Help! I'm caught in the grip of a clicker game where you feed the belly of a fusion reactor

The power of the sun at tap tap tap of a button

I regret to inform you, I am once again in the grips of an idle clicker. Feed The Reactor was only released last night, but I've already become one of the 0.1% of players to prestige its tech tree. In my defense, there's something a lot more active and engaging at the core of this 'idle' clicker than I'm used to.

Though, it also helps that Feed The Reactor's theming has me picturing myself as a lab boffin, carefully crafting the mix of fuel and ignition sources that will fire up the heart of a fusion reactor...

In many idle clickers, your only action is to incrementally increase your resource gain. Be it hiring more Grannies to bake biscuits in Cookie Clicker or buying more AutoClippers in Universal Paperclips. As actions go, it's a simple, one-way tool. You buy the upgrade, your production goes up. It's much more 'idle' than 'clicker'.

In the clickers that lean on this incremental progression, the other main action you can take is to prestige; this resets your progress, converting everything you've built into points you can spend on permanent upgrades that radically increase your resource gain. Not all upgrades are as straightforward as '10x the resource production of factories'; Cookie Clicker's unlocks include enabling production even after you've closed the game. However, as actions go, it still asks very little of you as a player. You progress, you reset, you invest your points, and repeat.

In many respects, Feed The Reactor revolves around the same mechanics. Your goal is to earn a stonking great amount of energy out of a fusion generator. You burn fuel, earn energy, spend the energy on incremental upgrades, and eventually prestige to buy permanent upgrades that increase your base level of resource gain. So far, very familiar. Where the game differs is that the incremental progression systems are adjacent to your main action: pouring ingredients into a great big fusion reactor like it's a food processor.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Adam Travers

When you start Feed The Reactor, you only have a couple of ingredients: fuel pellets and igniters. Clicking on the fuel button fires a yellow orb into the reactor, whereas the igniter button produces a red pulsing three-pointed star. Each time the pellet is caught in the igniter's pulse it's damaged, producing energy equal to that damage. Now both the igniter and the fuel pellet are bought with the same limited pool of material resource – fuel costs one material, and reactors cost four. This acts as a cap to how many objects you can shovel into the reactor. Once a fuel pellet's health is depleted, its material cost is returned to the pool. You start the game with nine material, so you can afford to field one reactor and five pellets, or two reactors and one pellet. As you earn energy, the incremental upgrades you can buy raise that material cap, increase the HP of fuel pellets, or the damage of the igniters' pulses.

To level up your reactor, and unlock new technologies you need to hit certain markers of energy production per second. How you go about this is up to you, and it's this freedom that has me gripped.

After I had upgraded my material cap a few times, I poured fuel on top of my igniter, but my energy per second barely crept up. At this point I'm picturing my white-coated boffin scratching their chin, writing some equations on one of those fancy glass whiteboards they have in the movies, and then giving the reactor a tentative kick to see if that fixed anything. It didn't.

The problem was the sheer number of pellets within the device. While there was an abundance of fuel to burn, only a small portion was touching my single igniter's damaging pulse. I dumped out the reactor tank and started afresh, this time with two igniters in the mix. Adding a second igniter ate up a chunk of my pool of materials, but the reactor became a much more effective fuel burner.

In time, you unlock different kinds of fuel and items, such as heaters and enrichers, that act as buffing modifiers to your igniters' damage output and your fuels' health. Each technology means new decisions about how you allocate materials and compose the mix of fuel and burners within your reactor.

Again and again, I find that my reactor's efficiency has plateaued, that my reactor is filling with fuel and it's not burning away swiftly enough. Every time it is an opportunity to figure out a better mix of ingredients which which to fill my hungry, hungry engine.

While you could walk away and leave the reactor to run in the background, passively amassing resources as in other idle clickers, my desperate need to optimise keeps dragging me back, compelling me to tweak the recipe. In other clickers, my success feels inevitable, as every click moves you towards a fixed goal. Here, a successful resource-producing machine feels, if not hard-earned, at least earned.

I've still barely screatched Feed The Reactor's story - what the engine I'm fueling is powering is a mystery to me - but I'm gripped by the active centre of this clicker. I stayed up late playing last night, forgetting my flat's lack of heating, not noticing my hands become icy cold.

Whatever direction Feed The Reactor may go, and whatever new toys I've yet to unlock, in giving me moment-to-moment choices instead of a simple one-way progression, it's fast rising above the other idle clickers that fill my Steam library. I just hope I my heating gets fixed soon, because forstbite will really impact my clicking efficiency.