Despite it’s extremely generic name, Crafting Idle Clicker is an okay idle game that caught my attention for an okay time. At its base, CIC is an idle game where you build nodes that produce resources which are then used to craft other resources or end products. You sell these things to buy more expensive nodes, which are in turn worth more money. You keep doing that while resetting your workshop to gain more levels, money multipliers and blueprints. It’s a fine idea for an idle game but after the luster of trying to optimize profits and production went off, there wasn’t much more in there to keep my attention.
The game starts fairly simple, you go through a tutorial that explains the concepts of the whole thing. You buy a wood-producing node and you wait for it to make some wood. You then upgrade it so it makes more wood per production cycle, and you keep doing that until you can afford to build Clubs. These take 3 woods in order to create 1, but they sell for much more than what you’d get for selling three woods. You can also make arrows with that wood and then bows by using arrows and more wood. Leather, iron, copper, gold… The list goes on. Sometimes you’ll need two basic material to make something else. At some level you get the ability to assign merchants to your items so they can automatically sell some of them, so the game becomes an exercise in optimizing your workflow.
This gets compounded by the auto-build feature that will automatically try to buy up to X of any node, so you don’t even need to ‘play’ to watch your industrial empire grow anymore. The most of what you’ll do is to tap on buttons to create resources faster. This is a big boost and can help reduce the time between two upgrades significantly. You can upgrade the multipliers to this mechanic and many others by spending premium currency that the game dishes out slowly, but what I’ve done the most is watch ads to get temporary boosts. You can reset your progress when you have enough fame, which you get by accumulating money and completing missions (crafting a certain number of specific items)
Doing so gives you lore while resetting your workshop progress, which you use to upgrade blueprints, which improves for how much you can sell the items. This isn’t a very fun system and I would’ve preferred to see a skill tree or permanent upgrades you could buy with this lore. With the achievement system, it kinda works. You can reincarnate which resets your merchants and research multiplier but increases the lore you get. It’s not very fun either, I completely failed to see the advantages of hard-resetting like that. Research is one of the systems I enjoyed less in CIC. You basically can’t craft everything right away even if you have the money, you need to wait for a meter to fill based on your research production. There are no ways to speed it up past a certain point except to just wait or use a time skip power by watching an ad or spending premium currency.
And there are some timed events where have a different tree of things you can build and buy and the ultimate goal is to build specific ones in order to get medals - which feed into the achievement system. They’re fine and broke the monotony a bit, but by the third one I was getting a bit tired. The fun of the game had been to try and set every node in my workshop to work as efficiently as possible (while watching as many ads as I could to maximize my production) and once that was done, I was confronted to a wall which would take a lot of time or money to clear. So I stopped there!
I still liked Crafting Idle Clicker, I just felt like I had seen everything it could offer before going through the whole crafting tree. If you’re curious for an idle game, this one is pretty okay!
