I am ready to retire. I have reached my goal of getting 95% of both prestige upgrades and achievements in less than two years. My last prestige upgrade (sugar lumps ripen one hour sooner) cost 100 million chips and the next one would have been a billion; I’m leaving with about 800 million banked. The last two achievements, coming very close together, were for making an undecillion cookies in one ascension and having 350 Chancemakers. This is the proudest moment of my life.
After a year of playing, I haven’t gotten past lvl 155. I don’t know how to hack and I’d rather not. Can you players who have legitimately gotten to higher levels post screenshots of your perks?
Copy the gibberish which is in the spoiler box in my post above, open the game and go to the Options menu, choose “Import Save” and paste into the box which opens. You may first want to do an “Export Save” and copy that gibberish somewhere safe so you easily can get back to your own game.
OK, so it finally sucked me back in. This is my first time playing since sugar lumps and the wizard and temple mini-games, so I’m not quite sure how those work out. It looks like, for worship, there are some that are good for idling and some that are good for active play, and that you otherwise forget about them, right? And what exactly does Selebrak, spirit of festivals, boost for each season? If he increases deer frequency, that might actually be a hidden drawback: It seems like I’m having a harder time keeping cookies and deer synchronized.
For wizard spells, the really cheap random one (which costs 7 mana for me) says that it casts a random spell with double failure chance and half the mana cost. So, what happens if you click that when you only have enough mana for the random spell itself? Does the random spell work even though you don’t have the mana for it, or is it an automatic mis-cast, or does it just do nothing?
It looks like the optimal use for spells and sugar (after you’ve dropped a few lumps on upgrading your high-value buildings) is to wait until you get an elder frenzy, and then cast the spell that makes your other spells safer, and then spam Conjure Baked Goods, buying more mana as needed with Sugar Lumps, until you either run out of sugar, run out of time on the elder frenzy, or get the bad luck to miscast. And maybe you should occasionally toss in the cheap random spell, when you have the mana for it, depending on how that works. Is this accurate?
Well, it depends on what your goal is. If you’re trying to get as many acheivements as possible, you want to save your sugar lumps to upgrade buildings (you get an achievement for getting each one to level 10). Otherwise, yeah, hitting Conjure Baked Goods when you have a good buff going is the only spell it makes sense to regularly use, as far as I can see.
OK, on reading about it more elsewhere, it turns out that there’s a much more effective use for spellcasting, if you don’t mind savescumming. Apparently, the seed used to determine the result of a spell is stored in the savefile. So you can keep on saving and casting the Fickle Finger of Fate (I think that’s the one), until you get either an Elder Frenzy or a Click Frenzy, and then go back to your save: You now know that the next time you cast that spell, that’s what you’ll get. You then sit back and wait for the other one of those two to occur naturally, and then cast the spell, and presto, Elder Click Frenzy. And of course, you were planning on this whole thing, so you’re also worshiping Godzamok, and when the combo hits, you also sell off about a thousand of your unproductive buildings before going on your clicking spree. Absolutely nothing can compare with that combo… if you don’t consider it cheating.
Clearly, storing the seed in the save file is the wrong move. But then, not storing the seed would also lead to abuse: Then, whenever you cast a spell with a result you didn’t like, you could just refresh the page and try again until it worked. I think the proper solution would be to store the seed, but to make one component of the seed the system clock, rounded to the nearest half-hour or hour or so: That way, if you tried something, failed, and re-loaded, you’d have to wait a while before trying again, but you also couldn’t sit on a favorable result indefinitely waiting for the perfect time to use it.
So I found out the other day that Orteil has released a new game called Neverending Legacy, and it’s quite addicting too. Probably even more so than Cookie Clicker, at least once it gets fleshed out some more. http://orteil.dashnet.org/legacy/
So I did some more calculating, and I think the best spell is actually Spontaneous Edifice. Using that can eventually net you an average of 10^37 CPS, regardless of what your base CPS is, and until it reaches that point, the gains from it will grow truly exponentially. That’s significant, because even heavenly chips only grow your gains quadratically, in the long run. I estimate that, from where I am now, it’d take between 500 and 550 hours of semi-active play (that is, with the game window open and checking up on it occasionally, but without worrying about Golden Cookies), without resets, and without cheating, to reach that cap. I think that I might be able to speed that up a bit by resetting, but not by much.
As someone who started playing 5 months ago (and spent a month and a half playing heavily), I have no idea how anyone was able to maintain interest in this game prior to the minigames being implemented. As is I almost lost interest on numerous occasions. And I am one who withheld looking to what would happen once you attained all the upgrades and HC’s and was unpleasantly surprised by the lack of a payoff or anything interesting.
