Challenges do have an impact on later runs. Some more than others.
I wouldn’t worry too much about order; do whichever ones strike you as fun. If you play a lot then you will end up doing many challenges; I am on 20 each of energy, black sky, pacifism; 10 anarchy, 8 winter, 5 atheism, 1 1000-years. (Atheism is slow.) But I think you should leave strategizing about challenges for later. They’re all worth doing once; as you do them, see how much fun (if any) you have and how much (if at all) you value what they give you, and then just do whichever ones you feel like. The ones I’ve done 20x each are (I think) the most helpful for long runs (other than 1000 Years, which you should do as soon as you’ve been able to get 1000ish time crystals because it will make building up TCs/relics easier).
But, for what it’s worth, my suggestions: Maybe do Winter first because it’s easy and it’s nice never to have to think “wait, do I have enough catnip production even if I’m hit by a cold winter?”. (You still have to worry about winter itself, but those predictably come around once a year so you can just look and see whether you have enough without having to wait a long time, whereas cold winters are less frequent.) Do 1000 Years as soon as you’ve got 1000 time crystals. Do at least one Anarchy early so you accumulate karma faster. Do at least one Atheism early; it makes a substantial difference to production (once you’ve got Solar Rev in any given run). Do everything else as you feel like it.
I haven’t bothered with Iron Will or with Post Apocalypse (which I think you won’t have available for ages anyway).
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.)
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.
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 :-).)
Are the Leviathans around?
When they are, having Blackchain makes it possible to exchange relics for blackcoin and vice versa. You can only buy/sell “all at once”; after the trade you will either have no more relics, or have no more blackcoin. The exchange rate wobbles around randomly but with a bias so that in the long term the value of your blackcoin holding slowly increases – until it hits 1100 relics per blackcoin, at which point it crashes to a much lower figure. So if you invest your relics in blackcoin, remember to sell up when that point approaches, and buy again after the crash.
It’s only actually worth bothering with this if you have quite a lot of relics.
Isn’t there a “Refine TC” button on the Religion page, for you? It lets you turn time crystals into relics (by default at the rate of 25 TC = 1 relic, so 1 for Tachyon Theory + 5 for Chronoforge means 6 relics = 150 TC, so you’ll still have 600 left over).
So far as I know (but I haven’t e.g. checked the code) doing the 1000Y challenge doesn’t stop you building ziggurats. Have you crafted some megaliths and got Construction? (I know I’ve at least once thought “huh, where has the ziggurat button gone?” because I hadn’t made any megaliths.)
OK, here goes. (Warning: the code is complicated and largely uncommented, and it’s very possible that I’ve misunderstood some of it.)
Activating a pact (1) incurs an immediate 0.5 units of “necrocorn deficit” and (2) incurs a further 0.0005 units of “necrocorn deficit” per day until the end of time.
By default, this doesn’t touch your actual stock of necrocorns. But a nonzero “necrocorn deficit” makes your pacts slightly less effective, in proportion to the deficit; and if the deficit reaches 50 units then Bad Things happen.
You can repay your debt, at a rate of 1 necrocorn per unit of necrocorn deficit, rounded up to the next integer number of necrocorns, by clicking the “Pay the debt” button. You can only do this when you can afford to pay your entire deficit.
If you haven’t taken the Siphoning policy, that’s it and you can stop reading here. Otherwise, read on.
First of all, siphoning doesn’t change anything about that initial 0.5 units of deficit per pact. What it does do is to try to pay off the ongoing 0.0005 units per pact per day automatically.
Good news: It does this incrementally and without rounding up to an integer number of necrocorns; as long as it’s able to keep up, it will keep your necrocorn deficit at zero and so the deficit will not decrease the effectiveness of your pacts.
Bad news: you pay a little bit more, in two ways which I’ll describe in a moment.
So, with siphoning, instead of the ongoing debt gradually building up your “necrocorn deficit”, there’s a three-layer thing. (1) So far as possible, the ongoing debt is taken out of your necrocorn production. Actual necrocorn corruption occurs discretely – an alicorn is corrupted gradually, bit by bit, until it reaches 100% corruption and abruptly turns into a necrocorn. But the siphoning process can use 1% of alicorn corruption to pay of 0.01 units of necrocorn deficit. (2) If pact-consumption is faster than marker-corruption, so that #1 can’t keep up, the consumption is repaid incrementally out of your stock of necrocorns – but you pay an extra tax for this. (3) If #1 can’t keep up and #2 runs out of necrocorns, then you accumulate necrocorn deficit just as you would have done without siphoning.
