Resource-based cities refer to the cities where the exploiting and processing of natural resources, such as minerals and forests, dominate industrial development. This special type of city is obviously staged during its development. From a new perspective of urban spatial structure, this paper quantitatively splits the development stages of resource-based cities based on the data of night lights images and uses the methods, such as the threshold panel model and non-parametric estimation. To delve into the impacts of resource-based industries on the evolution of urban spatial structure, as well as the timing of transformation policy design, different effects of the spatial agglomeration of central urban areas on urban growth and transformation by development stages are also analyzed in this paper. The results suggest that: the resource-based cities are relatively internally fragmented with noticeable differences among resource types and individuals, such as oil and gas resource type, and ferrous metal resource type. This paper attempts to adopt the proportion of mining employees as the indicator. Some 1.9% and 31.0% can act as the tipping points to divide different development stages of resource-based cities. The resource-based cities are split into four stages of development given two threshold values. In various stages of development, the correlation between the concentration of social and economic factors in the central urban area and the urban economic growth is noticeably different. Furthermore, 'the mature stage' has acted as a critical turning phase in the transformation of resource-based cities.