Golden Cookie

The Golden Cookie (not to be confused with the Wrath Cookie) is an object that shows up on the screen in a random position during normal gameplay. It remains on the screen for 13 seconds, slowly fading into nothing (the time it stays on-screen can be increased, see below). If it is clicked before it disappears entirely, it will grant the player one of five semi-random outcomes.

You can see how many Golden cookies you have clicked in the Stats menu. The menu previously listed how many Golden cookies have been missed, but Orteil removed that feature due to many players saying that it's "messing with their OCD". However, the number of missed clicks can still be found by typing Game.missedGoldenClicks into the console. Golden cookies are rare so keep an eye out for them.

Some have reported that reindeers and Golden Cookies do not appear unless the browser is refreshed, due to a bug.

An interesting fact is that golden cookies are always in 7. Frenzy (see below) is times 7 and chains are also always in sevens. This is because 7 is symbolic for luck.

Related Achievements/Upgrades

Achievements

Icon	Title	Description	ID #
File:GoldenCookie.png	Golden cookie	Click a golden cookie.	67
File:GoldenCookie.png	Lucky cookie	Click 7 golden cookies.	68
File:GoldenCookie.png	A stroke of luck	Click 27 golden cookies.	69
File:GoldenCookie.png	Fortune	Click 77 golden cookies. "You should really go to bed."	77
File:GoldenCookie.png	Leprechaun	Click 777 golden cookies.	84
File:GoldenCookie.png	Black cat's paw	Click 7777 golden cookies.	85

A Golden Cookie

Related Upgrades

Icon	Title	Unlocked at	Price (cookies)	Description	ID #
File:GoldenCookie.png	Lucky day	7 Golden Cookies	777,777,777	Golden cookies appear twice as often and last twice as long on screen. "Oh hey, a four-leaf penny!"	52
File:GoldenCookie.png	Serendipity	27 Golden Cookies	77,777,777,777	Golden cookies appear twice as often and last twice as long on screen. "What joy! Seven horseshoes!"	53
File:GoldenCookie.png	Get lucky	77 Golden Cookies	77,777,777,777,777	Golden cookie effects last twice as long. "You've been up all night, haven't you?"	86
File:GoldenCookie.png	Gold hoard	Game.Upgrades["Gold hoard"].earn();	7	Golden cookies appear every few seconds. "That's entirely too many."	83

Outcomes

Note: These numbers only apply exactly for your first cookie. There is an 80% chance that the cookie will be forced to be different from the previous effect. All chances are calculated from the source code.  For actual probabilities over the long term, calculated experimentally, see Golden Cookie Probabilities.

• 47.858% to get "Lucky!":
  • Get an instant boost of cookies equal to 10% of the current cookies plus 13, or 20 minutes worth of cookies (which is CPS * 1200) plus 13, whichever is less.
  • Stacks with Frenzy; if Frenzy is active when you get "Lucky," you can potentially get 20x7 = 140 minutes (or two hours and 20 minutes) worth of cookies.

• 47.858% to get "Frenzy"
  • Get x7 cookie production for 77 seconds.
  • Affects Cookies per Second, but does NOT affect Cookies per Click (although it indirectly affects cookies per click with the Plastic/Iron/Titanium/Adamantium/Unobtainium/Eludium/Wishalloy Mouse upgrades).
  • You can see how long you have left by using the golden bar at the bottom of the screen.
  • Doesn't stack with itself (getting a Frenzy while another Frenzy is active simply resets the timer).

• 3.308% to get "Click frenzy":
  • Gives x777 cookies per click for 13 seconds.
  • Works only for manual clicking, not for Cursor's autoclicking
  • Can also indirectly stack with frenzy. After buying all the main "mouse" upgrades, your clicking power during frenzy increases by approx x7 because of the increase in CpS, so therefore getting a "Click frenzy" during a "Frenzy" yields roughly x5439 clicking power until either the "Frenzy" or "Click frenzy" ends.

• 0.003226% to get "blab" (really rare):
  • Does nothing but has a funny message, which includes:
    • Cookie crumbliness x3 for 60 seconds!
    • Chocolatiness x7 for 77 seconds!
    • Dough elasticity halved for 66 seconds!
    • Golden cookie shininess doubled for 3 seconds!
    • World economy halved for 30 seconds!
    • Grandma kisses 23% stingier for 45 seconds!
    • Thanks for clicking!
    • Fooled you! This one was just a test.
    • Golden cookies clicked +1!
    • Your click has been registered. Thank you for your cooperation.
    • Thanks! That hit the spot!

