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See also: Universal Paperclips - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

I've never played cookie clicker, but I have a hard time imagining that it can hold a candle to universal paperclips. Never has such a pointless game made its point so well.

Cookie clicker is an OG in the "incremental" space. But while universal paperclips goes places, CC also goes to different, weirder places.

Universal Paperclips has the best story out of all the idle games I know, but it's not the best game. For one thing, it has very limited reset/prestige mechanisms, and the expansion mechanism in the final phase is very opaque and can mislead players into frustrating dead ends.

> For one thing, it has very limited reset/prestige mechanisms

Are those considered good things now? In all the games where I’ve seen them implemented, they haven’t increased fun at all, just prolonged the grind. I actually like universal paperclips more for being relatively grind-free — there is just enough boring time-consuming manual-labour to get its point across, and then it moves on

Story is pretty much all I care about, so I agree re: those mechanics.

They can be good if they unlock significant new game mechanics.

The most extreme example (I know of) in that regard is https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/ which has, at last counting, 12 different ways to reset, many of which are not accessible until you have done dozens if not hundreds of others. Exploring the entire game takes years of play.

Obviously, there's still lots of grindey repetition, and it's only something for people who find slow progress towards optimizing grind rewarding.

I'm taking microbiology classes (or will be again in the fall). I dig the premise. Thanks for sharing.

Oh, the "primordial soup" part is just the intro. After a few resets it passes quickly and is eventually skipped entirely.

Yeah I got past it pretty much as soon as I posted, which is kind of a pity. I like the idea of playing as a plant buying amino acids from the mycorhizae with hexose. The whole coal mining fungus with banking problems thing feels a bit too rooted in the human world.

Poking through the code though, I can see that that's probably not a problem that I'll have for long.

I was never able to go past the universe exploration step, nothing I did made significant progress past that and I couldn't find a way to speed things up. Is there a way to win or reach an end? (Which I assumed was consuming all of the universe?)

There is an end, yes, and it happens a little bit after consuming all of the universe. You'll know that you've reached it when you are offered the option to delete all of your progress and restart.

As with many of the better-designed incremental games, there are moments in UP where you might get the impression that the way to continue is to just do more of what you've been doing, but actually the way to continue is to do something slightly different. I think you're referring to the starkest of those.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was referring to.

It's been a while since I played it, but the key is to allocate as many of your resources as possible to reproduction rather than exploration, because that leads to exponential growth.

It's possible to complete the game in around 2 hours of active play, IIRC.

Well, now I'm stuck in the "combat against drifters" phase and everything is going too slowly, so I think I'll abandon the game once more... :(

The trick is to get the right balance for your von Neumann probes such that they survive long enough to propagate (hazard remediation mostly) while also not bottlenecking on a resource. Iirc you can harvest so much so fast that it's easy to be set for the foreseeable future. I would occasionally just stop mass/wire production to get my fleet going strong and it would take a long time before I needed to restart it. Meanwhile trust stacks up and probes get better.

Ah Cookie Clicker's got fancier graphics (although they're kinda heavy, I'd turn them off) and it goes... eldritch at some point. It's definitely the longer of the two to play, I recall finishing Paperclips in about three slow workdays.

There's one, I don't think Cookie Clicker has an ending. It's got countless multipliers, but eventually you're completely out of upgrades and achievements and it just sort of peters out in diminishing returns.

One remark though: if you've been playing for a while, save & back-up your save games. It stores progress in a cookie (I think) and they have a tendency to expire / get lost after a while. I just opened it up (it seems I last played a year ago) and it started a new game, but I had it backed up. Save before you stop playing.

The HTTP and HTTPS pages give you different save slots, so you may have been switched between the two.

A Dark Room has a similar feel, and like Universal Paperclips it opens up to be much more than a clicker: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/mobileWarning.html

that's not a good link

To clarify this a bit: the link goes directly to the mobile warning redirect, whether or not you're on mobile.

https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com is a link to the main site.

Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. I missed the edit window and can’t fix it. Someone else has posted the right one.

This is not a game; it’s a sci-fi novel about AI and self-replicating machines masquerading as a game. Love it!

When I first played paperclip I didn't know it was based on that thought experiment. I felt silly a year+ later when someone made the connection for me.

ugh... I can't remember the name someone posted a game here before web-based, you're in a terminal/folders structure, as an AI trying to escape into the net

http://skynetsimulator.com my project from a few years back

I’ve replayed this game many times, thank you for making it!

(Never thought I’d see cross pollination between HN and r/incremental_games!)

Nice! That place was invaluable for beta testing it and provided a ton of good ideas. Cool you saw it there.

Fun game - but I'm stuck! (Rot13 here on in to avoid spoilers for anyone else)

Fnaqobk nppbhag vf shyyl fpnaarq, V'ir nofbeorq Fxl/Fgne/Fha/Fbal/Revf/Fbyne/Whab - V fgvyy unir a0i4, RBAF, Yhan, naq Plcure hanofbeorq, ohg V'z fghpx ba rnpu bs gurz: a0i4 frrzf gb whfg unir n tnzr, RBAF erdhverf 10 pberf gb bireybnq, naq Yhan naq Plcure ner abg ihyarenoyr. Nal gvcf cyrnfr?

You have to force absorb them

Huh - as I recall, that was blanked out/unavailable. But it looks like progress isn't saved across page-closes, so it'll be a while before I can test that again. Regardless - thanks!

EDIT: Oooooh - you can (ROT13) punatr gur nepuvgrpgher bs lbhe pberf gb "zngpu" erdhverzragf gb Sbepr Nofbeo.(/ROT13). I'd assumed that (ROT13)n terlrq-bhg bcgvba zrnag vg jnf fvzcyl haninvynoyr(/ROT13). Cool, thank you!

Yeah you can click on the grey to get clues. You aren’t the first to have missed that unfort

Don't. You can expect to lose a workday to this ;)

Thank link should come with a NSFW warning. Just wasted 3 hours...

Ha! Hopefully you enjoyed it.

I remember the first time that I played it, knowing absolutely nothing about it. It goes so much deeper than I had anticipated.

As a heads-up, there is more than one ending!

And Exponential Idle!!

https://conicgames.github.io/exponentialidle/

I just played this game to completion. Very fun.

pls no.

I even bought a zipper after I played it because it impressed me so much. It was rather expensive but the quality was pretty poor.

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