Pocket City 2 tips and tricks: Essential building plans
There’s not doubt that Pocket City 2 is the leader of the pack when it comes to premium mobile city builders. Couple intuitive controls and clean graphics with a quirky personality and you’ve got a game that’s easy to pick up and play, and hard to forget. If you’ve never heard of Pocket City and are new to the city-building genre in general, you should head over to our introductory guide to get you up and running fast. Of course, if you’re looking to play Pocket City 2 on a larger screen, then we’ve got a list of great tablets for you as well.
Broadly speaking, a game of Pocket City can be broken up into three parts: the early game, the mid-game, and the end game. Each phase comes with its own goals and challenges. Fortunately, Android Police is on the beat with some top-tier insights to help you overcome whatever stands in your way of becoming the best city-state in the Pocketverse.
Early Game
Wait for the quest
Even if you know the basics of the game, it can be beneficial to wait for the game to give you a gentle nudge in the form of a quest. A common early-game quest is to build a Fire Department or expand one of your zones. Instead of rushing through the early game, take your time and wait for a quest to show up. You’ll get at least 800 XP, you’ll improve your citizen relations, and you’ll probably get a stack of cash on top. This mostly works in the early game, so don’t count on it if you’ve already got a few hundred people living in your city.
Developing your relationship with Ruby can be tricky. By not rushing to build residential zoning as fast as possible, it’s more likely she’ll show up and give you a quest to build 10 residential zones.
Explore
One of the most charming aspects of Pocket City 2 is the ability to explore your city on foot in an over-the-shoulder perspective. This doesn’t just apply to the streets and sidewalks of your city, but also to the interiors of the schools, restaurants, and shops. What’s the point of all this? Inside nearly every business and service is a little surprise, whether that’s a mystery crate or a couple of research points. This can be a great way to use your downtime while you wait for money to accrue to give you an edge in research that will help you out later on. You’ll have the most luck searching the Town Hall, Fire Departments, Police Stations, and Hospitals.
Mid-Game
Manage resources
Starting at level 10, you can begin selling your surplus resources. Initially, you can only grow food and harvest lumber, but that’s more than enough to start making $5,000 per day. By the time you get to level 20 (it happens fast, trust me), you’ll be able to mine and refine ore, pushing your daily exports to over $10,000. Here’s how to turbocharge your resource extraction.
To sell your resources, you need to construct a Shipping Dock, which can only be built next to water that is touching the edge of the map. Visit the shipping dock and set up auto-sell for wood, food, and metal. You can experiment with the amount to keep, but the default of 100 is a good number in general.
While you’re at the shipping dock, buy electronic components whenever you can. You’ll need them for some upgrades later on.
Bribe your way to success
As mayor of your Pocket City, part of your job is to make sure the city’s stakeholders are happy. That means improving your Relationship status with various denizens of the city. As you play the game, you have the opportunity to interact directly with some of these citizens and give them a gift to show your gratitude for all that they do. Normally, you can raise your Relationship status with that person by up to three points depending on the gift, but some of these NPCs have a favorite food, and if you know what to give them, you can get five Relationship points instead.
- Anna, Town Hall – Chicken Nuggets
- Officer Olivia, Police Station – Donuts
- Chief Franklin, Fire Department – Hamburger
- Ranger Patrick – Hot Dog
- Ethan, Elementary School and University – Omlette
- Doctor Denise, Hospital – Salad
- Megan, Shipping Dock and Cargo Train Station – Dumplings
- Barbara, Bank – Lobster
- Vivian, Animal Shelter – Noodles
- Shawnathan – Pasta
- Ruby – Roast Duck
- Eddie – Fries
What’s the point of Relationships? Every five levels of Relationship achieved nets you a free gift. For some relationships, if you can get it to 50, you’ll unlock a new building to draw more tourists and rake in more cash. To buy food, look around in your city’s commercial districts. They restock their larders every day.
End Game
Consolidate
By the time you cross the threshold into level 50, you’ll likely have most of the map covered, and you’ll begin to wonder how you’ll ever manage to push your population up past 100,000. The secret is to do more with less. This is especially true for power plants. When your city is just starting out, you don’t have many options to choose from when it comes to power — you can use the starter power plant, or you can use nothing. Once you unlock the fusion power plant (level 85), you can get rid of all those old plants and replace them with one or two of these bad boys to cut down on pollution and open up space for more residents.
Events
Hosting an event is an easy way to turn your money and material resources into experience points and more money. If you don’t feel like tearing down and building just to grind a few more experience points out, throw a community event to do it instead. Every event has a different set of requirements to make it successful, but in general, don’t place them near pollution, and, for the events unlocked later in the game, make sure you’ve built a News Station (unlocked at level 43) which automatically adds one star to any event. Events also have to be started between certain times of the day to maximize their effectiveness.
- Farmers Market, 6am – 4pm
- Block Party, 3pm – 11pm
- House Party, 3pm – 11pm
- Parade, 1pm – 11pm
- Fireworks, 7pm – 12am
- Marathon, 1pm – 11pm
- Ice Festival, 3pm – 11pm (only in winter)
- Stadium Concert, 4pm – 12am (only after you’ve unlocked the Mega Stadium at level 80)
Tear it down to build it up
This list of tips will get you started on your way to making the ultimate Pocket City, but we haven’t covered all the bases; there are still lots of tricks for you to figure out on your own. One last piece of advice: don’t be afraid to destroy what you’ve already made in order to build it back better. Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make your Pocketomelette. And if city building isn’t really your thing, you should check out our list of awesome casual games.
