You are a kitten in a catnip forest | Hacker News Reader

You are a kitten in a catnip forest

bloodrizer.ru

169 pointsmadars56 comments

So this is A Dark Room with kittens?

Here's two one-liners for the console to help speed up the process

    setInterval(function () { $('span:contains(Gather catnip)').click() }, 5);

    setInterval(function () { $('span:contains(Refine catnip)').click() }, 100);

clearInterval() on the numbers given back will stop the auto-clicking

Also unlocks the achievement 'Super Unethical Climax'.

I've played enough incremental games that I think I'd have more fun just writing some AI to play for me. This gives me a good starting point, thanks.

Thanks for this - I'm interested to see the content and play with the game balance, but I have no real desire to wait days for it to progress.

You can set up a check so that it doesn't refine catnip too quickly.

setInterval(function() { if ($('tr.resourceRow > td:contains(catnip:)').next().text().indexOf('K') >= 0) { $('span:contains(Refine catnip)').click(); }}, 5);

Oh man, I just had to stop playing this game. It's an incremental game like cookie clicker or candy box. Except it's much more complex. You have to balance more than a dozen different resources as the game goes on. I left it running in a tab at work, but I was going back to it so often during the day that I had to just wipe my progress and leave.

> more than a dozen different resources

I believe the end-game count is 43 these days.

It feels a lot like A Dark Room [0]. I remember ADR was open source, I wonder if it's built on or inspired by that.

[0] http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

There's a whole genre of games like this these days. I really think of A Dark Room and Candy Box as some of the best and more recent ones don't seem to really put much effort into it, though they can still be pretty engaging. The search term for them is "idle games" and I'd have sent you the way of the subreddit for them which has a comprehensive list, but they all seem to be set to private.

This one looks to be up: https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games

Thanks for mentioning that this isn't the ONLY one of these. I probably could have guessed eventually, but now I'm absolutely fascinated. Such a cool opportunity to build simple games with the potential for infinite expansion.

http://www.kongregate.com/idle-games, a bunch of the idle games submitted to Kongregate. Not sure when it all started but in like last year kong recognized it as its own genre. However the kitten game seems to be a bit more complex than a lot of the ones kongregate is hosting.

A classic of the genre: http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/

And a place to find more: https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games

Is there any way that cookie clicker could have been farming CPU cycles? I remember playing it and thinking that it was consuming an awful lot of resources after a while...

It's entirely possible - there are e.g. bitcoin miners written in javascript.

But never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

But none of those are viable anymore since asics.

I don't think javascript miners would have ever been remotely viable

They cost more to run in electricity than they generate, sure. But if it's the user's electricity, the person running it might not care. People still do CPU mining with stolen AWS servers even though CPU mining is inefficient.

>People still do CPU mining with stolen AWS servers even though CPU mining is inefficient.

I seriously doubt that. It's not just "inefficient", it's completely useless for bitcoin mining. It's something like spending $1000 in electricity to make a cent or two. It's not even worth the time to hack.

If you had that much cpu power under your control, you'd make more just selling it on darknet for 1% of its cost.

I noticed the same performance hit. My impression was that it was graphically clunky and poorly written, but I can't prove that nothing sinister was going on.

A lot of these games run on using really large numbers. Would a poor implementation of a big int datatype perhaps be to blame for the performance hit?

Well, you could look the source. I think last time I played most of it wasn't even minified.

I feel like the woodcutter bonus should be increased. It's not economically viable once you have even a moderate number of farmers. It takes 100 seconds to produce seven wood, if I have 5 farmers I can do it in a third of the time and I won't die of starvation in the process.

I fear today's productivity is already lost.

From reading the games subreddit the most economical way to get wood (woodcutters vs farmers) flips multiple times throughout the game depending on which upgrades you have at the time.

Once you start applying workshop bonuses to farmers and use the aqueducts you;ll be able to sustain a huge number of kittens with a handful of kittens.

Um, if you have 5 farmers, you could also have 5 woodcutters.

100 catnip->1 wood. Farmer=5 catnip/sec=100 catnip/20 seconds=1 wood/20 seconds Woodcutter=.07 wood/sec=1.4 wood/20 seconds.

Multiplying both by five changes nothing.

In the early game it makes far more sense to keep your assets as catnip until you need to spend them (or your barn fills up).

