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  • Aluminum Christmas Trees:
    • Upon getting 50 achievements, the milk will turn blood red. The stats menu lists it as raspberry milk, which may seem like a thinly-veiled excuse to have blood in the place of milk (not helped by the fact that the Grandmapocalypse occurs around the same time it's unlockednote )... until you realize that raspberry milk is indeed real, and was added mainly for Author Appeal.note  This also applies to the various other odd milks, such as orange and maple milk.
    • One of the random news ticker headlines is of doctors advising teenagers to stay away from a chocolate chip-snorting fad. It might seem like a simple joke... except starting in the late 2010s, snorting chocolate-based powders gained popularity. However, this could also be a lucky coincidence.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Being an overall math-based game, many have easily found strategies that maximize the amount of brown-sugary goodness you can gain in your playthroughs:
    • Milk-based mechanics, such as Mokalsium in the Pantheon and (to a lesser extent) Breath of Milk from Krumblor, are generally very powerful and are generally used in favor of other options.
    • Only going up to Exotic Nuts and never getting Communal Brainsweep or Elder Pact except to gain pledge achievements gets you both wrinklers and keeps a decent Golden Cookie to Wrath Cookie ratio.
    • The only Grimoire spell most people ever use is Force the Hand of Fate, which summons a Golden Cookie. Conjure Baked Goods and Summon Abomination are only seldom used. The most expensive spell, Spontaneous Edifice, won't summon any building that you have more than 400 of, which makes it entirely useless by late-game.
    • At least one Permanent Upgrade slot is dedicated to an "-illion Fingers" upgrade, since it allows for a Disc-One Nuke for ascensions.
    • You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't dedicate one of their two Dragon Aura slots to Radiant Appetite, which simply doubles all your incoming cookies, no strings attached. No dragon aura is capable of exceeding that quantity of income (not even Breath of Milk) at once, and so it's usually run by default, with the second slot being different depending on strategy; if a player is idling, that slot is usually Breath of Milk.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: Some of the darkest parts of the game do this. It includes things like employing child labor in factories to increase production, firing workers and replacing them with Cute Kittens, treating elderly grandmothers as monstrous elder gods who consume the world in fleshy tendrils and play bingo, creating planet-sized brains with quintuple+ digit IQs able to exhaust every thought in reality only to use them to dream up cookies into existence... The game gets more and more deranged as it goes, and it's hilarious for it.
  • Fan Nickname: Frequenters of /vg/'s now-defunct Idle Games General (that arose mostly because of Cookie Clicker's popularity) lovingly refer to Orteil as a FRENCH FUCK. Capitals always.
  • Fridge Logic: Overlaps with Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror - Players who develop enough cookies-per-second are informed that their universe is now made of cookies. Portal Devices import cookies from alternate-universe-Cookieverses, and Alternate Grandmas have a resemblance to Grandmapocalypse Grandmas. Clearly someone is importing their cookies and Grannies from other players.
    • Additionally, historians deem cookies produced from time machines to be "unfit for human consumption". These cookies are explicitly being taken from the past, so they might very well be the cookies you were making at the very start, long before you ever started bending natural law to your whims.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Collect all the Luck upgrades, and not only will Golden Cookies appear much faster and last longer, but the Frenzy one lasts long enough that you can potentially trigger a second Golden Cookie right on top of it. Stacking bonuses (namely some combination of Frenzy, building specials, and Click Frenzy) on top of each other will leave you rolling in cookie dough.
    • While many of the Grimoire spells would certainly be useful, it's very rare to see a reason to use any of them above Force the Hand of Fate, a spell that instantly summons a Golden Cookie. This allows you to potentially create insane combos when combined with other GC effects, such as combining an Elder and/or Click Frenzy with any other CPS booster. The downside is also quite possibly the weakest of all spells. It summons a Wrath Cookie... that you don't even have to click. Not even Spontaneous Edifice, the most expensive of the spells, is anywhere near as useful as FtHoF, especially by late-game.
  • Genius Bonus:
    • The Grandmatriarchs abducting children and stealing kitchen utensils seems to be a reference to Baba Yaga, a malevolent witch in Slavic folklore who is said to break into houses and kidnap children to eat, stopping only to count the spoons in the kitchen.
    • One of the Auras you can unlock for Krumblor is known as Dragon's Curve, obtained in exchange for 100 fractal engines. This is a reference to the identically-named fractal curve.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game has become stupidly popular in Japan, with the CookieClicker and Cookie Clicker (katakana) tags on Pixiv having sizable numbers of results. Someone has even come up with a Grandma figure and a fan video / theme song. There's also been a Cookie Clicker-only doujinshi event. While not quite to the same extreme, the game is also much more popular in the United States than Orteil's home country, France.
  • Good Bad Bugs:
    • It has been reported that if one clicks very fast or the browser lags, it is possible to register multiple bonuses from a single Golden Cookie in succession. It is also possible to occasionally get two reindeer at the same time. Only one crosses the screen, but two are counted.
