"Almost painful to recommend slowing down a clicker" - best bug report I have ever gotten :) You are right on both counts. The economy explodes within seconds (era multipliers outrun the cost curve almost instantly) and I am rebalancing it now so progression actually takes effort. And noted on the ending - making sure reaching THE CORE feels like a real finale, not just a stop. Patch coming shortly, would genuinely love to hear if the pacing feels right after.
v1.1 is live - both of your points addressed! The economy got the full treatment (soil hardness per era, smaller artifact bursts, steeper costs - no more buying everything in ten seconds), and THE CORE now has a real ending screen with your expedition stats and a final-publish moment. Your "almost painful to recommend slowing down a clicker" line made it into the devlog. Would love your verdict on the new pacing.
The new pacing is much more reasonable. There's a bit of late game difficulty with it, but it's still substantially better.
In the "late game", once the player has access to the strongest drill, process slows to a crawl. Shutting the game down and leaving it alone for a while (say, long enough to cap out the eight hours) means coming back to either a completed game or one where the player has so much money they can bulk up on high end equipment, then take another break and win while away.
This is exactly the follow-up I was hoping for - really glad the new pacing feels much more reasonable. And the late-game point is spot on: once you've got the strongest drill, active progress crawls, while the 8-hour offline cap lets you idle into a coin pile, bulk-buy top gear, then idle again and win by leaving. So the optimal move becomes "stop playing," which is the opposite of what I want the endgame to feel like. I'm reworking the late-game dig-power-vs-hardness curve so active play stays ahead of idling, and looking at how offline gains scale into the endgame wall. Thanks for sticking with it across versions and reporting this so precisely - genuinely valuable.
v1.2 is live and it targets exactly what you described. The late-game crawl is gone - I flattened the hardness curve in the deepest strata so active digging stays in a healthy m/s band all the way to THE CORE instead of grinding to a stop with the strongest drill. And the idle-to-win loop is closed: offline progress now runs at half efficiency, so leaving the game is a catch-up at best, never better than playing. Early-game pacing is untouched. You've reported across three versions now and the game's genuinely better for it - would love your verdict on the endgame this time.
