Orteil's quirky webtoy Cookie Clicker has recently gotten an upgrade, going from a simple but cute diversion to a... well, still simple and cute diversion, but with a shinier interface and some upgrades and achievements. Or is it?!... well, yes, mostly, but with a few twists that make playing now less of a grind and more engrossing. You still begin with a single cookie you click on to generate more, and as your cookies build up, you can spend them on things to make more cookies for you, or on upgrades to produce those cookies even faster. This time around, you can even sell facilities back.
If you played the original Cookie Clicker featured in a recent Link Dump Friday, the most immediate difference is going to be both the significant visual and user interface overhaul, as well as the fact that the game now runs smoothly in its own tab. To be honest, it looks great and now feels like a much more fully fleshed project that compels you to spend time with it in a way that the bare-bones original just didn't. It's weird, silly, and the vague yet freaky storyline that emerges through the sparse text as your cookies pile up and your success grows is a clever touch. On the other hand, it's still not quite as involving on a gameplay level compared to similar, yet more elaborate games like A Dark Room or Candy Box!, which does sort of relegate it to something you glance at from time to time rather than something you have a lot to do with as a player. The text, unfortunately, rarely has any actual impact on the game itself, making it pointless beyond a laugh... even if the game informs you that your cookie factory workers go on strike over wages, for instance, your factories still generate cookies in exactly the same way.
That isn't, incidentally, a strike against it, just an acknowledgement that Cookie Clicker isn't the same beast as its inspiration, and shouldn't be expected to be. It has a few surprises in store, an a ton of personality that, combined with a sly sense of humour and a unique style, make it a definite charmer. It progresses much faster than it did before, and is well worth keeping a tab open for if you're a fan of surreal, dark humour, and have always suspected your cookies would bring all the people to the yard.
Thanks to Sara and Alex for sending this one in!
So stupid, yet fun to play...
I'm getting a 503 error when trying to load the game...is it possible the JiG audience broke their servers?
I think we did! Or at least a combined effort caused the excessive load on their site. I'm receiving a 502 error myself.
Edit: Page is back up now! :)
Bummer! Sorry guys, you might have to keep trying. It definitely looks like the server is suffering too heavy a load right now.
It's not just JIG that's causing the server load. Supposedly this game's popularity has exploded over tumblr in the short time it's been out. Kind of scary, almost like life imitating art or something. :)
What's with the
kitty and milk upgrades? The more milk you have, the more CpS.... How can you tell how much milk you have? or is that what the upgrade buys?
Great game, mindless fun, and it gives the clicker such a feeling of cookie power!
silent george, you get milk by completing achievements. The milk level is given in the achievements sub-pane of the stats pane.
Interesting how these 'games' that require minimum interaction can be so compelling. Right now I'm making 6 million cookies per second. There's a sense of achievement even if you don't put any effort into it.
Awesome game. Once again, the most enjoyable part for me is running an Excel spreadsheet to determine the most efficient purchase, in terms of cookies per second per cookie spent. Of course, I had to save my calculations as "the cookie sheet."
@Mantus: No way! That's exactly what I'm doing as well!
By the way, some (incomplete) stats for those who are interested, since the cookies per second of each building isn't given until at least one is bought:
cps: cookies (produced) per second. Basically income rate.
Multiplier: how much a building's cps is multiplied by, usually applies after any +# cps bonuses. The game upgrades them by doubling each time, so one upgrade = 2x, 2 upgrades = 2x2 = 4x, and so on.
Cursor: base cps 0.1, can be upgraded for +0.1 cps, 2^2 multiplier, and an additional (after multiplier) bonus of +0.1, +0.5 and +2 cps for each non-cursor building.
Grandma: base CPS 0.5, can be upgraded for +0.3 cps, 2^9 multiplier (possibly higher - 2^9 = 512x !).
Farm: base CPS 2, can be upgraded for +0.5 cps, 2^3 multiplier.
Factory: base CPS 10, can be upgraded for +4 cps, 2^3 multiplier.
Mine: base CPS 40, can be upgraded for +10 cps, 2^3 multiplier.
Shipment: base CPS 100, can be upgraded for +30 cps, 2^2 multiplier.
