For those of you unfamiliar, Money-Clicker is a relatively new pay-to-click website that, in my opinion, has a lot of potentials. The premise is simple, you click a mine button up to 10 times (can be increased) in a row, expending "energy" which recharges every 5 minutes by default. After 10 clicks, you watch an ad, fill a captcha, and come back. As you mine, you gather materials and earn XP to level up, which grants you access to better mines with higher-paying materials. There's a large variety of upgrades including (but not limited to): increased material price & drop rate, faster XP & energy gain, and more materials dropped per click. Materials can be sold for MCC (money-clicker coin) where 1,000,000 MCC = $1 and MCC is used to purchase upgrades or can be converted to $. The final mine, accessible at level 200, drops materials worth up to $1 each!!!
With all that in mind, it's evident this is a more long-term grind (as is the case with all micro-earning websites), so don't expect massive earnings instantly. Fortunately, I've been on the website for only 10 days (a good part of which I spent trying to figure out the best methods), and have mostly caught up to some of the website's top earners. Here you can see my current balance and earnings-to-date.
I'd like to share my strategies I've learned thus far:
1. Very Annoying Ads: In your profile, you can adjust the frequency at which advertisements appear on the mining screen. By setting it to "Very Annoying", you can QUADRUPLE (4x) the number of materials earned per click (shown in your inventory, not the mining screen). Despite the name "very annoying", it tends to not have a tremendous impact. I personally keep my hand on the F5 button so, I can quickly refresh the page before the ads slow things down. The extra bit of time spent is made up by the 4x boost to materials gained.
2. Antivirus/AntiMalware: You may have noticed a warning beneath the profile option for Very Annoying ads. This does hold merit and I highly recommend installing an anti-malware/anti-virus to catch some of those links opening in new tabs before they try anything. I personally have Mcafee WebAdvisor, Avast, and Malwarebytes and haven't had a single issue. To quickly close the new tabs that open before they fully load up, just middle click the tab and it will disappear. If you accidentally close the wrong tab, use Ctrl+Shift+T (assuming Windows, look it up for Macs Wink), to re-open the tab.
3. Solve Media: Since you will be filling out 2 captchas every 10 clicks (once on the ad page and once on money-clicker), Google's ReCaptcha service will slowly begin to treat you more as a bot than a human, often mislabeling your captchas as incorrect and drastically slowing down your mining speed. This is why I opt for SolveMedia captcha (changeable in your profile), which doubles the time you can mine before this happens. Frankly, I find it faster to type out a word than solve a picture puzzle in the first place, but that's entirely subjective. The only cure for recaptcha treating you as a bot is to step away for a period of time (usually a couple of hours).
4. CPU Mining: I frequently have periods where I cannot do any mining, but bring my laptop to work. If you have a powerful PC and want to earn those last MCCs needed for an upgrade, I recommend trying CPU mining (just make sure you're not racking up your own energy bills)! I wouldn't upgrade past level 5 or 6 as it doesn't pay enough to justify that much spent in the long run, but it can definitely earn you some passive MCC in the meantime.
5. Stone Drop+, Price, and Drop Amount: If you look at the Mine Resources screen, you'll see that Stone is present in nearly every mine except for the last one. By upgrading stone's drop rate, you're largely negating the chance that you'll get nothing from a click. Alongside that, you should upgrade the price of stone as much and as often as possible since it is the most common thing you will be mining. To multiply these earnings, you should upgrade the number of stone being dropped from each click on individual mines as well. My current cave looks like this so I can earn 44 stone (Lvl 11 * 4x for very annoying ads) every click. My stone price is 0.8 MCC each, so that equals 35.2 MCC per stone click!!! As you can see, I've also upgraded the price/drop amount for some of the other materials in that cave. You can do this at your own discretion, but keep in mind how often you find each material and whether it's worth it in the end.
6. Faster Energy/More XP: It should come as no surprise, but upgrading how fast you regain energy and how much XP you earn will help in the long run to level up faster and reach those bigger rewards.
7. Drop Rates: Aside from stone, you should increase the drop rate of the rarest item in your current cave (except Coal) since it will carry over into the next cave. This also helps level up faster since you gain vastly higher xp from the rarer cave items than you do from stone, and it has no impact on the new rarest material in your next cave.
8. Energy Refills: Restocking your energy is actually quite affordable if you've upgraded properly. At my current level, I can purchase 4x 100-energy refills for a total of 2732 MCC, but I'll easily earn over 10,000 MCC with that 400 energy. This stacks with the energy you earn naturally as well!
9. Technical Upgrades: The technical upgrades reduce the frequency of captchas and ads, the former being captchas you fill in when returning from the ad page, and the latter increasing the number of clicks in the mine before having to view ads from 10 to 20, 30, etc. I personally haven't gotten to the point where I can drop 50k-100k MCC freely on these upgrades, but from a mathematical perspective the fewer ads upgrade is far more useful at speeding up your mining process since it doubles the time between ad views vs. sometimes removing the captcha (which only saves 10-20% of the total ad view time).
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Well, that just about does it. Let me know if you've found any strategies of your own or if you found this guide useful!