Casual Clicking - A Beginner's Walkthrough [WIP]

Introduction

Hey there, thanks for clicking on this guide! If you're here, you probably want to optimise how you play Cookie Clicker in such a way that you don't want to end up making any compromising mistakes or horrible decisions! Don't worry, it happens to the best of us.

Okay then, I'm going to get straight to the point: I am by no means a certified expert and baking master, but I feel like my knowledge is adequate enough to serve the fledgling player who wants to know the basics and more about the game. Numbers are horrifying, and this game has a lot of numbers, and chances are, you are afraid of numbers too. This guide is going to have a casual tone, as you can actually, realistically, probably see at this very moment!

In the guide, I will have chapters that correspond to your current progress in the game. For example, for my Billion Cookies section, the information provided is by then pretty relevant for players with a billion total cookies baked onwards. I'd recommend reading the guide this way.

Why would I do this to you people? Well, I'm the kinda guy that believes, if you follow a walk-through to the tee, you will end up never being able to truly enjoy the game for yourself, playing how your brain wants to play instead of your heart. However, I'm not going to stop you from reading ahead if your thirst for knowledge is as insurmountable as I think it will be!

Oh, and lastly, I'll be releasing this guide as I write it, i.e. this is a Work in Progress, so it probably won't be complete the first time you read this. I'll be adding chapters as time goes on, and I feel like this is probably the best approach since, at the time of first releasing this, the game has been released on Steam literally less than 24 hours ago.

Well, go on then! Read the guide, click the cookie, and all that good stuff!

No Cookies

Now, I'm going to be real with you. Odds are, you are already way past 0 cookies. You have a million or even a billion cookies right now, and you waddled over to the guide section in curiosity, but also for anything that might help you.

Why would I even say this? Well, that's because going from 0 cookies to a thousand takes like, less than 5 minutes. BUT, just in case, I'll outline what the hell you are even staring at!

Observe:

Now, what do we notice at first?

Obviously, we notice that I am a complete fraud, and I'm using the browser version of the game and not the Steam version, as evidenced by the fact that the version number is completely different to the Steam edition!!!

Why is this? Why, it's because the Web edition is the superior choice for testing and double checking the facts as I include them here. Without fact-checking, we would have never made it past discovering fire as a species. Okay, maybe it's not that important, but still.

As of writing, the Steam version and the Web browser versions are completely identical in game play, so you can actually use this guide for the Web edition of the game if you really wanted to, which is neat.

I'm going to break down a similar image with 100 cookies baked, and elaborate on key parts of the game.

1: The Big Cookie. It is probably the first thing your eyes dart to when the game loads for the very first time, and is also the cookie you should be clicking as per the title of the game! Initially, every click to this cookie will give you 1 cookie, but these click gains can be upgraded as the game progresses.

2: Bank and CpS. The bank is representative of the current amount of cookies you hold and can spend at your leisurely pace, or keep unspent if you want to hoard your pile like a cookie dragon.Foreshadowing! CpS on the other hand, stands for Cookies per Second, and displays how many cookies you earn per second. Very intuitive!

3: Bakery Name. You can change the name of your bakery at any time. Right now it has a randomly generated name consisting of a random prefix and noun, but you can type whatever you want into that bar. In fact, doing so grants you an achievement.

4: Building displays. For now, it is only a visual element in the game, but as you will see later, it will play a key role in furthering your tyrannical progress as a malicious cookie manufacturer. It will display the buildings you currently own in an aesthetically pleasing way, with a new row being added for every new building type you purchase. In addition, this is the place where the Options, Stats and Info windows will display when you click on them.

5: Buildings. The name of the game is Cookie Clicker, yes, but it would get real boring, real quick if that was literally the only way to gain cookies. These suckers important assets in your career will bake cookies for you and increase your CpS. Neat! In addition, the more you buy, the more upgrades for them you will unlock, and the more achievements you will earn.

6: Upgrades. Your buildings are helpful, but they would be nothing without the help of upgrades to exponentially boost their power. As you play, more upgrades will be available to purchase, ranging from building and click improvements, to unlockable cookies that multiply your CpS by a small amount, to kitten helpers, to... okay, I think I've said enough. Upgrades are good. Buy them!

