Over the span of six years, BitLife has become arguably the most popular life simulator game on both iOS and Android platforms, and it’s not just because of those weekly challenges. The game somehow remains relevant despite its age because Candywriter keeps rolling out new expansion packs, typically allowing players to enter new lines of work that previously weren’t available in the game. And yes, since this is a game designed for adult players, this definitely includes jobs that will put you on the wrong side of the law.
If it wasn’t enough for Candywriter to allow players to join crime syndicates and essentially become virtual mobsters with their characters, the company recently rolled out a new update that greatly adds to the number of illegal activities you can pull off while living your virtual life.
The Dealer Expansion Pack now allows you to enter the illegal substance trade in the BitLife universe, starting out as a (presumably broke) dealer with nothing more to your name but an uncanny ability to sell stuff until you eventually become the Kingpin or Queenpin of the syndicate you joined all those years ago. Do you have it in you to become the BitLife universe’s answer to Tony Montana or Walter White?
With that out of the way, let’s dive into this brand new update, as this BitLife strategy guide will tell you all you need to know about the Dealer Expansion Pack.
Getting Started: How to Become a Dealer
If you want to achieve success in the BitLife universe’s illegal drug trade, the first thing you need to do is to choose Dealing as a Special Talent when creating a character. Much like with other Special Talents, choosing Dealing allows you to develop your skill faster with each successful sale you make. And you can make those sales typically by going to Relationships, tapping on a family member or a friend’s tab, and choosing the Deal option, which becomes available for most NPCs in other menus as well, including the classroom.
Deal becomes available once you reach your sixth birthday, and at first, you’ll likely be dealing scented markers, chocolate bars, and stolen library books to friends and classmate — just be careful when doing the latter, as classmates can report you to the principal for selling stuff in class! Each successful deal, as noted above, increases your Dealing performance, and you’ll want the performance bar to be filled up completely once you reach your 18th birthday and become eligible to join one of the drug cartels in your hometown.
Typically, there will be about four or five cartels to choose from, each of which has a Money and Infamy stat associated with them — the former refers to how much money they’ve earned in the drug business, the latter refers to their notoriety in the community and with law enforcement. Different cartels also deal different types of drugs, and as is customary in the world of BitLife, these are renamed versions of real-life illegal substances — for example, Molly becomes Lolly, oxycodone becomes Moxihardone, and so on.
Similar to how it works with crime syndicates, you’ll start out at the bottom of the totem pole when you first join a drug cartel. You’ll be a lowly Dealer pushing banned substances in your street, and each successful deal will improve your Control of the turf, or street, as well as your Standing within the cartel. As a Dealer, you will be limited to selling drugs, as some of the options we’ll be discussing below won’t be available to you until you get promoted to a higher rank.
Getting Familiar with the Dealer Menu
After joining a cartel for the first time, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with your cartel’s main menu, which you can access by tapping on Job, then on your title at the top of the job menu. The upper part of the screen will show your Infamy as someone in the drug trade, your Standing within the cartel, and how much Control you exert on the street/turf where you are currently operating as a dealer.
Your Infamy increases as you complete important achievements such as successfully dealing to a cop or completing a drug run with most of the supply intact, while it decreases if you mess up on the job, say, if you get lowballed by one of your buyers or if your shipment is intercepted by the cops during a drug run.
In the activities section, you can view a list of Cartel Members and interact with them in various way, view your drug inventory under Drugs, leave the cartel, declare a Mutiny on your kingpin or queenpin, Plug your drug supply and sell to friends or family, or choose a new nickname if you don’t like the one the game randomly assigned you. We mentioned these options first because these are the ones anyone can access regardless of ranking — as a dealer, of course, you will be limited to these ones when you aren’t looking for people on the street to sell to.
Upon promotion to Runner, you’ll be allowed to go on Supply Runs, which are missions that send you to dangerous foreign territory (or in rare instances, in your home country) to retrieve product for your cartel. You’ll still be able to deal drugs on the side while focusing on your primary role as Runner. Promotion to Manufacturer unlocks the Manufacture option, where you can create new strains of drugs and manage them; likewise, you can still deal and do drug runs as a Manufacturer.