Your strategy only works if you have enough farms to cover your base needs (that's a lot of fields). With 10 cats you need to be producing 40 catnip/second baseline.

5 farmers and 5 woodcutters will only work if you're producing at least 15 catnip as a baseline. On an average winter (-75% from fields) you're screwed.

On the other hand if you leave 10 farmers running, you'll generate at least +10catnip/s even if you have no fields. It's simply not worth it for the extra half wood.

In the beginning, I kept on buying fields. But even if not, one or two farmers can cover a bunch of kittens, and then marginal woodcutters are better. Until later, in which calculation is pointless unless you really care.

I am. Such a sanitized version of resource management addiction, I don't even feel unclean playing it.

This is interesting and fun! Although from the title and it's placement on HN, I immediately hypothesized it to be someone's blog post about the endless distractions ever-present for the digital worker.

What, you mean like trying to close a few tickets before going home on a Friday, but wandering off to play with kitten-farming instead? Wouldn't happen.

>go east

Behind House You are behind the white house. A path leads into the forest to the east. In one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar.

A younger version of me who played these types of games would've responded with:

> take ajar

Somehow your comment rattled the cobwebs off old memories of trying to work through a game called 'castle', I think, with only rudimentary knowledge of English.

Would it be possible to get a copy of this? I would like to do some HTML and CSS updates to it. Do you the project on github?

The author has published all the code on Bitbucket (https://bitbucket.org/bloodrizer/kitten-game) and there even seems to be a vibrant community around it (/r/kittensgame).

Someone on that subreddit: "[...] space building is going well (oil isn't the issue anymore, now its starcharts) [...]"

Yeah, I want to play this.

There's a wiki linked at the bottom http://bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/wiki/index.php?page=Main+..., which has a link to the source as well as other stuff you may find relevant.

Simple means of accessing the currently available resources:

  gamePage.resPool

e.g.

  gamePage.resPool.maxAll()

Thank you. I got hooked and needed a way out

    setInterval( function(){ gamePage.resPool.maxAll() }, 1000 )

In that case, this is probably quicker:

  for(var i in gamePage.resPool.resources) { gamePage.resPool.resources[i].value = 100000000; }

Horribly addictive. You have been warned.

Need a newline in there, or this gets grim. http://imgur.com/7JfnPbj

Can someone explain the appeal of this? I'm not going to spend minutes clicking on a button repeatedly. What changes? Is there a story that gets told or something? Some min/max puzzle to figure out? What compels you to click this button?

It's a cookie clicker. You start by manually gathering 1 by 1, then can incrementally gain the ability and funds to buy faster means of production and spend resources on other goals.

I think the way people play these are to leave it running in a tab and check back now and then over the course of a day, and then never look at it again.

Lol at the downvotes. I'm asking, not judging.

What are the "other goals" you mention? How's this different from "for(i=0;;i++) printf("%u\n", i);"?

What are the "other goals" you mention?

Just play it for like 10 minutes, try and get as much catnip as possible, and things will be added to the interface. As you get better at managing those systems, even more will be added.

I don't understand it either. I got to a point where I couldn't buy more of anything and my advisor was warning me I didn't have enough catnip. I left it open with some JavaScript gathering catnip for me, but finally closed the tab when I seemed to be at a standstill.

I have played games like this in the past. They are extremely addictive not sure what part of the brain they tap into, but its powerful. However, in the end it sort of boils down to hitting +1 over and over again on a calculator then going "wow look how big the number is now". (Yes, there is usually some minmaxing that allows you to increment faster.) Having said that... I will still probably still end up checking this one out. =P

Somewhat broken in Chrome on Android. Tapping a button brings up what looks like a weird tooltip that blocks most of the screen. Pretty much unplayable.

Unlimited catnip: function clickn(n) { for (i = 0; i < n; i++) { $( "span:contains('Gather')" ).click();}}

Found this in game source:

  $("#devPanelCheats").show();

All my kittens are dead.

Metagame: Competitive speedrun videos

Well, that killed my productivity for the day.

So there goes my weekend...

SO far achievements unlocked:

Winter Is Coming

You Monster

Your cat is eaten by a grue?

Wow, I really enjoyed Cookie Clicker but this is unplayable. I just learned a lesson on how important graphics are for some people.

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