Like almost everything that you can harvest in Cookie Clicker, sugar lumps are a precious resource designed to help you maximize your cookies per second (CpS). However, they don’t unlock direct production upgrades. Instead, they’re used to unlock a variety of building upgrades, minigames, and other effects.
What are Sugar Lumps in Cookie Clicker?
Sugar lumps are little balls of sugar that slowly grow and mature at the top of your screen. Each one takes multiple days to form and develop before you can harvest it. While you can click to harvest them early, you reduce your chances of a successful harvest if you do so.
Sugar lumps are one of the rarest resources in the game. They take longer than almost anything else to become available and stack slowly. In fact, sugar lumps don’t even appear until you’ve passed the one billion cookie mark.
What Do Sugar Lumps Do in Cookie Clicker?
Use sugar lumps to upgrade your buildings. Some of these upgrades have two effects: first, they level up the buildings and, in some cases, unlock mini-games. Second, they increase your CpS by 1 percent per upgrade.
You can also use sugar lumps to progress in specific minigames.
How Should I Use My Sugar Lumps?
Since sugar lumps take a long time to gather, it’s crucial to prioritize the upgrades they can buy that you need the most. Don’t use your sugar lumps in your mini-games at first, even if it seems like moving a little quicker in the game might increase your CpS. The permanent boost to your production from upgrading buildings is far more valuable.
Prioritize unlocking minigames early in the game. Later, you should increase the building level of all your buildings — especially the garden. Upgrading the facilities that provide the most CpS after unlocking the games and expanding the garden gives you the best return on your sugar lump investment.
Temple
Upgrade your temple early in the game with a single sugar lump. This upgrade gives you access to the Pantheon game, where you slot gems under spirits for boosts to your CpS and other options.
For example, slotting a gem under Cyclius, the Spirit of Ages, will increase your CpS bonus up to 15 percent throughout a specific period. The length of time depends on which gem you slot under him. Placing a gem under Vomitrax, the Spirit of Decadence, will make your golden and wrath cookies have a more prolonged effect.
Remember that using the spirits will also have a negative effect of some sort. Cyclius causes your CpS bonus to go down by up to 15 percent at times. Vomitrax reduces the CpS generated by buildings.
Wizard Tower
Upgrade your wizard tower once you’ve unlocked Pantheon and have your spirits active. The minigame associated with the wizard tower is called Grimoire. It gives you access to spells that affect your CpS or cause other things to happen.
Force the Hand of Fate is a spell that can summon a golden cookie. If it backfires, you get a wrath cookie.
Conjure Baked Goods summons half an hour’s worth of CpS but can backfire to cause you to lose 15 minutes of CpS.
Haggler’s Charm reduces the price of your upgrades for one minute. It can backfire to make them more expensive for an hour.
Farms
Upgrade your farms to unlock the Garden minigame. It lets you grow, develop, and create new plants in your garden that give you certain benefits. The size of your garden will increase as you continue to upgrade your farm. After you’ve unlocked all the minigames, focus on expanding the garden with additional sugar lumps.
Planting Cronerice gives you an additional 3 percent CpS from your grandmas.
Planting Ordinary Clover gives you an additional 1 percent chance for a golden cookie to appear.
Planting Chocoroot gives you a 1 percent boost to your CpS, and if you harvest it at maturity, you get an additional 3 minutes of CpS.
Banks
You gain access to the Stock Market minigame when you upgrade your banks. The Stock Market includes an actual market where you can buy and sell at various prices, offices to upgrade, and stockbrokers who help you afford resources more readily.
For example, upgrading your office to Finance Headquarters requires that you’ve purchased 500 cursors. It gives you an additional loan slot and 100 extra warehouse spaces to store items in.
Types of Sugar Lumps
There’s more than one kind of sugar lump, though you’re likely to only see standard ones at first and for a while. Common lumps don’t have any additional effects. Keep an eye out for these other types since they grant different bonus effects.
Bifurcated Sugar Lumps
A bifurcated sugar lump looks like a regular sugar lump with a little extra growth on it. It gives you about a 50 percent chance to get an additional sugar lump when harvested.
