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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
