Despite being a seemingly simple Idle Game, Cookie Clicker has a variety of achievements that range from incredibly difficult to borderline unfair. While many of the more difficult achievements are Shadow Achievements that are not required for 100% Completion (unless you're playing on Steam, where they still count as achievements for the platform), there are still a fair number of them that are required to get the maximum milk rank.
open/close all folders
Normal achievements
- Some of the "have X of this building" achievements get ridiculously expensive. The worst one as of version 2.052 is Introspection, for having 700 You, which costs duovigintillions of cookies, a number with upwards of 70 zeroes. For comparison, the most expensive You upgrade, "Reading your clones bedtime stories", costs only about 27 unvigintilion, about 1000 times less than it costs to own 700 of said building. By extension, this also makes the final "have X of all buildings" achievement, Septcentennial equally as difficult, as it requires the player to have at least 700 of every building.
- Black Cat's Paw, the achievement for clicking 7,777 golden cookies. While this has gotten easier since its introduction thanks to things such as the Grimoire note and Garden letting you speed up golden cookie spawns, and even lost its former Shadow achievement status, this still takes a painfully long time, especially since Cookie Storm cookies don't count for the achievement.
- The final cookie milestone achievement as of version 2.052 is And a little extra, which requires the player to bake 1 trevigintillion (1072) cookies in one ascension. By contrast, the last CPS milestone achievement (Speed is the name of the game (no it's not it's called Cookie Clicker)) requires the player to bake only 100 septendecillion cookies per second (1056 CPS). Most of that income will likely have to come from combining Golden Cookies, making the last few cookie milestone achievements some of the most tedious to obtain.
- Any achievement dealing with sugar lumps, especially the "Years worth of cavities" and "reach level 10 (building)" achievements. Since you gain approximately 1 sugar lump per day note , it would take a whole year to get the former achievement. By the same logic, it would take 55 days to get any of the buildings to level 10. Getting all of the buildings (of which there are 20 as of version 2.052) to level 10 would take 1100 days, a little over three years. Getting the golden sugar lump shadow achievement (which fortunately doesn't count towards milk) has a 0.03% chance of occurring each day, meaning the average amount of time it would take to get it would be five years. With the introduction of Gardens, it is possible to speed things up to an extent - a Juicy Queenbeet produces a sugar lump when harvested, and with a full-size garden and all relevant buffs, you can get around four extra sugar lumps a day on average - doing it this way has its own caveats; see the section below.
- Keeper of the Conservatory, and by extension Seedless to Nay. The former is obtained from completing the full seed catalog, while the other is obtained for sacrificing it for ten sugar lumps. Getting all of the seeds is easier said than done, as several of the Garden plants are extremely frustrating to obtain, either due to extremely low mutation chances, expensive seeds, slow or inconsistent growth times, or obscure mutation requirements - or in the worst cases, all of the above.note To make things more frustrating, several plants hurt far more than they help.
- Bakeberry is one of the first frustrating ones. It's fairly simple to get - just crossbreed Baker's Wheat, the starting crop, with itself, right? Unfortunately, it has a 0.1% chance to spawn. Baker's Wheat thankfully has a minor, but useful, effect in boosting your CPS by a small amount, so it isn't hurting you, but it can still take an absurdly long time to get.
- Cronerice is one of the first wake-up calls to just how long completing the seed catalogue can take. It takes, on average, about 70 ticks to reach maturity, which is over three hours on the fastest soil type. It also has three possible mutations, and each of them has a low mutation chance, and one of them requires Cronerice with one of its children, meaning that even with the best mutation luck you'll likely have to grow it at least twice to get everything.
- Golden Clovers are just a slightly more powerful version of the Ordinary Clover, adding 3% to golden cookie spawn frequency over the Ordinary's 1%. It also has the lowest mutation chance in the game, at 0.07% under optimal conditions. You'd better notice it quickly, too, as on top of having an extremely unpredictable aging process, your average window for harvesting it and getting its seed is a mere five ticks.