File:COOKIE CHAIN3.png

a long cookie chain

• 0.975% to start a "Cookie chain"
  • If the number of cookies in your bank is less than 10 billion, the first cookie you click in the chain will reward you with +7 cookies, and 3 seconds after being clicked another cookie will appear which grants +77 cookies, and then the third +777 cookies, and so on. If the number of cookies in your bank has reached 10 billion but less than 100 billion, the cookie chain will start from +77 cookies, and when reached 100 billion it will start from +777 cookies, and so on.
  • However, each cookie only appears for a limited amount of time, decreasing as you proceed. The first cookie stays onscreen for 10 seconds, the second for 5, the third for 3 1/3, etc. reaching a minimum of 1 second for the 10th cookie and every one thereafter. The chain ends if you fail to click a cookie before it disappears. (Fortunately these are instant-on, there is no "fade-in") This lifespan will NOT be increased by Lucky Day or Serendipity.
  • Assuming you click on each cookie, the first five will always appear, but after that, there are a few things that can cause the chain to break:
    • There is a flat 2% probability of the chain ending on its own.
    • The chain will end if the reward that would have been obtained by clicking the next cookie in sequence is more than 25% of your bank. (That is, your bank is less than 4x the value of the next cookie)
    • The chain will end if the reward that would have been obtained from the next cookie in sequence is more than 3 hours of automatically collected cookies (That is, 10800 times your CPS). It is affected by Frenzy, so it can be 21 hours, assuming you have enough cookies in your bank. As of patch 1.0465, if the  the outcome of the new cookie is more than the current maximum (due to either the Frenzy running out or Wrath/Gold alternation), you get a 3/21 hours income exactly instead.
  • Other than these, there is no cap.
  • An easy way to get the most cookies out of a chain is minimising the screen until only a small part of the clickable cookie is visible. That way the cookie chain spawn will only appear in that area and you can get the highest chain possible.
  • Golden Cookies will not start chains until you have at least 100,000 cookies baked all time.
  • The following table shows the rewards and requirements for each level of the chain:

Rewards for Cookie Chain
Clicks	Cookies in bank needed	Cookies per second needed	Reward
1	3,111,111,108	72,017	777,777,777
2	31,111,111,108	720,165	7,777,777,777
3	311,111,111,108	7,201,647	77,777,777,777
4	3,111,111,111,108	72,016,461	777,777,777,777
5	31.111×1012(T)	720.164×106(M)	7.777×1012(T)
6	311.111×1012(T)	7.201×109(B)	77.777×1012(T)
7	3.111×1015(Qa)	72.016×109(B)	777.777×1012(T)
8	31.111×1015(Qa)	720.164×109(B)	7.777×1015(Qa)
9	311.111×1015(Qa)	7.201×1012(T)	77.777×1015(Qa)
10	3.111×1018(Qi)	72.016×1012(T)	777.777×1015(Qa)
11	31.111×1018(Qi)	720.164×1012(T)	7.777×1018(Qi)
12	311.111×1018(Qi)	7.201×1015(Qa)	77.777×1018(Qi)
13	3.111×1021(Sx)	72.016×1015(Qa)	777.777×1018(Qi)
14	31.111×1021(Sx)	720.164×1015(Qa)	7.777×1021(Sx)
15	311.111×1021(Sx)	7.201×1018(Qi)	77.777×1021(Sx)

Strategy

The golden cookie may fail to spawn the first time you start a new game on a browser with no saved Cookie Clicker data. This happens if minTime and maxTime do not get set properly. If you are going for a "true neverclick" run, reload Cookie Clicker after "Game saved" first appears.

Before obtaining the golden cookie upgrades you can time roughly when the next one will appear based on when you clicked on the last one. The minimum time between each is 5 minutes without upgrades. This makes getting the 7 and 27 clicks needed to buy Lucky Day and Serendipity easier. After you get the upgrades there's less of a need to time them as they appear frequently. With both upgrades, if you get a Frenzy outcome; the earliest time a new Golden Cookie can spawn is thirty seconds before the frenzy ends.