The extra tax defaults to 15%. That is, any time your pacts are consuming necrocorns faster than your markers are corrupting alicorns, your stock of necrocorns goes down, incrementally, 15% faster than the necrocorn deficit would have been going up without siphoning.
Some kinds of pacts make the tax higher or lower, always in proportion to the number of Black Pyramids you have. This is the “Necrocorn deficit recovery per pyramid” thing shown in the description of the pacts. So, e.g., the description of the Pact of Cleansing says “Necrocorn deficit recovery per pyramid: 0.3%”. This means that for each PoC you have, the 15% figure is increased by 0.3% for each Black Pyramid. So 25 BPs and 4 PoCs would mean an increase of 30%, turning 15% into 19.5%.
… Except that what the code actually does is more complicated than that, and I haven’t got my head around exactly what it does and why. (It looks wrong to me, but probably the confusion is all mine.) So the above is a Lie. My probably-inaccurate understanding of the Truth is below, but it’s complicated and (again) probably wrong. Read on at your peril.
Say that your “surplus necrocorn consumption” is the consumption of your pacts minus the amount you’re able to pay for from ongoing corruption. (So if this is <= 0 then everything’s fine, your stock of necrocorns doesn’t need to be touched, and there’s no tax to pay.)
Say that your “fully modified tax rate” is the thing described above (which is 19.5% with 25BP and 4PoC) and your “half-modified tax rate” is what you get if you do the same calculation but halve the change produced by your pacts, so that with 25BP and 4PoC it would be 17.25%.
Say that the “amount of tax” is the tax rate times the surplus necrocorn consumption.
If repaying your surplus necrocorn consumption while applying the half-modified tax rate would completely exhaust your stock of necrocorns, then add the surplus necrocorn consumption to your necrocorn deficit. (Untaxed – the tax is only paid when auto-paying ongoing deficit from necrocorn stock.) Then reduce your stock of necrocorns by the surplus necrocorn consumption plus the amount of unmodified tax.
Otherwise, reduce your necrocorn deficit by the amount of fully-modified tax, and reduce your stock of necrocorns by the surplus necrocorn consumption plus the amount of half-modified tax.
OK, so much for the tax and the “deficit recovery per pyramid”. I said, about 100 pages of text ago, that using siphoning imposes two costs on you for the convenience and the incremental-ness. One of them is the tax when you have to draw on your necrocorn reserves rather than just leaching off the corruption process. The other is a cost of leaching off the corruption process: whatever quantity of alicorn-corruption you use to repay your pacts’ ongoing cost, you also pay the same quantity of uncorrupted alicorns. So if you have 8 pacts costing a total of 0.004 necrocorns per day, siphoning will reduce your necrocorn corruption rate by 0.004 per day (as described above) and also consume 0.004 uncorrupted alicorns per day. Usually this cost is utterly negligible compared with your rate of alicorn production.
The only other thing I should say is a reminder that your rate of necrocorn corruption isn’t necessarily constant: it’s higher when you have no necrocorns. So if the rate of pact-induced consumption is faster than your rate of necrocorn corruption with necrocorns, then eventually you’ll consume all your necrocorns (with the weirdly-modified tax, as described above!), and then your rate of necrocorn corruption will suddenly increase. That may make it enough that you no longer need to try to consume necrocorns … until the quantity of corruption reaches 1 and you make a new necrocorn, at which point the corruption rate goes down again and you start consuming your newly-made necrocorn. All this happens with a granularity of one day, so if e.g. you have leviathans to feed and you’re quick about it you can feed that necrocorn to the Elders before it starts getting eaten bit-by-bit by the siphoning machinery…
There are lots of things that will improve as your game progresses, and they combine with one another. I’ll compare your current situation with mine – my game is a lot further along than yours – not to make you feel bad but to give some idea of how much things can change.
First, the summary. I may have forgotten some things. The summary of the summary is: it’s mostly paragon and cryptotheology. (And the fact that cryptotheology is useful is why you don’t really have “plenty of relics” yet :-).)
OK, now some actual numbers. Again, the point isn’t “hahaha, my numbers are bigger than yours”; your numbers will get bigger, and plenty of people have bigger numbers than mine. The point is to give some idea of how things scale.
In my current run I’m a long way into the “Dark Future” so almost all my paragon is burned: I have about 84k bp and about 1250 unburned from time passing on the current run. I also have 110 Event Horizons. My wood cap is about 540G, letting me build 59 breweries for an unob festival bonus of +218% in Redmoon. My uranium cap is about 7G, letting me build 147 loutposts. My titanium cap is about 38G, letting me build 273 factories and 113 space elevators. I get a +5652% space production bonus; my net unob rate in Redmoon is about 3800/s, somewhere on the order of 20x your figure.