7: Milk. This is a visual indicator of the number of achievements you have unlocked in your cookie career. At first it will be a basic white colour and grow to fill the screen. Then, it will change colours as you gain even more achievements to your name! Very interesting. Once you reach the 10 million cookie mark, the achievements will serve an extremely important role that increases in... extreme importantness... as your cookies baked all time ascends to new heights. You'll see!

Inserting this image again to break apart the text and so you don't have to scroll the wheel as much. Don't get confused!

8: Version number. Actually not very important if you just want to play the funny cookie game. It shows you what version of the game you are currently playing, which comes in handy when you want to know the version of the game you are currently playing. As of writing, the Web edition is on v2.031, and the Steam edition is on v2.04.

9: News ticker. Displays interesting news on the state of your career, and the world around you. The news ticker is reserved ONLY for those who are DEEPLY invested into the Cookie Clicker LORE. So, everyone. Clicking it will force the news reporters to rapidly progress to the next headline. Godspeed!

10: Options.Comes in handy if the game is running too slow or taking up too many resources. You can disable and re-enable graphical elements in accordance to your PC build as you wish. Also, as of v2.04, there is music in Cookie Clicker after all these years! You can choose to increase/decrease the volume of sounds and music in here as well. Oh, and also, a Scary Stuff toggle. Let's leave that for when we reach a quadrillion cookies. Oh, and also a section to manage mods, but as of writing nobody knows how it works and we are all afraid.

11: Stats. The fun and handsome cousin of the Options menu, where you can see all the interesting facts about your cookie clicking adventure. Here, you can view general stats such as cookies baked all time (the metric for which sections of this guide are relevant to you!), cookies baked from clicking, among various other scary and incomprehensible numbers. Then, you will see your upgrades and achievements unlocked, which will no doubt fill up tremendously as you play. The opportunities are endless!

12: Legacy. The prestige system of the game. We should leave this one for later.

13: Info. Here you can view all the updates added to the game since the 2013 release, and some helpful social links to the Discord channel, and Orteil's Twitter and Tumblr pages. Oh, and also the wiki which is most likely way more helpful than this guide will ever be. Please don't go...! ;-;

That should be about it for the elements of the game. That was certainly a massive wall of text, but thankfully we have gone past this horrible stage of... reading.. too... many... words at once...!

Oh, and by the way, you may be wondering what the game will do when you close it. The answer is, it will do absolutely nothing, and your cookie count will be just how you left it when you pick the game up again. Ridiculous! But also reasonable, but also responsible for atmosphere pollution since the best play is to leave your PC running all day and all night for those sweet gains. Oops!

Now that you are armed with all this information violently crammed into your brain, you should now go and click that Big Cookie mentioned before. It doesn't bite... yet!

Buy those cursors, grandmas and corresponding upgrades, and get to 1,000,000 cookies! It seems like an impossible number, but it is really, really possible. Really.

Million Cookies

Hello again. If you're reading this you've probably reached the 1 million cookie mark by now, or you skimmed ahead out of curiosity. Congratulations!

This section has a lot to say, so buckle up! Especially about upgrades. Wow.

First up, a quick explanation on how useful exactly the Cursor and Grandma will be for you in the short and long term.

These sets of upgrades are important. Very important. But arguably, the Grandma upgrades are even better. Either way, they are very important.

The first cursor you buy will give you two unlockable upgrades, then the 10th, 25th, 50th and then every 50th cursor from there will give you an additional upgrade that boosts both Cursors and clicking power tremendously. Every non-cursor building you own will support the Cursors you have by a sizeable amount, as seen in the Thousand Fingers upgrade above. You can see how the effect can snowball as you progress, and that's not all; the continued upgrades you can unlock from buying Cursors increase how much every building boosts Cursors, and every time, these will provide substantial and visible boosts to your CpS. Always.

In addition, getting 15 of a building type will unlock an upgrade that can be purchased that will double Grandma CpS and also give a boost to the respective building you got the upgrade from. For example, in the above image, the upgrade for Factories will boost your factories by 1% additive for every 3 grandmas in your inventory, but this grandma requirement changes for each item. It's small for now, but if you are smart, you realise that in the late-game, you will have a lot of cookies to buy a lot of grandmas, and that these upgrades work together so that all your grandmas are boosting everything at once. Very supportive! Every team needs people who fulfil support roles, and this is evident everywhere in all societies you can find on Earth.