The next rank is Lieutenant, where you will be tested on how well you can perform all those tasks you’ve unlocked so far, and once you reach Kingpin, you’ll be able to choose the remaining options; Bribe allows you to pay off the authorities to free jailed cartel members, while Gang War lets you organize an attack on a rival cartel.
The Ins and Outs of Dealing
As we mentioned earlier, your initial role within the cartel will always be as a Dealer, and your goal is to work your way up until you eventually make Kingpin. As a Dealer, your responsibilities are limited to peddling drugs on the current street until you reach 100 percent control. So how do you fill up the Control bar anyway?
First off, you’ll need to familiarize yourselves with the people on the street — you’ll see a list of about a dozen NPCs with different ages, occupations, and, as immediately visible on your screen, different Willpower stats. While these would normally be average, everyday folks with or without existing drug problems, you will always see one cop and one dealer from a rival gang in the list — these will almost always be the hardest people to sell to.
But if you’re able to close a deal with the cop, this won’t just increase your Control over your turf — you will also notice a small increase to your Infamy stat, which doesn’t happen when selling to anyone else.
Regardless of who you’re selling to, don’t set your selling price too high, as you won’t get too many new customers that way, and don’t set it too low either, because high-ranking cartel officers don’t like that — that could negatively impact your Infamy and Standing within the group! And make sure to view each potential buyer’s basic info, as that will give you a list of which drugs they’re taking — if you have what they currently take, that could greatly increase the chances of a sale!
Additionally, don’t get too discouraged by the paltry cuts you receive as a Dealer — as you move up the ranks, your share of the money you make per sale will get larger, and once you become Kingpin, you pocket 100 percent of the sale.
For some reason, it seems much easier to sell drugs as a new dealer — you may notice yourself closing more deals and even selling your stuff a few dollars above the street price. We guess that’s because Candywriter wanted to make it progressively harder to rise up the ranks, and if you think about it that way, that makes perfect sense. It shouldn’t take too long for you to take full control of your first street and get promoted to Runner, but as you’ll progress, you will find yourself dealing more and more with difficult potential customers. Let’s take a look at why they can be difficult.
Not Every Deal Will Push Forward as Planned
Regardless of how high your Dealing skill level is, you will eventually encounter some people on the street who, for one reason or another, aren’t interested in what you’re selling. They may find the price too steep, prefer another type of drug, or claim not to take drugs at all.
That’s okay — this won’t negatively impact your Infamy, Standing, or Control, as we’ve noticed. Then you’ve got the police, who will either turn down your offer because of their own reasons — too dangerous, trying to get clean, doesn’t want to get corrupted, etc. — or declare a bust and arrest you for drug trafficking.
Unfortunately, you’ll also deal with would-be customers who may grab the product they wanted to buy and try to run off with it — this becomes surprisingly common after you’ve made it past Runner and into Manufacturer. You can chase them down or let them get away with the theft, but it’ll always be best to choose the former — if you recover the goods, it’s no harm, no foul, but if they lose you, you’ll also lose some Infamy and Standing, but at least you tried. (Of course, there’s always the option to quit and restart the game before accepting the outcome.)
Lastly, many a customer will offer something in lieu of a cash payment — sometimes, it might end up more expensive than the drugs themselves once you have it assessed at the pawn shop, other times you might end up with a raw deal because the trade-in item just doesn’t cost as much as the drugs do.
This is always a calculated risk, but fortunately, it usually takes some good old fashioned common sense — and a bit of pop culture savvy — to figure out which items are worth their weight in gold, er…drugs, and which ones aren’t. Just take note of this quick bonus tip — do not ever accept the signed Pawn Stars poster in lieu of cash! That poster will always be worth one measly dollar, so don’t get fooled by those sneaky buyers.
Partying with Your Customers
We’ve decided to cover this in a separate tip because it’s such an interesting option as far as the Dealer role is concerned. Party allows you to do some drugs with the people on the street you’re currently working — or with other members of your cartel. The latter is great for improving your relationship with other cartel members, but for the purposes of this tip, let’s look at what partying with buyers can do for you.