By keeping a large sum of cookies in your bank at any given point you can maximize the returns of the "Lucky" outcome. The maximum available from a Lucky outcome is 1,200 times your current CpS (20 minutes of production,) or 10% of your current banked cookies. The game chooses the lower number, so for maximum gain from lucky cookies you need to have 12,000 times your CpS in the bank. If you have that amount in your bank, both upgrades and get all the golden cookies on average every 4 minutes and 50 seconds you'll receive 20 minutes worth of production from "Lucky" and 7.7 minutes from "Frenzy", which is equivalent to a 426% CpS bonus, not counting the other outcomes. This makes Lucky Day and Serendipity some of the most powerful upgrades in the game, if you're willing to invest the time into watching for golden cookies.

On the other hand, banking cookies ties up resources that you could use to buy cookie-producing buildings instead. With Serendipity, and assuming you hit all golden cookies, each banked cookie earns 0.1 cookies on average every 290 seconds, so each additional average cookie-per-second from "Lucky" costs 2900 cookies. As long as the price of buildings hasn't increased too much, buying them immediately without banking is a cheaper way to improve your CpS -- especially because "Frenzy" applies only to building income (roughly doubling every building's effective CpS) but doesn't affect the interest rate from banking. If the building you're considering buying costs less than 2,900 times twice its net CpS contribution, you should buy it as soon as you can afford it. In practical terms, if your antimatter condensers are upgraded to String theory but not Large macaron collider, you should start banking only when the next condenser will cost about 14,000,000,000 times your CpS multiplier. This threshold will be proportionally higher if you don't anticipate hitting all of the golden cookies.

• A trick to make golden cookies easier to see is to resize the browser window to an area roughly the size of a golden cookie. The golden cookie always appears somewhere within the area of the browser window. When the area is restricted in such a way it only takes a quick glance to check if a golden cookie has appeared.
• This strategy is also very helpful during cookie chains. When zoomed in, golden and wrath cookies appear larger so you're less likely to break the chain by missing a cookie.

'Get Lucky' Upgrade

With the introduction of the Get Lucky upgrade, banking more than 84,000 seconds of cookies becomes a viable strategy. The doubled duration of the "Frenzy" outcome means "Lucky" golden cookies can potentially give you up to 1,200 times your CpS including the boost from the frenzy, or 8,400 times your base CpS (140 minutes of cookies!), assuming that the amount is less than 10% of your banked cookies. Due to the reduced probability of getting the same type of golden cookie twice in a row, the golden cookie following a "Frenzy" has almost an 90% chance of being a "Lucky". 

Once you have Get Lucky, the "Click frenzy" can appear while already in a "Frenzy". This combo can lead to massive cookie creation. If you also have all the "mouse" upgrades, giving you 7% of your CpS per click, with an average of 6 clicks per second for 25 seconds (you usually lose a second moving the cursor onto the cookie), you can receive up to approximately 17⅓ hours of production not including the clicking bonuses from the Cursor upgrades (excluded from the calculation because of how variable the bonuses are) which can boost the final result to well over half a day's worth of production. With keyboard clicking (like the MouseKeys feature) enabled, the total figure can easily be in the neighbourhood of CpS*150,000.

Note that this also makes it entirely possible for a second "regular" Frenzy to occur whilst one is already in play. In this case, the effects do not stack; instead, it merely resets the duration of the 7x multiplier back to 154 seconds immediately following the second Golden Cookie click, not after the expiry of the first Frenzy. Similarly, triggering an Elder Frenzy (666x multiplier for 12 seconds) does not stack the multipliers, but instead replaces the Frenzy with the Elder Frenzy entirely. The brinksmanship of knowing just how long to leave a cookie on-screen before clicking it in order to maximise your cookie production thus depends on having a good eye for the Frenzy's timer bar, in order to click it when just over 26 seconds are left in case of a Frenzy + Click frenzy overlap combo. Keep in mind, though, that the amount of cookies lost by cutting a Frenzy short by a few seconds is relatively minimal, and that in most cases clicking the Golden Cookies as soon as they appear is sufficient.

Trivia

• The effect "Frenzy" was previously x2 cookie production for 60 seconds
• The effect "Lucky" was previously instant boost of cookies equal to 20% (currently 10%) of the current cookies plus 13
• The upgrade "Get Lucky" and its associated text are a reference to the Daft Punk song by the same name.
• All Golden Cookie-related achievements are based on all time clicks, not clicks from the current game.
• Because Golden Cookie-related upgrades are based on all-time clicks, if you unlock the 'Get Lucky' upgrade and reset, once you click one golden cookie, all three upgrades become available.
• Cookie Blabs are titled "???" in the notification (where "Frenzy" or "Lucky" usually appear).