For every building, except for Cursors which do their own thing, you will unlock an upgrade to purchase when you buy a building for the first time, then every 5th, 15th, 25th and 50th purchase of a building will give you more upgrades, and from that point, every 50 additional purchases will unlock further upgrades! Oh, and buying lots of buildings will also get lots of achievements. But achievements are only cosmetic, right? They don't really do anything... right?

That's where the kitten upgrades come in:

Every Cookie Clicker adept loves these little guys, and not just because every player is a cat person! (May or may not be completely false. )

Why are they so loved? Well, it's because they provide arguably the best CpS multipliers in the game. In fact, when you get the first kitten available, the Kitten Worker, your CpS will be multiplied by the absolutely staggering... +10%... multiplier... to cookie production...

Okay, this is not a good first impression, but trust me. This is not the only kitten you will get. In fact, you probably already see a pink kitten at the bottom of your upgrade store. The funky thing is, each kitten upgrade multiplies the effects of all the others, as well as having its own base multipliers to work with, so it scales very high when you own many of them.

A very important thing to note is that from now on, achievements are actively powering these upgrades, and are now worth aiming for whenever you get the chance. As aforementioned, a good source of achievements is bulk buying buildings whenever you have a cookie surplus and the prices are cheap compared to your current bank. But there is a miscellaneous set of achievements that can be earned at any time, but they are meant to be hidden, so if you don't want to be spoiled, you can avoid this section if you wish:

Cookie dunk: Pretty much impossible on the Steam edition of the game! On the browser version, it was unlocked by resizing the window such that the Big Cookie was submerged in the achievement milk, but this is impossible here since the Big Cookie shrinks as the window does. I am fully expecting a hotfix to resolve this issue sometime soon! For now, keep it in the back of your head.

Tiny cookie: In the Stats window, the top three stats have a small cookie contained within their text. Click on them.

What's in a name: Pretty simple and chances are you've already done this; just rename your bakery.

Here you go: Click the slot this achievement is in. It is directly to the right of the What's in a name achievement.

Tabloid addiction: Utilize your cookie clicking skills for something more important; clicking the news ticker 50 times.

Olden days: At the bottom of the Info window, there is a small clickable to the bottom right. Stare at it and move on. I mean, you don't have to click it if you don't want to... It's just chilling there, doing its own thing. What kind of a person are you to disturb it? Honestly, there is nothing to gain from being a rude, foolish individual and destroying the peace around here. Unbelievable.

Just wrong: Sell a grandma. They will hate you for it!

Lastly, alongside kittens, you will have noticed the cookie upgrades in the store as well. These will multiply your CpS as you obtain them, multiplicatively. This means owning many of these upgrades at a time strengthens their overall effect compared to owning just a few. Try to get them when it feels reasonable to do so! You will be seeing a LOT of cookie upgrades in your career.

I promise we will be done soon; let's talk about golden cookies. What, you don't know what a golden cookie is? Me neither on my first play-through until I read about them on the wiki!

Here is what a golden cookie looks like:

That's too shiny for an ordinary cookie, and you'd be right; this isn't some run of the mill average cookie at all! In fact, it's arguably the most important thing in the game according to experts! But, at this moment in time, it's just a helpful little boost to get you going.

You see, whenever you click one of these cheeky buggers, you will get a variety of outcomes that help you out in the long run. I'll be listing the most prominent of them here:

Frenzy: A 7x cookie production bonus for 77 seconds! By the time the effect is over, you'll have gained 9 minutes worth of production in those 77 seconds, which is very helpful in the short term. It can give you the cookies you need to purchase that next building or upgrade quickly.

Lucky: Gives you a flat amount of cookies according to the amount you have stored in the bank compared to your CpS. The exact amount is 15% of your bank up to a limit.

Click Frenzy: Multiplies your cookies per click by x777 for 13 seconds. Extremely powerful, and any player is always happy to see it! Click as fast as you can and purchase the mouse upgrades to further increase the potential this effect brings.

Building Special: Chooses a random building, checks the current amount you own and gives you a CpS multiplier according to that amount. Each building you own at the moment of gaining the effect gives you an extra 10% boost. This means that the building specials tied to the cheapest buildings are the best boosts you can get from this effect. So that means, the further you progress, the better the building special effect will become.

From these, the Frenzy and Lucky effects are the most common, with Building Special being third, and Click Frenzy being the most rare. Click Frenzy looks good, and it IS good, unlike many things in life! It will surely become one of your favourite effects to have.

