Top Ten Study Tips (alternate title: How I Optimized Cookie Clicker)

Hello literate, sighted people and potentially those being read to,

I'm The Noah

First name The,

Last name Noah,

And THIS is Noahbody Cares. Sorry for accidentally making a post I cared about last time, we should be back to your regularly scheduled RUBBISH now.

So I'm a sophomore at [university], and it can be stressful to sit and do homework alone. Sometimes I combat this by doing homework with others, though I've yet to find a group that doesn't get distracted every .5 seconds (Yes, I'm aware the common denominator in all these groups is the fact they contain exactly 1 The Noah). When I really need to focus I find somewhere quiet and promise myself I'll work hard for at least an hour or two. 

It was around the 2 hr mark on one of these solo missions that I decided to revisit an old passive game Cookie Clicker http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/ (one of those "clicker" games where you watch a number increase and you can leave and come back every few hours or days and buy things to make the number increase faster.) I figured I'd play for a few minutes and get back to work... And I did... For a while...

You see, my strategy in passive games like Adventure Capitalist and Cookie Clicker is usually just buy the most expensive thing you can afford until you're out of money, and then change windows and do homework or study for the test on Thursday until I think about it again or get to a stopping point. Once I was done with all my homework I was generating hundreds of thousands of cookies, when I starting trying to improve my strategy.

Unreadable simplified
Spreadsheet that I made just
for you, that you can't read :/

Okay, so every type of building you buy has a little number beside it that shows how many cookies it will generate every second (CPS or Cookies Per Second). Every time you buy a building (with the currency of the world - cookies of course) the price of that building increases by 15%. So, since I'm an engineer and I had a test I hadn't studied for on Wednesday, I launched excel and tried to calculate which building would really be the most worthwhile investment for my cookie empire.

You want more pictures to look at? Here!

After playing around for a minute I realized that CPS/Cost gave you a number for how much any given building was worth. If that sounds confusing to you let me give you an example: Imagine you are shopping for a printer so you can make some counterfeit money, horrible you! But don't worry, you're printing cash so you can donate to charity and buy merch from musicians you would otherwise just quietly enjoy on Spotify, so that makes it okay. Anyway your options are a $10,000 printer that can print 60 bucks in a day, a $50 printer that can print 40 bucks per day, and a $5 printer that can only print a crisp $1 bill every eon. Obviously, the 50 dollar one feels like the best deal, even though it won't print the most money in a day, and its not the cheapest. The printer that's the most "worth" the most is the one that can print the most fake dollars in a day per real dollar you spent buying it.

So here was my spreadsheet roughly:

building cost/price   CPS C/cost = WORTH Grandma 655  18,760 28.641 Farm 11 313 27.946 Mine 26 724 27.846 Tower 2,330 63,750 27.361 Factory 162 3,660 22.593 Bank 22 365 16.667 cursor 18 210 11.932

Pretty good right? Using this data realized that I had really underappreciated "low cost-low output" buildings like Grandmas, so I apologized to Grandma and promised to visit ore often (which of course was a lie I'm busy studying for a test Thursday after all), then I bought more buildings and adjusted my spreadsheet after each few purchases.

Now I guess I'm done for the day, I better study for that test... Unless... I noticed that the numbers for "worth" were kind of random, and as the ratio between CPS and cost fluctuated sometimes it was hard to tell at a glance which "worth" was the highest. For a while, I would multiply or divide all the worth's by some number I picked so that they were a little closer to 1 and it was easier to tell which one was worth the most... But hey, if I figure out how to find the maximum value in a column, I can divide them all by that number, and since 28/28 (or any number/that number) equals 1:

building	cost in millions	CPS	C/cost = WORTH	WORTH adjusted
Shipment	20,600	793000	38.495	1
Temple	3,520	111,000	31.534	0.819
Bank	655	18,760	28.641	0.744
Farm	11	313	27.946	0.726
Mine	26	724	27.846	0.723
Tower	2,330	63,750	27.361	0.711
Factory	162	3,660	22.593	0.587
add 2%	5,000	102000	20.4	0.53
Grandma	22	365	16.667	0.433
cursor	18	210	11.932	0.31
			Max Value:
			38.495

           New spreadsheet for your eyes to enjoy, I even made it a pretty color for you.

Are you still with me? Do you see how the adjusted worth of each building is clearly a percentage of the value of the most valuable option? I also added bonuses to my spreadsheet as they appeared like "increase total CPS by 2% for 5 billion cookies"! is that a good deal? How much is 2%? Well, I don't have to worry about it because my spreadsheet knows that it's only half as worthwhile as buying another "Shipment" building.

Okay, now I'm sleepy... And I need to study or a test in the morning.

Glad to be back to posting rubbish no on will read. Also, glad I'm enjoying being alive atm, although I could stand to lay of the cookies for a minute.

~ The Noah... signing out or whatever