How CIT Tower works

You own one tower and you make it taller. This page explains every part of the game in plain words, with the numbers, so nothing is hidden.

Getting started

Press Play now and you are building; no account needed. Your tower is kept on this browser (a cookie that lasts 30 days) and after five minutes the game asks you to sign in so it is safe. Sign in or create an account at any time, here or on the CIT Tools page, and the tower moves to the account for good: same account as Most Wanted, CIT Heist and CIT Ranch, with the Tower keeping its own wallet. Guests do not appear on the leaderboards. You start with a 24/7 on floor 1, $1,500 and 3 Keys.

The loop: tap a floor, buy the upgrades inside it, and once it has three of the five it is open and the roof unlocks the next floor. Every floor earns money every second into its own till. Build, upgrade, repeat. There is no top floor and no reset.

Controls

• Scroll or swipe up and down to ride along the outside of the tower. Drag sideways to turn around it. Pinch, or hold ctrl and scroll, to zoom.
• Tap a floor to open its room. Every upgrade you own is drawn in it. Collect the till and buy the next upgrade from there.
• Tap the roof (or the Build button) to see the three blueprints for the next floor. Floors are built the moment you pay.
• Tap the lobby doors for your tower's directory, vault and recent history. The visitor queue sits top right.
• A green coin on a floor means an unmanaged till holds more than a minute of income. Red means it is full.
• The bar at the bottom opens the same menus. Escape closes anything.

Floors

Floor N+1 can be built when floor N is open (three of its five upgrades bought) and you have the cash. There is no construction wait: the floor is there as soon as you pay, as a shell, and starts earning with its fit-out.

Every floor is a business from CIT or San Andreas. Each has a category: Food, Retail, Service, Jobs (the CIT civilian jobs as offices), Entertainment, Criminal, and the six Legendary ones (CIT HQ, Space Miner Lab, BigFoot Exhibit, Most Wanted Board, Heist Planning Room, Blueberry Ranch Office). Some only appear from a certain height: the Car Showroom from floor 8, the Bank Branch from 10, Come-A-Lot and the Smuggler's Office from 12, the Pilot Lounge from 15, the Casino Floor from 20.

The five upgrades

Each floor has five slots, bought in order. Together they cost 2.2 times the floor's build price, split so the first ones are cheap: 4.5%, 9%, 13.6%, 27% and 45% of that total.

1. Fit-out: the floor starts earning its base rate.
2. Equipment I: +50% of base.
3. Staff: +50% of base. With this the floor is open and the next floor unlocks.
4. Equipment II: +75% of base.
5. Manager: banks the till for you. All five together also give +25%, five stars, and gold windows at night.

So a five-star floor earns 2.75 x 1.25 = 3.44 times its fit-out rate. Buying an upgrade never loses what the till holds: the amount is kept and the clock is adjusted to the new rate.

Blueprints and rarity

When the roof is unlocked the game offers three blueprints for the next floor. You pick one. Rerolling all three costs 2 Keys. The offers stay the same until you build or reroll, so you can go and earn the Keys first.

A legendary roll always offers one of the six legendary businesses. Rarity is rolled on the server before you see the cards.

Sets

Three floors of one category stacked directly on top of each other get +10% each. Five in a row get +25%. Longer runs stay at +25%. The build cards tell you when a blueprint would continue or complete a set, so the choice is: the rare Casino now, or the third Food floor that finishes a set?

Money and tills

• Each floor earns per second into its own till. A till holds at most 4 hours of that floor's income. The Vault upgrade raises this for the whole tower to 8, 12 and 24 hours. This is what makes coming back feel good, and it is also what stops a tab left open for a week from earning a week.
• Floors without a manager show a coin. Open the room and press Collect. Floors with a manager bank themselves every time the game talks to the server, still capped by the till.
• The cash figure in the corner already counts what managers will bank on your next action.
• Money is CIT-sized on purpose: a floor earns about the same at any height, so what grows is the price of the next floor. Floor 100 costs about $1.1M, floor 1,000 about $540M, roughly CIT's most expensive house.

