parks to have everything covered.
City 2: 8 Art Galleries, 22 Parks.
The tough news is that doubling your popularity does not double your earnings. You are 78 % to get a citizen. How is that possible when the immigration rate (shown on the city map) doubled from 6 to 12? Well, the number shows bihourly percentage to get a citizen but you can only get one a day, never more. The higher your rate is, the more waste happens when you get "lucky" multiple times a day. At 500+ popularity (another hard cap) the success rate is 98.6% a day so decent cities just pretty much get a citizen every day and do not sweat it. Our starter village called City 1 mines half of it - not bad!
Feel free to copy the build, feel free to modify it. Your first dCity challenge could be designing balanced cities based on 8 Art Galleries with either Basic or Luxury Homes for some SIM income (make sure you reach 100 popularity as the mining power only increases when you have a full lot of 50 - keeping one Park in the mix goes a long way here). Setting up one of those cities lets you start mining dCity cards that allows you to start selling on the market (you can prefer to sell Parks rather than citizens) and actually playing the game at a low initial investment. Soon, you will be ready to explore the game further!
If you need to be told you can lose your initial investment (partly of fully), you can just join dCity Discord to find someone that tells you - I won't bother.