I have 339 tradeposts (plus the effect of several Pacifism completions) and 101 markers. Levi energy is maxed at 1065 (this would be 2x lower if it weren’t for ten Black Sky completions). A single trade caravan (5k unob) gets me about 45 TCs, so about 15x what you get.
And of course the much faster rate of TC production means that I can afford to buy more levels of RR; I’m on RR45 versus your RR7, meaning something like a 6x improvement in unob production through time travel – except that I also have 100 Blazars, which I think means that my RR is 3x as effective as it would be without them.
So if my calculations are right I’m getting TCs at something like 20 x 15 x 18 x your rate. And then I’m turning those into relics much faster because I have (110 Black Cores, hence) more pyramids and 116 Black Nexus. I have 24 BPs, and your first Black Sky challenge completion effectively gives you one more. So each 25 TCs turn into 1+BPxBN = 1+25x116 = 2901 relics.
My prescription: More paragon. Also, more paragon. Once you’re able to generate relics at a fair rate, cryptotheology. At some point, do some challenges.
I’d definitely pick burned paragon. (It’s definitely what I’m planning to do, but my game is quite a bit further along than yours. I’m not much tempted by the compendia option – I’m in mid-relic-run right now, which is where you might expect that to be valuable, and the only thing I care about that’s science-capped is space stations, and a few extra kittens are clearly much less useful than 1500bp.)
You can’t open it until after Eldermass, which means not until something like a week into January. What you get is based on where you are in the game, but you can control that somewhat. E.g., if you are at max Leviathenergy then you get the gift of burned paragon; so if that seems like a good idea to you, you can wait until your next relic run and open the present at some point when that’s the case; if not, you can open the present at a time when it isn’t the case.
Doesn’t look much like it from the save they shared. Only one AI core, 12.44K gigaflops.
@argonplatypus I’m pretty sure I know what’s happened but I don’t know how or why.
You had 186 warehouses. Somehow these got upgraded to 186 spaceports. Spaceports are very energy-expensive, more so when you have more of them.
I’m guessing that somehow you switched from a version of the game without spaceports to a version with spaceports and something got confused.
Anyway, there’s probably a better way to do it, but here is a nasty hacky way to fix it if the situation is still ongoing:
Open up the web developer tools in your browser and find the Javascript console. In it, type the following:
s = game.save(); s.buildings[11].stage = 0; game.saveImportDropboxText(game.compressLZData(JSON.stringify(s)), function() {})
This should turn your spaceports back into warehouses.
OK, so I’ve just upgraded to version 1.4.9.3, and now I have spaceports.
Spaceports are upgraded warehouses. (If I’m reading the code right, which I might not be, you can do the upgrade at any time, but there’s no point until you start having storage facilities in space.) When you do the upgrade you lose all the warehouse storage. Buying spaceports doesn’t directly give you more storage but it makes your moon bases and cryostations store more. It also makes planet crackers store more uranium. By 0.85% of base capacity per spaceport in each case.
Spaceports cost a lot of starcharts – first is 100k, and in addition to the regular compounded 15% increase for each you buy (reduced by price-reduction metaphysics) the starchart-cost goes up by a further factor of 1.35 per spaceport (unaffected by price-reduction metaphysics). I think I wouldn’t start buying them until I am not feeling at all starchart-constrained. (Which is probably a bit too late. I don’t like feeling resource-constrained and tend not to start buying much of anything until they start feeling fairly cheap.)
They also cost a nontrivial amount of energy, which I guess means that energy-improvement things (energy challenge, Dark Novas) are a little more valuable now that spaceports are a thing.
So e.g. I just replaced 360 warehouses with 50 spaceports (some way into a relic run, fairly late game, 38K burned paragon, TT25, blah blah); the extra storage let me build an extra two chronospheres, elevators/outposts to the value of about 5% extra in unob production, three more markers, and a bit of extra housing. Net energy cost of about 1000 units. Net starchart cost on the order of 10^13 starcharts.
So far as I can tell, that’s the whole story: no other weird interactions.
I think because it’s a thing that happens, literally, every game day. It isn’t happening continuously, like the things displayed as per-second; it happens at the start of each day. (Why is that? I dunno.) This isn’t the only thing that’s displayed in a similar way; there’s also antimatter generation from sunlifters, which happens once per game-year.
(Necrocorn corruption rate is also displayed “per day” and doesn’t happen continuously, though it’s a different kind of not-happening-continuously and it’s not that you get a fractional necrocorn every day.)
