With a 42 day legacy behind me, I have, in my own way, managed 100% of Cookie Clicker achievements. Well, 99%. The last one is to click 7,777 Golden Cookies—that's not fucking happening any time soon. I have about 1,300 Golden Cookie clicks. Since I don't expect this to be the end of this save (I'll get to that later), good enough.

The progress towards 700 of everything

At the moment, the achievements for buildings top out at owning 700 of them. This takes you into the duovigintillions, which is patently absurd and also impossible in casual play. The octodecillions are the highest you can get in the normal gameplay flow, to the point where "cookie clicker octodecillions wall" is one of Google's autocomplete queries. (If you don't know how to think of the big numbers, consider a million as one, a billion as two, a trillion as three, and so on. Duovigintillions are 22, and octodecillions are 18.)

After this point, Heavenly Chips stop mattering, and the rapid gains you saw in the early-mid game where you could double your output between ascensions stops happening. Caby pithily considered this the point where you have too many cookies.

Problem being, this isn't nearly enough to complete the building achievements. The intended way to climb higher is to now rely on stacking buffs (Frenzy, Click Frenzy, Elder Frenzy, building specials where one of your buildings will boost your CpS based on how many you own, etc.) from Golden Cookies and minigames, especially Krumblor's Dragonharvest. This will massively catapult your production temporarily into the novemdecillions and beyond depending on the buffs stacked, but here's the issue with it:

1. For one, Golden Cookies are already a chance thing. You can spawn them in through Force the Hand of Fate and increase their chances of spawning with upgrades and the garden, but when they show up and which buff you get from them is up to pure chance (sort of). Most often, it will be a "Lucky!", which awards you some amount of your cookies per second at once. Not useful to us.
2. You're in the Grandmapocalypse during this, and you kinda need to be, because the most important buff to stack is the Elder Frenzy, at a x666 multiplier for about 15 seconds. Grandmapocalypse stage three makes Wrath Cookies, the dangerous equivalent to Golden Cookies, incredibly common, and they are just as likely to give you a "Ruin!" (takes away some amount of your CpS) or a negative building special, where the amount of one of your buildings will "rust" your CpS instead. The chance of an Elder Frenzy is exceedingly low.
3. We're not just talking the Frenzy + Click Frenzy buff stacking of the early game. You really need Frenzy, Elder Frenzy, Dragonharvest, and either two building specials or a building special and Click Frenzy to make headway. This means you're not only already giving up one of Krumblor's more useful passive auras for the chance to get Dragonharvest, but you somehow need to get all of the above, each by no means guaranteed out of a Golden Cookie a single time, but all at once, with them being time limited.

There are setups people have come up with to vaguely make buff stacking consistent, or at least unlikely as opposed to near-impossible, but what's funny about these is they quite often rely on external tools or edge case game behavior. Cookie Clicker runs in a Web browser, so at any moment, you can reload the page to undo the thing that just happened. There's tools you can paste your exported game save into to tell you what the next, say, 100 Force the Hand of Fate Golden Cookie outcomes will be, due to the "seeded randomness" of the grimoire. There's scrying, which casts Gambler's Fever Dream to determine the next outcome of a particular spell, usually Force the Hand of Fate, and while it doesn't rely on external tools, it does rely on ascension scumming until you get the outcome you want, or having deep knowledge of how the game picks spells, sugar lump types, and shiny Wrinklers.

In other words, this is all already a little dicey as to the "legitimacy" of doing it. More so, Cookie Clicker's entire aesthetic at this point is over-the-top silly cosmic horror. You've already bent other centuries, dimensions, and light itself to your will. You already have enslaved a horde of grandmas who have melted into a pile of irradiated haggis and nibble on your baked goods. One of the last buildings is a literal JavaScript console, and the very last building are clones of yourself, shaped in your image and being read bedtime stories by you.

Cookie Clicker has debug tools. Why would this not be the logical next step for game progression? Really consider it in the lore of the game. Why wouldn't your baker go for the debug tools if it meant even more cookies? You mean to tell me there's grandmas that can generate cookies with their mind, but being able to spawn a Golden Cookie on command is cheating?

To me, this is just the canon next step in Cookie Clicker.

Introducing the debug tools

You can open the debug menu most simply by suffixing "saysopensesame" to your bakery name. This lets you spawn specific Golden Cookies at your whim, multiply or divide your cookie bank or sugar lumps, disable or enable upgrades at will, turbocharge garden and sugar lump development, spawn Reindeer really fast, spawn Wrinklers really fast, and the all-important "Ruin the Fun", a button that instantly nukes your save, giving you all of everything.

By this point, I had been mostly leaving the game idle, popping my Wrinklers once a day, all that good shit. Whenever I was bored and wanted a boost, I'd just start spawning and stacking buffs, almost like I was tinkering with reality itself. Indeed, this was the only thing that got the numbers pumping again. I tried to stack even more. It did get a little funny and save-scummy because you can't use the debug tools to only spawn positive building specials, so if I accidentally got a negative one, I'd have to reload the page.

