balancity, being a game primarily about stacking city blocks into tall towers, unsurprisingly has three achievements related to city height. unfortunately the developers seem to assume that you were raised from birth as some kind of balancity mastermind, expecting you to reach two THOUSAND metres for the final hidden achievement. for reference, i win most of my games at around 250 metres, the highest leaderboard score on default settings is around 1400 metres, and the game's camera refuses to scroll up beyond a maximum of 3000 metres.

realistically there's no way you're building an actual tower up to 2000 metres. unless you're a real architect, in which case you should probably spend your time on real buildings rather than fakes.

this guide describes how to hit 2000 metres (the boring way), a few more interesting alternatives that i couldn't manage but have some potential, plus some other random crap i found interesting but have nowhere else to put.

good luck!

you might think that this achievement is actually really easy. after all, if you're allowed to place buildings up to 3000 metres in the air, there's nothing stopping you from just dropping a building from that high in the sky and getting the achievement that way.

unfortunately the game is slightly smarter than you.

here's how it works:

• only apartments are considered for your maximum height.
  
• the apartment must be powered and have access to an office.
  
• the apartment does not necessarily have to be grounded.
  
• height calculations appear to be made every game tick, so the apartment only has to stay above 2000 metres for a single frame.

in that case you might consider that you could place an apartment, office and power source up in the air and have them drop together, thereby satisfying all of these conditions. however, whilst the apartment itself doesn't need to be grounded, there is an additional rule at play:

• power sources must be grounded in order to provide power to buildings.

so unfortunately our sick nasty airdrop strategy isn't quite going to cut it. we'll have to think of something else instead.

sidenote: this achievement will only proc if your gravity is set to normal. all other game settings can be changed as you please.

the most failsafe way to get to 2000 metres looks like this:

• start a game with normal gravity, manhattan platform and no random events.
  
• build a city as usual, but WITHOUT placing buildings around the immediate centre of the platform.
  
• place and launch the final rocket to unlock the maximum 3000 metre height limit.
  
• stack elevators on the centre of the platform to reach the required 2000 metre limit.
  
• place an apartment, office and turbine on top of the elevator to update your maximum height count.

this isn't quite as simple as it seems, since you'll need around 30-40 elevators stacked in order to reach your target -- and you don't need to be an architect to know that tall and thin things really like to fall over.

as a result we'll be exploiting some of the game's weirder controls in order to help us stack the elevators pixel-perfect. the arrow keys let you move the camera in perfect lateral lines. once you place your first elevator in the centre of the platform, do not move your mouse. instead, tap up and down with the arrow keys to move your camera around, guaranteeing that you'll place your next elevator pixel-perfect aligned with the first.

repeat this process to stack upwards. note that this isn't infallible - the game will eventually flip out and kick one of your bottom elevators sideways, disrupting your entire stack. try to place each elevator as close to the top of the last as possible to avoid physics issues, but balance precision with speed as you make your way up to the top before the game finally snaps.

if done fast enough you can use this method to reach all the way to the 3000 metre camera height limit, far exceeding what the game expects you to manage. once you see any horizontal movement on your elevator stack, though, i recommend you bail and place your office/apartment/turbine combo on top as fast as possible, since any shifty movement at all in the stack pretty much guarantees the bottom is about to fall.

this is the method i personally used to get the achievement, getting it in around 25 minutes. here's my clear video:

if elevator stacking is too boring for you, an alternative can (possibly) be found using the spaceship special building! i've never actually achieved it but i'm pretty sure it could be done with some patience.

here's the rundown:

• start a game with normal gravity, manhattan platform and no random events.
  
• build a city as usual.
  
• place the final rocket near the edge of the platform.
  
• stack an office, apartment and turbine on top of the rocket.
  
• watch as the rocket launches your items high into the sky, hopefully reaching the 2000 metre mark!
  
• if the rocket does not make the flight, build apartments to nudge the launch pad off the edge of the platform to destroy it, ready to be rebuilt with a fresh rocket.

the rocket item conveniently has a perfectly flat nose, despite what the rocket's texture suggests. this means we can easily stack items on top of it. the rocket also seems to count as a grounded object, despite the fact that it's literally flying. i have no idea why this is the case, but hey, it's useful for what we're doing here.

the highest i've managed to get with this method is 413 metres from platform level. however, my rocket always tilted to the right because the launch pad itself is solid, intercepting the rocket's flight path - if you were to build the rocket, then place a solid building (e.g. an elevator) to the right of it to prevent it from skewing right on launch, i think you could probably get at least the 1000 metre achievement with this method.

2000 metres is like, a lot, though. so maybe not that far.

still, it's fun!

on top of the two main options i'd recommend are a few methods which i tried for a bit, thought might be able to work, but with easier alternatives around didn't put much time into getting running. if you're feeling real weird, here's some of those ideas to try:

• the rocket is not the only moving vehicle. the airport can be placed once your city reaches a certain base height, and sends airplanes through your city that can collide with buildings. this could potentially be used to launch buildings upwards with the right construction.

• there are multiple situations where moving vehicles can get stuck in objects. placing roads on top of each other will eventually get some of the roads stuck inside of the moving cars, making the roads extremely difficult to separate. unfortunately this act of true love also displeases the game, regularly crashing whilst this is happening. if enough of these unmovable roads were stacked on top of each other you could probably make a stable tower all the way up to 3000 metres.

• meteors will send mid-air objects flying upwards, depending on the angle at which they're hit. by toppling a grounded energy generating building from the platform onto a falling meteor, then placing the office and apartment in mid-air near where the building peaks, you might be able to sneak in a few frames of powered apartment time before the energy generator updates and moves out of its grounded state.

and of course, maybe you can build a tower 2000 metres high, and maybe you can place the buildings in mid-air and still have it count! all solutions are valid when "3000 metre tall elevator stack" is the best current solution.

• placing too many apartments without enough workplaces will eventually cause you to place shanty houses. these shanty houses damage your city's reputation over time, implying that they're meant to be a punishment. however, unlike apartments which will be empty until supplied resources, shanties always have 5 residents in them regardless of power or available workplaces, making them the perfect tool for cheap wins - simply place 400 shanties before the riot takes hold (or 200 in scenarios) and quickly place the key buildings to win.

• the reputation damage from shanty houses can also be used to quickly stir up riots with which to farm the citizen saviour/riot repressor achievements.

• whilst the height-related achievements require default gravity to unlock, none of the generic "beat free build with x restriction" achievements have any such check. as such, you're free to turn off gravity entirely to complete these achievements for free.

• receiving a jumpscare from peppy the clown will immediately reset your city's reputation to 100%. i have no practical usage for this, i'm just commending peppy on his quality mayoral work.

2000 metres is a high requirement that took a lot of experimentation to work out, but after some work i'm happy with the solution i came up with. as much as balancity is a pretty simple game you definitely need to make good use of the mechanics to get this achievement. i'm kinda suspicious of the fact that 2% of players seem to have gotten it though, maybe i overthought this somehow LOL

hopefully this guide helped you! good luck on completing the other achievements and the rest of the game.

pce -- 2021-09-04T19:57:30+01:00