Alchemy Lab: base CPS 400, can be upgraded for +100cps, 2^2 multiplier.
Portal: base CPS 6666, can be upgraded for +1666 cps, 2^2 multiplier.
Time machine: base CPS 98765, can be upgraded for +9876 cps, 2x multiplier (most likely more).
Have fun making cookies!
This was cute and fun, but lacked the variety and mystery of Candy Box. You never really were challenged to think about what you were doing - no matter how efficient your purchases it ultimately boils down to waiting for cookies to accumulate.
I like how the news ticker at the top has a darkly suggestive bent to it, playing the game out as your cookie baking is far more problematic than joyful.
I also like that the developer has tried to inject some surprise and mystery with some of the late-game upgrades. The upgrades, though, all just boil down to altering your Cps in minor ways. There are some very late game upgrades that require you to maintain cookie levels so you can avert self-inflicted disaster, but by then the game has already dulled from a few days of play. There's nothing that adds any strategy or puzzle solving to the game, like how Candy Box had you crafting potions or engaging in combat.
A fun distraction for a day or three if you leave it running in another tab while you do something else, but it just didn't capture the wacky variety of Candy Box. I didn't find myself captivated by seeing what would happen when I met the next milestone. Hopefully the developer takes his newfound fame and uses it to experiment wildly as he continues to develop the game.
4chan represent! (It's where the game started out)
Pretty sure I heard about it on /b/, but it looked different back then. And I got multiple time machines, all of which are gone now.
My favorite thing about this game is the news ticker, and the shout-out/references in all the achievements and upgrades. "Pierce the heavens, etc"
Nevermind, it's the "Cookie Clicker Classic" seen up-right.
Favorite news item so far went something like: "Cookie manufacturer abandons common sense, builds based on OCD"
Ouch, Cookie Clicker. Right in the truth.
I like the game, but the prices get far too ridiculous compared to the benefits received. Eventually you're paying billions of cookies for a pittance of cookies per second.
Agreeing with @Tenzhi:
It's really fun in the beginning, but once you get up to around 10,000,000 cookies a second, the diminishing returns make it a chore: Right now, the most efficient purchase for me is a time machine. It's around 3,000,000,000 and will improve my production by a whopping 2%. It's really not worth it anymore.
According to the wiki (yes, there's a wiki) getting 100 time machines will take 150 days, and getting 150 will take 300 years.
There are some wild things that will happen:
Grandmapocalypse
but I really don't have the patience anymore to care.
Yeah, it was a fun toy but I think I'm closing that tab now as well. A time scale of months is too much.
For the record, I got this far:
369,253,658.3 CpS
91% of upgrades
92% of achivements
284% of milk
58 time machines
Lol wtf Diego I've had this running for about 2 days now and only have 36 million cps.
Done finally. I used javascript code to abuse frenzy and speed up my rate. Still took a long time since I waited for my gold cookies, and both the bingo center and elder pledge have long cooldowns to get all the upgrades.
928,647,617.5 was my final CpS (660.4%). This is with 200 cursors and grandmas. 100 of everything else.
All achievements unlocked, all upgrades purchased.
Elder covenant is activated as the golden cookies are far better than the red cookies and imo more than make up for the -5% it gives.
If I were to give a rough estimate, this would have taken several weeks as most of the top updates required close to 100 trillion
v1.034
Upgrades unlocked
Unlocked 86/86 (100%)
Achievements
Unlocked: 77/77 (100%)
Milk: 308% (rasperry milk)
Cookies per second : 1,015,848,677.1 (multiplier : 695.2%)
...I'm a bit dissapointed in the other JiG guys.
?
Did you cheat at all? Because I'm guessing you did.
I also took a break in my main build and tried to speedrun this game/webtoy. My criteria was to start with a complete wipe/hard reset and try to buy 1 time machine as soon as possible.
I got bad RNG with gold cookies but still managed 51 minutes to the 1st time machine, the gold cookie RNG dictates a run like this.
I don't know if Mike's comment was directed at me or another person.
...but no I didn't cheat, however I did use a spreadsheet to plot the best choice for each upgrade/building.
