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[LordBucket]

"You are a kitten in a catnip forest."

So lately I've been playing Kittens. I think it's the most brutal incremental game I've ever played. You start out collecting catnip. Then you start processing the catnip into construction material and making buildings out of it. Then hunting. Science! Steel, steam, oil, and moon colonies. Build ziggurats! Gather starcharts from skygazing and build a fleet of trade vessels. Worship ceiling cat and carry your faith over across multiple world resets.

Rawwr, kittens!

Screenshot

Spoiler: A couple tips (click to show/hide)

 * Catnip production varies by season. Winter is harsh. Your kittens can starve to death.
 * Kittens gain experience the longer they stay on a specific production type. This improves their efficiency. A single master level kitten is worth 1.1875 unskilled kittens. But, whichever skill is being slowly gained because a kitten is assigned to it, all other skills are slowly lost while the kitten is not assigned to them. So you'll benefit from generally keeping kittens on the same task, and not letting them die.
 * "Just build everything" is not always a good strategy here.
 * 5 ticks per second. By default the game shows you numbers based on seconds, not ticks. If something reports 0.00/second, it's probably positive per tick, but not enough to equal .01 per second. You can adjust than in settings.
 * The game has multiple persistent upgrade resources and systems. But don't be surprised if you don't see any of them in your first week of gameplay. There's some dispute as to the best time to do a first reset, but the significant early game marks are "once you reach 35 kittens" "once you reach 71 kittens" and "when you unlock concrete huts." 35 kittens makes you eligible to receive karma, which gives a happiness bonus that increases kitten production rates. 70 makes you eligible for paragon, which increases all production rates plus can be spent on upgrades. And concrete huts, once unlocked, allow you to relatively quickly increase your kitten population by a lot. In each case, you'll probably benefit from not immediately resetting once reaching one of these points, but rather getting at least several more kittens to actually benefit from the thing you'e unlocked. For example, if you reset with 35 kittens you're "eligible" to receive karma, but the actual karma you'll receive will be a very small decimal. If you push to 40, that's the point you'll get a full point of karma worth a 10% happiness bonus. Same with paragon, where each kitten after 70 gives one point. So resetting at 71 gives you only one paragon, whereas pushing for even one more gives twice as much. Some people on reddit claim that 120 is a good first reset point, but personally my first reset was in the low 60s, and I don't regret it. Things really start to slow down after a certain point. But if I were to do it again, I'd consider pushing to 75-80 for a first reset, to get at least a couple points of paragon too. But I wouldn't stress over it too much. The 30% happiness bonus I received from karma from that first reset definitely helped on my next run.
 * wiki

[Arcvasti]

This seems fun so far. There was a period in the first summer where I had to mash the gather catnip button because I hadn't discovered agriculture yet and twenty catnip fields isn't enough to feed four kittens. Once I got agriculture though, I don't think I'm in danger of starving, as long as I remember to keep reserves of catnip for winter and be prepared to subject my clicking finger to torment for the greater good of my fuzzy subjects.

[Chiefwaffles]

Ooh, I remember playing this a while back. Pretty great game.

The best idle games are the ones with new mechanics being introduced constantly.

[Arcvasti]

The main thing in this game that confused me at first is that there are two ways of doing things:

"Togglable" actions, which increment a resource at the speed of clicking. The most basic togglable action is completely free and gives you one catnip, the basic resource.

and

"Passive" actions, which increment in a per second way and require investment of other resources, either once-only or continual.

The game segues from having only "Togglable" turn-based things at the very beginning into interspersing them with "Passive" things which just do things while you wait. If you have a fast clicking finger, you can do stuff like I did above like sustain a higher kitten population then your resources could normally manage. I find it interesting that the main limit to this is physical endurance, which is a meta-resource. I'd have a lot more catnip if I just spammed the "Gather Catnip" button all the time, but I can't do that for prolonged periods of time because my finger would cramp up and such. This is far from new or unique, but its something I find interesting nonetheless.

[Chiefwaffles]

Isn't that the trademark feature of just about every idle game ever?

[LordBucket]

The main thing in this game that confused me at first is that there are two ways of doing things:

"Togglable" actions, which increment a resource at the speed of clicking. The most basic togglable action is completely free and gives you one catnip, the basic resource.

