Cookie Clicker Explained

Cookie Clicker is a game about clicking a

cookie

. At first it is simple, but it becomes more and more complex. The late game meta has elaborate strategies to maximize

cookie

production, unlock all upgrades and achievements, and uncover the deep history of the great mappocalypse, the krumblor dragon, and the mysteries of the cookie universe. At first, you click on the cookie, which gives you a cookie. You click again, you have two. Then three. With fifteen cookies, you can buy a cursor that clicks for you, automatically generating cookies. Ten cursors generate one cookie per second, or one CpS.

So you make more cookies, you buy more cursors, you make more cookies, and then for a hundred cookies you buy your first grandmother. This kind old lady does unpaid work to grow her cookie business: her cookies become popular in the neighborhood and then recognized throughout the city. Production accelerates exponentially. You buy cookie farms to grow cookies, mines to extract cookies from the earth, factories to produce cookies on an industrial scale. The cookie economy transforms the world around it: chocolate pollutes rivers, there is an obesity epidemic. But the world is too addicted to cookies to stop: economists say that "cookies permeate the economy" and "if we start eating anything else, we're all dead." Cookie banks are starting to use cookies as currency.

In the temples, thousands of people pray to the baker in heaven. There is no value, ideology or meaning beyond cookies. You produce hundreds of thousands of cookies per second, straining the fabric of reality itself. You build wizard towers and alchemy laboratories to magically summon cookies, you fly in space shipments of cookies from alien worlds. You open portals to a parallel dimension, receiving millions of cookies per second. Alien beings and cosmic elder gods come to taste your cookies, and entire cities are engulfed in a transdimensional disaster, but the system can't stop, it can only grow, cookies are all we know.

A local "confused idiot" says "you have to admit this whole cookie thing is a little sinister." Time machines bring cookies from the past, corrupting history with dough abominations. You make cookies from antimatter, from light, from pure chance, you make cookies from other cookies, and cookies from beyond the fourth wall, you make billions of cookies per second. The foundations of the cosmos are cracking under the dough of the cookie economy. Everything is transformed, whether into cookies or the means to create cookies: “The cookie dough of the universe, at the molecular level,” an infinite, “sentient” and terrifying cookie gestalt.

The only escape from the cosmic cookie machine is death, but even that can't save you. When you're ready, you'll ascend: you'll leave the mortal world for a higher cookie plane of existence, where you can purchase special celestial upgrades. Then you are reborn in a new game, without cookies, to start all over again. But you retain certain upgrades and bonuses, so you can quickly catch up and surpass where you were before. Birth, death and rebirth are an endless, inescapable cycle of cookie samsara. And the mechanics become more complex. Cookie Clicker is an idle game. You don't have to sit there clicking the cookie; you should leave it on in the background while it creates cookies for you and occasionally return to spend cookies on updates.

In the early game, this passive style of play is efficient. Upgrades like Golden Lock and Shimmering Veil optimize idle cps. But in the late game, the best way to progress is with an active playstyle. Because every five minutes or so, a golden cookie appears; If you click on it in time, you get a random temporary bonus like Cookie Frenzy, which increases your cookie production seven times for one minute. The best effect is the Building Special, which temporarily multiplies your production rate based on how many buildings you have, so if you have hundreds of buildings, that can multiply your cps thousands of times.

And if you can stack multiple multipliers together, you can increase output millions of times. You can generate more golden cookies with the Grimoire, the minigame unlocked in Wizard Tower. One of the Grimoire's spells, called Strength, The Hand of Destiny, summons a Golden Cookie. So by manipulating the mana pool by strategically selling towers and spending sugar cubes to replenish mana, you can cast the Hand of Fate spell several times in a row, reliably generating three or four golden cookies at a time. If you're lucky and those cookies grant multiple build specials, you can generate CpS multipliers of millions of times regular output, generating weeks of cookies in minutes.

To make the most of these bonuses, you need certain plants from the Cookie Garden. The Garden grows cookie seeds into cookie plants, which can mutate along complex evolutionary cookie trees to unlock new seeds with new effects, like thumb clicking and lowering prices, but the good thing is the berries . When you harvest bread berries, you'll get 30 minutes of instant cookie production. So if you harvest them while you have a huge Golden Cookies CpS multiplier, you can produce months' worth of cookies instantly. You can fill the garden with berries, freeze them when they're ripe and keep generating Golden Cookies until you get a huge multiplier, then harvest all the berries at once, for massive wins.

Alternatively, you can opt for the Click Frenzy Golden Cookie effect, which synergizes with the Godzamok Pantheon idol. Once you have Krumblor the Cookie Dragon, you can do some pretty wild things with Dragon's Fortune and Dragonflight Auras, although for passive play the Breath of Milk aura is usually ideal for buffing kitties. Of course, seasonal events like Christmas are also essential, so you can upgrade Santa Claus from a fetus elf to a bulky elf, to elderly Santa Claus, and then to the final Claus, who grants dominion over his kingdom and a sassy 20% cps bonus. So the late game involves a variety of minimizing and maximizing strategies for optimal cookie production.

But cookies come at a cost. As production increases, grandmothers' discontent increases. “You make me sick,” says Grandma. “You could have stopped him,” Grandma says. After the Bingo Center and One Mind tech tree upgrade, the Grandmapocalypse begins. . The hired workforce at the base of the pyramid rebels, a hive mind of mutant grannies rises and transforms the world into a supernatural horror landscape of cookie-cutter monstrosity. Crumpled "tendrils of flesh" are visible from space, writhing masses of dough enveloping entire cities and spreading like an infectious virus. The only way to end the Great Apocalypse is with an Elder Pact: you can sacrifice some economic gains to save everyone.

But it may actually be more efficient to continue the mess and send everyone to work anyway. Because the Grandmapocalypse spawns Wrinklers. Wrinklers absorb 5% CpS, but when you pop them, they give back more than they took. Then economic production can be increased by risking the lives of older people. Disaster is actually an opportunity to exploit the vulnerable to generate more wealth. Ultimately, the cookie economy is not designed to help people, it simply produces cookies; like a virus or a tumor, its nature is to exploit everything around it for its own expansion. Grandmas, banks, temples, every part of life is perverted to serve the purpose of "the economy".

Nothing is too sacred to be sacrificed on his altar. And for what? What good is a massive global economy if it fails to protect the elderly and vulnerable? Even those with the most cookies don't really benefit from the system: beyond a certain level of wealth, you can never spend that many cookies. And it's not like the game will ever end. You can't win. You keep making cookies until you stop or you die. You're just hoarding cookies for the sake of it. In reality, it's not about cookies, but about accumulation, about getting more. You could be accumulating any meaningless number (points, subscribers, little green pieces of paper) and, past a certain point, you're just making a number go up.

It's not even a real number, because look, behind the scenes, you can cheat, you can literally type in a number and print two trillion cookies out of thin air [cookie printer goes brrr], its value is imaginary. And yet, the lives and health of our grandmothers are being risked to increase this imaginary number. The problem is that a system designed to make cookies is not designed to generate well-being, justice and happiness. Any system of endless growth, of singular purpose, that warps the entire world around one goal, can only grow until it self-destructs. The only way to escape that game... is to stop playing.

Thank you for watching this video about Cookie Clicker. You can play the game at the following link. The game is created by Orteil and Opti; consider supporting them on Patreon. Be sure to hit Like and Subscribe and the bell to help our numbers go up. Thanks to sponsors Jader Fontoura de Moraes, Jamie Starr, Lisa Penelton and LeglessLegolas. Health.