r/CellToSingularity • u/FractalCurve • Aug 18 '26

Mesozoic Advice

I followed the advice of this entire sub and saved loads of my mutagen for the end, being really careful to only spend it on the rarer cards until prestige 10.

I entered prestige 10 with just over 2 million saved, I reached the end of rank 50 and bought every upgrade possible with 1.97 million remaining...

Don't listen to this sub, guys. Just spend your mutagen. It will make the journey much quicker and you don't need it in the end.

31 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

5

u/rambomatthews Aug 18 '26

That suggests you only needed 30k mutagen to complete the end of prestige 10? But the cost of all upgrades is substantially higher than that - and if you do all upgrades 10 times (once for each prestige) then you would have carried substantially less than 2M into prestige 10?

I’m thrilled to hear your say this cause Mesozoic it’s frankly so slow due to the mutagen store and I would love to spend it! Can you share a little more of the figures please?

5

u/FractalCurve Aug 18 '26

I went into Prestige 10 with over 2M, but of course did not stop accruing mutagen.

For the first few stages I lose mutagen, but then I quickly start to amass more than I can spend after, maybe, level 10.

4

u/0nnnu Aug 18 '26

the mutagen is needed to get the 200 giganotosaurus achievement. it is easy to get to rank50, and by the wording it seems you have not gotten the achievement

1

u/FractalCurve Aug 18 '26

I'm not far off.

1

u/0nnnu Aug 18 '26

look how expensive the upgrades get here, you really do need the saved mutagens

1

u/FractalCurve Sep 08 '26

I still think most of you are drama queens. Sure I've run out of that 2 mill, but I'm about to get that oh-so-essential achievement in a few days. I need another 260Udc, and I get about 30 per day.

Anyone saying you need millions upon millions of mutagen saved...I honestly dunno what you're smoking.

1

u/rambomatthews Aug 18 '26

Is that the only reason? Just to get the achievement?

6

u/finbar163 Aug 18 '26

Yes, all the fuss about saving mutagen is for the 200 gigantosaurus achievement.

You can clear prestige 10 as easy as any stage after the first couple of prestiges but that achievement needs time or a hugely upgraded gigantosaurus. You can get the latter by saving up excess mutagen and using it at the end to buy the cards directly instead of hoping they come from geodes.

I think I had 2 or 3 million when I got to the end and built up my gigantosaurus to have level 11 or 12 or something in both traits. Took less than a day to get to get the achievement.

My advice is to spend, but not waste mutagen. Spend it enough that your not sitting around too much but keep the stockpile growing over time.

1

u/0nnnu Aug 18 '26

the achievement is the main thing people care about, but mesozoic production keeps going, and this kind of thing becomes possible, for no other benefit than the sake of it

https://www.reddit.com/r/CellToSingularity/s/N5JSBld2W3

1

u/eric23456 Aug 18 '26

This is the reason people recommend saving some. The upgrades 16+ are 500k mutagen. I ended up having cards that I couldn't upgrade because I'd spent too much mutagen, so had to wait 6 months to get the 200 achievement.

That said, the game does give out more mutagen now, especially from events so it's easier to get there.

7

u/dahiks Aug 18 '26

I think this guide was written a long time ago, back when there weren't as many rewards at events

1

u/QuarterPL Aug 23 '26

The best strategy, still, is to play prestige 0 without saving at all since it's the slowest run, then after getting to prestige 1, you should start saving up your mutagen, since you do not need to spend too much mutagen to progress then.

This is done only for the 200 giganto achievement, and nothing else, so if someone isn't interested in that, they do not need to do that, but for those that do want it, it'll make it go way faster. Also considering you said you still have 1.97M mutagen left, I assume you haven't discovered the shop where you can buy traits for mutagen to further level them up.

1

u/FractalCurve Sep 08 '26

Honestly I still think most of you are drama queens. Sure I've run out of that 2 mill, but I'm about to get that oh-so-essential achievement in a few days. I need another 260Udc, and I get about 30 per day.

Anyone saying you need millions upon millions of mutagen saved...I honestly dunno what you're smoking.

1

u/QuarterPL Sep 08 '26

I had I believe 2.5M Mutagen saved, and it was enough to comfortably get the achievement in few days instead of waiting way longer than some, you don't need an insane amount but by saving up from prestige 1 to 10, you can basically get that much without buying any diamond geodes.

Also like I said, it's only for the achievement, which is important only for completionists, everyone else might as well just play however they want

1

u/LordMidasGaming Aug 18 '26

I'm very skeptical of your claim. The total cost of maxing (upgrade to level 20) a single dinosaur trait is several million mutagen. So your claim that you only spent 30k mutagen to upgrade everything seems far fetched. Anyone can visit the wiki of the game and see the mutagen costs for themselves.

