so I’ve been tentatively figuring all this chrono whatsit out with a lot of help from the wiki and google. but I am completely lost on the chronosurge option. particularly how you’re supposed to be able to restart it immediately on the next run? I know the wiki says it needs 750 void to purchase it, but it doesn’t say anything about pre-reqs, so does it just show up when I have the void and flux? and the thing that raises your max flux, if I’m understanding it correctly, is part of the chrono purchases, which reset every run, so if you have more than the max stocked up as long as you don’t have it turned on, you won’t lose the points?
so basically, if i’m understanding it right, chronospheres, (with the minimum of resources coming with), void, TCs, and relics would all need to be pretty well stocked up before this becomes even vaguely pertinent? because right now I’m still at a level where I can get relic stations… but it takes me 3 rl days to get there ^^; and I think void also resets? so would chronospheres bring back the void and unobtanium and other such things as well? (or did I just accidentally spend all my void without noticing? >>')
if I’m not totally off the mark here, then how many chronospheres per run would I really want to have as an easy grab before I start considering this set up? at the moment I’m kinda playing with some of the easier challenges, and using them as paragon grabs as well. if it matters, I’ve currently got almost 2k burned paragon and just over 700 regular, and I’ve been resetting every time I feel like I hit a wall, which is netting me around 400-450 paragon a run…
thanks much!~
To get Chronosurge you need at least one level of Chronocontrol, which needs Paradox Theory, which needs Void Space. So if you have VS and PT and enough void and flux, then you can buy Chronosurge. (Note that VS costs 100 void and PT costs 250 void.)
On resets, void behaves like any other non-crafted resource: it goes away unless you have chronospheres, and if you do have chronospheres then an amount X turns into 0.015 * #chronospheres * X.
Unobtainium behaves the same way. Crafted resources behave differently: they go away unless you have chronospheres and Flux Condensator, and in that case an amount X turns into 1.5 * #chronospheres * sqrt(X).
How many chronospheres is enough? I dunno. What Chronosurge gets you is the ability to regenerate flux, which you might want for two reasons: (1) because you need flux to buy more Chronocontrols, which you might want to do to accumulate void faster, and (2) because if you can generate enough flux regularly enough then you can keep Tempus Fugit on all the time.
For #1, well, it depends on how many Chronocontrols you want to buy and how patient you are. You need to have bought at least one already in order to be able to get Chronosurge. The next one will cost you 3750 flux, so e.g. if you have 10 chronospheres then you need to skip 375 years to collect that much flux.
For #2, the question is how often you do how much time-skipping. Roughly speaking, you want to do as much as you can (except that there’s a tradeoff against accumulating void, since if you do a time-skip you never get to the end of a season where paradoxes can happen). So suppose you have F chronofurnaces; then you dissipate F/10 heat per second (er, I forget how this interacts with Tempus Fugit, so all of this may be off by a factor of 1.5). Each year skipped makes 10 heat, so with F chronofurnaces you can afford to skip F/100 years per second, which if you have S chronospheres means generating FS/100 units of flux per second. TF costs 5 flux per second, so you need FS/100 >= 5 or FS >= 500.
So e.g. if you have 15 chronofurnaces then you need at least 34 chronospheres. If you have 50 chronofurnaces then you need at least 10 chronospheres. Etc.
This all assumes that you are time-skipping as fast as you possibly can, on average. That might not be true (1) if you are deliberately doing less in order to accumulate void (though you can instead alternate between doing it faster and building up heat, and then doing it slower and accumulating void), and/or (2) if you are doing your time-skipping manually rather than with some sort of automation and you can’t afford to give 100% of your attention to the game.
(If you don’t do enough time-skipping then what happens is that you run out of flux and TF stops. That’s not the end of the world: you still have Chronosurge and chronospheres so you can get more flux. Just make sure you remember to get more while you do have those, because if you reset then you won’t be able to get more flux this way until you’ve got Chronosurge again, and that costs flux, which you’ll have to get the hard way by gasp not playing the game for a while :-).)
so… long answer made short. I am so not ready for that xD I haven’t actually seen more than 20ish void in a single game. I managed to complete an energy challenge (once, and with great suffering!) but I’m sitting here looking at what you answered me with and it’s like trying to figure out a language that just… isn’t english in any variant xD so I gather I need to keep an eye out for paradox theory and void space. are these also things that need to be bought every single run? while I do use kitten scientists, I only use it on workshop, bonfire, religion, and trade tabs, so any chrono anything would be done manually, and honestly, with how easily distracted I am… <<’ not very quickly.
As far as asking about chronospheres goes, at this point in time, I think I’m more worried about how many I should gather per run, before I let the run reset, because right now a single 450 paragon run is still taking me a day and a half, what with restarting from zero materials. theoretically, if they each do 1.5%, then getting 67 per run would let me keep all materials from every run, at which point, if I use that as my reset metric, would mean that my resources will simply continue to build. So, assuming that’s correct, once I can reach that comfortably, I’d probably have some void and TCs and relics built up, as well, at which point delving into chrono-whatsits should be easier, and will make more sense when I can actually see for myself what happens when I click the button.
am I at least correct with this? >>’ thank you so much for the help! <3
Paradox Theory and Void Space are technologies that you buy in the “Science” tab.
