Synergism is an Idle Game by Platonic/Pseudonian2/Pseudo-Corp released in 2020. It has you produce Coins with buildings you buy. However, the game's main point is its titular synergy. After you purchase some upgrades, every building you buy is going to affect other buildings. As more resource become available and new mechanics open up, nearly everything will start affecting something else and won't become obsolete. The game is so long and massive that it's going to take months to reach the endgame, with some parts also being convoluted/requiring a specific setup to get through efficiently.
It is playable here
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Note that the game hides a lot of its content before you unlock it. It's impossible to talk about many of its systems without spoiling them.
This game provides examples of:
- A.I.-Generated Economy: You can unlock the ability to buy buildings and Automators/Multipliers/Automator Boosts automatically when affordable, which are usually bought in the Automation Shop. You can also unlock upgrades that let you automate upgrade purchases for different categories, New Game Plus tiers, and tier resource gain per-second.
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: Challenge 10 runs the first five challenges at the same time, in addition to Coin production getting divided by e12,500,000 and a base goal of 1e3,500B Coins.
- Ant Assault: The game has you take care of anthill starting from the early-to-midgame. It normally doesn't cause problems, but the third upgrade unlocked for it makes those ants scare off the taxman for up to a 99% tax reduction.
- Broke the Rating Scale: Researches 4x12, 4x13, and 4x14 are called "0/5 Multipliers SUCK", "-1/5 A.Boosts SUCK", and "-5/5 MULTIPLIERS STILL SUCK", respectively.
- Catching Some Z's: Researches 2x6 and 2x7 that increase the amount of offline progress you can have at one time depict three zs in their icons.
- Challenge Run: You can start one of several challenges which require you to reach a certain resource total without helpful things, like Multipliers, Crystals, or things making the game harder like higher costs. Depending on the tier, the challenge will force you to Transcend, Reincarnate, or Ascend beforehand. Beating a challenge gives a boost to the main game. You should have it done within the first few minutes of playtime.
- Color-Coded Item Tiers: Talismans and Talisman Fragments have six colors that determine rarity: Common is white, Uncommon is green, Rare is blue, Epic is purple, Legendary is orange, and Mythical is red.
- Crossover Cosmology: The divine beings who you give tributes from Wow! Cubes and their counterparts from higher-level boxes mostly come from Greek mythology (Hermes, Aphrodite, Plutus, Iris, Athena, Artemis, Ares, Chronos, and Midas, who's not actually a god), but there's also Moloch, a Biblical figure who's supposedly a Canaanite god.
- Diminishing Returns for Balance:
- After a certain point, your coin gain becomes so high that you have taxes. Not only do they divide profits by a certain extent, but they can even cap coins per second gain. That said, they can be reduced with upgrades, runes, challenges, and Constant to let you progress farther.
- Beating a transcension challenge more than 100 times or a reincarnation/ascension challenge more than 25/10 times counts 0.05 or 0.5 effective wins for each subsequent completion, respectively.
- Cube Tributes and their higher level counterparts have their effect weakened once you have more than 1000 of a certain type.
- Effortless Achievement: The first few achievements are earned for purchasing one of each coin buildings.
- Export Save: You can export the game's save file to clipboard or as a 50KB+ file and paste it back to the game. Exporting gives you a small Quark bonus (up to 125 at once which can be increased with Research and overall Patreon donations). The game developer also mentions exporting every time he releases an update.
- Factor Breakdown: The "Stats for Nerds" tab in the Settings provides various stats like Free Accelerators, Ascension Speed Multipliers, or Cube Multipliers. Selecting one of them shows the various multipliers and other factors that make them up alongside the final result.
- Gambling Minigame: Typing "gamble" into the promotion code input menu lets you bet a certain number of Quarks to see whether you win 25% more than you bet or lose them. This can be done once in an hour and/or 15 minutes after importing a save.
- Guide Dang It!: Early on, you can only really gain Wow! Tesseracts if the Ascension lasts more than 10 real-life seconds. Problem is, nothing in the game even mentions that, so you may go through Trial-and-Error Gameplay by doing a bunch of Ascensions automatically in less than that time, not knowing that you won't get the resource that way until you find out the hard way by seeing the Ascend History.
- Hard Mode Perks: Completing Challenges 11-14 the first time unlocks Corruptions, which when invoked nerf the scaling of various gameplay elements like multiplier/accelerator effect or rune EXP gain, with the nerfs starting with a small detriment at level 1 and getting increasingly stronger as you raise it, but in exchange they provide stacking multipliers to Ascension Score, which translates to more Ascension resources per reset.
- Lampshade Hanging: The game points out how players are likely to find Prism Rune's effects underwhelming twice. Challenge 8 states "You'll never complain about Prism being bad again" and the achievement for beating it twenty times is called "I didn't even notice Prism was gone".
- LOL, 69:
- The achievement "The coolest of numbers" is earned for having a constant of 6.9e21.
- Research 6x9 has "lol" next to it and states it's the funny number. It makes you gain a +0.69% bonus to blessing level per level.
- Lootboxes: Wow! Cubes are parody of them (the description almost mentions lootboxes by name). Each one opened grants a random Blessing, though you can also spend them on upgrades and the game remains free in terms of real-world money anyway. Later on, there are Wow! Tesseracts, Wow! Hypercubes, and Platonic Cubes that contain things that boost the previous bonus type's effects (or in case of the last one, have entirely new ones).
- Luck-Based Mission: The Time action has you try to click within a randomly generated 2.5 second interval. Winning grants you Quarks based on how large the accumulated multiplier is, while losing grants nothing.
