Time machine

The Time machine is a late-game building in Cookie Clicker that appears in the buildings overview as a futuristic machine and in the store with its own distinct icon. In Cookie Clicker Classic, it was the most expensive building at base level, costing 123,456,789 cookies and producing 123,456 cookies every 5 seconds, which works out to 24,691.2 CpS. At that rate, it was about 18.5203 times faster than the Portal.

One of the Time machine’s most recognizable side effects is its visual impact on grandmas. It causes some grandmas to wear a pink jumpsuit with a visor, ride a hoverboard, and carry a green rolling pin, which makes them look like they have come from the future. This is a purely cosmetic change, but it is part of why the building stands out so much among the early game’s visual upgrades.

A few trivia points help explain its place in the series’ history:

• Since the full release of Cookie Clicker, the Time machine was the only building whose store icon was completely different from its appearance in the buildings overview. With the later addition of the Javascript Console and You, there are now three such buildings.
• Before v2, when prices and yields were adjusted to fit the newer buildings, the Time machine’s base cost and output followed the game’s old pattern of sequential numbers. Its numbers were arranged like a playful countdown and count-up sequence rather than the more regular balancing used later.
• The game also contains an achievement title with a deliberately lowercase start, and that title is one of the few in the game not to begin with a capital letter.

As a result, the Time machine is remembered both for its absurdly large Classic-era numbers and for introducing one of the game’s most memorable cosmetic grandma variants. Its design and iconography make it one of the clearest examples of Cookie Clicker’s early humor: a building that is mechanically powerful, visually distinctive, and just strange enough to fit the game’s tone.