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Apr 20, 2023

Pocket City 2 tips and tricks: Essential building plans

How to exploit the most joy from your residents! The original Pocket City is

How to exploit the most joy from your residents!

The original Pocket City is still one of the best premium city builders on the Play Store, but now Pocket City 2 is here, and it's improved on the original in nearly every way with new buildings, new infrastructure, and new mechanics, making it one of Android's best games. If you're new to the world of Pocket City and city builders in general, check out our beginner's guide. If you're looking for a new tablet to play Pocket City 2 on, check out our list of the best tablets available.

Generally 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 tricks to help you overcome whatever stands in your way of becoming the best city-state in the Pocketverse.

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 most likely 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.

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.

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 was just starting out, you didn't have many options to choose from when it came to power — you could use the starter power plant, or you could use nothing. Now that you’ve unlocked 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.

Don't be afraid of destroying huge swathes of your city in order to make it better. By now, you’ve probably got more money than Croesus, so spending $500,000 to make your city perfect shouldn't be burdensome. Whether you’re trying to create a perfectly optimized utopia or reaching for aesthetic perfection, don't worry about breaking a few eggs to make your Pocketomelette.

Daniel writes guides, explainers, and technology news. He especially likes deep diving into niche topics that require more than scratching the surface. He's been writing in newspapers, magazines, and blogs for over 20 years writing hard news, entertainment, and science stories. When not writing he enjoys reading science fiction, playing music, and raising a rambunctious toddler. The devices you'll find him using every day are his Pixel 4a, Acer 311 Chromebook, and Amazon Fire HD 10. As soon as he saves up some money he's getting a 3D printer.