I really wanted to like that game. But it was hard to see the icons, and that “Alpha” logo constantly moving in my peripheral vision drove me back out in a matter of minutes. Too bad, it has potential to be far more interesting than most idle games.
It’s an idle game; we minimize it for weeks or months at a time, checking in now and then to realize gains and evaluate strategy. It’s also a mindless mouse exercise during boring conference calls. I don’t know anybody playing this like it’s an x-box.
I agree that the icons could be clearer, but on the other hand it doesn’t take long to learn them by heart. What I quite like about it is that the different start positions really make it a completely different experience. I had one random game start me in an ice desert and everybody starved to death after a few years.
In case anyone still cares, I now have 400 of every building, every prestige upgrade, and over nine billion Heavenly Chips in store the next time I ascend. All that I’m really missing now is sugar, since I re-started well after sugar lumps were implemented. As soon as I get to 10 billion HC I’ll close it down until the next update, because I’ve a hunch there might be some very expensive new prestige upgrades. Progress on cookie count is, at this point, based entirely on selling a Chancemaker (for 35 duodecillion cookies) and then sponetaneously edifying it back every 45 minutes, and that’ll remain the only relevant factor up until about a trillion HC (which isn’t going to happen, barring some new game-changer as big as spellcasting).
So, there’s a new update. A bunch of new achievements, a few new cookie flavors, a new kitten… and a farm minigame. What I know of it so far:
You have a grid of planting spaces. The size of the grid depends on the level you have for farms. You start with one kind of seed, baker’s wheat, but there are 33 others that can be unlocked. You can plant any kind of seed you have in any free grid space, or leave a space blank. The plants take a while to mature, after which they produce some benefit (baker’s wheat gives +1% CPS). A mature plant has a chance to reproduce, starting a new plant in a space adjacent to it. Usually, this plant will be the same kind as the parent, but it can be different, especially if there are multiple different plants next to the empty square. A mature plant eventually decays away, but if you harvest it before that happens, you have a chance to unlock that kind of seed, and can then plant it yourself. There are also different kinds of soil you can use in your garden, that give various bonuses and penalties.
So far, I’ve found baker’s wheat, thumbcorn (+2% to clicks), and cronerice (+3% to grandmas), and gotten the seed for thumbcorn. I haven’t gotten cronerice seed yet, because (unsurprisingly) it takes a very long time to mature. It’s also apparently possible to get weeds, but I haven’t seen any yet: I don’t know if they just waste space, or if they give penalties.
Basically, it seems to be a very slow and unreliable crafting system. Nothing looks really game-changing yet, but then, there are a lot of plants I haven’t found yet.
Update on this: There is indeed something really game-changing, but oddly, I haven’t found anyone else online talking about it. Cheapcap fungus (buildings and upgrades are 0.2% cheaper) enables the game to go truly exponential, and with a fairly fast timescale. Since making that post, I’ve gone from about 3.6 tredecillion to 24.6 tredecillion, and that’s even with taking some time to get the seeds, discover the strategy, and refine it.
The basic idea is buy cheap, sell dear. Get your field up to 6x6 (level 9 farms), and fill it with Cheapcaps. When they’re mature, switch your soil to clay, switch your diamond worship to Dotjeiss, switch your dragon aura to Fierce Hoarder, and cast Summon Crafty Pixies, then buy as many buildings as you can (just set it to buy 100 at a time; if it can’t afford 100, then it’ll buy as many as it can). After you’ve bought all you can, harvest all the cheapcaps, switch worship and aura back (one aura must be Earthshatterer), and wait for the Pixies to wear off (optionally, you can also re-cast Pixies repeatedly until you get a backfire). Then sell back all of the buildings you just bought: They’ll sell for about 18% more than what you paid for them, and since you paid your entire bankroll, you’ve just multiplied your bankroll by a factor of 1.18 .
The whole cycle takes two hours, limited by the worship-switching. You’ll end up sacrificing Chancemakers (or whatever your top building is) to switch your dragon aura, but that’s OK, because you can just sell all but two of those so they’re cheap. You don’t need CPS for this to work anyway (in fact, a high CPS is actually a drawback, because of the cost to plant the seeds).
In between cycles, you’ll also have nearly two hours to do other gardening, and you’ll both cast a lot of spells and harvest a lot of mature plants with this strategy, giving you progress towards both of those achievements.