- Money Sink: The Cash Grab upgrade in the quark shop, which gives a +1% to offerings and Obtainium, while other upgrades usually give at least +2% to one of them. Starting from v.2.5, its cost even scales faster than Offering EX and Obtainium EX.
- More than Three Dimensions: The Tesseract building types are based on numbers of dimensions, adding one for each tier. Those include Dot, Vector, Three-Space, Bent Time, and Hilbert Space.
- New Game Plus: Quite a few ways.
- At 1e16 Coins, you can Prestige to gain Diamonds which can be spent on Upgrades and Crystal production as well as Offerings which can be spent on Runes, while Coins, Coin Producers, Coin Upgrades, and Crystals are reset.
- At 1e100 Coins, you can Transcend to to gain Mythos which can be spent on Upgrades and Mythos Shard production as well as Offerings which can be spent on Runes, while all Coin and Diamond Upgrades/Features, Crystal Upgrades, and Producers are reset.
- At 1e300 Mythos Shards, you can Reincarnate to gain Offerings (far more than the previous NG+ tiers), Obtainium that can be spent on Research, and Particles which can be spent on Upgrades and Atom Production, but a lot of things including Challenges and Mythos Upgrades are reset.
- After completing challenge 10 once, you can Ascend to gain Wow! Cubes which can be opened for random boosts or spent on special upgrades, as well as higher-level boxes once you can reach a high enough score. However, just about everything mentioned above as well as Buildings, Runes, Challenges, Anthill, and most Research are reset.
- Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: Several of the achievements provide various stat boosts or unlock new features, while even the achievements that don't give a direct reward still provide Achievement Points and Quarks.
- Number of the Beast: The Satanic Becomings achievement is gained for having 66 Alchemies, Satan Incarnate for 666 Alchemies, and Is This More Demonic?! for 6666 Alchemies.
- Obvious Rule Patch:
- Challenge 12 starts you off with 7 Galactic Crumbs to buy a Breeder Ant. Since the challenge makes Reincarnation impossible, you wouldn't be able to buy Worker Ants as they cost Particles which come from that reset, making it impossible to gain the multiplier from the Anthill and progress.
- Before 2.9, Corruption I would lower the number of free Multipliers and Corruption II would do the same for Accelerators. Players who thought that it'd be easy to cheese the game by only relying on one and not the other are in for a shock if they tried to put one at a high level and not the other, as they would get a severe decrease in the profit increaser that's not covered by it unless both corruptions were at the same level. Since then, both corruptions have been merged into one, avoiding the issue altogether.
- Play Every Day:
- The Daily action has you gain a certain number of Quarks. You can use it again after the end of each day.
- You get Quarks once you open enough for Wow! Cubes, Wow! Tesseracts, and Wow! Hypercubes, with the requirement increasing for each Quark, but resetting after each day.
- Power Crystal: Crystals multiply Coin production depending on how many of them you have.
- The Power of the Sun: Research 8x25 and cube upgrade 5x10 have you gaining/getting enlightened with the power of a thousand suns to boost several gameplay aspects slightly with each upgrade.
- Rainbow Speak:
- The research tab's description is white, but the words "Reincarnations", "green-bordered", and "red-bordered" are dark green, light green, and dark red, respectively.
- The hotkeys subtab description if you don't have an enabled key is purple, but the word "gold" is written in its respective color.
- Schmuck Bait: The last two Constant upgrades are very useful for increasing rune effectiveness and Cube/Tesseract gain, but they're only meant to be purchased once. That said, there's nothing stopping you from buying them again, it just wastes Constant. This stops being an issue once you unlock the Constant upgrade autobuy, which also makes the upgrades no longer subtract from your constant.
- Score Multiplier: Each Ascension has an Ascension Score based on the number of completed challenges which can be multiplied by increasing corruption levels.
- Shout-Out:
- Some of the achievement names are references:
- "Highway to Hell", earned for purchasing 666 Accelerators.
- The "Every kiss..." and "...begins with K" achievements, earned for beating Challenge 5 fifty and seventy-five times, respectively.
- 'War, what is it good for?', earned for beating Challenge 11 five times.
- "Amish Paradise", earned for exiting Challenge 3 with at least 1e99,999 coins and without any of the row 1 generator upgrades.
- "Cookie Clicking", earned for obtaining 1e40 Galactic Crumbs.
- The :antismith: code is stated to be a reference to Antimatter Dimensions.
- Research 5x4 has the description "You're beginning to feel like an ant god (ant god)".
- Before a proper description was added, Platonic Omega had the description "I suppose that, after all, we all are Everywhere at the End of Time."
- Some of the achievement names are references:
- Skill Point Reset: The Quark Shop has an option to reset its upgrades and get all Quarks spent on them back, though doing so costs 15 Quarks and some upgrades cannot be refunded.
- Technicolor Magic: Mythos and Mythos Shards are purple. The former are used to buy Mythos Buildings based on magic, while the latter provide Multiplier Power boosts with each one raising their base effect by 0.005.
- Unobtainium:
- Parodied with the name of the resource that is used for Research, Obtainium. The resource itself looks like a blue shard, but it's possible to get large quantities of it eventually.
- A more straight example are Quarks, which can only be received through exporting, achievements, and a few special actions. They're used for special upgrades in the Quark Shop and it's unlikely you'll get more than a few thousand for a while.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside:
- Many upgrades available post-Reincarnation let you increase game speed and processes, which makes the game think more seconds passed in-game than in reality. This does not apply to the Quarks-per-export timer, though.
- The rewards from Ascension are based on the Ascension timer, whose speed (separate from the above) can be increased by buying Chronos hepteracts and other upgrades.
- Year Outside, Hour Inside: The Spacial Dilation corruption slows down game speed when it's applied.