    • Normally collecting plant seeds in the garden is a massive Luck-Based Mission, taking a lot of time and prayers to the Random Number God, but there's a glitch that simplifies all of that immensely. First get at least five seeds different, fill over half of the plots, then repeatedly click where the "trade in completed seed catalogue" button would be. After a few clicks the game will somehow register as if you were reversing the seed catalogue sacrifice, granting you every seed for free. Thus you can sacrifice the catalogue for sugar lumps then repeat the glitch for quick and easy lump farming.
  • Heartwarming Moments: The Valentines Day cookies depart from the typical sardonic humor and affectionately color-code each cookie to different aspects of love, heartbreak, mending, and self-love.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the Fortune updates (Fortune #018, to be exact) says "There's plenty of everyone, but only one of you." The final building, You, turns this message from heartwarming to hilariously ironic.
  • It Was His Sled: The Grandmapocalypse is hardly shocking anymore, both in part since it's part of the reason why the game became well-known in the first place, and especially since as the game received further updates and the definition for "lategame" moved further and further away, the whole event has gone from being the endgame of Classic to the midgame of the Prestige update to just around the end of the earlygame by the Steam release—hardly spoiler territory considering you almost certainly won't even have all the buildings in the game by the time you start it.
  • Junk Rare:
    • "egg", a rare egg drop during Easter, gives a mere +9 cookies per second. Not +9%; just +9.
    • Another is the "blab" Golden Cookie/Wrath Cookie result. All it does is say something random and goofy, and increment up the number of Golden Cookies clicked on. It's completely useless, and it's also by far the rarest possible result - the odds of a "blab" are roughly one in 30,000.
    • Some of the Random Drop cookie upgrades can be this, as they offer the same bonuses as early-game cookies, but are far more elusive. These include the Bakeberry Cookies, the Wheat Slims (both of which are very rarely dropped from Bakeberry and Baker's Wheat plants respectively), and the Halloween and Christmas cookies, rarely dropped from popped Wrinklers and Reindeer respectively.
  • Low-Level Run: An achievement for a Challenge Gamer is to reach one billion cookies without buying any upgrades at all. Requires a ton of patience and a ton of luck with Golden Cookies. Previous versions made it easier with a large New Game Plus modifier, before the bonuses get locked in an upgrade.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "Moist cookies."
    • That creepily funny face the grandma makes is also memetic in its own right.
    • Uncanny Cookie Clicker, destroyer of save filesExplanation
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The sound of clicking a Fortune is extremely pleasant and satisfying.
    • Same with clicking a Golden or Wrath cookie, even when the latter gives you a debuff.
    • The alt cookie sound makes it incredibly satisfying to just click the Big Cookie. The clicking sound is also used for clicking on cookies during a Cookie Storm, making it even more satisfying.
    • One of the heavenly upgrades gives you the option to activate a chime whenever a Golden or Wrath cookie pops up. Said chime is a soft, pleasant wind chime sound, making it worth buying even if you have the Cookie Monster extension.
  • Nightmare Fuel: These cookies may not be easy to stomach.
  • Nightmare Retardant: Try taking the Grandmapocalypse seriously during Christmas season, when snowflakes are falling, Wrinklers have cute little Santa hats, and reindeer are prancing across the screen.
    • An update added a feature to turn scary stuff off. Not only does this remove the background of the Grandmatriarchs but also gives wrinklers funny googly eyes and gives the grandma icon angry Big Ol' Eyebrows instead of the horrific, visceral Nightmare Faces.
  • Polished Port: The Steam version is much more well-optimized compared to the browser version and features more extensive mod support, in addition to featuring a wonderful soundtrack by C418 and support for Steam achievements and cloud saves.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: By the endgame, only four buildings give reasonable amounts of cookies and even some previously high-powered buildings are worth zero. Two of them are the last two buildings, but the other two are Cursors and Grandmas, the first two "buildings" in the game, which rescue every other building type via upgrades that increase their strength based on how many of the other buildings you have even before the Synergies kick in. After a while, you'll want to build those others purely for upgrading Grandma and Cursor ability.
    • As of 2.002, Golden Cookies also rescue poor-production buildings with a potential multiplier effect; instead of a standard increase, there's a chance that production will be increased by 10% multiplied by how many of a building you have. 400 farms by themselves are inconsequential on production, but that multiplier kicks in and suddenly you have a 4000 percent multiplier. Combine with "Force the Hand of Fate" and... well, see Game-Breaker above.
  • Signature Scene: The Grandmapocalypse. If you've heard anything about this game beyond it simply being Exactly What It Says on the Tin, it's the coming of the Grandmatriarchs.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some preferred the Stylistic Suck of the original Cookie Clicker and feel the new version lacks some charm.
  • Ugly Cute:
    • Crumb, one of the girl scouts who was horribly scarred in a baking accident.
    • For some, Wrinklers. Even moreso during Christmas, when the Wrinklers get little Santa hats and red-and-white stripes, somewhat counteracting their Nightmare Fuel-esque appearance. It helps that, despite first impressions, they're actually helpful to the player.

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