Unless you’re talking about some very new feature, there isn’t anything called exactly a “spaceport”. I’m going to guess you mean “when should I start doing space things and in what order?”; if I’m wrong about that, then everything I say may be useless to you.
I think you should head for space more or less as soon as you can (enough catpower, enough starcharts, a decent rate of oil generation); the main tradeoff is about starcharts, which you also want for (1) ships and hence titanium and (2) geodesy, but once you’re in space you can build satellites which bring a substantial increase in starchart generation rate.
Obviously the first thing you do (because it’s the only thing you can do before you’ve done other space things) is an Orbital Launch. This opens up (1) satellites, (2) space stations, (3) space elevators, and (4) a mission to the moon.
Depending on your exact energy situation, you may want to leave launching satellites until after you have Solar Satellites, and you may want to leave launching space stations until you have plenty of energy. I suggest getting Solar Satellites as quickly as you easily can and then getting as many satellites as you can; they will pay for their own cost in starcharts quickly (and hence, via getting more ships, for their cost in titanium).
You can’t build space elevators until you have unobtainium. You can’t get unobtainium until you have reached the moon. So, moon launch pretty early: I would say as soon after reaching space as you are able to do it.
Once you’re on the moon you will want to get making unobtainium. That means making lunar outposts. Unobtainium is very useful and initially you will be making it at a painfully slow rate. You should probably prioritize things that help with that. Space Manufacturing is a big one. More lunar outposts. Space elevators, but note that they cost unobtainium as well as helping you make it. Your first space elevator will cost you 50 unob and make unob generation 1% faster, which means it pays for itself on a timescale of 5000 unobtainium. If you’re expecting this run to get as far as making 5000 unobtainium (which it might or might not – if this is your first time in space, you might e.g. want to get as far as unobtainium huts, then build all the housing you can and reset) and if you aren’t impatient to get unob huts or something as quickly as possible, then it’s probably worth it.
Unless you’re expecting to reset pretty soon, then soon after your moon mission launch you will also want to set off for Dune. Lunar outposts eat uranium, and you can make quite a lot of uranium with the planet crackers you can build on Dune. You probably want to go to Piscine too to build research vessels for more starcharts.
If you expect this run to continue for a good long time then launch for T-minus too to build cryostations there for more storage (especially of unobtainium). First cryostation costs 25 eludium so 25k unob, but actually it should probably be a lower priority than e.g. microwarp reactors and eludium huts.
Other destinations are relevant if you want to start doing relic / time crystal things, which you almost certainly don’t on your first visit to space. Helios gets you sunlifters -> antimatter generation. Kairo gets you space beacons which (with the addition of a lot of antimatter) get you relic generation. Yarn gets you terraforming stations, which means that once you can make a lot of antimatter you can increase your population somewhat. Umbra gets you “HR Harvesters” which are useful energy sources once you’re many thousands of years into the game. Charon gets you “entanglement stations” which improve relic generation and let you build more AI cores safely (which in turn lets you make moon bases store more). Centaurus gets you another energy source. All of these things are only relevant once you’re substantially further on than your first trip to space.
You can sacrifice unicorns and use their tears to build unicorn-theology buildings that generate/attract alicorns, sacrifice alicorns to get time crystals, and refine time crystals to get relics. (It looks to me as if you’ve already been doing this. You say “I can’t refine them from 25 time crystals either.” but I think that’s just because you don’t currently have 25 time crystals. You already have enough alicorns to get 25 time crystals by sacrificing them, though you might do better to wait until you’ve built more Utopias and Sunspires.)
That’s a rather slow way to get relics. Once you have a few hundred time crystals and at least 5 relics, you can build some Sunlifters (space, Helios; you’ve already got a couple), which generate antimatter very slowly, and then buy the Chronoforge workshop upgrade, and then “Combust TC” to move through time more quickly and so get antimatter faster. Once you’ve got a big pile of antimatter – you’ll need to buy some Confinement Chambers, which it looks like you’ve already started doing – you can use it to buy the Relic Station workshop upgrade, at which point your Space Beacons will start generating relics.
BUT! All of this will be significantly less painful if you have a substantial amount of paragon, which you don’t at present. Perhaps you have philosophical or aesthetic objections to resetting; if not, before starting to chase relics at all you should do the (get as many kittens as you easily can, reset) cycle several times. This will give you more storage as well as faster production. Once you’ve got a reasonable amount of paragon, you should probably do a unicorn-religion-based time crystal run, not worrying about relics but building up enough time crystals that you can e.g. buy chronospheres so that subsequent runs are faster.
Yeah, the third run is definitely pretty early to be thinking about challenges.