I don't understand what's going on but this is cool as hell

November 20, 2022 4:19 PM

The Barnacle Goose Experiment is an abiogensis (wikipedia yeah I didn't know either) body horror idle clicker by Everest Rose Pipkin where you play as a researcher in a biodome tasked with generating a world out of their own body. There is sound so you may want to mute the browser tab.
posted by juv3nal (28 comments total)

(post title is this response to the twitter announcement)
posted by juv3nal at 4:24 PM on November 20, 2022

Some super basic high level pointers

Your initial verbs are cry, piss, & spit which will generate corresponding resources that can be picked up then combined (sometimes with multiple copies of themselves) to craft other things. Each use of cry, piss, & spit will decrease your "living" stat which when depleted will kill you. Once dead you get some blood and the ability to create mushrooms and dreams. Executing the "dream [dream]" verb will return you to a living state. Oh also untried crafting combinations will be in bold.

posted by juv3nal at 4:56 PM on November 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Oh some resources will generate other resources on an interval just by having them around (I'm not certain whether they need to be in your inventory or not) so be sure to have a peek in the description way in the bottom left when you mouseover an item. It may be worth reconsidering whether or not you want to use it up for crafting (or some other verb that could consume it).
posted by juv3nal at 5:08 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I got confirmation you can leave those item generators on the ground and they will still do their thing.
posted by juv3nal at 5:29 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Ooooh this sounds like the idle clicker version of Horse Master and therefore I cannot wait to try it.
posted by qDot at 5:32 PM on November 20, 2022

Ooh I made a bee! This is very exciting.
posted by silverstatue at 5:36 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Heyyy I've been meaning to ask for a new clicker game.
posted by rhizome at 5:58 PM on November 20, 2022

It appears the goal state can be reached without ever dying, though it's not clear that dying is held against you in any way so maybe don't worry about it. It looks like getting there also requires thousands of steps and waiting for lots of pieces of dust and eyelashes.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 7:09 PM on November 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Even more basic, please... How do I do anything? Like, do I need to click or type, and if so, how and where?
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:29 AM on November 21, 2022

Even more basic, please... How do I do anything? Like, do I need to click or type, and if so, how and where?

If you're right at the very beginning, I guess there is a letter you have to click through (or maybe two? not sure), then a short sequence where you click a few times to get a little person to move across the screen into a biodome? I'm not sure about that stuff because I don't think the intro sequence is repeatable without deleting a cookie or something.

But yeah generally the idea is just to click. For the intro sequence iirc it didn't really matter much where, but broadly inside the letter(s) and then inside the illustration of the biodome I guess?

After that you should be presented with a screen with a bunch of little frames where you just click on words to do stuff & the previous pointers should apply.
posted by juv3nal at 4:44 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thank you. There are no clickable words except SAVE GAME, CALENDAR, CLOCK and DOOR. Maybe I need to allow more javascript from Google. :-/
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:55 AM on November 21, 2022

Yes, looks like that was it.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:59 AM on November 21, 2022

I accidentally broke this. If you don't want to accidentally break it do not talk to the firefly until you it's producing one lantern per second. They're flying in so fast that I can't click/hold any other objects. Oops!
posted by cocotine at 7:09 AM on November 21, 2022

Has anyone produced tree yet? I dont understand. It says seed produces tree every three days but it just won't! Every other thing is producing so nicely. I just want a tree!
posted by silverstatue at 7:12 AM on November 21, 2022

Don't love that I have to play the game for some amount of time just to access the "load game" interface to get my save file off my phone!
posted by sagc at 7:44 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Apparently finding new songs and playing them on the radio gives you more life back than any food.
posted by charred husk at 11:18 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, how is this running for people with ~10 000+ objects? It's really struggling for me, to the point of unplayability.
posted by sagc at 1:04 PM on November 21, 2022

love [cat]
eat [vegetable]
posted by shenkerism at 1:10 PM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I must be missing some leap from early game to mid-game, because I don't have half the stuff people are mentioning here and I certainly don't have a problem with 10k items.
posted by shenkerism at 1:12 PM on November 21, 2022

I have to admit, I just spent like an hour combining random things, dying, and coming back to life, until I had amassed a good number of items that generated other items - when you hover over them, it'll be in bold in the bottom-left pane.

Once you get something that creates other creators, numbers can start to balloon pretty quickly. Other things I've noticed:
- Wearing items is handy, as it lets you use the action of an item (like the clock) without having it in your inventory
- Try combining multiples of the same item - I've seen up to four of the same item combine
posted by sagc at 1:20 PM on November 21, 2022

If you look through the source code, the game's internal logic entirely comes from this Google document. Needless to say, it is intensely spoilertastic.
posted by jackbishop at 3:03 PM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is there any way to obtain a reference list of the "recipes" for the items you crafted? My students have been discovering interesting things but now I don't know how to make more of them.
posted by saturday_morning at 8:01 AM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

saturday_morning, you need the Journal. It too is created from resources.
Spoiler... this Google Doc is the source of the game logic. You know, to help your students. :)
posted by tayknight at 8:55 AM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Overthought my plate of [beans] and went way overkill before discovering + triggering the end game, just as a consequence of shoving all my mail in a separate room to stop distracting my hoard of research assistants. Discovered all the items and almost all the recipes.

Fun game! A lot better on desktop than mobile. Figuring out how to manage my inventory well helped a lot. When you have multiples of an item, clicking the # will let you move it en masse. Breaking down locales will also reduce clutter and give you useful resources.

Anyone know how to "pocket" items? A bunch of clothing allegedly gave me that ability but I never saw a corresponding option.
posted by Emily's Fist at 2:50 PM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think the "pocket" function just means that you can hold more in your inventories. When I wear an item, the little max number goes up.
posted by ninazer0 at 3:30 PM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Having a look at how it stores items, it has a separate entry for each individual one rather than having a count. Once you hit the producer feedback loops, it's going to gobble through RAM.

With a bit of refactoring it could be a fun incremental.
posted by Marticus at 10:26 PM on November 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

After getting a win, I tried a second run to see how one might finish without dying. Much more challenging but definitely possible. Dreams and blood are trivial resources if dying is on the table.

Blood is not that hard to get. Making a knife is not hard, and then you just need some method of regaining health. The cheesy way to make infinite health is to make a cup (very easy), and then you can drink your own piss in limitless quantity (as consuming it also generates it, so you don’t actually lose any). Plus, it’s sterile, and you enjoy the taste!

Dreams are harder! You need at least one dream to make a bed, I think. Easy way to do a small amount of dreams is making drug or alcohol, which generate 1 dream when consumed. There are a couple of automatic dream generators, but they are a lot harder to make than the consumables. Sleeping in the bed also generates health so it also saves you from having to worry about food for blood generation.
posted by notoriety public at 8:40 AM on November 29, 2022

Oh, and the easy way to get bootstrapped on getting your cloth production chain going also involves the knife. You can create infinite thread by cutting hair, and that will fund the significant amount of bootstrapping you need to do cloth-wise to make your bed. And then lie in it.
posted by notoriety public at 9:11 AM on November 29, 2022