Universal Paperclips: 10 Tips to Help you Convert the World

Universal Paperclips was introduced to me by a friend of mine and quickly became one of my top 3 incremental games. There are three stages to the game, so three tips will be for stage 1, 3 for stage 2, and 3 for stage 3, along with one universal tip.

Stage 1

#1: Match your price with your production

That title wording is horrible, sorry. Basically, you can set your clips to a certain price via one-cent increments. The lower the price, the higher the consumer demand, and the faster your clips sell. Yeah, people genuinely buy singular clips, apparently. Once you unlock the RevTracker, you can see how much money you earn at every price level. Try your best to match your production with the average sold, as this will make you the most revenue per second. This starts off around $0.08 per clip in my experience. Slowly save up to buy Marketing while buying Wire when needed. When you upgrade Marketing, your clips will begin to sell faster. You might need to raise the price so that you don't sell out of clips faster than you can produce them.

#2: Use the WireBuyer

Trust me on this one. The WireBuyer might seem like it'll cost you money (it'll sometimes buy at a higher price than you might like), but once you purchase it you'll never have to click that button again. It'll remove that part from your brain so you can focus on other things, and as all the rich gurus out there will tell you, that's incredibly valuable. So buy it and keep it on, unless it's running down your money too fast, in which case you should probably reevaluate your entire strategy.

#3: Use the Investment Engine

The investment engine works like investing in real life: you can either have the money slowly compound, trade actively, or dump it all into crypto. That's how I see the low-, medium-, and high-risk investments in this game, anyway. And for the love of god, don't neglect this. Start off with low risk, then switch to medium and then high once you've upgraded the investment engine a bit using the Yomi from the Strategic Modeling Engine. Or just keep it at low-risk the entire time, that's what I did (which was probably mildly unhelpful). Even my risk-averse gameplay made me a bajillionare pretty quickly. So, again don't neglect this thing. Among everything else, it'll help you get to Stage 2 Faster. Speaking of which...

Stage 2

This stage is unlocked after the project Release the HypnoDrones.

#4: Balance your production

This stage becomes quite complex, but when it comes to creating drones, make sure you've always got enough wire. I personally recommend prioritizing Wire Drones over Harvester Drones, but make sure you're always producing Paperclips. To match your production rate, you need 1.618 times more Wire Drones than worker drones (The Golden Ratio aka phi). This is pretty neat, in my opinion! Oh, and of course, remember that the more factories you have (and the more efficient those factories are), the more drones and solar farms you need to create the needed production.

#5: Upgrade your drones (and factories)

All of the upgrade Projects at this point tend to upgrade a certain aspect, especially the drones, by either 100x or 1000x. I shouldn't have to explain to you how broken that is. Every single upgrade from this area will skyrocket you to new levels. There are a total of eight drone-related upgrades, each having a substantial effect on your progress, especially Momentum, where your drones and factories will constantly become better, forever, as long as they are fully powered. Still, make sure to manage everything.

#6: Balance your Working and Thinking

Swarm Gifts (unlocked when the Thinking timer reaches 0) are bonus Trust, and they're very powerful. The more drones you have, the more trust you get per swarm gift (max is 20) and the less time it takes (minimum appears to be around 8 seconds). Try to balance it, though, so that you're not running completely out of wire. Also, your drones will eventually start to become bored, and you'll have to spend 5,000 Yomi to entertain them. Make sure to keep an eye out for this popup, as your drones aren't producing swarm gifts during their boredom.

Stage 3

This stage is unlocked after the project Space Exploration.

#7: Don't forget Wire and Harvester Drones

You'll still need some amount of production and Swarm Gifts. I personally had 1 point in each. Not having any points in Wire and Harvester Drones kept me stuck at around 2 billion drones for almost an hour. Also important is to maximize Honor to increase Probe Trust, letting you level these stats faster (though Yomi will be your limiting factor eventually. Greed is the best strategy in Stage 3). If possible, without sacrificing other stats, keep Exploration, Wire Drone Production, and Harvester Drone Production all at 1. Don't get stuck like me.

#8: Manage your stats

Don't underestimate the Drifters. Keep your Combat at about 8 (between 5-10, 8 seems to be around the maximum), your Exploration at 1 (for reasons above), your Speed at maybe 5 once you unlock the relevant project (OODA Loop, allows less of your drones to be killed by Drifters, earning you more Honor), and your Self-Replication should be at around 15, but make sure that you decrease it to around 5 if Drifters start to outnumber you until their population is at more reasonable levels.

#9: Don't forget your goal

Your end goal is to convert all the matter in the universe to paperclips. The drifters are important, but they are a means to an end - do not expend all your resources trying to fully defeat them, as you will never be able to do so. Remember your goal, and remember the power of compounding.

#10: Check the Wiki

Conveniently, there's a little sector that has an explanation for everything in the game, situated at universalpaperclips.fandom.com/wiki/Universal_Paperclips_Wiki. Go look at them for any other tips you have. That's it for this guide (for now: it doesn't exactly match my quality standards, but I've been writing another one for a while, so I'm a little too exhausted to fix it at the moment). As usual, leave feedback down below.