- Queenbeets have detrimental effects while they're growing. Each Queenbeet drops your CPS by 2%. In addition, they're frustrating to even get growing to begin with; they mutate from Bakeberries, already mentioned above, and Chocoroot, which require the CPS-draining brown mildew to be mutated.
- If that wasn't bad enough, Queenbeets have an even more powerful sibling: the Juicy Queenbeet. Juicy Queenbeets can only spawn in the center of a 3x3 ring of Queenbeets (and nothing in the game ever hints that there are plants that need more than two "parents" to mutate), and have a base 0.1% chance to spawn per tick. With the maximum farm size, you have enough space to plant four of these rings, giving you four chances per tick to get one - which also means you're suffering -64% CPS the whole time, and with the chance of getting one being so low, you could potentially suffer this debuff for hours at a time. Once you finally get one to spawn, it has by far the longest growth time in the game, taking over two days even on the fastest soil type. Even worse, each Juicy Queenbeet gives you a -10% CPS debuff and makes all plants surrounding it less efficient, making it hard to mitigate via positive plant effects. Each Juicy Queenbeet, when harvested, gives you a single sugar lump, which can potentially cut down on the time needed for some of the above sugar lump achievements, but depending on your view it might not even be worth it.
- Two plants, brown mold and Crumbspore, have a chance of spawning when harvesting mature Meddleweed. Not only are these the only plants that spawn when a mature plant is harvested (as opposed to just spawning next to them when the proper mutation conditions are met and you get lucky), Meddleweed is a completely detrimental plant that does nothing and that you're likely to just destroy whenever it initially spawns. If you're diligent about keeping your garden free of weeds, freeze your garden before going to bed, and aren't reading a guide, you'll quickly run into a dead end without the fungus crops for further crossbreeding.
- Several of the fungus plants have the ability to overtake other nearby plants, killing them in the process, which can be a major source of pain when trying to crossbreed multiple things at once. You can either risk having them kill valuable or rare plants, or dedicate your entire field to nothing but fungi.
- Everdaisy is incredibly annoying for its strange mutation requirement: it has a chance of spawning on any space that has three Tidygrass and three Elderwort touching it. Nothing in the game even hints that any plant can need more than two parents, making it and the Juicy Queenbeet mentioned above a case of Guide Dang It!. It isn't even that useful, essentially being a weaker, but immortal version of the already very long-lived Tidygrass.
- Any child of green rot is annoying to get for one simple reason: Green rot is absurdly short-lived, lasting only an average of two ticks before dying. While it doesn't take long to grow new ones, it's extremely annoying since you can't just plop a few down and come back later like you can with most mutations, you have to give the Garden constant attention since they only last a few minutes at most.
- To add insult to injury, seven plants have their own unique, extremely-rare upgrades that can be unlocked when you harvest a mature plant, with the most common having a chance of 1.5% and the lowest being only 0.1%. Thankfully, once obtained, they remain unlocked through each ascension. In addition, whether or not you get a drop is determined when you harvest the plant, meaning you can Save Scum to try and save yourself some time.
- While the seasonal achievements have gotten a lot easier ever since 1.041 introduced season switching makes them much easier, several holiday achievements are extremely frustrating to obtain:
- Hide & seek champion requires the player to collect all of the Easter egg upgrades. It's much harder than it sounds, as unlike the other holiday upgrades, eggs are separated into two different tiers of rarity, with the "rare" eggs appearing much less frequently than usual. This adds another layer of luck to an already Luck-Based Mission, making the act of obtaining the eggs much more tedious than needed.note Thankfully, getting the achievement doubles the drop rate of eggs on all future ascensions, making it a lot less annoying to get them all on future runs.
- Eldeer, which requires you to pop a Reindeer during an Elder Frenzy. It's a hugely frustrating Luck-Based Mission, as you have to take the risk of clicking a Wrath Cookie to get the Elder Frenzy bonus, and have a Reindeer pop up at the same time. Making matters worse is the fact that said bonus lasts for only six seconds (or twelve with the Get Lucky upgrade). At the very least, you'll get five and a half hours' worth of cookies from meeting the conditions for the achievement. Notably, once upon a time, people were trying to do it long before it was an achievement because of the insane amount of cookies it gives, and the achievement was added as a nod to this meta, but in an era of combos and much more efficient strategies, however, this just serves as a frustration.
