Cookie Clicker is a game about clicking a cookie.
It’s simple at first, but gets increasingly complex.
The late game meta has elaborate strategies to maximise cookie production, to unlock all
the upgrades and achievements, and to uncover the deep lore of the grandmapocalypse, the
krumblor dragon, and the mysteries of the cookie universe.
In the beginning, you click the cookie – which gets you one cookie.
You click again, you’ve got two.
Then three.
With fifteen cookies, you can buy a cursor that clicks for you, making cookies automatically.
Ten cursors make one cookie per second, or one CpS.
So you make more cookies, to buy more cursors, to make more cookies – then for a hundred
cookies, you buy your first grandma.
This kindly old woman performs unpaid labour to grow your cookie business – your cookies
become popular in the neighbourhood , then renowned all over town . 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 the rivers , there’s
an obesity epidemic . But the world is too hooked on cookies to stop – economists say
that “"cookies permeate the economy", and "If we start eating anything else, we're all
dead" ”. Cookie banks start using cookies as currency . At temples, thousands pray to
the Baker in the sky . There is no value, no ideology, and no meaning beyond cookies.
You produce hundreds of thousands of cookies a second, straining the fabric of reality
itself . You build wizard towers and alchemy labs to summon cookies magically, you fly
in shipments from space of cookies from alien worlds.
You open portals to a parallel dimension, taking in millions of cookies per second.
Alien beings and cosmic elder gods come to taste your cookies , and whole cities are
engulfed in transdimensional disaster , but the system can’t stop, it can only grow,
cookies are all we know.
A local “confused idiot” says “you gotta admit, all this cookie stuff is a bit ominous”
. Time machines bring cookies from the past, corrupting history with abominations of dough
. 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 trillions of cookies a second.
The foundations of the cosmos crack under the mass of the cookie economy.
Everything is transformed, either into cookies or into the means to create cookies – “The
universe [becomes] cookie dough, [down] to the molecular level” , an infinite “sentient”
terrifying cookie gestalt . The only escape from the cosmic cookie machine is death – – yet
not even that can save you.
When you’re ready, you ascend – you leave the mortal world for a higher plane of cookie
existence, where you can buy special Heavenly Upgrades.
Then you are reborn in a new game, with zero cookies, to start it all again.
But you keep certain upgrades and bonuses, so you can quickly reach and surpass where
you were before.
Birth, death and rebirth are an endless inescapable cycle of cookie samsara.
And the mechanics get more complex.
Cookie Clicker is an idle game.
You’re not meant to sit there clicking the cookie – you’re meant to leave it on in
the background while it makes cookies for you, and occasionally come back to spend cookies
on upgrades.
In the early game, this passive playstyle is efficient.
Upgrades like the Golden Lock and the Shimmering Veil optimise for idle cps.
But in the late game, the best way to progress is with an active playstyle.
Cause every five minutes or so, a Golden Cookie spawns – if you click it in time, you get
a random temporary bonus like a Cookie Frenzy, which increases your cookie production by
seven times for one minute.
The best effect is the Building Special, which temporarily multiplies your rate of production
based on how many buildings you have – so if you have hundreds of buildings, that can
multiply your cps by thousands of times over.
And if you can stack multiple multipliers together, you can increase production by millions
of times over.
You can spawn more Golden Cookies with the Grimoire – the minigame unlocked at the
Wizard Tower.
One of the Grimoire spells, called Force The Hand of Fate summons a Golden Cookie.
So by manipulating the Mana pool by strategically selling Towers, and by spending Sugar Lumps
to replenish Mana, you can cast the Hand of Fate spell several times in a row, reliably
generating three or four golden cookies at once.
If you’re lucky, and those cookies grant multiple Building Specials, you can generate
CpS multipliers of millions of times regular production, making weeks worth 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 a complex cookie
evolutionary trees to unlock new seeds with new effects – like thumbcorn buffs clicking,
and cheapcap reduces prices, but the good shit is bakeberries.
When harvested bakeberries, give you 30 minutes worth of cookie production instantly.
So, if you harvest them while you’ve got a huge CpS multiplier from Golden Cookies,
you can make months worth of cookies instantly.
You can fill the garden with bakeberries, freeze them at maturity, and keep spawning
Golden Cookies til you get a huge multiplier, then harvest all the bakeberries at once,
for massive profit.
Alternatively, you can go for the Click Frenzy Golden Cookie effect, which synergises with
the Godzamok Pantheon idol.
Once you’ve got Krumblor the Cookie Dragon, you can do some pretty wild shit with the
Dragon’s Fortune and Dragonflight Auras, though for passive play the Breath of Milk
aura is usually ideal for the buff to kittens.
Of course, the seasonal events like Christmas are also essential, so you can upgrade Santa
from an elf fetus to a Bulky elf to Elder Santa and then to Final Claus, who grants
dominion of his realm, and a cheeky 20% cps bonus.
So the late game involves a variety of strategies to min-max for optimal cookie production.
But the cookies are not without cost.
As production increases, the grandmas grow discontent.
“You make me sick” grandma says.
“You could have stopped it”, grandma says.
After the Bingo Center upgrade, and the One Mind tech tree, the Grandmapocalypse begins.
[Nanageddon music].
The indentured labour force at the bottom of the pyramid rebels, a hive mind of mutant
grandmas rise , and transform the globe into an eldritch horror-scape of cookie-based monstrosity.
Wrinkled "flesh tendrils" are visible from space , writhing masses of dough engulf whole
cities , spreading like an infectious virus.
The only way to end the Grandmapocalypse is with an Elder Covenant – you can sacrifice
some economic gain to save everyone.
But it can actually be more efficient to continue the disaster, and send everyone back to work
anyway.
Because the Grandmapocalypse spawns Wrinklers.
Wrinklers leech 5% of CpS, but when you pop them, they give back more than they took.
So you can increase economic production by risking the lives of the elderly.
Disaster is actually an opportunity to exploit the vulnerable to make more wealth.
Ultimately, the cookie economy is not designed to help people, it just makes cookies – like
a virus or a tumour, 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 its altar.
And for what?
What's the point of a massive global economy if it fails to protect the elderly and the
vulnerable?
Even those with the most cookies don’t really benefit from the system – past a certain
level of wealth, you can never spend that many cookies.
And it’s not like the game ever ends.
You cannot win.
You just keep making cookies until you stop or you die.
You’re just hoarding cookies for its own sake.
It’s not really about the cookies – it’s about accumulation, getting more.
You could be collecting any meaningless number – points, subscribers, small green pieces
of paper – past a certain point, you’re just making a number go up.
It’s not even a real number, cause 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], their value is imaginary.
And yet the lives and health of our grandmas are being risked to increase this imaginary
number.
The problem is that a system designed to make cookies is not designed to make wellbeing,
justice and happiness.
Any system of endless growth, of singular purpose, that warps the whole world around
one goal – can only grow until it self-destructs.
The only way we can escape such a game… is to stop playing.
Thanks for watching this video about Cookie Clicker.
You can play the game at the link below.
The game is made by Orteil and Opti – consider supporting them on Patreon.
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Thanks to Patrons Jader Fontoura de Moraes, Jamie Starr, Lisa Penelton, and LeglessLegolas.
Cheers.