How to play ChiliClicker
The game explains almost none of this to you, which is the genre's tradition rather than an oversight. Here is the whole of it.
The first few minutes
Click the chili. Each click pays one chili to begin with, and at fifteen you can afford a Chili Picker, which harvests whether you are clicking or not. Buy pickers until an Abuela is affordable, then Abuelas until a patch is, and you have understood the shape of the game. The store only shows tiers you are close to affording, so the list grows as you earn. Nothing is missable and nothing expires.
What things cost
Each unit of a generator costs 15% more than the one before it, so the tenth Abuela is around four times the price of the first. The 1 / 10 / 100 / max buttons choose how many a single click buys; buying ten at once is a convenience and not a discount. Selling refunds 25% of what the units actually cost you, discounts included, which makes it a way out of a misclick rather than a source of income.
A tier that looks expensive usually is not. Every tier is priced to pay for itself in roughly the same number of seconds, so the newest thing you can afford is nearly always the right thing to buy.
Upgrades, and why achievements are not decoration
Upgrades are bought once and kept. They change a rule rather than adding to a pile: a tier produces double, clicks count for more, a tier gets cheaper. The store lists a few you cannot buy yet along with what unlocks them, so you can see where the line is heading.
Achievements are worth chasing even if you do not care about achievements. Each one raises Heat by 1%, and Heat multiplies everything the farm produces, so a completed milestone is a permanent raise. One achievement is a joke that grants no Heat at all. You will know it when you earn it.
Weevils
A weevil latches onto the farm every 90 to 240 seconds, up to 3 at a time before upgrades, and each one diverts 5% of everything you produce while it sits there. Click one to pop it and you get back more than it ate: 115% of the hoard, before the upgrades that raise it.
So a weevil is closer to a piggy bank than a pest, as long as you remember to break it open. Ignore them and they are simply a tax on production.
Golden chilis
Every five to fifteen minutes a golden chili drifts across the screen and stays for thirteen seconds. Catching one rolls a weighted outcome. Most are good: production multiplied for a while, a payout worth a share of your bank, a discount on the next thing you buy, or half an hour in which the store marks whichever purchase pays for itself soonest. One is a blight, which is the bad one, and it is in the table on purpose. A reward with no downside gets clicked on reflex, and a reflex is not a decision.
Some outcomes spawn another golden chili immediately, up to 5 in a row, each link worth more than the last. If one appears the moment you catch one, stop reading and click it.
Farm milestones
The total number of buildings you own, across every tier, is worth watching. Each time it crosses the next threshold the whole farm gets a free multiplier, and the thresholds double as you go. It is why progress arrives as a jump rather than a drift: save, buy, watch the number leap, start saving again.
Ascension
Eventually a run stalls, and the answer is to burn it down. Ascending takes your buildings and your upgrades. You keep every achievement, every point of capsaicin, everything capsaicin has bought, and whatever the vault is holding.
What you get for it is capsaicin, calculated from everything you have ever earned rather than what you hold at the time, so there is no advantage in hoarding before the fire. Capsaicin buys permanent upgrades that apply to every run afterwards, including vault slots, which let you carry a chosen upgrade through the next ascension instead of buying it again.
The first ascension is the one that feels expensive. It rarely is.
While you are away
Closing the tab does not lose you the time, but it does discount it. Coming back credits 50% of your usual production for up to 3 hours away, and upgrades raise both the rate and the ceiling. Golden chilis do not pile up while you are gone, and weevils do not eat what was never produced.
The save lives on the server rather than in the browser. Sign in with an emailed link, no password to invent, and the same farm opens on your phone and your laptop. Without signing in the game still remembers you on the browser you played in.