In general, people who are already addicted (as designated by their messy hair and pockmarked faces) and those whom you have a good relationship with are more likely to party than those who aren’t.
That means you’ll want to drop some compliments to potential buyers if you want to use the Party option and not get shooed off — or worse, reported to the cops and busted for dealing. If you’re able to successfully party with somebody on the street, that increases your Infamy rating while also improving your Standing within the cartel and your Control of the turf where you’re working.
In addition to those small ratings boosts, you can also get your Infamy, Standing, and Control up a bit if the person you’re partying with gets addicted — interestingly, even bald people get that messy hairdo once they get hooked on a drug. And if the NPC overdoses and dies, you also get all three stats boosted. Our test characters haven’t been arrested yet after such an event, but needless to say, this is one instance where you’ll have to be careful while partying — best to move on to another person on the street rather than risk your current customer/drug buddy OD’ing on you!
Use Your Common Sense When Going on Drug Runs
Runner is the next position in the chain of command after Dealer, and while you can still deal drugs on the side, your main responsibility here will be flying out to oversee supply shipments. That means you should make sure the supplies for the manufacturing of certain drugs get to your cartel with little to no hitch; losing too much product could cost you a bit of Infamy and Standing, so be very careful when answering the questions during supply run scenarios!
Once again, common sense will be your best friend in answering the questions — for example, if you catch someone from your drug run team trying to sample the stuff, call their attention instead of letting it pass. (The risk here is that they may beat you up in retaliation, but we haven’t seen any examples so far that are fatal, even to those with a full bar of Health.)
That’s also going to be at play when you’re choosing the packaging and pickup points. For the former, used condoms and glass/ceramic containers are a definite must to avoid, so with that in mind, don’t go with anything too flimsy or breakable.
For the latter, make sure you’re choosing a pickup point that’s as inconspicuous as possible, such as a vacant parking lot or a quiet forest. You’ll still be at risk of someone tipping off the law and your supplies getting seized, which, of course, will really hurt your Infamy and Standing, but at least the aforementioned areas are much safer than baseball stadiums, restaurants, and the like.
Also, be sure you’re accepting all the time when your fellow cartel member dares you, or asks you to accompany them to the bar — this is always good for a quick Infamy boost!
Once you’ve completed the mission, you’ll be given a payout for your hard and dangerous work — we’re talking hundreds of thousands here, so as you can see, it can be really lucrative to go on supply runs, even when you’re no longer a Runner. And naturally, that also means you have more raw materials to craft different strains of the drugs you’re selling.
How to Make the Most Out of the Strains You Manufacture
After you’ve made about seven successful supply runs with most of the materials intact (most meaning 90 percent and upward, as we noticed), it’ll be time to “craft” with those materials as a Manufacturer. Things can sometimes get a little tricky in this particular role, but not too tricky — in fact, all it usually takes is to review the type of drug you’re working with and take note of its general after-effects.
When choosing a substance to cut the pure version of the drugs with, keep those after effects in mind and pick the substance that’s closely associated to that effect. To cite a simple example, if you’re manufacturing a strain of a drug that usually gives the user superhuman strength, Creatine would be a good substance to cut it with. Likewise, Coffee Grounds can be used to cut a drug that’s designed to make its user feel hyper-energetic.
Before you manufacture doses of your new strain, name it, and sell it to the people in your turf, you’ll have to test it out with your fellow cartel members. Choose any cartel member in the drop-down box, and take their comments into account.
If they say your phone will be ringing off the hook thanks to this new strain, that means it’s likely going to be a high-demand product, but if they say the strain gave them the worst trip ever or caused them to do things that aren’t characteristic of the drug’s pure version, go back to the “lab” and tweak your formula. There doesn’t seem to be any hard, fast rule when it comes to the cut percentage, but we tend to keep it low and make our strains as close to pure as possible.
