How to regain productivity IRL (Actual Guide)

A guide on how to stop playing Cookie Clicker and get back to work in real life.

Introduction

Cookie Clicker can be a very time-consuming hobby. If you are reading this, you've probably already realized how much of a negative impact it can have on your real life productivity. In this guide, I will show you possible ways of breaking free from Cookie Clicker, and getting things done IRL.

Method 1: Realizing the futility of your actions.

The first and probably fastest way of breaking free, is to realize there is no real end goal in Cookie Clicker.

It's an incremental game, and that means the numbers are just going to get higher and higher. At some point you're gonna purchase every type of building, all regular and ascension upgrades, and all mini-games. After that, there will be nothing more for you to do, unless you're going for the achievements, which, realistically speaking, is going to prove impossible too.

As I'm sure you're aware, Cookie Clicker features a special set of 16 (at the time of writing) Shadow Achievements, awarded for "unfair and difficult tasks". They don't count towards your milk bonus, but they ARE counted towards completing the game on steam.

For example, one of them requires you to have a whopping $31,536,000 profits on the stock market, which is equivalent to one year in CpS. There is also one for getting to a million cookies without clicking the cookie even once, and even one which has a 0.001% chance to unlock by itself every second! And to truly illustrate how pointless chasing after them is, one requires you to cheat (Although thankfully, it doesn't count as a steam achievement). Speaking of...

Method 2: Cheating

This one has probably the highest chance of freeing you from the clutches of this game.

To access the developer console in the steam version of the game, first select Cookie Clicker in your steam library, then right-click and select Properties>Local Files>Browse and navigate to ./resources/app/ and open the file "start.js" in a text editor. You then need to find the line containing "DEV=0;" and change it to "DEV=1;". Save the changes and close the file, then launch the game.

You should now see the console window on the right side of your screen. From here you can technically call any command you'd like, but if you aren't familiar with javascript we can simply enable the cheat menu. To do that, simply type "Game.OpenSesame();" to the console and hit enter.

A window should now appear on the top-left corner of the screen. Hover over it to access cheats, and then press Ruin The Fun. Congratulations, you have now unlocked everything in the game, you dirty cheater.

Method 3: Automation

While cheating is a... nuclear solution, this method is a more reserved approach.

In the newest (at the time of writing) update, official support for the steam workshop was added, This introduced third-party mods to the game. What we are interested in, are mods automating the gameplay, essentially playing the game for us.

There is a bunch of them out already, but personally I recommend using Cookie Assistant by hitsub[JP]. It allows you to manually switch different actions on and off, providing flexibility in just how much you want the game to play itself.

Set every option to whatever you'd like, and rejoice! Now that the game is doing everything by itself, you can focus on doing something more productive.

Conclusion

As you can clearly see, all of the above methods work because I was able to write this guide instead of staring at a png of a cookie for 30 minutes straight.

Jokes aside, Cookie Clicker is a very good game (me making a guide on how to stop playing it is good proof of that) but as much as the community likes to joke about it, you shouldn't let it overtake your life. At the end of the day, it's a game about improving productivity, so why don't you improve yours.
Just try to remember that next time you decide to stay all night chaining golden cookie combos.

[OmegaKnuckles]

Honestly, though, you have played
the game for a long time.

Don't you have anything
else to do with your time?

[jurando]

lule0003: Thank you for your input! I've adjusted the guide based on your feedback. No idea where I got the original numbers from, and it did not occur to me to check if cheated cookies tasted awful was an actual achievement on steam or not.

[Fresky]

But how else do I get the feel good chemical when I see my number goes up faaaaast with a good golden cookie combo?

[Lookas123]

First section is a bit misleading, it's 0.001% per second for just plain lucky, and cheated cookies tasted awful is not a steam achievement (third party also isn't).
Also, 1000 hours is rookie numbers

[Boddo]

Finally, a guide that didn't win 246487198 awards by only typing one sentence with poor grammar because that's apparently considered a good joke now

[Zager]

My wife left me

[sandał]

you saved my life, thank you