The lift

Visitors wait in the lobby, each wanting a floor. Up to three at a time (four with Fast Lift rank 3), a new one every 45 seconds, and they leave after 3 minutes. Press Lift: the cab starts at the lobby, hold to accelerate, let go to brake, and the ride ends when the cab stops. Within a fifth of a floor is a perfect stop; two floors off is nothing.

• The tip is 10% to 20% of your next floor's price, depending on how close you stopped. A VIP (gold face) tips double.
• A perfect stop has a 25% chance of a Key. A perfect stop with a VIP always gives one.
• Tips are capped at 25% of a day's passive income per day, so a script tapping the lift all night gains nothing over a person who plays a bit each day.
• Fast Lift makes the cab quicker and easier to stop, which means more visitors per minute.

Keys

Keys are the second currency and they are only earned by playing: perfect lift stops, stopping a robber (1 to 3), a clean rewire, the daily crate (1 to 3), the helipad (3), orders (1) and achievements (2 to 50). They are spent on rerolling blueprints (2) and cosmetics: paint (5) and the spire (20). Nothing in CIT Tower is bought with real money.

Robbers and blackouts

• Robbery: about once per 25 active minutes once you have 3 floors, a robber runs along the front of a floor toward the lift. Tap him within 25 seconds and you keep the till and get 1 to 3 Keys. Miss and that one till is emptied, never the vault. The Security Office makes robberies 25% rarer per rank.
• Blackout: about once per 40 active minutes once you have 8 floors, five floors go dark and stop earning. Tap a dark floor and connect the four wires to their sockets. Fast and clean gives a Key. Left alone, the lights come back after two minutes and those floors simply lost that time. The Generator makes blackouts 25% rarer per rank and, at rank 3, half as long.

Events only roll while you are actually here: a day away counts as at most five minutes of chances, so you never come back to a pile of missed robberies.

Daily

• Crate: once a day (midnight UTC), 1 to 3 Keys and half the price of your next floor. The streak counts days in a row; missing one just restarts it, nothing is taken away.
• Orders: three a day, such as deliver 8 visitors, build 2 floors, buy 5 upgrades, collect 3 hours of income, stop a robber. Each pays the price of your next floor and a Key.
• Helipad (upgrade): a helicopter drops a crate on the roof once a day with 3 Keys and twice the price of your next floor.

Tower upgrades

Bought in the Upgrades menu. Each costs a share of your next floor's price and 1.6 times more per rank, so they stay meaningful at any height.

The numbers

Floor N costs 25 x N^2.3 x 1.001^N. A five-star common floor N earns 3.5 x N^0.1 per second, so a floor earns roughly the same whether it is the 5th or the 500th (the Tiny Tower model) and the price of the next floor is what climbs. That is what makes the early game quick and the late game a long race. Rough guide, checked with two bots playing the real rules: a first session reaches floor 10 to 15; then about two weeks to floor 100, four months to floor 300, a year to floor 500. Floor 1,000 is a multi-year target, which is the point of a leaderboard with no top.

Leaderboard

• Floors is the main board. Ties go to five-star floors, then to whoever reached that height first.
• Also: income per second, five-star floors, Keys earned lifetime, and floors built this week, which resets Monday (UTC) so new players have a board they can win.
• Tap a name, or type one, to look at a tower: height, income, five-star count, legendary floors, founded date. Read only.

Fair play

Everything is decided on the server: income from timestamps, blueprints from server dice, purchases checked against the vault, tips decided from a skill score the server caps. Repeated requests are ignored, amounts are checked, every cash change is written to a ledger that is reconciled against every wallet. Till limits and the daily tip cap mean autoclickers, scripts and clock changes gain nothing. If you find a bug that makes money, report it on the forum instead of using it.

What is real CIT and what is not

The businesses are the ones CIT players know: 24/7, Ammunation, Pay 'n' Spray, Burger Shot, Cluckin' Bell, the gym, the banks, the casinos, and the civilian jobs (Trucker, Pilot, Miner, Lumberjack, Fisherman, Farmer, Butcher, News Reporter, Delivery Man, Electrician, Fuel Transporter, Crane Operator, Ice Cream Man, Space Miner, Hunter and BigFoot) as offices. The tower, the floors, the Keys and the lift are this game's own invention. Prices and incomes are game numbers, not CIT ones.