Bakehouse — Cookie Clicker Idle Game

How to Play Bakehouse

Bakehouse is a cookie clicker idle game: you tap one big chocolate chip cookie, spend what you bake on helpers that bake for you, and keep growing until the machines do most of the work. It is inspired by Cookie Clicker, and it keeps the loop that made that style famous, but the thing you build is a street. You begin with a single oven in a Corner Bakery on a cobbled high street at golden hour. Every purchase you make shows up in the picture at the top of the page, and five boarded-up lots to the right of your bakery are waiting to become shops.

Tap the cookie with the mouse or your finger, or focus it and press Space or Enter, to bake. The first tap is worth one cookie. Spend cookies in the Store on eight kinds of producer: Mixing Bowls, Apprentices, Brick Ovens, Pastry Chefs, Bread Lines, Delivery Vans, Flour Mills and Cookie Factories. Each one bakes a fixed amount every second, and each one you already own makes the next of its kind 15 percent dearer. The buy buttons let you take one, ten or as many as you can afford. A producer appears in the list once you have held half its price, and the next one along shows as a dark “???” so you can see what is coming. Anything you cannot afford says how many more cookies you need.

The Upgrades section holds recipes and training. Each producer has recipes that double its output once you own 1, 5, 25, 50 and 100 of them, with two more tiers at 150 and 200 for long runs. Three pins double the value of every tap, four Wrist upgrades make each tap bake an extra one percent of your cookies per second, and six flavours add five to fifteen percent to everything you bake. On a phone, Store, Upgrades, Shops and Stats are four tabs under the cookie; on a wide screen the recipes sit above the store.

Orders, Rush Hour and the Golden Croissant

Idle play pays, but Bakehouse also rewards the minutes you are watching. About every minute or two a customer walks up to the Corner Bakery with an order: somewhere between 30 and 60 taps, to be done in 15 to 25 seconds. The clock starts on your first tap, and the ring around the cookie fills as you go. Fill the order and you are paid ninety seconds of your current baking, at least thirty plain taps’ worth, and a thank-you sticker goes up in the bakery window. Miss it and the customer simply leaves, and nothing is lost. A card you ignore for ten seconds before the first tap leaves quietly too.

Every few minutes comes rush hour: a bell rings, a queue of customers forms at the door and every tap is worth seven times as much for 25 seconds. And every few minutes a cyclist rides across the street carrying a golden croissant for eight seconds. Tap it, or press G, and you get a lucky batch of cookies, an oven frenzy that makes all baking seven times faster for a minute, or, rarely, a sugar rush that makes taps worth 777 times as much for ten seconds. These boosts never stack with themselves, so a second sugar rush can only turn into something else.

Opening Shops

When the cookies you bake in one run reach a target, the Shops tab lights up and you can open the next shop on the street: the Patisserie at 4 million, the Donut Stand at 300 million, the Café at 10 billion, the Cake Studio at 200 billion and finally the Grand Bakery at 4 trillion. Opening a shop is the prestige step. Your cookies, producers and recipes reset, and you start a new run with permanent gains: baking doubled by each of the first four shops and tripled by the Grand Bakery, plus a special perk each time, and stars. A confirmation dialog tells you exactly what resets, what you keep and how many stars you will earn before anything happens.

Open all six and the street holds its Street Fair: the lights come on, fireworks go up over the roofs, and an ending card shows your time played, cookies baked, orders filled and stars. You can keep playing after that, and the deeper recipes and the daily order are still there.

Tips and Strategy

• Buy the cheap producers early. Mixing Bowls and Apprentices are cheap and, because each purchase only raises the next price by 15 percent, a good stack of them pays for itself quickly.
• Read the recipe tiers. A doubler for a producer needs a set number owned, so it often pays to buy up to 5, 25 or 50 of one kind to unlock the recipe that doubles all of them.
• Save your taps for orders and rush hour. Tapping hard during rush hour is worth seven times as much, and a filled order pays about a minute and a half of baking, so these are the best moments to be active.
• Do not hold cookies for nothing. A lucky batch is capped at fifteen minutes of your baking, so a huge bank does not make it bigger than it needs to be.
• Open a shop as soon as it makes sense. Every shop doubles your baking for good, and the stars you earn grow with how much you baked in that run, so push past the target a little if you are close to a big recipe.
• Take the offline earnings. Your ovens keep baking while you are away, at half rate, so come back and press Collect and continue before you do anything else.
• Use the daily order. Today’s customer has a bigger tap target, and a streak counts each day you fill it.

What Makes Bakehouse Different

In most clicker games the upgrade screen is a list. In Bakehouse the street is the upgrade screen. Apprentices stand behind the counter, up to six at a time. Brick Ovens glow in the window, up to six, and pastry chefs in tall white hats move in the back. A bread line carries loaves through the side window, delivery vans drive loops along the road, a windmill turns on the hill behind the shops and chimneys rise in the distance. Each recipe you buy adds a line to the chalkboard menu until it fills, thank-you stickers cover the glass, and the street gains bunting, a fountain and string lights as shops open. After you have been away, a stack of bakery boxes waits on the doorstep.

The other twist is the customers. A pure idle game can be played with the tab in the background; Bakehouse asks for a burst of attention every few minutes and pays you well for it, without ever punishing you for skipping it.

A Short History of Clicker Games

The clicker or incremental game began as a joke and became a genre. Cow Clicker, made in 2010 as a satire of social games, had you do nothing but click a cow. Cookie Clicker, released in 2013, gave the idea a warm, funny home: one big cookie, a store of grandmas and factories, and numbers that grow into the absurd. Since then incremental games have shown how much depth a single number can carry, from Universal Paperclips to games built around prestige resets. Bakehouse follows that tradition with a bakery theme and a visible street, and keeps the numbers readable with words, short form or scientific style, whichever you pick in Stats.