The correct choices are more important than any coding hack or cheat.
One way to get cookies (relatively) quickly at high levels is to hold off on upgrades and use the pop-up cookies. Spoiler follows:
The golden cookies will occasionally give you a flat pay-out that increases the more cookies you have�e.g., right now I have 12 trillion (12,000,000,000,000) cookies and the golden cookie payout is about 144 billion (144,000,000,000). But once you start down the road of the evil-magic upgrades, the ones that start with the bingo center and feature red-outlined ingredients, you start getting red cookies. Some of these give bad outcomes, like lost cookies, and some give you bonuses. One red-cookie bonus is especially good:
Sometimes the red cookie will give you a cookie chain: you click it and it gives you six cookies, and then a few seconds later another red or golden cookie appears that gives you 66 cookies, and another one appears that gives you 666 cookies, then another appears that yields 6,666 cookies, etc. It maxes out at the same order of magnitude as your current level of cookies, meaning that if you have 2,000 cookies it maxes out at 6,666 cookies, but if you have 357,000,000 cookies, the last cookie to appear will give you 666,666,666 cookies. If you hit high numbers of cookies, this adds up much faster than just hitting upgrades and letting the cookies accumulate.
You do have to keep an eye on the window for this to work. What I did was narrow the window as much as I could, so that I had a tall, narrow window. This way I could keep an eye on it as a kind of side-bar while I had other windows open.
Followup to my spoiler:
It seems to top off at 6,666,666,666,666 cookies�6.66 trillion cookies�unless I missed a cookie. Boo. Well, 6.66 trillion free cookies is still a lot of cookies. It does dash my idle dreams of accumulating a quadrillion cookies without a huge wait, though.
A friend and I have been continuing to play with Cookie Clicker ever since it was mentioned in Link Dump Friday a month ago. The creator continues to tweak it and add to it, altering the balance. One recent feature is a special bonus for resetting the game:
Resetting a game after producing very large amounts of cookies will give you "prestige" ("heavenly chips") which will boost your production rate in the next go-round, depending on how many cookies you had produced before the reset. This, together with the milk generated from achievements, makes subsequent runs go a lot faster.
There's a key to amassing cookies quickly in the late game, when your production rate is high but your goals are often astronomical:
The key is to use golden cookies together with your cookie bank.
The "Lucky" golden cookie immediately gives you either 20 minutes of production or 10% of your current cookie bank, whichever is smaller. So if you have a lot of cookies banked, you'll get more from golden cookies, up to the 20-minutes-worth maximum. But things can get even better.
Two of the golden-cookie upgrades each double the frequency of golden cookies, and the third doubles the duration of the effects for golden cookies which temporarily change your production rate. This leads to an potential opportunity.
With all these upgrades purchased, you can sometimes get a Lucky golden cookie while a "Frenzy" golden cookie (x7 production) is still active. In this case you will get 20 minutes worth of production *at the Frenzy rate*, or 140 minutes of normal production, if your bank is big enough. And because of the way golden cookies are generated, such an overlap is fairly common, as long as you keep a sharp eye out for new golden cookies while a Frenzy cookie is active.
Although much rarer, it's also possible for a Click Frenzy cookie to overlap a Frenzy cookie in the same way. In this case, you get a Click Frenzy which is 7 times stronger than normal. If your cookies-per-click is really high, this can give you a huge windfall, probably the biggest in the game.
golden cookiiiiiie!
If I keep this up, I'm going to give myself a repetitive motion injury. Curse you, cookies!! ( >[]
Malone.audrey please be very careful with those things! Health first. :)
note to other players--downsizing is pretty much always a bad idea. I lost so much revenue thinking I was selling back buildings the same as what I had paid for them
Could someone please explain the whole "Grandmapocalypse" 'event'?? And yes, event is in single quotes.
How do you get golden cookies? I don't see them anywhere. thanks.
Nice pixelated graphics, looks zoomed to 75%. Game is surprisingly well implemented for such a straightforward idea. Not a quick click-thru as it first appears, but very long and satisfying. For "a game about Grandmas and antimatter condensers," it is strangely entertaining.
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