ChooseYourOwnLump

Choose Your Own Lump!

This is an add-on for Cookie Clicker that helps manipulating time so that the right coalescing lump type can be chosen.

Getting Started (aka TL;DR)

1. The number of grandmas, the stage of the grandmapocalypse, the slot that Rigidel is being worshipped, and the auras of the dragon can all be used to indirectly manipulate the type of the next coalescing sugar lump (similarly to how Force the Hand of Fate planners can be used to achieve big combos).

2. This mod tries all possibilities and tells you which ones give the desired lump types. Look at the pictures below and try to understand what the mod is telling you; this information is available in the lump tooltip.

3. Add the mod to your game following the instructions below, choose your lump type and adjust your buildings/dragon etc. accordingly, export your save, wait for the lump to be auto-harvested, and then load your save game again. If everything went alright the type of your next lump is the one you choose!

4. The most common issue is the discrepancy. In short, the game does not account for Javascript being slow, so sometimes the game misses the autoharvesting time by one or two millisecond. Reload your save game until the discrepancy matches the expected discrepancy (typically 1); the tooltip will provide instructions as needed.

Theory

Introduction

Coalescing sugar lumps are the sugar lumps that generate roughly once a day right under the “Stats” button. There are five types of sugar lumps: normal, bifurcated, golden, meaty, and caramelized. After the current sugar lump is harvested, the next sugar lump starts growing.

The type of the next sugar lump is randomly determined as soon as the previous one is harvested, although their appearance only starts differing after 57% of its growth has happened. The key here is that the random seed used to determine the next lump type depends only on the game’s random seed and the time that the lump started growing. Thus we can look at all the possibilities of time for the “birth” of the lump and manipulate this value to give us the type we want.

The most obvious way of manipulating the sugar lump birth time would be simply harvesting a ripe sugar lump at the right moment. However, the game uses millisecond precision for determining when the lump started growing, so if we miss the mark by more than one millisecond we get an essentially random lump type. We would need to write a script to achieve this super-human reaction time, and I believe this is a bit too much cheating for my taste.

Therefore, our goal is to manipulate the growing time of the current sugar lump and let the game autoharvest it.

Manipulating the Next Lump Type

The following factors affect the harvest time of the current lump and the type of the next lump:

• The time the current lump started coalescing;
• The heavenly upgrades Stevia Caelestis, Sucralosia Inutilis, and Sugar Aging Process;
• The game seed;
• Which slot Rigidel is in;
• The number of grandmas (if Sugar Aging Process is present);
• Dragon auras Dragon’s Curve and Reality Bending; and
• The stage of the grandmapocalypse.

The first three are “persistent”, requiring an ascension to change; the latter four are “transient” and can be changed within an ascension.

Knowing the factors above is exactly what we need to simulate the choice of the next lump type… except for the discrepancy, explained below. (In ChooseYourOwnLump.js, this simulation is contained in the method CYOL.PersistentState.prototype.predictLumpType.)

Harvesting Methods

Besides clicking on the lump to harvest it, a new sugar lump starts growing if the game is open and the lump falls (i.e. it becomes overripe, so the lump is autoharvested), or when a save game is loaded and the game notices the previous lump fell. Two different pieces of code handle each of the latter two, and the timing of the first one (lump falling while the game is open) is unreliable. So we will use the second one.

The plan goes as follows: we choose a combination of the transient states that gives us the lump of our choice, modify the state accordingly, save the game (preferably exporting it), wait for the autoharvest time to pass, load the save game, and hope for the best.

A Wrench in our Plans

There is one issue, however: the part of the game code which grants us lumps when the game is loaded (Game.loadLumps) calls Date.now() three times, and Javascript is too slow to guarantee that all these three calls return the same number. Typically there is a discrepancy of one or two milliseconds between these two calls. This is where savescumming enters. If we assume that the discrepancy will be 1 (i.e. one millisecond will elapse between the first and last call of Date.now() in Game.loadLumps), we can simulate the calculation of the next lump type accordingly, and then we just need to load the game a few times until we actually get the simulated discrepancy.

In my machine, roughly 50% of the time the discrepancy is 1 millisecond, so this is the default setting for the mod.

Practice

This mod looks at every combination of “transient states” (number of grandmas, dragon auras, Rigidel slot, grandmapocalypse stage), filters the predictions to the lump types of your choice, and displays them in the lump tooltip (the box that appears when you hover the mouse over the sugar lump). The tooltip looks like this:

The “Predicted next lump type” line says that, if the player makes no changes to its save game, then the next lump type will be caramelized.

The first line says that, if the player is in stages 1, 2 or 3 of the grandmapocalypse (awakened, displeased, or angered grandmas), Rigidel active in the jade slot, and the dragon has only Reality Bending as the active aura, then the next sugar lump type will be meaty.

The second line says that, regardless of the stage of the grandmapocalypse, if Rigidel is inactive and the dragon has neither Dragon’s Curve nor Reality Bending as active auras, then the sugar lump will be caramelized.

For the first line, only one of the two relevant auras (Dragon’s Curve and Reality Bending) is needed, so this configuration works with a partially-trained dragon. If the dragon is fully trained, then the other aura must be set to something other than Dragon’s Curve.

All of this assumes, of course, that the discrepancy that happens when loading the save game matches the one assumed during the calculations. Thus some savescumming may be needed to guarantee that the discrepancy matches the assumed value. This value can be adjusted in the settings, but I believe most users will want that value to be 1.

