I’ve just landed in the Cookie Clicker Discord server and people are chatting about the best way to optimise the baking-based idle game to make as many sweet treats as possible.
“Consistency + DF is scryless.” “I love double gfd carryover + seed transfer at the same time.” “Fthof ready to cast at minimum magic with SI+RB, orbs spam around 30s before nat spawn with orbs + DH for hopefully F/DH/BS.”
I’m suddenly very glad that I’m not actually trying to “beat” Cookie Clicker, a game that was released in 2013 and that still has a community dedicated to spending thousands of hours trying to get all of its 637 Steam achievements.
Like many idle games, Cookie Clicker is exponential. As the name suggests, you start by clicking a cookie. That’ll net you your first achievement, and you’ll be on your way to the achievement for baking 1 trevigintillion cookies in one ascension. That’s 1 followed by 72 zeroes, and is close to the number of atoms in the entire universe.
This huge number is still only scratching the surface of the achievements. Aside from the cookies themselves, which often require both skill and luck-based combos to create in amounts big enough, there are minigames like breeding dozens of kinds of plants and successfully playing the stock market to contend with.
But before you can get to that, you will have to learn what ascension is. After a few hours in the game, you’ll probably have enough buildings and upgrades that you’re making millions of cookies per second. Leave that running for a while (or micromanage the hell out of it, depending on your preference) and you’ll reach a trillion total cookies, which will give you a prestige level. By ascending, you can reset your game and start from scratch with no cookies or buildings but cash in these levels for permanent upgrades.
It’s at this point you might wonder when the best time to ascend is. So maybe you Google it and find out the community recommendation is 365 levels of prestige. This, incidentally, is when the Cookie Clicker community considers the “early game” over. By the late game, it becomes essentially necessary to use external resources, like the “Force the Hand of Fate Planner,” which allows you to predict which cookies-per-second multiplying spells you’ll be casting out of a random seed.
The difficulty of some of the achievements, as well as the absurd number of them, are really an integral part of Cookie Clicker’s satirical escalation. Before too long, players will be absorbing entire universes to make cookies, all to get a little pop up with something like “I don’t know if you’ve noticed but all these icons are very slightly off-center” or “There’s really no hard limit to how long these achievement names can be and to be quite honest I’m rather curious to see how far we can go. Adolphus W. Green (1844–1917) started as the Principal of the Groton School in 1864. By 1865, he became second assistant librarian at the New York Mercantile Library; from 1867 to 1869, he was promoted to full librarian. From 1869 to 1873, he worked for Evarts, Southmayd & Choate, a law firm co-founded by William M. Evarts, Charles Ferdinand Southmayd and Joseph Hodges Choate. He was admitted to the New York State Bar Association in 1873. Anyway, how’s your day been?”
And yet, without any other kind of end state for the game and the only sense of accomplishment coming from endlessly doing more, many people decide that getting all of the achievements is a reasonable goal. This usually takes years of dedicated play. Thankfully, there’s a wiki, a subreddit, a Discord server, and an amorphous collection of Pastebin and Google Doc guides that will be there for you – if you can get your head around the lingo. (But great news: there’s a guide for that, too.)
One of the people who might end up helping out is Lookas, a player who got 100% of the Steam achievements within a year of that version’s release. “We knew it was theoretically possible,” he says. He and a friend, Fillex, were motivated by the fact that the Steam version has an achievement which unlocks a year after first starting, meaning it would be the “last achievement” if they could pull everything else off before that.
“The process for getting 1 year 100% is basically focused around sugar lumps,” says Lookas, basically proving how complicated Cookie Clicker is by bringing up a mechanic I haven’t even been able to mention yet. At their most optimised, sugar lumps are given out automatically at a rate of 1.3 per day, and you need (or needed, at the time Lookas was playing – it’s actually harder now) 1068 lumps to get all the achievements. That leaves nearly 600 to get manually, which requires more than 50 garden sacrifices, which take 5 days at their most optimised.
To be honest, I don’t know what a garden sacrifice is and at this point I have a headache. But it just goes to show how many different things Cookie Clicker 100% players have to get their head around. Limes5402, another Discord user who has pulled it off, admits that people often don’t follow through with big goals. “There are people that say they’ll grind for something like a 100% speedrun and then quit in a week,” he says.
But even so, Cookie Clicker’s most difficult achievements have up to a 5% accomplishment rate on Steam. By comparison, about 1 in 5 Baldur’s Gate 3 achievements have less than a 5% success rate. Some Cookie Clicker players do use what Lookas calls “lax rulesets” which allow for things like autoclickers, and some even edit their save files just to get the achievements to pop, but that also goes to show what putting a big number of arbitrary, difficult tasks in front of people with no other win condition will push them to do.
Grinding Cookie Clicker achievements has also become a video genre, spreading the idea to millions of viewers. When Dragoon, a creator with almost 900,000 subscribers, releases a video, “there’s three times more people joining for a week,” says Limes.
When people have pulled off every combo and trick and actually gotten all of the achievements, they’re often not done with Cookie Clicker. They stick around, still baking cookies, meaning there’s always someone to explain things to newcomers. (Those unfathomable quotes from the Discord earlier were from Lookas, although he’s debating high level play rather than explaining the basics.) It doesn’t make grinding a trevigintillion cookies any less extreme, but it’s ultimately the thing that makes it possible.