I also used the debug tools to spawn Reindeer really fast. Normally, at fastest, these guys show up every two minutes, and given there's an achievement to pop 200 Reindeer, you tell me just how much time I would have to spend staring at the game to get them. (About seven hours, assuming you don't miss any.) Just getting Reindeer! No thanks, the actual mechanical thing of the achievement is just to click on 200 of them, which I did do, just with the debug thing spawning them really fast.

Once you've gotten to the duovigintillions, you're not far from finishing off the cookie upgrade path, and you're also really not making a ton of progress even with buff stacking. (I sincerely hope there aren't upgrades in the future that cost trevigintillions of cookies or higher.) This is kind of it for Cookie Clicker—or is it?

The road to level 10 everything

Sugar lumps are the worst mechanic in the game. These effectively lock your progress to a once-a-day number going up and really force the "idle" in "idle" game. You've gotten 95% of the achievements? Fuck you, wait two years to get the last five percent. This is less down to lumps themselves and more to the upgrade path of buildings—you need that amount of sugar lumps to get to the next level with a building. Level 1 takes one lump. Level 10 takes ten lumps. You can imagine waiting eight days to upgrade a building and then nine to upgrade it again really isn't my jam.

There are ways to get sugar lumps without just waiting for them to coalesce (one that's actually quite fair and I would've been happy to do if I knew about it), but I invented my own path towards upgrading all my buildings: buying them. I decided that ten vigintillion cookies would equal a sugar lump, and every level 10 building past that would bump the cost by another ten vigintillion. (If Orteil did program something like this in, he'd probably have a nice gradual price ramp or even just doubling the price per building. I should've done that, and did for the last few buildings, but even still, nothing ever put a dent in my bank.)

So, I go in the JavaScript console (in my browser, not in the game), give myself 55 sugar lumps, subtract the proper number of cookies (requiring a "big number calculator" on Google because Windows' calculator physically cannot handle numbers this big), and upgrade a building. Again, knowing what I know now, I think planting juicy queenbeets (back to that in a moment) would've felt less hollow to me than making up my own thing, but I didn't know about them when I did these achievements and I can't be assed to remove them from my save to try again. It's fucking Cookie Clicker, it's fine.

Buying the jalapeno dip

There's two things left to do after your buildings are all turbocharged! Currently, there's four minigames in the game, the garden attached to Farms, the stock market attached to Banks, the grimoire attached to Wizard Towers, and the pantheon attached to Temples, but only the first two really count as "games" per se. I finished the stock market achievements first, so we'll start there.

The stock market in Cookie Clicker is a gigantic mess, just like the real one. Butter, cereal grains, chocolate, white chocolate, recipes, and You are all on the stock market, going nuts (which are also on the stock market). Buy, sell, make a profit.

Every minute, a new stock market tick happens, and stuff rises or falls. Internally, stocks actually have states (slow ascent, slow decline, fast ascent, fast decline, unstable, stagnant) that last a certain number of ticks, and that's what controls their trajectory. Thus, what you're really watching for isn't the highs and lows, but changes in behavior to let you know where a stock will be soon and if it's time to buy it or sell it. (There's really no reason to buy and sell anything other than the max amount of a stock at once, which there's handy buttons in the GUI for.)

Stocks do bottom out quite often, the lowest being at a dollar, and anything under $10 a share is usually when I bought in. Sometimes, I'd go higher than that, but anything other than $40 a share, I didn't bother. This probably bit me in the ass going for the $10 million in profit achievement, since it felt like the stocks that soared over $200 a share never really dipped below $50 a share, so occasionally I'd buy them too, but mostly, it was slow gradual progress towards that $10 million mark. (Imagine if the achievement were still $31 million in profit!)

This is the least fun part of Cookie Clicker to me. I think if I were still in that honeymoon period where I was glued to it all day, I would've been a lot more into it, but as with the real stock market, it's pure luck where any particular stock goes and a lot of waiting and hoping for rebounds. I had many, many cases of buying in on sugar at $8 a share only to watch it hover around $1-3 a share for several hours in real time. (The stock market also requires level 12 cursors for the top office achievement, so you can add another 23 days of waiting to the sugar lump thing to finish upgrading your cursors on top of it, or two and change if you're filling your garden with juicy queenbeets and harvesting them.)

Hippie dippie bullshit

That brings us to the last thing I did in Cookie Clicker, the garden. The gist is that there's 34 plants that each have some effect on game mechanics, CpS, Golden Cookie frequency and duration, the longevity of other plants, and so on, and you're trying to crossbreed them to unlock the rest and complete your seed catalog. You can then sacrifice your seed catalog and start over in exchange for ten sugar lumps. Each tick in the garden is affected by your chosen soil—fertilizer massively shrinks how long each tick is, but saps plant efficiency and supercharges weed growth, while wood chips saps efficiency in exchange for a higher chance of mutations. (And you can spend a sugar lump to get a tick with three times the chance of mutations. Pair with repeatedly refreshing the page for maximum gains.)

