(The actual first step to getting started in dCity or any HIVE app is to get HIVE Keychain. I made a guide about that already, take a look).
Hello and welcome to dCity!
Maybe you got a student airdrop from your punks, maybe you have heard about it from a friend, maybe 100 other reasons and now you want to know 'how to play' dCity! Welcome!
How can you get started? The site dCity.io/info has a lot of information, but the game is quite complicated since it is based on a very simple game that gradually added more and more layers and mechanics one at a time, over time, over the last 4 years.
It is indeed a 'numbers game', and each NFT has certain stats, and all the stats add up in a certain way and produce certain effects, including more than a dozen types of new tokens as well as multiple types of rewards.
So 'its complicated'. Slow down, take your time. You can possibly make mistakes if you rush things when you are getting started. @jelly13 first said it in his insight full post about citizen mining - 'Buy SIM first, slowly experiment from there'. The benefit to buying SIM is that it is scaleable to any budget. And the benefit to learning before buying could be orders of magnitude in profitability - or the difference between success and failure.
So there you have it - use BeeSwap to buy SIM with Swap.HIVE and hold it to start getting holding SP, which gives holding rewards. It also let's you start voting in governance, like how much of rewards should go to SIM holding rewards:
On the City page, within the Government tab, in the Lobby subtab, SIM power holders can vote on a certain distribution of rewards. Currently I am voting for Ranking Rewards, as you can see, and Holding Rewards is the top voted option with 57%+ of the votes. This is what gives HOLDING SIM as SIM POWER around a 50% apr at the time of posting. Since its based on voting, this number can be quite volatile, changing all the time.
But the HIVE is coming in.
Here is what I am getting every day for just over 4 million SIM POWER.
Is my SIM POWER going up?
There might be a bug, or maybe a display error, that sometimes happens to people, where they 'think' that they don't get counted (and maybe they don't). One of the easiest ways to fix it is to 'unlock' a tech. That doesn't mean buy a tech card, I'll explain in a minute. Here's gerber confirming this:
I am going to recommend that you unlock GMO tech card this is on the CITY screen under the Technologies tab. GMO is the most useful basic tech right now (although Basic Automation can occasionally give it a run for its money), and the most expensive, meaning it is the most profitable Tier 1 tech to mine, if and when your city gets that far.
Unlock it here:
In order to actually mine any new tech cards, you would need a research lab, and the mining percentage works based on how much EDUCATION stat you have. This is all explained on the INFO page, under Discovering and Unlocking:
There are other game mechanics that are good to learn about. One of which is 'Citizen Mining'. This is based on Popularity Stat of your city, and has been changed so much over time that none of my older guides are any good anymore.
The most up to date guide is actually @jelly13's Napkin Math update, but its so technically advanced that I still read it a few times a month to see if I learn anything new, and I usually do.
The basic idea is that you get some chance every two hours to get a new citizen, this chance is based on how much popularity your city has and how high the WAR TAX amount is at on that day. If you get a citizen, you are on a cool down for 24 hours.
There are four types of citizen you can get, each has a different value and each can turn into different things, in different ways. Homeless and Immigrants are transformed randomly using Job Centers, Young citizens are transformed randomly over time, and Students randomly gain (debt) which can be paid for to activate a random transformation to another unique set of citizen cards. Again, all of this info is broken down more on the respective sections of the Info Page.
The game mechanics have changed over time, as things are added, subtracted, adjusted and modified. The game will also continue to change, as @gerber loves his creation so much maybe he cannot bear to leave it alone. Perhaps it is his proud reputation that is keeping him interested and motivated.
Either way, its a lot of fun, and while things go up and down all the time in crypto, it has been the case and might be again in the future, that dCity tokens/cards aren't the stupidest thing you can do with your money. Some days you might even feel really smart.
Just keep reading the Info Page.