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:
- 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)
- 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)
- 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
- 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)
- 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)