Feeder City Guide In SimCity BuildIt – Why & How?!

If you don’t want to spend money on SimCity BuildIt when you’re later in the game, you need a feeder city. Period.

Actually, you will need more than one but first things first.

The more you progress, the harder it gets to get the items to unlock more space and you will also have more and more problems with storage and it will either take forever to progress or you will need to spend some cold hard cash on it ๐Ÿ™

That’s the truth but here’s what you can do – you can create one or more so called feeder cities (also called satellite cities). Those are additional cities that will support you with exactly that

  • farming items to expand your city space
  • extra storage capacity
  • producing bulk items a lot faster
  • help to find items on the marketplace that are hard to find

So let’s start off with all you need to know to create your feeder city, in the second part you will see how you operate your cities in your daily life in SimCity BuildIt.

Set Up Your Feeder City

The higher you get with your city in SimCity BuildIt, the harder it will get to gather additional items to expand your map. In lower cities you will find more of these items and you can use them in your main city.

Also, if you need to produce basic items like nails, planks or hammers you will have a problem with your maximum storage capacity and this will slow down your progress a lot.

If you have one or more feeder cities, you can simply stockpile them there and transfer them when you need them (I’ll show you later how to do that).

The reason why not so many do that is that they think it’s messy to switch between the cities but actually it’s just a few clicks once you have it set up properly and that’s what I will now show you step by step.

Please keep in mind that you will need to set up an extra GameCenter, Google Play or Facebook account to make this work!

Gamecenter (iOS) or Google Play (Android)

Go to settings and then GemCenter in your iOS device or Google Play in your Android and log out of GameCenter/Google Play and then create a new GameCenter/Google Play account with a new email address. Now you can simply start SimCity BuildIt with the new GameCenter/Google Play logged in and you’re good to go. Also make sure that you find your other account and send a friend request so your feeder city will be connected to your main city.

I still would recommend you to use Facebook because this makes switching accounts more easy.

Facebook (iOS & Android – my favorite)

This is a lot easier if you ask me. Simply create a new Facebook account with a fresh email address and enter some basic info like a picture and personal info (Facebook will shut down fresh accounts if they look like not being a human account). Now you will send your main Facebook account (that you have connected SimCity BuildIt to) a friend request that you accept.

Now you’re able to start SimCity BuildIt with that Facebook account and you will see your main city in the friends list.

Building Your Feeder City Right

If you want to build your feeder city right there are some things that you will need to mind, otherwise it might get less effective.

You will need…

  • Population of 10,000 Sims to unlock the Trade Depot and the Global Trade HQ
  • Reach Level 8 to see expansion items in the trade depot
  • You need to stay below Level 9 because then there will be more items and the chances to get land expansion items is a lot lower

This takes a little time, I’d say some hours but you can simply do it on breaks and don’t need to do it all straight.

I also recommend you to use parks to boost your population, this makes it easier to stay below Level 9 ๐Ÿ™‚

How To Operate A Feeder City

Now here’s how I operate my feeder cities…

Transfer Simoleons Between Your Feeder City & Main City

You can’t transfer money directly, but you can just put some cheap items in the marketplace of your main city for the highest price possible and then visit with your feeder city and buy that item.

If you want to transfer money to your feeder city you will, of course, make it the other way round ๐Ÿ˜‰

Also, no problem if another player buys that item – then you made some nice extra money for a cheap item but I’ve never seen that happening ????

Transferring Items

Here is the catch – if you simply do put your items (no matter which one) to the Trade Center for a cheap price, there’s a high chance that other players might see them before you can switch between cities and buy them before you can do that. So here’s what I’m doing:

  1. Place the item(s) in the trade center in the feeder city for the highest possible price
  2. Switch to main city and visit the feeder city trade center to buy them
    Problem: Now you have spent a lot of Simoleons here that you need to transfer back to your main city
  3. So put some items you don’t need in the main city in your trade depot for a high price
  4. Switch to your feeder city and buy those items to transfer the Simoleons back.
    If you don’t need the money in your main city, you can also keep it in your feeder city for a while, the money is not lost and you can transfer it at any time back to your main city ๐Ÿ˜‰

Using the Global Trade HQ

Selling the items for a high price to prevent anyone else is buying them also has another benefit – you will have plenty of simoleons in your feeder city that you can use to buy land expansion items and other items you need in your main city in the global trade HQ in your feeder city.

Because you stay below Level 9, you will see them there more frequently than you do in your main city.

Conclusion

I have now 5 feeder cities that I operate and when I think back I think it might have taken months more to get to the point that I reached now with my main city or I would have had to spend a lot of money for it, so even if this might sound like an annoying thing to do in the beginning, the feeder city strategy will help you out a lot. It doesn’t take that much time to operate once you have it set up ๐Ÿ™‚

  1. You Told that I can get land expansion items below level 9, but this is not the same now. i made 1 feeder city, but seriously, i can’t even see the land expansion items in global trade hq.

    So what can I do now?
    Can you help me?
    If you want to help then please contact with me on Facebook, name is suprabhat mishra

  2. Suddenly I cannot find my friends in feeder city, I am using facebook, only Daniel i.e. cannot find my main city, though from my main city I can see my feeder

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