As a Manufacturer, you’ll need to earn a cumulative $100,000 from all of the strains you’ve created, so what you’ll want to do here is to focus on producing those that are in high demand from your customers. Strangely, it takes a bit longer for Manufacturers to get promoted to Lieutenants than it does Runners to move up to Manufacturers, but that’s simply BitLife ramping up the difficulty as you make your way through the chain of command.
Lieutenants Should Keep a High Standing and Maintain Positive Relations with the Cartel
The next rank you can move up to in the BitLife Dealer expansion pack is Lieutenant, and as you may have noticed from the very first time you joined your cartel, you’ll be one of several in the group, with each of you competing to be next in line to become Kingpin or Queenpin.
Basically, Lieutenant is a mix of all the three main roles you had previously fulfilled — Dealer, Runner, and Manufacturer. As a high-ranking officer within the cartel, you have greater power AND greater responsibilities, and you’ll need to perform well in all three areas in order to maintain a good Standing and keep your Infamy as close to 100 percent as possible. You’ll also receive more orders from your boss to shake down (i.e. intimidate) people who owe money to the cartel. Doing all this will give you an edge over the more tenured Lieutenants.
Bear in mind, though, that even if you’ve got a stellar record within your cartel and are outperforming the other Lieutenants, the only “clean” way to become Kingpin or Queenpin is if the erstwhile head of the organization dies. Cartel members can randomly get killed during the course of the game, particularly when you age up and a gang war takes place between your cartel and a rival, but Kingpins/Queenpins tend to be much likelier to survive such attacks.
Given all that, you might have to wait until the cartel leader is in their 70s or 80s before naturally inheriting their position. But there’s another way to become Kingpin or Queenpin, and this is why having an excellent Standing and high Infamy is so important during this phase of your journey as a BitLife drug dealer.
If You Can’t Wait to Become Kingpin, Declare a Mutiny!
That’s right — if you’re tired of waiting for your cartel’s head to die of old age, natural causes, or (in what we’d guess are very rare cases) not-so-natural causes, you can always declare mutiny in hopes of becoming the new Kingpin or Queenpin. You can use this option regardless of your rank in the cartel, but preferably as a Lieutenant.
When doing so, you’ll be given a few choices for how you wish to overthrow your cartel’s erstwhile boss. For example, you can go for a public embarrassment, threaten them, talk up your accomplishments, or snitch on them to the police. Regardless of which choice you make, we cannot stress it enough — without your fellow cartel members’ support, and without the Infamy and Standing to back that up, the mutiny won’t be successful.
Some methods may also be more effective than others — for instance, we tried using troll bots to embarrass the cartel leader despite being a brand new dealer with pitiful Infamy and Standing stats, and it somehow worked! But we’d wager that this was mostly a stroke of luck, given our test character had literally just joined the cartel.
If you’re unsuccessful in your plans of mutiny, chances are your cartel’s leader will send someone to rough you up — in rare instances, this may turn out to be fatal, but we haven’t experienced this yet during our playthroughs.
But if you’re able to pull off the mutiny, that will end up in the Kingpin or Queenpin’s death, and you’ll end up inheriting their assets, including, but not limited to their house, vehicles, and even their pets. This could make you insanely rich if you aren’t already, but as you may have guessed by now, being the head of your own drug cartel can be harder and trickier than your previous roles in the cartel!
Declaring a Gang War
One of the unique things you can do as a Kingpin or Queenpin is to declare war against one of your rival cartels. Choose the Gang War option in the main job menu, and choose a cartel to attack; after picking a cartel, you’l be asked which of your cartel members you wish to assign to wipe out the rival group. You’ll also need to choose a method of attack from the second drop-down box — choices may include conventional ones like stabbings, shootings, and pipe bombs, as well as less traditional means of mayhem such as self-driving car collisions.
Unfortunately, the chances of a successful attack won’t be as high as the chances of rivals randomly laying siege on your cartel after hitting on the Age button and going through the usual motions. In fact, we’d estimate the chances of success to be as low as 5 to 10 percent, and that’s even when choosing more ostensibly competent (i.e. more infamous, higher-ranked) to carry out the attack. Far more often than not, the attack will be an epic failure, with the attacking cartel member losing their life and many innocent people dying.
