Core Circuit Game Review

Core Circuit Game Background

Core Circuit is an energy and AI-themed clicker game where your goal is to generate enough electricity to fuel the technological singularity by bringing about AGI.

How to Play Core Circuit

Press the red and gray play button at the bottom center of the welcome screen to start the game.

Tap your mouse on the craft button to create items for sale, and then press the sell button to cash in the goods.

Select items from the right side of the screen to place them in the grid.

Basic Gameplay Advice

Interface

The top of the screen shows your energy savings, energy production rate, and cash savings.

The right side of the screen shows the 12 different items which are for sale. Items become grayed out when you can’t buy anymore.

The lower right corner shows current play time, maximum energy storage, number of items to sell, sales profit bonus percent, your sales limit, and how much the items for sale are valued at.

The bottom of the screen has 4 buttons: generator, craft, market, and sell. The buttons are colorful when they are enabled. When the buttons are gray you can not use them.

• Generator allows you to manually generate electricity for sale.
• Craft allows you to generate widgets for sale. The cooldown period between crafting depends upon buying and upgrading the Wrench of Speed.
• Market only becomes available after you have purchased the BitTrader, which allows you to sell your stored energy for a cash profit. Unfortunately, this market only allows you to sell energy, so you can not arbitrage energy price oscillations.
• Sell allows you to sell whatever goods you have in inventory (in the lower right) to add the cash to your savings.

When an item is selected from the menu on the right the bottom menu replaces these buttons with buy and cancel buttons. When an item is selected from the playing field there is a cancel button and an upgrade button shown in this area.

Some items (like Item Infusers and Crystal Core Generators) break periodically, requiring you to repeatedly click on them when they show a wrench, restoring them to normal operating condition.

Items

Here is a list of the 12 different types of items you can buy.

• Titan Click Monument: It costs $200 and boosts energy gained per manual click. Upgrades start at $310 and it can be upgraded as many as 20 times.
• Monument of Clicks: A giant statue honoring the power of clicks, symbolizing progress. You can purchase it for $2,000. It can be upgraded twice. The first upgrade costs $14,000 and the second upgrade costs $98,000. It adds energy equal to 1% of the current energy generation speed, with the 2 upgrades adding an additional percent to 2% and an additional 3% to 5%.
• Energy Tank: Adds the value to the storage limit, allowing up to 100,000 units of energy to be stored. You can hold a total of 5 of these, with the first one costing $1,000 and the costs ramping quickly with the second one costing $8,000 and the third one costing $64,000. Upgrades start at $50,000 for the first upgrade, $100,000 for the second, $500,000 for the third, and $1,000,000 for the fourth. The initial storage limit is 100,000 per tank, with a level 2 tank holding 500,000, a level 3 tank holding 1,000,000, a level 4 tank holding 100,000,000, and a level 5 tank holding 200,000,000.
• Crystal Core Generator: Generates energy continuously using a powerful crystal core. You can hold a total of 6 of these, with the first one costing $15,000 and the next one costing $52,500. Upgrades on each unit cost $100,000, $250,000, $1,500,000, and $5,000,000. Initially these produce an average of 300 units of energy per second, growing to 1,100 units after the first upgrade, 5,300 after the second upgrade, 15,500 after the third upgrade, and 31,000 after the fourth upgrade.
• Money Vault: Costs $10,000 and enables you to expand the sales limit to $2,000 while earning bigger profits per sale. The initial profit boost is 10%. The first upgrade costs $5,000 and provides a 10% profit boost along with a $5,000 sales limit. The second upgrade costs $10,000 and provides a 15% additional profit boost and a $20,000 sales limit.
• Item Infuser: These automatically generate random items to fuel the economy and increase trade opportunities. You can hold a total of 15 of these, with the first one costing $100 to purchase and the cost ramping to where the final one costs $98,781. These break down and need periodically repaired.
• Turbo Processor: This costs $10,000 to purchase and boosts the speed of Item Infusers, reducing crafting time with advanced processing. This increases the processing speed of Item Infusers by 50%. It can be upgraded twice for $20,000 and $100,000. These upgrades further boost Item Infuser speeds by 100% and 200%.
• Sales Optimizer: Costs $3,200 and gives you a 10% bonus when your goods are sold. The first upgrade costs $3,200 and puts your sales bonus at 25%. The second upgrade costs $11,200 and boosts your sales bonus to 50%.
• Auto Merchant: Automatically sells items when storage reaches its limit. You can buy one for $5,000. There is no upgrade available.
• Wrench of Speed: A legendary wrench that reduces manual crafting cooldown for faster builds. You can buy 1 for $500. It can be upgraded twice for $2,000 and $10,000. The initial cooldown period is 2.5 seconds, with it reducing to 1.5 seconds after the first upgrade and 1 second after the second upgrade.
• BitTrader: Unlocks the market, which allows you to track prices and sell energy at the best time. You can purchase it for $10,000. It can not be upgraded.
• Singularity Crystal: A mysterious crystal harnessing infinite energy from a collapsing star. You can purchase it for $50,000,000.

Game Goal

The goal of the game is to generate (and store) a billion units of energy.

Initially you build and sell widgets, and then use the cashflow from operations to improve the speed of the same, then later you transition to building energy infrastructure and unlocking a marketplace to sell energy, so that you can use the proceeds to generate more energy faster.

When you have the market window open you can still tap on the generate button to generate energy. With the marketplace open you can select to sell 10%, 25%, 50%, or 100% of your stored energy. Select the percent button, then tap on the purple SELL button to sell energy. Tap the red X at any time to close the market window.

Advanced Playing Tips & Strategy

Early in the game it makes sense to generate money and not worry about energy. So keep tapping on the craft button and sell before you reach the sales limit. Purchase a handful of Item Infusers to augment your manual click-based item production with automated products.

Sell goods before reaching your sales limit so that production does not go to waste. If you do not want to watch it regularly then buying the Auto Merchant is important for not letting production go to waste.

If you intend to manually click frequently then it makes sense to purchase and upgrade the Wrench of Speed.

Next it can make sense to purchase the Sales Optimizer and Money Vault, then upgrade each.

At somewhere around this point it makes sense to shift from generating widgets as your primary focus toward instead generating electricity. Buy at least one Energy Tank, one Crystal Core Generator, and unlock the markets with a purchase of the BitTrader.

From this point onward it can make sense to rapidly invest in buying energy infrastructure, leaving the marketplace window open most of the time and press on the blue GENERATOR button to manually generate energy.

It is ideal to place the Crystal Core Generators either along the leftmost column of the playing field or the top row, so that you can see them even when the market is open.

Energy prices tend to oscillate between 0.05 and 0.52. Generally it can make sense to sell anywhere above 40 cents and quickly reinvest the profits into more infrastructure until you have all of the Energy Tanks, all of the Crystal Core Generators, and the Singularity Crystal, with all of that infrastructure fully upgraded.

Educational Aspects

This is a simple clicker game, but it can be used as a jumping off point to discuss economics, business, trade, technology, and how the broader economy works.

Player Age Recommendations

This game is fun for players of all ages. Completing the game can take 2.5 to 5 hours, depending on how quickly one clicks, how focused one is on the game, and their play strategy.