Looks like at the max character limit for a chapter, so good luck with reaching a billion baked cookies!

Billion Cookies

Wow, you got to a billion cookies that quickly? Well, that's kinda predictable, it's not that hard, smh!

Joking aside, this is steady progress, which is always good to have! Now, get ready for some exclusive tipping and tricking you'll read in this chapter that I was definitely the first to discover, and nobody else knows about this except me! How exciting!

Let's get started with an intermediate level golden cookie crash course. Since Frenzy/Lucky are the most common effects you can get, I would advise you to plan for them the most. Well duh, that's how basic probability works, you might be saying, and you'd be right. But there is a hidden strategy behind the Lucky effect that the pros know how to take advantage of. It's kind of complicated but not really:

Basically, if you are clever, you might have seen that 15% of bank bonus that I wrote about in its description from the Million Cookies chapter, and figured out that you could get Lucky effects forever and get an infinite amount of cookies this way! Well, you are on the right path, but unfortunately our lord and saviour Orteil has forsaken us and given us a hard cap on how big of a bonus it can give us!

Notice how, in the screenshot of the Lucky effect I have inserted above, I have a CpS of 10,000 and the effect gave me exactly 9 million cookies. That's about 900x my CpS in one golden cookie, which is more than the Frenzy effect gives us! And you probably thought Lucky was useless when you saw it for the first time. Dead wrong.

In order to get 900x CpS from one Lucky effect, you need to have 6,000 times your CpS stored in the bank. I have more than 60 million cookies which is higher than 6,000 times my CpS, so I am receiving the highest rewards.

This is what it takes to cap out the Lucky effect and take maximum advantage of it. 6,000 times is a lot, and it's reasonable to think it would take too long than what would be practical to wait for it to reach that number. That's why, I'd recommend actually idling and letting this game run in the background for a little while until you reach the 6,000x limit. You've probably been at this for a couple hours, and it's time for a break.

Just kidding haha, you can't escape.

I'm going to be real, the billion to trillion road is kinda boring and slow compared to how you started. You will want but not necessarily need that 6,000x cap in conjunction with looking out for the golden cookies to get to the trillions super quickly, which is where the game picks up again in my opinion. A whole 3 magnitudes higher than a billion is exciting to think about, after all! You could of course build to the cap right now with the weakened Lucky bonuses and Frenzies, or you could even get lucky with a Click Frenzy, if you feel so inclined.

Actually, keeping on the topic of golden cookies for just a little bit longer, you might have noticed you've unlocked an upgrade or two for them. This is because you've clicked enough of them for the game to unlock them. Here's a homework assignment for you; nab 77 of those sweet cookies for an even sweeter upgrade. The stat for how many you've clicked total can be viewed in the Stats window.

There is something even sweeter than golden cookies, and you've probably noticed them, and then got disappointed on how long they take to coalesce; sugar lumps.

Sugar lumps are collected about every 24 hours, or every 20 hours if you handpick them and get super lucky, which probably isn't happening. The best possible use for them this early is unlocking minigames.

Minigames? What the heck are you talking about, you might say, and that would be expected. A game about clicking cookies, having things to do other than clicking cookies? Impossible!

Let's get serious now. There are four minigames to unlock as of writing, and these are related to the farms, banks, temples and wizard towers. How do you unlock them? You level them up using a sugar lump, sadly :( of course!

Remember, only the aforementioned Farms, Banks, Temples and Wizard Towers have minigames for now, so you should spend their sugar lumps accordingly! Anywhere else is a waste.

I feel like a good handful people are not going to unlock even one minigame before they reach a trillion cookies, so I'm going to place an exclusive set of chapters just for minigames between Trillion Cookies and Quadrillion Cookies. If you feel like it, you may read it at any time in accordance with your minigame unlock progress.

For good measure, I'm going to say right here that, in case you are concerned with this kind of stuff (which is totally reasonable considering it takes 4 lumps to unlock them all), here is an order of which buildings you should level up first:

Temples <-> Wizard Towers -> Farms -> Banks

It just so happens that this order increases in complexity as it progresses, which is perfect for anyone who is unfamiliar with them. The order is also this way because Temples are going to be far more useful to you in the super early game compared to Banks which are pretty much worthless here! Also, Temples are better to get first if you're playing idle, but if you're clicking those golden cookies, there is an item in the Wizard minigame you will love.

