In the very long run, most of your income will come from grandmothers and cursors, but that doesn’t mean that the other buildings are useless. Rather, their value comes from increasing the value of your cursors, via the “…for every building you own” cursor upgrades.
In the not-quite-so-long run, prisms, antimatter condensers, and maybe even time machines also give you non-negligible contributions on their own. The cursor contribution at this point will be relatively small, but they’re also correspondingly cheaper than antimatter.
Every so often, a yellowish cookie about a third the diameter of the Big Cookie will show up at a random spot in the window. It’ll stick around for some amount of time before fading away. If you click it before that, it’ll give you a benefit of some sort, usually either a lump-sum bonus of cookies (as many as you’d get from 20 minutes of current production rates), or a period during which your cookie production is multiplied sevenfold.
You can purchase upgrades which will make them show up more often or make the effects last longer, and there are achievements for clicking various quantities of them. If you go into the Grammapocalypse, some or all of the golden cookies will be replaced by red cookies (also known as wrath cookies), which are usually beneficial but sometimes have negative effects.
Um, I have left my Cookie Clicker running in the background ever since my last post. In the last few months I have taken to resetting it every 1000 hours or so. I am up to 10.857 million heavenly chips, gunning for 1 octillion cookies! (it’ll still be awhile tho)
They spawn every few minutes, but there is a bug where the very first time you load up the game they don’t show up (nor do reindeer) until you reload the browser window. Do a save or auto-save and refresh the page, and you should start to see them.
Although it’s true that they are vastly less efficient, the main reason to buy the other stuff is for the achievements, which will increase your milk, which is a very strong multiplier along with kittens in the end-game.
A couple of questions: what the deal with resetting and Heavenly Chips? I’m not sure I understand how it works- do you want to deliberately reset every so often?
Also, once you do the One Mind upgrade What happens if you don’t stop the wrinkler things from reaching the cookie? If something bad, that more or less ends leaving the game running in the background.
Cookies and reindeer have taken me about as far as I can go. Any further upgrades now cost tens of quadrillions of cookies. Is biting the bullet and taking the One Mind upgrade the only way to go forward?
Yes, you want to reset every so often. When you reset, you will get some number of Heavenly Chips, based on your all-time (across all resets) cookie production. Those Heavenly Chips will then give you a bonus on production in subsequent games. The details of this might be changing in the next update, though.
You want wrinklers to be nibbling on your Big Cookie. While the wrinklers are on the cookie, they’ll eat 5% of your production each… but those cookies aren’t lost; they’re still there in the wrinklers. When you eventually pop the wrinklers, they’ll give you back all of the cookies they nibbled, plus interest. The only times you actually want to pop wrinklers are if you’re trying to find Halloween cookies or Easter eggs (a small random chance on each wrinkler-pop), or you need the cash to buy some significant building or upgrade, or if you’re about to reset.
Caveat to this is if you’re actively playing (i.e. looking out for golden cookies), you want to temporarily appease the elder grandmas by buying the pledge (don’t buy the pact that permanently appeases them*, as it results in a net loss). That way all the cookies will be golden, rather than the red wrath cookies which are sometimes negative, and you don’t have the wrinklers lowering your active CpS. You don’t want them while you’re clicking golden cookies because the production and click multipliers go by your current CpS.
It’s OK and in fact preferable to start the Grandmapocalypse though, as it gives you a net increase to letting it run passively due to the wrinkler bonus.
*Actually, when you have enough cashflow that the ~66 trillion it costs is NBD, buy it once and then revoke it immediately so you get the achievement for it, and increase your milk a little.
100 hours in and I think I am starting to reach a point of diminishing returns. I have reset once and have a career total of 130 quadrillion cookies baked. I’ve had 109 achievements, and a few more seem reasonably within grasp (I finally gave in and peeked at the wiki, which let me get the tiny cookie and dunk the cookie right away), but I don’t see sticking around to get 200 prisms or 7777 golden cookies. Might try for the trillion cps, though! By bedtime tonight I should be able to be close to half a trillion (that’s assuming I just let it run, of course. It’s not like I’m actually going to sit there for hours looking for cookies. Oh, hell, I probably am).
There’s one that’s x666 production for 6 seconds (or 12, if you have the 3rd golden cookie upgrade), which is pretty good. But overall you want the golden cookies if you are active, as some of the red ones are bad. And by far the best thing you can get is the mega-combo of frenzy (x7 overall production for 77/154 seconds), and then during that get another golden cookie which gives you the clicking frenzy of x777 to your clicks for 13/26 seconds.
You pretty much need all 3 golden cookie upgrades to get this combo, because it makes the initial frenzy last 154 seconds instead of 77, and your average spawn rate for golden cookies at that point are about 2 minutes. So there’s a very high chance you’ll get another golden cookie during the frenzy, and if it happens to be clicking frenzy you have a whopping x5439 to your click rate for 26 seconds. Obviously, at this point you want to mash click like no tomorrow. I play on my laptop with a USB mouse, so I can simultaneously click the mouse and with my other hand click the laptop mouse button as well as tap on the touch pad for 3 simultaneous clicks.
To illustrate how insanely powerful getting this combo is: in my current game I have 5.836 quintillion cookies baked. Of those, 1.856 quintillion are hand-baked. The vast majority of the hand-baked ones are just from having gotten this super-combo 4 or 5 times and gone hog wild on clicking, as described above. It’s a bit rare to get the combo, but when you do it’s insane.
Oh, and also the prestige multiplier (heavenly chips) that you get from resetting is really important for combating the brick wall of diminishing returns. By far the most important milestone in heavenly chips is getting to 5,000, which you will get when you reset with 12.5 quintillion total cookies baked. Not only does this unlock a bunch of new cookie upgrades, but most importantly it unlocks a holiday switcher upgrade thing that lets you change the holiday season at will. Then you can rack up all the extra achievements and upgrades that come with them.
(It’s also apparently possible to access other holiday seasons by changing the date in your system time, as well as a direct cheat to unlock it, but I don’t cheat. It’s kind of a grey area as to whether the former counts as cheating or simple ingenuity. But since there’s a built-in, non-cheat way to get the holiday switcher I’m going that route instead)