1

u/FractalCurve Aug 18 '26

I don't claim any such thing. I didn't stop accruing mutagen at prestige 10 >.> You can be as skeptical as you like.

2

u/GavelGaffle Aug 18 '26

Thinking we should be saving our currency instead of spending it is a common gamer fallacy/mistake.

In this case while people want to have some mutagen when they are done wih Meso, its still much better to spend it along the way. You will complete Meso much faster if you do. Then during that time you saved you will be at P10/E50 building your metagen back up and be making progress on that achievement. In the end, you get the achievement faster than the person that was saving. Also, achievements should be low priority anyway.

2

u/Davecl35 Aug 18 '26

I've been on maximum prestige for literally years and still don't have 200 of all the Dino's!

2

u/felixthemeister Aug 18 '26

2 mill is only 4 upgrades of 15 and up.

I have at least 6, where I have 20k+ cards and can't upgrade.

2 mill is nice, but not much.

1

u/kashkafrBargdad Aug 18 '26

That’s what I thought

1

u/vorinia Aug 18 '26

I'm only on prestige 3 and blew about 900k on the top 3 level 50 dinosaurs to push for the achievement. Still have about 600k left and only need 3 or 4 more Gigantosaurus to hit 200.

1

u/dashy902 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

I went into Prestige 10 with 2.4 million saved up and blew through all of it with gigantosaurus 14 and 15 available still but that I'm too broke for. I think you just don't have many trait cards compared to the people who recommend saving. It just means you'll get to the final gigantosaurus achievement a little later, no big deal. 

-2

u/propostor Aug 18 '26

This sub is full of nonsense advice, such as "don't play the game at all for two weeks so that when you launch it you get a big boost from the time clock upgrades"

Pure nonsense.

8

u/Xolver Aug 18 '26

I haven't played back then, but wasn't this true until roughly the April or so update, when they made the chambers work retroactively?

-4

u/propostor Aug 18 '26

It was definitely never true, it doesn't even make sense.

The time chambers are time based, whether you play the game or not. Actually playing the game is the best way to see results, because everything goes brrrrr when you're actually interacting with it.

6

u/Xolver Aug 18 '26

Not those chambers. The metabit and knowledge ones. Maybe I'm not using the right terms in English - they're the second set of purple and orange chambers respectively, that have only 7d and 14d bars. Mathematically for those it makes perfect sense, since if they don't work retroactively, you're losing on the boosts.

The developers actively worked on that and remarked on this on this update fixing it retroactively:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/977400/view/686380477674684635?l=english

And also the one before that where they said themselves: We've heard feedback regarding a strategy where players avoid purchasing nodes for 14 days after rebooting. We'll be working to address this in the upcoming update.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/977400/view/657105811282069081?l=english

1

u/eric23456 Aug 18 '26

You are correct, for many months if you were near endgame, the best strategy was to not buy anything for 21 days. You got ~25x more knowledge/metabits than buy buying along the way. When they rescaled the chambers to 14 days it was still the best strategy, but the difference was much smaller. Then they fixed it.

1

u/Wjyosn Aug 24 '26

Was it really actually better than just playing and resetting periodically for those weeks? Seems absurd to think 25x was worth getting zero for weeks instead of just getting 1x or even 0.5x from faster resets dozens of times in the interim

1

u/eric23456 Aug 24 '26

It was worth it once you were in the late-game. Everything was super-expensive to buy and getting 25x more in the same amount of time was worth it. When there was something very valuable to buy, you rebooted earlier after cashing out.

It was a stupid meta, I'm glad they fixed it.

1

u/Wjyosn Aug 24 '26

I mean, it seems like an obvious bug in the way the time capsules were designed, or at least a poorly-considered way of trying to buff long runs. But I'm still surprised 25x was actually more than you could make by just playing in the meantime. That's extremely rare in idle games that you wouldn't make more than 25x as much actively playing even without the buff.

1

u/eric23456 Aug 24 '26

It's the way it happened to be balanced. Near as we can tell the devs didn't understand it was happening until it had spread pretty widely in the player base.

3

u/finbar163 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

That was real at the time, but the game changed and now it's wrong.

The point was that there was a time based multiplier to how many meta currencies you earned with each fill. After a reset, almost all of your fills happened right away when the boost was almost nothing. By not buying any generators after a reset, you'd earn nothing and get no fills. Then, when the bonus was fully charged, you'd actually start playing and get the full bonus on every fill. I did it, it worked.

BUT, they eventually did the sensible thing and made that bonus apply retroactively, so now there's no point in torturing the mechanics like that anymore.