I'm going to end this section with a helpful tip that most people probably have already realised, but just in case, here it is outlined for you.

This small window appears whenever you hover over a building, as you've realised before! It contains a whole lot of helpful information such as what percentage of the CpS is coming from this building, how many cookies they all bake together per second, and more. For example, their cookies baked per second is important for what I'm trying to get at here.

You've seen a whole lot of 'X buildings are twice as efficient' upgrades, which are essential in the toolset of a cookie entrepreneur. In the above image, you can predict just how many more cookies per second you'll be baking when you put those bad boys to use! In this example, the Sun festival upgrade doubles the total CpS of the temple, and you can calculate how this will affect your total CpS overall compared to the price of the upgrade. Very helpful if you want to wisely spend your cookies!

The fact above is the most obvious way you can utilize those tidbits of information, but there are other relevant uses for the window that will pop up later.

Trillion Cookies

Welcome back, aspiring baker! You've idled, clicked golden cookies all night long, or a combination of both to get here. Because God knows this game will give you cookie-induced insomnia for days. In all seriousness, getting here took some effort regardless of whether or not you stayed up all night, so well done.

Here's a little hint; if your playstyle revolves around the Lucky effect instead of idling like a reasonable person with things to do , you're gonna want to calculate if buying a certain building or upgrade will set you below the hard cap of 6,000 times your CpS stored in the bank! Seems scary, but not really if you just ignore the CpS after your purchase and just look at it before you buy, which saves brain power and is most likely more efficient, somehow, in a way not even I can fathom. If you've got 100 million cookies per second, don't let an upgrade set you back under 600 billion! That's basically how it's done.

Speaking of the Lucky effect, how about we have a little chat about its potential. If you've been actively looking at the Cookie Clicker window, you've got a few golden cookie clicks under your belt. Getting 7 and 27 of them have given you upgrades which improve how often they spawn, and how long they stay on screen before ceasing to exist. Intuitive, very much so! However, there is an incredible upgrade unlocked at 77 clicks that will set you back about 77 trillion cookies, which is quite exhorbitant depending your financial position!

Why is this elusive upgrade so valuable? Well, that's simply because with this upgrade, you will just barely be able to get another golden cookie within an active Frenzy! For one, the potential for Click Frenzy soars if you happen to get it during an active Frenzy, which is incredible for where we are at! Less exciting but overall much more reliable; the hard cap for Lucky effects is raised by x7 while Frenzy is active. This means, the new cap is now 42,000 times your current CpS while there is no Frenzy active, and 6,000x while there is one! Your Lucky gains just got promoted!

I'd be getting this upgrade when I have around twice the upgrade cost in my bank if I were you. Maybe even less! There are further applications using this upgrade that will help a lot as well, such as Frenzy and a Building Special with a cheap building like Cursors.

As a side note, I think now would be a time to crack open that dusty old calculator in your wardrobe that you haven't used for years when it comes to calculating your Lucky cap. Or just use the built-in calculator app on your PC. Back then, finding the cap for 6,000 times your bank was pretty simple, but it's pretty reasonable to start using one for 42,000 times your cap... What? What do you mean calculating the cap in your head was never simple? Don't you have godlike mathematics skills like the rest of us!? For shame!

You might have noticed by now, that the blue Legacy bar you've been waiting to see fill up for all this time, has finally done so! Congratulations! This is where the Prestige system of the game is accessed. Odds are you've seen it fill one or two times, and have seen the requirement for the next prestige level... What the HECK do you mean I need an entire 6 TRILLION more cookies for just ONE MORE LEVEL!?

This is interesting, and also extremely intimidating! This seems like it will take forever to get even 20 more levels if the requirement keeps multiplying by six every time! This is everyone's first concern, but do not fear; it is not nearly as ridiculous as you first thought, and in fact, is pretty reasonable!

