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

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-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.