11/4/2024, 2:25 PM
everyone in 2020 had more than enough time on their hands to pick up some new hobby. some people picked up speedrunning a game, some of my friends started drawing for the first time, and my new thing of choice was Orteil's Cookie Clicker. well.. it technically wasn't a new thing for me, i actually played a ton of Cookie Clicker back in 2014 or so, but it was usually just to pass the time in school. no, things in 2020 were different, now i was playing Cookie Clicker to pass the time at school at home. listen, i don't like idle games. like, at all. they're just an exercise in patience and there's pretty much no gameplay in the slightest. but i've always kind of had a soft spot for Cookie Clicker specifically, probably just because i played it a ton as a kid, but also it just seems to have a lot more of a personality than most other idle games. i follow Orteil on tumblr, and the dude's got a sense of humor i really mesh with. plus, i feel like every idle game after Cookie Clicker was just trying to copy it, and it just don't feel the same man. CC also has a lot of genuinely great artwork and tons of unique ideas that actually give it some iota of Real Gameplay, compared to other games where the whole thing is "buy more things to watch number go up!" plus, CC doesn't fall into the trap of even offering microtransactions, which is nice. maybe i'm just biased, but CC is just about the only idle game i can stomach. so much so that during my brief stint with it in 2020, i thought to myself, "i should really just bite the bullet and go for 100% without cheats someday."
this was the first of many mistakes.
about a year later in late 2021, CC gets a Steam release and i'm instantly all over that. i import my save from the browser version, and suddenly it's the only thing i've played for like a month. i'm shredding through the shadow achievements, i'm racking up the prestiege, i'm... VERY slowly working my way through the farm achievements, everything's going great. and then i stop for a bit. and then i fall off the game for another 6 months. this happens several more times in summer of 2022, winter of 2023, and spring of 2024. this curse just keeps coming back, and it'll never leave me alone.
so here i sit, nearly four years after starting this save file, sitting at 95% of the achievements and 11 shadow achievements for extra garnish, and nothing to show for it. i've gotten the Shiny Wrinkler, i've clicked 7,777 golden cookies, i've gotten the Juicy Queenbeet, i've seen it all. except for the things i haven't.like i said, 95% of achievements, i'm sitting at 596/622 right now and those last thirty or so achievements are gonna be the end of me. but we're not here to talk about those right now. no, instead i want to go over the parts of this whole journey that have made me want to give up, go home and take a cold shower. here's the worst Cookie Clicker achievements, just for you.
i don't like having to wait. i especially don't like having to check back on things every so often while waiting. this achievement drove me nuts because it requires so much of both of those things. A Wizard Is You is achieved by casting 999 spells, and it's simply just misery. at least with Black Cat's Paw (clicking 7,777 golden cookies) there's a sound to notify you that a golden cookie has appeared, and you can use a garden setup to make the golden cookies more frequent. with spells, you have to wait for your mana to recharge, and there's no way of knowing exactly when it's back up to full without just checking on it. and if you wanna be efficient, you have to use Haggler's Charm to get the most out of that mana meter. but that chooses a spell at random to cast for half its cost, with a higher chance of backfiring. and the worst part? all the spells in this game are ass!! there's not a single good one! they all either barely do anything to affect you, or are way too punishing! like, dude, i get a 2% discount on upgrades? what is this, the employee discount at GameStop? this one took me eons to get, and it's only going to get worse from here.
i have such mixed feelings on the garden. on one hand, it's a super unique and fun mechanic that lets you give yourself buffs that are (mostly) set and forget when you're just letting it do its thing. on the other hand, when you're going for specific plants (say, trying to get a certain achievement,) it becomes extremely tedious and annoying to wait several hours at a time for ticks to go by, only for your plants to not mutate, wasting all of your time. some of these plants take a comically long time to mature, like the Cronerice or the Duketater. and good lord, even when they are mature, there's a very real possibility you'll not be paying attention, and they wilt away before you can harvest them, wasting all of your time and forcing you to restart the whole process. and of course, there's the dreaded Juicy Queenbeet. this achievement took me well over 3 years to finally get, and it was a grueling experience all the way through.
man, fuck the stock market. i hate the economy. money can go to hell, i think we should go back to a system of trading and bartering. and this achievement required me not only to remember the economy exists, but interact with it too! come on Orteil, why you gotta do me like this? all jokes aside, this is a simple achievement. have your stock market earnings surpass a whole year's worth of CpS, or $31,536,000. but do you realize how much that is? for selling a day's worth of CpS, you get around $100,000, and that's usually when the stocks are sitting somewhere around $120 per stock. with very few exceptions, stock values very rarely ever go any higher than $200. this means that, with the BEST of luck, you're selling a full set of stocks for $200,000, which if you've been keeping track, is 1/15th of what we need. but more realistically, you're gonna be selling stocks for somewhere more around $50,000 for a full set, and that's not even factoring in that you actually have to buy them in the first place, which makes your profits sink down a little. the strategy i employed was to equip the Supreme Intellect dragon perk (yes those are real things that exist in this game about baking cookies) so that the stock market is a lot more chaotic. then, i waited for a stock's value to go down to the single digits, then bought the max amount i could. then i waited for it to go all the way back up, and sold it for a huge profit. but this takes a long ass time, because stock prices only change ever tick (60 seconds) so it can take hours for prices to rise to a sellable amount. it's agony, and one of the most infuriating achievements in the entire game, even if it is a shadow achievement.