For every 3 orders of magnitude you gain in cookies baked all time, you will gain 1 order of magnitude in prestige levels gained. Sounds impossible to grasp, and reasonably so, because the definition of 'order of magnitude' has been sought after by even Albert Einstein himself, but to no avail, and still remains a complete mystery! But fear not, we can just cower away in sheer terror and instead write down what we think it means here, just like English class has tought us:

1 Trillion Baked = 1 Prestige Level

1 Quadrillion Baked = 10 Prestige Levels

1 Quintillion Baked = 100 Prestige Levels

1 Sextillion Baked = 1,000 Prestige Levels

Jokes aside, yes, this is actually how it works, and is the most helpful rule of thumb to remember if you aren't quite sure how many cookies baked are required for whatever many prestige levels. In between those numbers, it's a bit of a grey area if you don't have the formula written down in front of you, which can actually be found right here[cookieclicker.fandom.com] if you feel so inclined!

But why? Why would you actually want to reset your progress for a measly 1% CpS boost? Well, first of all, calm down, because resetting this early would be a complete waste of time! No, we will have to wait. The reason why I'm mentioning all this in the Trillion Cookies chapter is so you can understand the basics of whatever this fancy Legacy system means sooner rather than later, and be ready for it when the time comes.

And it will come. Which is horrifying. All that progress turned to dust. But fret not; despite how bad of an idea this sounds, it is actually most likely the sole reason why this game is so popular in the first place. You get exclusive Heavenly Upgrades to spend your Heavenly Chips on, as per the Legacy description. Yes, that's right; a whole new frontier of fancy and incredibly helpful upgrades to boost your empire to the moon! I'll be elaborating on these upgrades later, when the time to reset is best. Trust. Me. You will not want to miss out!

Right about now, it also seems like a good time to talk minigames. More specifically, I'm going to enlighten you on their basics as I promised in the Billion Cookies chapter, but not right here; they are quite long, so I'm going to be covering them in the next two chapters which you can probably see right now; Basic Minigames Explained Part I and Part II.

Be warned! because of the nature of the minigames and their function, I'm going to need to explain them in a level of detail that will spoil complicated strategems and locked features of the game for this point in time. If you'd prefer to tinker around with them yourself, that is perfectly fine by me! It's better to have just one set of chapters fully explaining them from the get-go than to share a little information at one point, then write the full explanation at another in the same guide.

Get reading, or not, I don't mind. Either way, you should be aiming for a quadrillion cookies so you can get started on the Quadrillion Cookies chapter! There is something very game changing in between the quadrillions and quintillions that I'll have to explain, and it is also the stuff of nightmares. Farewell!

Basic Minigames Explained, Part I

To start off this chapter, here is an image of all the minigames stacked on top of each other.

Hover over the black bar to expose the image once and for all like a true aztec warrior.

As you can see, this is quite a lot of information to take in! So much so, that I'm probably going to only talk about the Pantheon and Grimoire games here and leave the complex Garden and Stock Market games untouched for now. I'll probably need two chapters to handle the basic minigames alone!

Let's get started on the Pantheon:

Immediately visible in the image, you can see three spaces up top that are empty, and an array of strange alien looking people and sculptures to choose from. You can probably deduce that the strange aliens go into the empty slots, and you'd be right. However, not all weird aliens are born equal. In fact, a few of them are practically unusable for an active golden cookie clicking playstyle, but are quite good for an idle playstyle. It is up to you.

You can place up to three selected gods and goddesses to insert into the diamond, ruby and jade slots, which increase the power of your selected champions, and you get 3 chances to do so. Filling all three at once gives you a 21 hour time period to wait for your swaps to refill total, but filling them in one at a time and waiting for the recharge only needs two hours of waiting from when you unlock the minigame, and one hour thereafter to be back at 3/3 swaps.

I'm going to provide a brief description of each deity's effects when placed upon the shrines:

Holobore, Spirit of Asceticism: Actually a pretty okay dude for what it's worth. They give you extra base CpS in exchange for a sworn obligation to never click a golden cookie; if you do so, they gets pissed off and leave! And to make matters worse, they takes ALL of your swaps with them! Be careful about clicking golden cookies with this guy, and use him when you leave the game to idle for best results. Since the negative is always the same, they are best in the diamond slot.

Vomitrax, Spirit of Decadence: Gives you longer golden cookie effects, but reduces your CpS by an equal amount. This one is best used for when you are planning to combo multiple golden cookie effects at once, but that is far beyond the scope of your run when you are only at a billion cookies baked! Otherwise, they has no obvious effect when you are clicking golden cookies absent-mindedly, and a negative effect if you're idling. Tricky to optimize, in my opinion.

