As far as time management games go, Star Wars: Tiny Death Star (Free) is about as simple as it gets when it comes to understanding its freemium aspects. It takes time to stock floors, sell items and earn coins, and build floors. The game’s premium Imperial Bux can be used to speed up each of those activities and acts as the only currency that can be used to upgrade your bitizen-ferrying elevator. Still, there are a few tips and tricks that players can adhere if they want to get the most bang for their bux.

Horde Your Bux Early On for Elevator Upgrades

Simply put, the starting elevator in Tiny Death Star sucks. At the start of a new game, you’ll want to save up as soon as you can for the first upgrade. It’s much faster than the starter, coin rewards are doubled, and a faster elevator means more potential bitizens. Personally, I’d recommend saving all your bux just for elevator upgrades, as the upgrade benefits are real, useful and the only way to to upgrade an elevator is with bux.

This also means that you should refrain from spending bux on skipping missions, fast-tracking restocking or buying out inventory. Restocking and inventory simply take time, while missions are almost never worth skipping, even if the requirements feel onerous. Also, I wouldn’t recommend spending bux to fill residential vacancies, at least at the onset. Once you get more floors and it becomes less likely you’ll ferry a bitizen to a specific new residence, you can consider it (however, see the tip further down on dream jobbers to minimize this desire).

Save Your Recruiter VIP for New Floors

The Recruiter VIP is my favorite person in Tiny Death Star, as he’ll instantly fill out any vacancies in whatever residential floor you take him too. If you take him to a completely empty floor, that’s five new residences that would have either taken five bux or a decent amount of time trying to ferry bitizens to that respective floor. They’re also pretty rare, too. Thus, it makes perfect sense to save them for when you have empty floors. If you get one before you have an empty floor, save it and build one before using it.

Go All In On Dream Jobbers

As we mentioned in our review, Tiny Death Star is pretty stingy when it comes to doling out bux. In fact, the only sure fire way of earning them is to place bitizens in their respective dream jobs, which doubles the stock of the item they are in charge of and also provides a one-time reward of one bux. So it’s in your best interest to try and place as many bitizens as you can into their respective dream jobs. There are a few techniques you can employ to make this happen more often.

For starters, make sure that you build lots of extra residential floors. One piece of advice I’ve heard is to make every other floor residential. This will not only make it far more likely that an elevator-riding bitizen will actually go fill a vacant spot on a resident floor, but it also means you’ll have tons of extra unemployed bitizens with dream jobs that need to be satisfied. Once you’ve gotten a good system going, it’s just a matter of moving in bitizens, placing them in their dream jobs, and evicting any bitizens that either have dream jobs for floors you haven’t built yet or have already given you their bonuses and have been replaced. This tactic is a little tough at the onset when you don’t have too many floors, but the more you have, the easier it’ll be to cycle dream jobbers in and out.

Reserve Floor Upgrades for Low Stock Shops

This may be more of a personal preference for me, but I’m not a fan of having to deal with floors that have low inventory/restock times. So whenever I had some spare credits or a VIP that upgraded floors, I’d focus on those floors. As you upgrade them, both their inventory and restock timers get longer, meaning you have to check them less throughout the day. Considering Tiny Death Star doesn’t really give players any bonuses for perpetually fully stocking floors (other than an occasional buying frenzy), I’d rather simply have an upgraded floor that I have to check less.

Practice Common Sense Time Management

As with most timer-based freemium games, it’s never a bad idea to remember to practice good timer management. Make sure your restock timers are either in progress or stocked when you know you’re going to be away from the game for awhile. Remember, Tiny Death Star won’t let you know when an individual floor runs out of stock, so it’s never a bad idea to periodically check on the game when you know you have multiple floors that were completely stocked.