The garden is quite fun, kind of the ideal medium between gradual, time-fixed progress and what you feel you can actually affect. I used a guide for what the most ideal path for mutations was, though I had no luck with the "ideal" garden plot arrangements and just planted whatever I was trying to crossbreed in columns. As the minigame goes on, you encounter plants that don't die and plants that take longer and longer to gestate, topping out at the juicy queenbeet, which requires two days in real time to mature.

Here's what I don't get, and what kinda annoys me about the guides I've read. I've already bemoaned the slow death march of the sugar lumps, but a juicy queenbeet will, in exchange for denting your CpS for two days, give you a sugar lump if harvested when mature. They say that sacrificing your seed catalog is a really fast way to gather lumps, but that's bullshit, because, at fastest, with all that effort and all the setups, you're looking at roughly four days to get eleven lumps. If you fill the largest (6x6) garden plot with juicy queenbeets, you're looking at 36 sugar lumps in two days and change. Is your CpS going to be miserable with that many juicy queenbeets? Sure, but by this point, I wasn't even popping Wrinklers. There was dick shit I could spend cookies on by the time I got here.

Like I said, I wouldn't have had to make up my own mechanic for sugar lumps if I knew about this, but it is what it is. I surrounded my single juicy queenbeet with elderwort, one to minimize the chance of weeds fucking with it, but also to cut off a few hours of maturation time (as elderwort speeds up the growth of plants in a 3x3 square around it, and this effect does stack with other elderwort). Harvested it around 2PM yesterday, marking the end of my current Cookie Clicker journey.

What's next, and what I've realized about cheating in games

This save isn't going away. Whenever Orteil brings out the next update with another minigame or whatever, we'll dive back in.

I've always prided myself on playing games legit, as if I were playing them on the original console exactly as intended, and I still prefer that. I used to never use save states (if I'm doing a hardcore RetroAchievements set, I still can't). Keep in mind, I'm also an autistic guy who grew up in the world of neckbeards and Redditors, watching grownass men on the Internet argue about dumb shit from like age 8 onwards. It's always been about doing it Right, because if you're not doing it right, you're doing it Wrong, and being Wrong on the Internet is Bad.

As I've grown older and beaten more games and stopped desiring fights with randos and stopped placing my self-worth on doing random, ultimately insignificant things, be it making a lot of big impressive things for a few people on the Internet or just being good at games, the notion of a "right" way to enjoy any kind of media seems more and more arbitrary. Of course if you just spawn in all the guns and murder everything in the starting point in a game, you ruin all the tension. That's no fun.

But then you get stuff like Tempest X3, which I've owned for forever and finally beat in Wales over this past summer. This game is great fun for the first hundred levels, if pretty fucking brutal by then. The port also adds on an extra thirty levels that just take the piss in difficulty. Rather than aggravate myself, I just started save state scumming every level. The way I saw it, I was here to see all of the content the game had to offer. It wasn't some challenge run I took on—I just wanted to see it to the end. That's what I did, "legitimacy" of my own personal run of the game be damned.

I know this sounds obvious as hell, but there really are people that think cheating in a game is just always bad, or need permission to use some cheat or exploit in a personal, non-ranked, competing-against-nobody run. Of course there's games I love for the challenge, and those tend to be the sets I master on RetroAchievements. I ground those out, got The Run, and it was exciting and I'm still hugely proud of them, silly as it is. It's fun! It got me to enjoy games I felt were passé again.

But cheating can do that too, and Cookie Clicker is the prime example of that. It's a game built around random odds and waiting. If you're cheating to get around the mechanical difficulty of a game, that's one thing, but the difficulty in Cookie Clicker is "you forgot to freeze your garden when you went to bed so your extremely rare golden clover plant got eaten by weeds" or "you have to come up with a setup to stack all these multiplication buffs on top of each other to squeeze out another minute of good cookie production". Is that what I'm here for? The one in a million chance I can keep playing?

No, what I'm here for is to see it through to the end. It being my own way is neither here nor there—games are for my entertainment, it's my game at the end of the day. Maybe some people would call into question the point of going for 100% achievements if you're not going to do those "properly", but again, it's all ridiculous, and I know it's ridiculous, but it's something I find curious to think about nonetheless. (For what it's worth, sugar lumps and progression aside, all the minigames, Hardcore/Neverclick, the ascension achievements, etc. were all done properly. I put the time and knowledge into those, again because I found it enjoyable to do those.)

What I will say about cheating is that you should always consider if doing it legit will be more enjoyable. Would I have gotten more enjoyment out of the game waiting for those 200 Reindeer? Not really, it's not that fun of a mechanic, it doesn't really take learning or have any sort of satisfying payoff. Getting good at, say, Pole Position for an RA set, yeah, that was fun. That took some doing, some practice, it enriched my Pole Position experience. There isn't much enriching about hoping you get that last Halloween cookie drop, so you just start refreshing the page over and over as you pop Wrinklers.

Legit or not, this game just ate up another month-and-a-half of my time and energy, and I enjoyed the ride and I missed it. Thank you Orteil for building it. Maybe now I can go do something productive with my time. Back to school today, journal peeps!

Tagged under: cookie clicker gaming