You probably don’t want to be buying them every run. The usual approach is that most of your runs are relatively quick ones – maybe just building up paragon, maybe doing challenges, whatever – and every now and then you do a longer one for time crystals / relics / void. There’s no point getting Paradox Theory and Void Space unless you’re doing a longer run. (Aside from one special case: if you do the Atheism challenge then completing it requires you to get a cryochamber, and those require Void Space.)
It usually isn’t efficient to try to get many tens of chronospheres for “ordinary” runs: you can get more kittens per unit time, hence more paragon per unit time, by getting somewhere from 1 to 10 chronospheres + Flux Condensator + somewhere from 10k to 100k of unobtainium (and, optionally, some eludium). That doesn’t take a super-long time, especially once you’re some way into the game, and going further isn’t usually worth it.
It’s true that once you get > 67 chronospheres you can start growing resources. But note that one key resource is unobtainium, and buying all those chronospheres costs unobtainium. In order for {buy lots of chronospheres, reset} to make a profit in unobtainium, you need to be gaining enough to make up for the cost, and that means quite a lot more than 67 chronospheres.
(Also: that’s only for non-crafted resources. Crafted resources carry over according to a different formula with a square root in it, and they will decay no matter how many chronospheres you have. And, importantly, blueprints are a crafted resource and are needed for building chronospheres, so you’ll need some way to get lots of blueprints quickly in order to pull the trick off.)
The usual thing you’ll see, in e.g. “Sagefault’s Endgame Guide”, is that what you need is 8.14G unob capacity so that you can build 100 chronospheres. I think you can actually get away with slightly less than that, but that’s the right order of magnitude.
It is true that by the time you have enough chronospheres to keep gaining resources through chronosphere-resets you will have “some void and TCs and relics built up”, but that’s quite a long way into your future and you will have more than “some” of those things at that point.
My first “interesting” runs – I don’t claim that the sequence was optimal – went something like this: a unicorn-religion-based run to get 1k or so time crystals, both for buying modest numbers of chronospheres and for the 1000 Years challenge; the Winter challenge so that I never again had to worry about cold winters; the Anarchy challenge just because it was a fairly easy one; the Atheism challenge (this is a pretty slow one and you do want to have some time crystals available for it); a fairly hefty relic run lasting I think a couple of weeks, at the end of which I bought a bunch of cryptotheology buildings costing ~140M relics; the 1000 Years challenge, which I should of course have done before the relic run; a bunch of paragon grinding; another relic run of similar length. After that, an alternation between challenges (pacifism, black sky, energy, anarchy again) and paragon-grinding, and then another relic run. Etc.
You should expect quite a number of iterations of (relic run, challenges + paragon grinding) before it’s worth thinking about getting enough chronospheres to grow your resources indefinitely via chronosphere-resets.
ok! as much as I hate that answer, it also helps a super lot xD certainly helps put my priorities in order, at least! honestly, I kinda suck at straight paragon runs, mostly cuz I get bored and twitchy and a lotta things say they’re only supposed to last like 30-40 mins? but by that time i’ve only got like… 70 paragon worth? which i think has a lot more to do with the kitten scientists not having really good priority definitions and me not having the patience to sit and baby it closely for half an hour at a time, so. for now, I think 2-3 day long challenge runs that happen to get me TCs, relics, paragon, and challenge bonuses are probably going to be it for me for the rest of the month, at least xD
thank you so much for the help tho! seriously. I don’t really feel like I understand how to do the thing, but at the same time I understand the how-to-get-there part much better, and realize just how far away I am from that, so I’m no longer so antsy about it xD tbf… I don’t play most idle games I get into for more than about two months or so, because after a certain point you stop having things to do. I am now on month 5 of this game, and not even vaguely bored with it, so I’m kinda delighted with the new recognition of just how much farther I still have left to go before I can even really call myself “mid game”
yay! <3
I just realised that one of my earlier calculations was kinda wrong. I said that you need (# furnaces) times (# chronospheres) to be at least 500 if you want to be able to run Tempus Fugit all the time, but if you’ve done the 1000 Years challenge (which you should) then the amount of heat generated by a timeskip is halved, so the figure is 250 not 500.
My paragon runs are fairly quick (partly because I’ve got a pile of paragon, cryptotheology, etc., to speed them up) but I find them pretty boring even so. My usual rhythm in between relic runs is: challenge, paragon, paragon, challenge, paragon, paragon. Usually a challenge run leaves me in a situation where I either have or can quickly get a reasonable amount of unobtainium, FluxCond and a few chronospheres, so doing a couple of paragon-grinding runs afterwards is natural.
(I have a home-grown autoclicker. I’m pretty sure it’s a lot less fancy than Kitten Scientists – deliberately so, because I want to feel that the machine is just doing the routine scutwork for me and all the decisions are mine, though I feel less bad about having the machine make the decisions when I’ve told it exactly how to make them.)