Meaty Sugar Lumps
Meaty sugar lumps look like little red meatballs. It gives you equal chances to get zero or two sugar lumps and a 20 percent chance to harvest one sugar lump.
Golden Sugar Lumps
Golden sugar lumps look like normal lumps colored with a golden sheen. It doubles the cookies you have stored in the bank up to an entire day of CpS. When harvested, it also increases the spawn chance for golden cookies. You get a 10 percent boost for the next day.
Caramelized Sugar Lumps
Caramelized sugar lumps look like darker golden sugar lumps with a bit of toothpick through them. You can get one, two, or three sugar lumps from them. They also refill your sugar lump cooldown.
How do you get variant sugar lumps?
You have to have the game open for variant sugar lumps to grow. If you are running it offline, be sure to access it once every day. If you don’t, only normal sugar lumps will appear.
Sugar Lump Maturity
Sugar lump maturity is a slow process. It takes 20 hours to mature, at which point you can harvest it if you choose. However, you have a 50 percent chance to lose the lump if you harvest it at this stage.
After the lump is mature, it takes another 23 hours to ripen and you can harvest it without a penalty. When 24 more hours have elapsed, the sugar lump will fall and be automatically gathered.
Sugar Lump Auras, Upgrade, and Effects
There are a variety of upgrades, auras, and effects that can change your sugar lump progression.
Heavenly Upgrades
These upgrades are purchased with heavenly chips that you earn for ascending.
The Stevia Caelestis upgrade costs 100 million heavenly chips and causes sugar lumps to ripen an hour faster. You have to purchase “Wrinkly Cookies” as a prerequisite to this upgrade.
Once you’ve unlocked Stevia Caelestis, you can choose Sugar Baking for 200 million heavenly chips. This gives you an additional 1 percent CpS for every sugar lump you have that isn’t used.
With Sugar Baking unlocked, you can unlock Sugar Craving for 400 million heavenly chips. It lets you use the sugar frenzy effect to turn up your CpS to 300 percent for one hour in exchange for a sugar lump. However, you can only use the sugar frenzy once every ascension.
If you have the “Lucifer” heavenly upgrade unlocked and have purchased Stevia Caelestis, you can get Diabetica Daemonicus. It costs 300 million heavenly chips and has the same effect as Stevia Caelestis.
With Diabetica Daemonicus, you gain access to Sucralosia Inutilis for 1 billion heavenly chips. It causes bifurcated sugar lumps to grow 5 percent more often. It also increases the chance for it to drop two sugar lumps by the same amount.
With Sugar Craving and Diabetica Daemonicus, Sugar Aging Process is available for 600 million heavenly chips. It causes each grandma you own to make sugar lumps ripe six seconds faster. This is capped at 600 grandmas.
Auras
You can choose Auras once you’ve sacrificed enough buildings to Krumblor.
Dragon’s Curve gives you an additional 5 percent to sugar lump growth speed and makes non-normal sugar lumps more likely to appear.
Reality Bending has several unrelated effects, but it boosts both sugar lump aging and the chance to get an unusual sugar lump. If you have it active with Dragon’s Curve, the other effects disappear, and Reality Bending causes the sugar lumps to ripen and mature more quickly.
Other Effects
In the Pantheon minigame, if you select Rigidel, Spirit of Order, your sugar lumps ripen more quickly. Depending on which gem is slotted, they can be done 20, 40, or 60 minutes sooner.
If you grow Juicy Queenbeat in the Garden minigame, you get a sugar lump when you harvest a mature plant.
If you’ve discovered every seed in the Garden minigame, you unlock the Sacrifice Garden tool. This kills every plant and seed in your garden but gives you ten sugar lumps.
Sugar lumps are valuable because they can increase your CpS, upgrade your buildings, unlock games, and even be used to make those games progress more quickly. Choosing upgrades, auras, and effects that prioritize your sugar lump production can help you maximize your cookie production quickly. Just make sure you don’t harvest too early and lose your chance for an upgrade.