Later on there are actually toggleable buildings too. As in, you can turn them on or off, or even adjust specifically how many of them you want running, that consume some resources to produce others. So, active, passive, and toggleable passive. Plus, in some cases there are passively collected resources, like catpower, that that need to be actively used for hunting/exploration/etc.

Isn't that the trademark feature of just about every idle game ever?

Yes, but the implementation is somewhat more complex here than in any other idle game I've ever played.

This seems fun so far. There was a period in the first summer where I had to mash the gather catnip button because I hadn't discovered agriculture yet and twenty catnip fields isn't enough to feed four kittens. Once I got agriculture though, I don't think I'm in danger of starving, as long as I remember to keep reserves of catnip for winter and be prepared to subject my clicking finger to torment for the greater good of my fuzzy subjects.

While inconvenient, it's not the end of the world if you lose some cats. New cats will replace the old ones. But i've had soem death spirals, once or twice, where I didn't properly adjust for the lower skill of the replacement cats. Say, have 2 master level farmers die, then replace them with 2 unskilled farmers, and then everykitty dies because they can't produce enough food.

Also be aware that weather variation affects seasonal farm output. Warm/cold weather gives plus or minus 15% on top of the regular modifier. So while a regular winter gives a -75% penalty to catnip production, a cold winter gives -90%, for example. You might have plenty food to carry you through a regular year, but if the RNG gives you a couple cold seasons in a row, that might be a different story.

You can of course simply reallocate more farmers, but it's definitely a thing to be aware of. Especially if you leave the game running overnight while your calciner is producing titanium, for example. Couple bad seasons in a row, every kitty dies, and then since farmers need to be reassigned manually you end up with a bunch of new immigrants, who then all starve to death again, and you come back the following day to a cat massacre.

[Tobel]

Thanks for the reminder I had almost gotten over my catnip addiction. Jerk.

[Antioch]

*Walk away to get something to drink*

Cold winter

Bye bye kittens.

[Arcvasti]

This seems fun so far. There was a period in the first summer where I had to mash the gather catnip button because I hadn't discovered agriculture yet and twenty catnip fields isn't enough to feed four kittens. Once I got agriculture though, I don't think I'm in danger of starving, as long as I remember to keep reserves of catnip for winter and be prepared to subject my clicking finger to torment for the greater good of my fuzzy subjects.

While inconvenient, it's not the end of the world if you lose some cats. New cats will replace the old ones. But i've had soem death spirals, once or twice, where I didn't properly adjust for the lower skill of the replacement cats. Say, have 2 master level farmers die, then replace them with 2 unskilled farmers, and then everykitty dies because they can't produce enough food.

Also be aware that weather variation affects seasonal farm output. Warm/cold weather gives plus or minus 15% on top of the regular modifier. So while a regular winter gives a -75% penalty to catnip production, a cold winter gives -90%, for example. You might have plenty food to carry you through a regular year, but if the RNG gives you a couple cold seasons in a row, that might be a different story.

You can of course simply reallocate more farmers, but it's definitely a thing to be aware of. Especially if you leave the game running overnight while your calciner is producing titanium, for example. Couple bad seasons in a row, every kitty dies, and then since farmers need to be reassigned manually you end up with a bunch of new immigrants, who then all starve to death again, and you come back the following day to a cat massacre.

So far I've assigned everykitty to farming during spring so as to have oodles of catnip to plant more catnip fields so I can assign more kittens to other things in future seasons. Forty catnip fields is more then enough to sustain six kittens with no need for farmers, especially with a couple pastures thrown in to reduce the catnip consumption.

[EuchreJack]

I feel sorry for the poor kittens that keep coming to my settlement in winter only to die shortly from starvation.  At least they help out while they're alive...

[Frumple]

I find it interesting that the main limit to this is physical endurance, which is a meta-resource.

... well, physical endurance or how sensible you are. Autoclickers are a(n incredibly trivial to acquire and use) thing :V

[miauw62]

There does appear to be a maximum clicking rate, though.