Godzamok, Spirit of Ruin: By far, they're your best bud when you want to play the meta like a sweat! In seriousness, he is excellent with game plans revolving around getting production combos and click effects at the same time. The negative is the same, in which you are selling pretty much all of your highest bought buildings to get use out of their bonus, so they is a good fit for diamond slot.

Cyclius, Spirit of Ages: By far my favourite aztec god just by concept alone. The basic idea is, they generate either a CpS boost or drain depending on a cycle of time. Higher powered slots reduce the time for the cycle to complete, while low power slots drag it out over the entire day. In fact, the wiki has it all figured out in terms of how to optimize them completely and always get a positive bonus, which can be viewed right here![cookieclicker.fandom.com]

Selebrak, Spirit of Festivities: Not relevant in the early-game unless you happen to be playing during a seasonal event. They boost seasonal events in various different ways which can be viewed again on the Pantheon page in the wiki. This is another one who's best in the diamond slot, because the negatives are basically negated by the fact that switching seasons was never pricey to begin with.

Dotjeiess, Spirit of Creation:Possibly among the worst, if not THE worst spirit to have slotted, EXCEPT for your very first run where you have no prestige bonuses at all! Might as well put them in the diamond slot for the duration of your first run since 7% cheaper buildings is pretty awesome in its own right. I can maybe, possibly see a use for them during one-time building shopping sprees where you've got a lot of cookies and CpS doesn't matter, but it seems like a very bad idea to slot them at any other time.

Muridal, Spirit of Labor: Probably the best boost-to-drain ratio among all idols, giving 5-to-1 advantage in clicking power versus CpS drain. Regardless, this one is pretty mediocre and the slots could be given to other more worthwhile ancients instead, except for Click Frenzy combos where it excels best! I can see Muridal and Godzamok teaming up to be a solid click combo setup... but again, there are other spirits worth slotting more. Tough!

Jeremy, Spirit of Industry: The simplest guardian to understand; more CpS, less gold. Use when idling for max efficiency out of this one. There is literally nothing else left to say!

Mokalsium, Mother Spirit: On paper, seems like a 10% CpS boost at most, but you have to remember that milk is super unpredictable and wacky to anyone but the top experts on the game. When I tested this out with max milk and kittens, it pretty much gave a 3x CpS boost in the diamond slot. Beyond that, it's a shot in the dark for me to evaluate whether this is worth it in the early-mid game. Test it for yourself if you've got swaps to spare.

Skruuia, Spirit of Scorn: As the wiki states, this disgusting creature does not cause wrinklers to ingest more cookies, but simply to pop into more of them despite whether Skruuia was active during their feed. Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest that the negative effect scales with worship power, so just put them in the diamond slot. Actually, you might not even have any room left for diamond since like half of the spirits have negatives that don't scale with jewel strength! Weird how that works. Just activate them when you are about to pop your wrinklers.

Rigidel, Spirit of Order: This is the spirit for the job when you've 'beaten' Cookie Clicker by getting all the CpS/Cookies Baked achievements and are waiting on the sugar lumps for those Lvl 10 building achievements. I guess they are also fine to have on anyways if you really like nice and neat building numbers. It takes very little effort to get your building total to end in 0 regardless.

Okay, I think that's all of them! You can notice how most of them are at their best at the mid-game beyond. For goodness sake, Skruuia only has his positive effect active at the quintillion cookie stage anyways! I still think it was worth providing my takes on each this early, however, since there may be players who get their first sugar lump before even 100 billion cookies, and they still provide good bonuses for first runs like Dotjeiess.

I'm going to cover the Grimoire in the very next chapter.

Basic Minigames Explained, Part II

This is the second part of the Basic Minigames Explained set of chapters, which will go into detail about the Grimoire.

There are a handful of spells shown here, and unlike the Pantheon, most items here are worthless junk! Let's go over them anyway for good measure! But first, a quick explanation on Mana.

Mana is the fuel for your magic casting abilities, and it actually recharges way slower than what you would expect, but the recharge rate is increased by how much current Mana you hold. For instance, you would much rather cast a spell and have even 5 Mana left over 0 Mana, because the difference between the two is 15 minutes or more until full charge! You will need to learn how to be mindful of your resources if you want to be a good magician, but this is learned over time.

Also, if you do in fact end up with 0 mana, the recharge rate may display as 0 per second, but this is just a visual error. It is still recharging, just very slowly. All the more reason to make sure you have a surplus after the fact!

