Cookie Clicker – How to Access the Garden in Cookie Clicker

Without any upgrades or anything, a Golden Cookie spawns m minutes after the last one disappeared, where m is a random number between 5 and 15. Each of the upgrades Lucky day and Serendipity cut that time in half, and the debug upgrade Gold hoard makes them spawn pretty much constantly instead. Also, if your last cookie gave you a cookie chain, then the next one spawns 3 seconds later. This means that you are not more likely to get a Golden Cookie if you haven't clicked on one in a while.

Without any upgrades, again, a Golden Cookie lasts for 13 seconds before disappearing. The Lucky day and Serendipity upgrades both double that. If your last cookie gave you a cookie chain, then it disappears after 6 seconds instead.

When you get what appears to be a flat number of cookies, it either gives you 15% of your banked cookies or the equivalent of 20 minutes of cookie production, whichever is lower.

The bonus you get is randomly chosen each time you click the cookie. It normally chooses between Frenzy, which multiplies your production by 7, and Lucky, which gives you cookies as I just described. There is also a small chance of getting a Click frenzy, which multiplies your cookies per click by 777, and an even smaller chance of getting a Cookie chain, which gives you 6 the first time you get it, 66 the second time, etc. until you get something else. As Michael Madsen's answer points out, the effects appear to alternate because every time you click a golden cookie, there's an 80% chance that it will remove the previous effect from the list of possible effects before it picks which one actually happens.

Once the Grandmapocalypse begins, you also have a chance of getting Ruin, which makes you lose half as many cookies as you would gain from a Lucky cookie, Clot, which cuts your production in half, and Elder Frenzy, which multiplies your production by 666 for a few seconds.

The real pros are that you gain a prestige CPS multiplier, access to new multiplier bonuses and possibly some achievements. The cons are essentially summed up by you losing almost everything else.

You keep:

• All achievements earned
• Cookies baked (all-time)
• Golden cookie clicks (all-time)
• Legacy started

You lose:

• Cookies in bank
• Cookies baked (this game)
• Golden cookie clicks (this game)
• Cookie clicks
• Handmade cookies
• All buildings
• All upgrades
• Session started
• Wrinklers popped
• Elder pledges
• Season switches
• All other stats not yet listed.

You gain:

• Cookies forfeited by resetting gets cookies baked (this game) added to it
• The number of resets gets incremented

• New CPS multipler cookie upgrades based on how many cookies have been forfeited by resetting (14/10/2013):

  if (Game.cookiesEarned>=9999999999999)
  {
      if (Game.prestige['Heavenly chips']>=1) Game.Unlock('Caramoas');
      if (Game.prestige['Heavenly chips']>=2) Game.Unlock('Sagalongs');
      if (Game.prestige['Heavenly chips']>=3) Game.Unlock('Shortfoils');
      if (Game.prestige['Heavenly chips']>=4) Game.Unlock('Win mints');
      
      if (Game.prestige['Heavenly chips']>=10) Game.Unlock('Fig gluttons');
      if (Game.prestige['Heavenly chips']>=100) Game.Unlock('Loreols');
      if (Game.prestige['Heavenly chips']>=500) Game.Unlock('Jaffa cakes');
      if (Game.prestige['Heavenly chips']>=2000) Game.Unlock('Grease\'s cups');
  }

• Any unearned achievements related to the amount of cookies baked (this game) prior to resetting (v.1.036), not cookies in bank:

  if (Game.cookiesEarned>=1000000) Game.Win('Sacrifice');
  if (Game.cookiesEarned>=1000000000) Game.Win('Oblivion');
  if (Game.cookiesEarned>=1000000000000) Game.Win('From scratch');
  if (Game.cookiesEarned>=1000000000000000) Game.Win('Nihilism');

  Since the reset achievements are cumulative in the sense that gaining a higher tier of the achievement will also gain you the lower tiers, you should wait until your all-time cookies are at least 1 quadrillion in order to get all these achievements in one reset. If you are interested in future-proofing some, you might wait for a quintillion.

  //new Game.Achievement('Galactus\' Reprimand','Reset your game with <b>1 quintillion</b> coo- okay no I'm yanking your chain
  
  v.1.0375

• A CPS multiplier percentage (prestige) based on your cookies forfeited by resetting. Cookies reset only gets cleared on hard resets so your prestige will not decrease, but will be recalculated every time(v.1.036+):

  var prestige=cookies/1000000000000;
  //prestige=Math.max(0,Math.floor(Math.pow(prestige,0.5)));//old version
  prestige=Math.max(0,Math.floor((-1+Math.pow(1+8*prestige,0.5))/2));
  //geometric progression

  The comment is wrong though. It's actually just an arithmetic progression. The multiplier is only applied if you purchase the upgrades to unlock it (14/10/2013):

  var heavenlyMult=0;
  if (Game.Has('Heavenly chip secret')) heavenlyMult+=0.05;
  if (Game.Has('Heavenly cookie stand')) heavenlyMult+=0.20;
  if (Game.Has('Heavenly bakery')) heavenlyMult+=0.25;
  if (Game.Has('Heavenly confectionery')) heavenlyMult+=0.25;
  if (Game.Has('Heavenly key')) heavenlyMult+=0.25;
  mult+=parseFloat(Game.prestige['Heavenly chips'])*0.02*heavenlyMult;

  Based on every trillion cookies lost to soft-resetting, a progression is calculated and the resultant value is multiplied by a percentage and used as a multiplier. In v.1.035, the multiplier value of each calculated "Heavenly Chip" (prestige point) was 5%, but, in v.1.036+, it is 2%. Both the progression formula and the value of the prestige CPS multiplier seem likely to change in future updates.

The prestige CPS multiplier is rather low and arithmetic progression quite steep. For 1 quadrillion cookies (all-time), you get less than 90% multiplier, and for 1 quintillion, you get about 2800%. For 1000 times the cookies, you only get about 31 times the amount of multiplier.

More problematically is also the issue of having to gain everything again from scratch. The early game was the most fun part of the game so you might consider a reset just to go through it again (but easier due to the effect of the prestige multiplier). Having done so, I can confirm that resetting with a decent all-time and thus a sizable multiplier around 1000% will make it quite easy to get back to where you were before the reset in just a few days time and with each reset, it only gets easier.

To get 2000 Heavenly chips (enough to get the Grease's cups), you would need to have reset away 2,001,000,000,000,000,000 (2.001 quintillion) cookies.

There are also some shadow achievements related to reaching 1 million cookies in a short time without buying the heavenly chip upgrades, but they are not directly related to the prestige system and rather explicitly require you not use it.