Breaking Cookie Clicker

Setup

Last week I was itching to start some sort of low-effort mini-project and I had the silly idea to set up a computer for the sole purpose of playing Cookie Clicker. In my miscellaneous electronics bin I just so happened to have a Raspberry Pi 3 Starter Kit, USB wireless adaptor¹, USB keyboard, and USB mouse².

With the addition of a spare microSD card for storage and my living room TV as a monitor, I had all of the hardware required for a basic computer setup. I installed Raspberry Pi OS, went through my usual Debian setup procedure, and soon had a working machine in my living room who's entire existence would be dedicated to running Cookie Clicker 24/7!

Breaking Cookie Clicker

For those who are uninitiated, Cookie Clicker is an incremental game based around acquiring as many cookies as possible. The game starts with the player clicking a large on-screen cookie to acquire cookies one by one, and escalates exponentially through the purchase of cookie-producing buildings and cookies-per-second-multiplying upgrades to the point where the player is acquiring hundreds of cookies-per-second, then thousands of cookies-per-second, and so on up to unimaginable levels. There is no real goal of the game, and player interaction is closer to bookkeeping than an interactive gameplay experience. The enjoyment of Cookie Clicker really comes from seeing numbers increase, and watching exponential growth spiral out of control within the context a cookie-obsessed world filled with parallel universes, time travel, portals to the cookieverse, and more, all geared towards the seemingly arbitrary production of cookies.

I personally don't find these sorts of games to be very fun. Seeing numbers go up at an ever increasing rate is enjoyable on a weirdly primal level, but playing Cookie Clicker as intended feels more like spreadsheet management than an actual game. However, I do find it fun to break Cookie Clicker by using tools to accelerate progression and optimize cookie acquisition without cheating³. After purchasing certain upgrades, clicking on the large cookie will produce cookies proportional to the player's cookies-per-second statistic. Even after acquiring a good number of these upgrades, the vast majority of cookies earned will come from sources other than clicking on the large cookie, as the player would need to click on the large cookie many times per second over a long period of time to match the idle cookie output of their buildings. However, I am running Cookie Clicker on a Debian-based Linux distribution which means it is possible automate clicking with xdotool!

To set up a dumb auto-clicker I open a terminal next to my Cookie Clicker Chromium window and run the following command:

$ sleep 1; while true; do xdotool click --delay 20 -repeat 10000 1; done

The command starts with a one second pause to give me time to move the mouse cursor over the large cookie in the Chromium window if I have not done so already. The command then uses a forever-loop to repeatedly run xdotool click --delay 20 -repeat 10000 1 which translates to "click the left mouse button 10,000 times with 20 milliseconds in between each click". With the forever-loop, this whole command effectively translates to "wait one second and then click the left mouse button 50 times per second forever". When I want to stop the auto-clicker I move the mouse cursor off of the Chromium window and back onto the terminal window where I then press CTRL+C to interrupt the command.

By clicking at a frequency beyond the human limit I am able to far outpace the game's idle cookies-per-second rate. For example, if clicking the large cookie once gives me an amount of cookies equal to 5% of my cookies-per-second value, then having an auto-clicker that can click 50 times per second means that my effective cookies-per-second is 100% + 50 * 5% = 350% the base rate.

This increased cookie production is great, but not absolutely game breaking on its own. The real gains in cookie production come from combining the high click rate of an auto-clicker with stacked golden cookie effects. During gameplay a small golden cookie will occasionally appear in a random position on screen. If clicked the golden cookie will give you either a one-time bonus of cookies or provide a short temporary multiplier to the player's cookie production. If the player has purchased upgrades that increase the rate at which golden cookies appear, as well as upgrades that increase the duration of golden cookie multiplier effects, then it is possible to (very rarely) encounter a scenario in which one golden cookie grants the player the "frenzy" multiplier (multiplies cookie production by 7 for X seconds) and then while the frenzy multiplier is still active another golden cookie grants the player the "click frenzy" multiplier (multiplies cookies per click by 777 for Y seconds) such that the effects stack and suddenly clicking 50 times per second will earn the player days' worth of cookie production in mere seconds. Reducing the size of the browser window can be used to manipulate the area in which golden cookies spawn such that golden cookies always appear within the area of the large cookie right under the player's cursor. Every golden cookie will get clicked the instant it appears, and the player's cursor will already be in position to take advantage of any frenzy + click frenzy combos that occur.

The intended way to play cookie clicker is to purchase buildings and upgrades in order to maximize your average cookies-per-second and build up a large stash of cookies over days or weeks. But this auto-clicker strategy transforms the game into a puzzle all about finding ways to maximize the number of cookies that can be acquired during these short rare random bursts of massively increased cookie production. This strategy is incredibly effective and greatly accelerates the rate of progression within the game. To give some perspective, by the end of this ~7 day project I had baked a total of 357.692 quattuordecillion cookies, of which 330.316 quattuordecillion were hand made, so 330.316 / 357.692 = ~92% of all cookies produced during the run came from clicking on the large cookie!

Closing Thoughts

This was an amusing mini-project. I had a fun time making arbitrary numbers increase in a completely inconsequential setting. This is not the first time I have done one of these tool-assisted Cookie Clicker runs, and there is a certain tranquility that comes with working on a zero-risk project where the outcome is already known⁴. Like I said before, I don't really enjoy incremental games, and this week-long run was getting to a point where the novelty of breaking Cookie Clicker was starting to wear off. I have no intention to continue this run, but I will leave my save here for record keeping purposes.

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Footnotes

1. The last time I had worked with a Raspberry Pi was with the Raspberry Pi Model 2B board, which did not have an on-board WiFi adaptor. It was only after this project concluded that I realized that the Raspberry Pi Model 3 supports wireless without the need for a USB dongle, so my USB wireless adaptor was completely unnecessary.

2. As well as an absolutely filthy mouse pad. 🤮

3. Where my definition of cheating specifically refers to use of the browser JavaScript console and/or actions that would earn the player the "Cheated cookies taste awful" shadow achievement. Use of an auto-clicker is considered cheating by the speedrun.com Cookie Clicker game rules, but for this and other casual experiences with the game I consider an auto-clicker fair game as long as the auto-clicker is simulating actual click events as this setup does with xdotool.

4. You make a lot of cookies and then get bored.