Blogger Thæn Nothing — Kittens Game Apotheosis Farming: How I Learned To…
“And those who tried it had seen their modest earnings grow exponentially, justifying the mess they made of their lives.” – Hey Mister DJ I Thought You Said We Had A Deal, They Might Be Giants
Introduction
Kittens Game is an incredible incremental game. If playing incremental games aligns with your personal preferences, I highly recommend giving it a try. In this guide, I will reveal all the game mechanics and provide a complete walkthrough. Think of it as a tutorial, a speedrun guide, a love letter to a brilliantly designed system, or even a memoir of my insanity in the pursuit of achieving astronomical numbers.
To give you a brief overview, in Kittens Game, you are in charge of managing a village of kittens. You assign them different tasks to generate resources, which you can then use to construct buildings, purchase upgrades, and research technologies. The goal is to expand your village and build a mighty empire or a galactic federation of kittens. It’s your typical incremental game with a twist.
Along your journey, you will create hyper-efficient workaholic sun cultists, develop artificial intelligence with conflicting values, cross dimensions to commit genocide, engage in trade with unfathomable elder gods, and, of course, manipulate the timeline to start over and do it all again.
Let’s focus on the timeline manipulation aspect. Resetting your progress in the game rewards you with two resources: karma and paragon. Karma increases the happiness of your kittens, resulting in slightly higher production. Paragon, on the other hand, boosts production by up to 200% and increases storage capacity without any limit. It is an essential resource that can be utilized to acquire important upgrades called Metaphysics. Additionally, paragon can be converted into Burned Paragon, which is half as effective as regular Paragon, but the two can be stacked together. This means that with a high amount of both Paragon and Burned Paragon, you can achieve a +300% production boost. Pretty neat, huh?
Let’s talk numbers for a moment. Each kitten you have in the game grants you one point of Paragon. The costliest “normal” Metaphysics upgrade, Renaissance, requires 750 Paragon. As for the most expensive upgrade in the entire game, specifically designed for end-game players to have a long-term goal, it demands a whopping 60,000 Paragon.
Now, I didn’t mention one additional effect of Burned Paragon. It slightly enhances the traits of your village leader. You can assign a kitten to be the leader, and they receive a production boost. Each trait possessed by the leader provides a small bonus to your society. For example, a leader with the merchant trait grants you 3% more resources from trading, and a leader with the metallurgist trait increases the product yield by 10% when crafting metallic goods.
Burned Paragon directly influences the effectiveness of these traits, with the impact scaling proportionally to the square root of the Burned Paragon amount. This means that doubling your Burned Paragon will only double the increase in trait effect. For instance, with 100,000 Paragon and the Policy that doubles leader trait effects, a merchant leader would provide a 35% gain from trade. So, even in the total end-game scenario, the effect isn’t significant. Right?
Apotheosis
In a recent experimental alpha build of Kittens Game, a new resource was introduced: apotheosis. Apotheosis significantly amplifies the amount of Paragon acquired during each reset. It’s incredibly powerful, which is probably why it’s not a part of the main version of the game.
Each point of apotheosis grants a flat 1% increase to Paragon gain. This means that having 100 apotheosis will double your Paragon, and 300 apotheosis will quadruple it, and so on.
But how do you obtain apotheosis? By completing Challenges. These challenges require you to fulfill specific objectives, such as reaching the planet Helios, while operating under certain restrictions, like allowing only half of your kittens to work. Upon completing a Challenge, you earn apotheosis based on its difficulty. You can enable multiple Challenges simultaneously and receive rewards for each one as soon as you meet their respective goals.
Additionally, you have the option to enable Conditions, which make the Challenges even more challenging but also increase the apotheosis reward. For example, one Condition disables metaphysics upgrades.
In this guide, there are two crucial Challenges and one significant Condition that we will focus on.
The first important Challenge is Winter Has Come. When this Challenge is active, the production of catnip by your kitten farmers is unaffected by Paragon, and it’s constantly winter, resulting in a 75% reduction in catnip production from catnip fields.
At first glance, this Challenge might not seem like a big deal, but keep in mind that happy kittens consume more catnip. And guess whose kittens are in a perpetual state of euphoria due to their immense amount of positive karma?
So, in this Challenge, kittens consume 20 times more catnip, it’s always winter, and farmers don’t receive the Paragon bonus. It’s not as dire as it may sound, though. Due to their perpetual state of euphoria, farmers still produce more than the norm. However, it significantly influences early-game decision-making.
Completing Challenges not only grants apotheosis but also rewards you with additional resources. For instance, Winter Has Come gives you 1000 void upon completion, which is a substantial amount. Normally, void can only be acquired in small quantities (less than 10) from periodic events that occur every 15 minutes.
The objective of Winter Has Come is to reach the planet Helios. While the Challenge itself poses a low level of difficulty with a relatively small apotheosis reward, the void you acquire will prove useful.