[BurnedToast]

Played normally till I hit theology research, which was like slamming into a brick wall - I required tens of thousands of culture and furs, and the furs require you to press a button every few minutes to collect, and if you don't process them into parchment right away your kittens eat them. The culture was only provided by two buildings - one that was very expensive and provided only 0.03/s and the temple which gave 0.5/s.... and ALSO required culture/furs to build. I would have literally had to "play" for 8+ hours, tabbing back every few minutes to collect furs and culture to advance at all.

So I said screw that and edited my save to have a ton of everything... and let me warn everyone, even with massive, absurd cheating this game is SLOW SLOW SLOW

So don't get into it unless you want something with a truly glacial pace. I know incremental games are usually slow but this one is absurd.

[LordBucket]

So far I've assigned everykitty to farming during spring so as to have oodles of catnip to plant more catnip fields so I can assign more kittens to other things in future seasons. Forty catnip fields is more then enough to sustain six kittens with no need for farmers

I've found that 4 kittens assigned early-ish to farming is enough to carry me through to over a hundred kittens. Aquaducts make a huge difference once you get them. And just by building catnip affecting buildings "whenever" those same four kittens grow to sufficient production capability to feed everyone seemingly regardless of total population. And  even with just those, I'm routinely having to convert hundreds of thousands of catnip into wood because catnip is at cap.

Played normally till I hit theology research, which was like slamming into a brick wall

The game is rather brutal compared to other incrementals I've played. And I agree the fur-->parchment-->manuscript-->compendium thing is especially harsh. But there are ways to upgrade culture, and it's only really a bottleneck for a small part of the game. Fur is more often the bigger bottleneck, and sometimes I find myself assigning fully half my kittens to hunting temporarily to produce enough. Ampitheatres and (upgraded) temples both increase culture rate and capacity, and you may as well be building a whole bunch for ampitheatres anyway because they decrease happiness penalties. They're worth building even just for that, and as a side benefit they mostly solve the culture problem.

I feel sorry for the poor kittens that keep coming to my settlement in winter only to die shortly from starvation.  At least they help out while they're alive...

Can't you just assign them to farming to produce enough food to feed themselves? It's possible there might be specific combinations of things unbuilt that might cause them to not, but I haven't run into it yet from regular gameplay. Simply from whatever food-affecting buildings I've built anyway, starving during winter hasn't generally been an unsolvable problem.. Maybe you're building too many huts, and not enough fields and pastures in the first year?

EDIT:
Just reset. Couldn't unlock any food buildings besides catnip fields, but was able to unlock farming by winter with only a single scholar and two libraries. And with 27 catnip fields, unskilled cats can feed themselves and create a surplus simply by setting them to farming. As long as you unlock farming, first winter shouldn't be difficult to survive. Just don't spend all your wood on huts right away and you should be ok. Four kittens is probably about right to end your first year with.

[Arcvasti]

So far I've assigned everykitty to farming during spring so as to have oodles of catnip to plant more catnip fields so I can assign more kittens to other things in future seasons. Forty catnip fields is more then enough to sustain six kittens with no need for farmers

I've found that 4 kittens assigned early-ish to farming is enough to carry me through to over a hundred kittens. Aquaducts make a huge difference once you get them. And just by building catnip affecting buildings "whenever" those same four kittens grow to sufficient production capability to feed everyone seemingly regardless of total population. And  even with just those, I'm routinely having to convert hundreds of thousands of catnip into wood because catnip is at cap.

I've got three farmers so far, 55 catnip fields and several aquaducts. Not enough to fully sustain through winter unless I spend half of autumn storing up catnip, but more then enough to be able to feed everyone while still providing a much-needed wood supplement. Wood is MY main bottleneck right now because of the extremely low ratios of the lumberkittens and the fact that the lumber mill is the hardest to build and least effective of all the base resource affecting buildings. I'm up to my ears in mines and aquaducts and academies, but I've only got a few lumber mills and passive wood gathering moves at a crawl, especially when I turn on a smelter. Catnip Extraction or whatnot helps, but I also need catnip for eating. Maybe once I can get some better axes or skill up a bunch of kittens it'll change, but for now its a pain in the tail.

EDIT: After doing some math about it, it turns out I was being WAY too cautious about my catnip reserve in winter. I only really need ~5000 catnip to survive the winter and even that's overly paranoid. I still have much more mineral and science then wood, but I might be able to get Reinforced Warehouses today instead of tommorow at this rate.