- Reindeer sleigher isn't all that bad by itself, just pop 200 reindeer, right? Unlike most other "do this thing X amount of times" achievements, the number of reindeer you've popped resets between ascensions, making it very unlikely that you'll obtain this one without knowing it exists and intentionally triggering Christmas season multiple times.
- Several achievements are based on Easter Eggs that aren't conveyed to the player at all, and aren't likely for you to do during normal play.
- Two are based around resizing the game's window. Cookie-dunker requires you to make the window short enough that the Big Cookie touches the milk river below it, while Stifling the press requires you to make the window skinny enough that the news ticker only displays "News: help!" and then click it.
- Many are based around clicking things that look like inconsequential background elements, if you even notice their existence at all. Tiny cookie is any of the small cookies used as bullet points on the Stats page, Baby it's old outside is one of the Santa's helper grandmas shown amongst the other grandmas during Christmas season, Here you go is the slot for the achievement (it's the one directly to the right of "What's in a name"), and Olden days is the madeleine found all the way at the bottom of the Info page.
- While Uncanny Clicker has been made significantly easier than it used to be, it's still very difficult to attain without cheating. The description says you have to click "really, really fast". The exact specifics of how it's implemented are a bit strangenote , achieving it with just a mouse and your index finger is near impossible. Using a graphics tablet, a dedicated mouse setup, or Window's mouse keys function are the most reliable ways of getting it without just outright cheating.
- Liquid Assets requires extensive usage of the Stock Market to achieve $10 million in profits. The Stock Market is already seen as the least enjoyable minigame as-is, with most people only ever using the Loan system for buffs while ignoring basically everything else since making profit from it is exceedingly slow and luck-based. Not only does this achievement require a comically-large amount of profit be made, a particularly cruel element comes in with how the Stock Market's profit total isn't saved between prestiges, resetting to 0 every time. The result is that the player has to stay on the exact same run while they grind the Stock Market into dust.
Shadow achievements
When even the game itself states that these are "unfair or difficult to obtain", you should know you're in for a hard time.
- All of the Speed Baking achievements are very difficult to obtain. Each one requires you to get to one million cookies within a certain time period on a fresh save or Born Again challenge run - 35 minutes for I, 25 for II, and 15 for III. The first one isn't too bad if you have a decent strategy (or start during Christmas season, as the Santa upgrades and reindeer drops give you a massive advantage), the second one less so, but Speed Baking III is a frustrating Luck-Based Mission; the only way you can possibly get that many cookies in such a short time is to get the perfect combination of Golden Cookies and have two show up in the shortest possible interval.
- Seven Horseshoes is the even more nasty big brother of Black Cat's Paw (mentioned above). This one requires 27,777 golden cookies to obtain.
- True Neverclick is a more challenging variant of Neverclick, requiring you to get to one million cookies baked on a Born Again run without clicking the Big Cookie at all. The only way to get cookies without clicking the Big Cookie is to wait for golden cookies to spawn, and hope you get a "Lucky!" reward, as all other possibilities rely on your CPS, clicking, or buildings to work and thus won't give you anything when you have none of those things at your disposal. While not difficult, it can be incredibly tedious; since you're on Born Again, you have no upgrades to make golden cookies spawn any faster, and you don't have the Golden Chime to let you focus on another window until you hear one appear, you have to watch the screen like a hawk to snag one at their base appearance rate of once every 3.5 to 10.5 minutes. Oh, and did we mention that one "Lucky!" isn't enough to afford a cursor, forcing you to do it twice?
- When the Cookies Ascend Just Right requires you to have exactly one trillion cookies in the bank when you ascend. This achievement requires immense persistence to get.
- Gaseous Assets, like its cousin Liquid Assets, requires you to make a massive profit on the Stock Market, but this one is even worse, requiring $31.536 million (an entire year of CPS).