The second important Challenge is Atheism. While this Challenge is active, you cannot gain or use faith. This Challenge significantly affects the gameplay. Remember those workaholic sun cultists I mentioned earlier? In normal endgame scenarios, the production bonus from Solar Revolution is so high (around 8000%) that once you unlock it, you can breeze through the rest of the tech tree, essentially completing it in less than five minutes. While this setup is highly efficient, it can also become monotonous in the long run, as you’re simply clicking through menus as quickly as possible to build housing for kittens and then resetting.
Enabling the Atheism Challenge results in a longer and more engaging playthrough, providing a considerable amount of apotheosis.
The objective of the Atheism Challenge is to build a cryochamber, which requires gathering numerous time crystals and reaching the end of the tech tree.
Now, let’s discuss the important Condition: “No Apocrypha.” This Condition disables several religion-related upgrades. However, since we already have Atheism enabled, this Condition adds minimal difficulty. Nonetheless, it offers a massive multiplier to apotheosis rewards, approximately 20 times.
So, our focus will be on starting from scratch, in a godless world of eternal winter, and progressing to reach the distant planet of Helios, where we will construct a Cryochamber to preserve the lives of our society’s greatest kittens. This strategy yields approximately 450 Apotheosis and can be repeated indefinitely.
It All Comes Together
This unique combination of Challenges and Conditions results in an extraordinary amount of apotheosis, which, in turn, generates an enormous quantity of Paragon. The leader, made incredibly powerful by this setup, possesses traits that contribute to truly captivating gameplay and optimization challenges. Despite having numbers that are 10 to 100 times higher than initially designed, the game’s systems manage to create captivating experiences. I believe this is primarily due to the impeccable design of Kittens Game’s mechanics and a touch of cosmic luck.
In this guide, I will share the strategies I use to complete this run as quickly as possible, making it a delightful speedrun experience. My personal record stands at 2 hours, 48 minutes, and 5 seconds in real-time, equivalent to Year 12, Autumn, Day 42 according to the in-game calendar.
“Rules”
To ensure an enjoyable and intriguing run, I follow a set of self-imposed guidelines:
Offline progression is disabled, but pausing is allowed. The time spent paused does not count towards the total playtime. This allows for more thoughtful decision-making and prevents the run from becoming a mindless checklist.
Keyboard shortcuts for simple actions, such as leader switching, worker assignment, pausing, upgrading leaders, and observing events, are permitted. However, observing events must require actively pressing a button each time; holding down a key for continuous observation is not allowed. I made a hotkey script specifically for this run, incorporating all the necessary shortcuts.
Opening multiple instances of the game to manipulate trading RNG is allowed. No one enjoys a run dependent on luck, and I justify this action within the game’s universe as “timeline manipulation.” Admittedly, this rule is somewhat questionable.
Prerequisites and a Disclaimer on Numbers
Before diving into the specifics, let’s establish the prerequisites and address the numbers presented in this guide.
To embark on this run and achieve optimal results, you should have:
Completed the Anarchy and Black Sky Challenges at least once.
Accumulated a significant amount of Burned Paragon (over 100,000) and a moderate amount of regular Paragon (over 500) to maximize your production bonus.
Acquired all the available Metaphysics upgrades.
As for the numbers cited in this guide, they are based on my own resource totals at the time of writing. Keep in mind that these numbers may differ from yours due to various factors. Since this run entails specific and unusual circumstances, with costs exponentially increasing rather than following a linear progression, it is challenging for me to determine how the optimal quantities of certain resources would change if you possess more or fewer Burned Paragon or Karma than I do.
For the sake of consistency and to ensure this guide remains a valuable reference for me and others, I will base the specific numbers mentioned on my own resource totals. Here are my current stats:
Even if your numbers differ from mine, many of the strategies discussed will still apply, provided you have fulfilled the prerequisites.
Outline
To provide a comprehensive guide, let’s outline each distinct phase of the run. Each phase will be covered in detail in separate posts, as there is much to discuss within each segment.
Phase 1: Start to Leader: In this phase, we aim to develop a powerful leader by accumulating job experience. We must mitigate the risk of starvation, establish a thriving village, and create an exceptional education system.
Phase 2: Leader to Geodesy: To fully utilize our leader’s trading abilities, we need to unlock the gold production from Geodesy. This phase focuses on celestial observations, maritime exploration, the beginning of the industrial revolution, and maintaining an ongoing party 24/7.
Phase 3: Geodesy to Astrophysicists: Acquiring the rare metal required for our objectives necessitates profound knowledge about space. This stage revolves around luxury housing, negotiations with Zebras, and the advent of the internet.
Phase 4: Astrophysicists to Cryochamber: This final stretch tests our skills and determination. We strive to privatize the moon and negotiate with elder gods to accomplish our goal.
Stay tuned for the in-depth discussions on each phase and discover the strategies to optimize your gameplay in Kittens Game.