The Mana recharge formula is pretty hard to get the hang of and is dependent on multiple factors, so I'd recommend checking out the wiki[cookieclicker.fandom.com] for further learning.

Conjure Baked Goods: Reasonably priced with a reasonable reward. It's very similar to getting a Lucky golden cookie, but not quite; the backfire turns the spell into a combination of both a Clot and a Ruin. It would actually be a decent pick to consistently use if only Force the Hand of Fate didn't exist. Such a tragedy!

Force the Hand of Fate: What do I have to say; this spell is world famous, and universally loved, for very good reason. A free golden cookie! What more could you ask for? This spell is the spell you cast when you want to make an absolute boatload of cookies with an insane combo. You can even sell your wizard towers to cast two at once, and with the use of a sugar lump, cast FOUR at once! Absolutely amazing. A more detailed description is available here[cookieclicker.fandom.com] on the wiki, once again. Oh, and you don't have to click the negative wrath cookie that sometimes appears if you don't want to. In fact, I'd actively advise against it... mostly.

Stretch Time: It's not very useful, really. The best time to use this is when you've got a pretty good CpS-based golden cookie combo going, but even then, why not use Force the Hand of Fate to potentially get a greater combo rather than extending an okay one. But at the end of the day, it is quite cheap, so maybe it has its use when you've got a Frenzy and good Building Special, or an Elder Frenzy, but that's a pretty big stretch!

Spontaneous Edifice: You are only going to even be able to use this in the mid-late game which is pretty disappointing. It takes a very long time to recharge, so it isn't quite worth using to go ham and spam it for infinite buildings for a couple weeks. The best use I can see here is only having the Cursor building bought and spamming it for the next big Cursor upgrade to unlock, but even that is not quite as effective as just playing the game.

Haggler's Charm/Summon Crafty Pixies: These spells do basically the same thing but for upgrades and buildings respectively so I'm grouping them! They are only really worth it for items that have colossal prices, like perhaps the next kitten upgrade or 50th building. Actually, yeah, that's a pretty good move right there. But also the best move you can make. Pretty meh everywhere else.

Gambler's Fever Dream: Far too unreliable and just not worth it in my own opinion. Even if they all land on Force the Hand of Fate, the double backfire means you will actually reach 100% backfire chance. Just don't use it. It isn't even tempting to go ahead and see what it does because it's so awful! That's like, the entire point of gambling!

Resurrect Abomination: Despite how absolutely useless this sounds on paper, it might have applications on the first stage of the Grandmapocalypse, where waiting for a full circle of wrinklers takes several hours, combined with reasonably cheap casting price. On stage 3, you might as well just wait, but even then you can cast a cheeky spell or two if you're impatient! Pretty reasonable, just like how Conjure Baked Goods is reasonable.

Diminish Ineptitude: Remember what I said about Gambler's Fever Dream being worthless? This might be the path to redemption. A 10x less likely backfire chance translates to 5x less likely backfires with GFD, which is actually very good when you consider the unpredictable nature of the spell. Use this combo if you are feeling silly. I can see some applications with Force the Hand of Fate as well.

Basically, the best use out of the Grimoire is to just spam Force the Hand of Fate whenever the opportunity arises. There's no reason not to do so! In fact, this strategy is valid as soon as you unlock the Grimoire with one simple trick; waiting for a Frenzy to trigger, and then activating the spell. No matter what, the outcome will end up helping heaps.

Work In Progress

Hello, as of the 3rd of August 2021, I've finished writing the Trillion Cookies chapter and shuffled around the minigame information you may have once witnessed in the Billion Cookies chapters. It's much neater this way!

This guide is a Work in Progress, so be prepared to see new sections appear regularly.

To do:

- Write the Quadrillion Cookies chapter

- Elaborate on the Garden and Stock Market minigames at some point. They won't be waiting forever... eugh!

Please let me know what you think of this current progress in the comments. Has it helped you in any way, shape or form? That would surely make my day to know this guide has done at least one good thing.

Hopefully, it will have been worth the wait. Thanks, and have fun.

Credits:

-Cookie Clicker Wiki[cookieclicker.fandom.com] for being stellar research material and acting as an excellent fact-checking device! If you want further details on what I write about, the gods of mathematics over there have you covered.

-Orteil for making this awesome time waster!

-You for hopefully not wasting your time reading this thing!

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2591407770					

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