In the screen above, the current lump type is bifurcated, as can be seen in the second line of the paragraph above the predictions. This line will always say the type of the lump regardless of the growth stage.

Only the predictions whose lump types were selected by the user are shown. The predictions which result in shortest lump growth time are shown first in the tooltip.

If the heavenly upgrade “Sugar Aging Process” is purchased, then the number of grandmas matter for the sugar lump growth time. The required number is displayed right after the colon:

Sometimes, the predicted configuration will limit how far (or how early) in the grandmapocalypse the game can be; for example, in the first line of the tooltip above, only the first two stages of the grandmapocalypse (and Dragon’s Curve active, and Rigidel in the diamond slot) yield the golden lump type. If you are past that stage, the only way of going back is to stop the grandmapocalypse either through Elder Pledge or Elder Covenant.

You can check the grandmapocalypse stage on the Status menu, or by looking at the picture of the grandmas in your buildings list; they will match the ones displayed in the tooltip.

In some rare cases, the required stages are on “the middle”. For example, in the fifth line above, only stage 1 (awoken grandmas) work. If you are past this stage, the only way of still getting the golden lump is to use the Elder Covenant to get out of the grandmapocalypse, then revoking the elder covenant to start the grandmapocalypse again, and exporting the save and quitting the game before the grandmapocalypse progresses to stage 2. This will “freeze” the grandmapocalypse until the game is reopened, allowing the lump to be harvested under stage 1.

Increasing the number of grandmas by 200 is equivalent to raising Rigidel one slot (unslotted to Jade, Jade to Ruby, or Ruby to Diamond). For example, in the image above, the second line is equivalent to using 337 grandmas instead of 537, but worshipping Rigidel in the Diamond slot. They have exactly the same results, so the mod only displays the one with the most grandmas.

Compatibility with Spiced Cookies

As a special provision, if Spiced Cookies is in use and the discrepancy patch is enabled, this mod assumes that the discrepancy is zero, regardless of what is set in the settings.

Using the mod

The best solution is adding https://staticvariablejames.github.io/ChooseYourOwnLump/ChooseYourOwnLump.js to Cookie Clicker Mod Manager.

Alternatively, run

    Game.LoadMod('https://staticvariablejames.github.io/ChooseYourOwnLump/ChooseYourOwnLump.js');

on your browser Javascript console, or create a bookmarklet with the code

    javascript:(function(){Game.LoadMod('https://staticvariablejames.github.io/ChooseYourOwnLump/ChooseYourOwnLump.js');}());

Changelog

1.0.0

Initial release.

1.0.1

Functionally equivalent states are no longer generated multiple times; for example, instead of generating a state with 500 grandmas and Rigidel on the ruby slot and another state with 300 grandmas and Rigidel on the diamond slot, only the former one is generated.

1.0.2

States that differ only in the grandmapocalypse stage are now shown together.

More than half of the time all four stages of the grandmapocalypse yield the same lump. This should help declutter the display screen. However, to display everything, I made the sugar lump tooltip wider in a kludgey manner; this might cause incompatibilities if any other mod messes with that tooltip.

1.0.3

Update to Cookie Clicker 2.029, CCSE 2.017.

Nothing really changed sugar-lump-wise besides version numbers.

1.0.4

Minor UI improvements.

1.0.5

The discrepancy is now displayed in the lump tooltip.

1.1.0

Released under GPLv3 or later.

Technically the minor version number should have been increased a few patch versions ago, since more functionality was added (significantly improved displaying of states and displaying the discrepancy).

1.1.1

Fix visual bug regarding the display of the discrepancy.

1.1.2

Warn the player if the Pantheon was not loaded when the lump type was being computed.

1.1.3

Remove code injection to Game.lumpTooltip that showed the lump type, as this information is already shown together with the discrepancy.

1.1.4

Fixed nasty bug when loading settings. (Sometimes CYOL.UI.settings.discrepancy was being loaded as a string, resulting in wrong predictions due to Javascript silently performing string concatenation where it should add two numbers.)

Thanks to u/cookieliker and u/GLucky88 for the bug report!

1.1.5

Display version number in the stats menu.

1.2.0

Add option to only show predictions matching the current grandmapocalypse stage, the current dragon auras, and the current pantheon configuration.

1.2.1

Use CCSE v2.018.

1.2.2

Update to Cookie Clicker v2.031.

1.2.3

Register the mod in the modding API and use it for storing the settings.

1.2.4

Minor tooltip improvement: the current lump type also has an icon now.

1.2.5

Compatibility with Spiced Cookies’ discrepancy patch.

1.2.6

Update to CCSE 2.021 and display a notification on load.

1.2.7

Update to CCSE 2.023.

1.3.0

Several internal changes; mainly, porting the mod to TypeScript and adding a robust test suite.

Bug fix: The setting to search for meaty lumps was not being saved.

1.3.1

Update to CCSE 2.025.

1.3.2

Update to CCSE 2.026.

The mod won’t check the CCSE version anymore. (Reasoning: currently CCSE updates far more frequently that Choose Your Own Lump, and usually in a backwards-compatible manner. Not asking CCSE version every time makes the mod a bit more future-proof.)

Known Bugs/Limitations

The performance is abysmal: it takes roughly 5 seconds on my machine to scan through all possibilities. This is particularly bad when savescumming, because the mod may try to re-scan all possibilities every time the save game is reloaded.

License

Choose Your Own Lump is a Cookie Clicker add-on. Copyright (C) 2020 Static Variable James

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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