A full year means a lot of things happened. Or at least it should mean that. Luck­ily for us that holds very much true for 2022!

The most im­port­ant event has to be the re­lease of Up­date 1.4.21 or in more un­der­stand­able terms: the re­lease of cus­tom the­or­ies. Co­in­cid­ent­ally this was also the first ma­jor event of the year hap­pen­ing on 16.01.2022 and the main trig­ger for me to start a news sec­tion for the rank­ings.

Over the course of the next months we got 4 of­fi­cial cus­tom the­or­ies, 2 the­or­ies to help auto­mate parts of the game and over a dozen un­of­fi­cial cus­tom the­or­ies in de­vel­op­ment (while most prob­ably not know­ing a bunch more which aren’t pub­licly known yet). An­other hand­ful of the­or­ies are ready to be tested for adding them to the of­fi­cial, so all in all a great suc­cess which lead to count­less hours of fun!

Most of the other minor up­dates aren’t ex­actly in­ter­est­ing for the cas­ual player but we did get the game trans­lated to 2 more lan­guages (Czech and Ser­bian) which takes the total num­ber of lan­guages up to 28!

The com­munit­ies and the game it­self are in great shape with the Subred­dit r/​Ex­po­nen­tial­Idle hav­ing al­most 6400 mem­bers, the Dis­cord server sur­pass­ing 10000 mem­bers for al­most 10600 users and the game it­self hav­ing now over 500000 down­loads (while I don’t have ex­act num­bers this means more then doub­ling and be­ing around 4x the num­ber of down­loads!).

Enough of­fi­cial news, com­ing to some more spe­cific news!

Be­gin­ning with the cus­tom the­or­ies:

1. Gen­eral needed know­ledge:
   • All of­fi­cial cus­tom the­or­ies also give tau for the main game but at a re­duced rate (10% of their rho for all of them ex­cept 40% for Euler’s For­mula)
   • Tau is given up to a cap of e150 (raised on 4th May this year from e100 after the old cap was reached to quickly)
2. Wei­er­straß Sine Product by xelaroc: this was the first ad­ded cus­tom the­ory already in­cluded in 1.4.21. I won’t re­count everything as you can look to the rank­ings and news your­self for some his­tory. Just the most im­port­ant know­ledge con­densed:
   • The first per­son to com­plete it on the old tau cap of e100 was Playspout
   • The cur­rently highest value of it on any save is e126 also by Playspout
   • As it was op­tim­ized for the old cap of e100 tau (or 10% of the rho) it is cur­rently the one cus­tom the­ory no one will be able to fin­ish (mean­ing reach the cap of e150) but the highest value on a main save is about e106 (this should also be by Playspout)
3. Se­quen­tial Lim­its by El­lip­sis: this was the second cus­tom the­ory, ad­ded a week after 1.4.21 was re­leased.
   • The first per­son to com­plete it on the old tau cap of e100 was Playspout (who also was the first per­son to com­plete both of them)
   • The cur­rently highest value of it on any save would be e155 (if not for the cap) also by Playspout
   • The highest value on a main save should be e132 by d4N­f6Bg5
4. Euler’s For­mula by Snaeky (idea), pea­nut (pro­gram­ming) and XLII (bal­an­cing): re­leased at the same time as the next of­fi­cial cus­tom the­ory and the first one to be de­veloped by a team. As it was the faster one, it was mostly chosen to be played first and it is also lis­ted third.
   • The first per­son to com­plete it on the new tau cap of e150 was Playspout.
   • The cur­rently highest value of it on any save would be e160 (if not for the cap) also by Playspout
   • It is so far the only the­ory which was com­pleted for the new cap on a main save (ac­tu­ally so far I know of 7 com­ple­tions: Playspout, NG­Z001, Black­Seal, Fi­nalul­tima, XLII, and dyme)
5. Con­ver­gents to by Sol­arion: re­leased at the same time as Euler’s For­mula.
   • So far nobody has com­pleted it on the new cap
   • The highest value of it on any save is e130 by Playspout
   • The highest value on a main save should be about e124 by BluePlusSym­bol

Next we had some big de­vel­op­ments re­gard­ing guides and strategies:

• This site was de­veloped far bey­ond what it was prior (but you already knew this or no­ticed this when you are read­ing this re­cap)
• Sev­eral new strategies for the­or­ies were found (see the guide here as well) - amaz­ing after how much was already known after the first 8 and a half month or ori­ginal the­or­ies
• We got even more tech: XLII de­veloped a bet­ter and pub­licly avail­able sim­u­lator for the­or­ies with a whole bunch of strategies and more neat fea­tures in­cluded (pre­vi­ously we had the first sim­u­lator by An­tharion, which was at first not pub­licly avail­able, then a port by xelaroc of this sim hos­ted on repl.it and fi­nally a bot on the Dis­cord server which used the pre­vi­ous one in the back­ground)

Fi­nally some more stats and re­cords re­lated up­dates:

• We got 2 play­ers who man­aged to get 1,000,000,000 minigame stars (first XLII and then NG­Z001)
• Com­bin­ing the highest val­ues for all the­or­ies on main saves gives us a tau value of e6956 tau while the highest tau value on a single save has just sur­passed e6800 (about e6802) by (who could have guessed) Playspout
• The­or­et­ical max­imum by com­bin­ing all the highest val­ues from alt saves gives us a tau value of e7607 which shows how much we still have to gain
• Over 1000 play­ers have reached ee50000 f(t) and over 100 play­ers have broken ee60000 f(t)

Over a year the lead­er­board is bound to have fluc­tu­ations, so let’s take a look at some stats and changes. First some facts:

• Over the course of 12 edi­tions of the rank­ings we had 33 play­ers in­cluded, out of which 2 come from the iOS lead­er­board
• We had 14 hon­our­able men­tions
• The highest f(t) changed from ee60000 to ee67409 (and cur­rently ee67488) -> an in­crease of ee7409 (or ee7488)
• The low­est f(t) changed from ee57892 to ee65601 (and cur­rently ee65868) -> an in­crease of ee7609 (or ee7876)

Be­fore I start to list the changes over the years for the play­ers, something for the eye! The user Hue­vos Re­vuel­tos has star­ted com­pil­ing a lot of lead­er­board val­ues for the Top 20 and now even the Top 100. From the 7th of Oc­to­ber on­ward he has cre­ated the fol­low­ing visu­al­iz­a­tion of the de­vel­op­ment of the cur­rent Top 25:

A new year should hope­fully mean new things as well. So we can try to make some pre­dic­tions or easier: col­lect known in­form­a­tion about the fu­ture of Ex­po­nen­tial Idle (or at least for the next year).

A bit sadly the fore­see­able fu­ture is done rather quickly:

New cus­tom the­or­ies should get ad­ded though an ac­tual tim­ing is cur­rently un­known.

Be­sides this we have some gen­eral hap­pen­ings (rank­ings and news will con­tinue monthly, guide will keep get­ting up­dates) but noth­ing ex­pli­citly planned. So in a way it is up to you all to see where it will go: write new cus­tom the­or­ies, en­gage in the com­munity, grind the lead­er­board, de­velop ideas your­self and sug­gest them in any com­munity or just have fun in your own way.

Thank you for read­ing and I can end only on one wish:

Happy New Year and happy id­ling for 2023!