On the other hand, you can always quit and restart BitLife if you’re dead-set on taking out an opposing cartel — at the moment, you can still exit the game before accepting the failure of the ambush, restart the app, and try again until you get it right.
And when you do get it right, you’ll end up with the rival cartel’s assets, including their cash, their members, and the streets they were controlling. Just make sure to give the cartel member their fair share of money for a job well done — it isn’t easy, after all, to take out a rival gang in BitLife’s version of the drug trade!
Should You Add New Drugs as a Kingpin?
In addition to declaring gang wars and bribing authorities to free jailed cartel members, you can also add to the list of drugs you’re currently selling as the head of your cartel. By default, each cartel only sells a maximum of two drugs and a minimum of one, but once you’ve become Kingpin or Queenpin, you can add more new drugs until you reach the maximum of four. But should you even bother with this if you’re doing so well with your existing inventory?
The short answer would be, in most cases, no — as the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Given everything you’re doing while in charge of your cartel, from the supply missions to the yearly income from the strains you created to other forms of active and passive income, you should be swimming in cash anyway, so why make your virtual life harder by selling more types of drugs?
Remember that you cannot view each drug type’s general demand in your city until you’ve already decided to sell them, so there is a chance you’ll be adding a drug that not too many people look for on the streets. And manufacturing and selling low-demand products will put you in the red for that particular strain — it’s just a drop in the bucket, but nonetheless something you can do without in the grand scheme of things.
However, if the drugs you’re selling are NOT in high demand for one reason or another, that’s when you can add a few new drugs in hopes of improving your financials.
Selling Drugs to Your Friends and Family
Yes, it is possible to sell drugs to friends and family members thanks to the BitLife Dealer expansion pack, and you’ll be surprised at how easy it is, even when you’re selling to NPC loved ones who, on the surface, don’t seem like the type to dabble in substance use. You can either use the Plug option in the main job menu, or you can go to the Relationships tab and tap on any friend or family member you wish to sell to.
While this is a completely optional part of the Dealer experience in BitLife, we might as well go into some detail about what you can expect if you sell drugs to family and friends. On one end, they may enjoy the drug and give you positive feedback, but on the other side of things, they may complain about having a bad trip, which would negatively impact your Relationship bar. The same applies if they refuse to buy from you and instead tell you to get your act together.
The worst thing that could happen if you sell to friends and family would be if that loved one of yours overdoses on the drugs you sold them. We’re guessing this will be patched in a future update, but we haven’t seen any other negative consequences, such as getting estranged from other family members, after the fatal OD. But it is worth noting that you can end up with a loved one’s blood on your hands if you choose to add them to your list of loyal customers.
Dealing with the BitLife Legal System
Naturally, being a member of a drug cartel in the BitLife universe will put you in the radar of law enforcement, and that doesn’t just apply to kingpins and queenpins — even lowly dealers could bring down an entire cartel if it just so happens that the cops are on their trail! The best thing to do in such a situation is to exit the game and restart it, but if you’re curious as to what happens in these cases, it’s simple — you get directed to the usual arrest and court trial dialog boxes, and you go through the BitLife legal system as the long arm of the law finally catches up with you (and actually just you — the rest of your cartel somehow makes it out okay).
The sentence for drug trafficking in BitLife is a paltry four years, and you may encounter situations, especially early on in your time as a cartel member, where the group’s head will ask you to take one for the team and spend four years behind bars as the “fall guy,” in exchange for a hefty amount of cash.
Accepting the sentence will derail your progress if you’re moving up the ranks, but you will get a boost in Infamy and your Standing within the cartel will likewise improve. Saying no to this offer won’t be the end of the world, but be warned that it will negatively affect your Infamy and Standing alike.
As we mentioned earlier, it is possible to sell drugs to actual cops patrolling the street where you’re currently working. But what if that kindly old professor actually turns out to be an undercover officer? Yes, it is possible that one of the random folks on the street is, in reality, working undercover for the police force, and there is absolutely no way you can make a deal with these “narcs.” Naturally, this will lead you to the usual legal process, unless, of course, you choose to quit and restart the game before getting arrested.