This is serious. Don’t tell anyone I did this. It isn’t legal. Someone might call the police.
After Club Penguin shut down in 2017, the fanmade revival Club Penguin Rewritten took its place (until Disney issued a cease-and-decist in 2021). I spent a lot of time messing around on the site just to reminisce, but I didn’t really have it in me to grind out thousands of coins in a defunct kids’ game from the late 2000’s.
So I did what anyone would do: I spent about 2 hours making a program that could take advantage of the game’s most lucrative minigame: The underground mine. Unlike other minigames on Club Penguin, you could earn coins in the mine just by wearing a miner’s hat and digging at different locations in the room. After about five to ten seconds you’d be rewarded with a bit of pocket change. While the process was mind-numbing if you kept at it for long enough, it was by far the quickest way to generate an obscene amount of moolah.
And that’s exactly what the program did. Using advanced screen-scraping technology, I was able to automate the grueling process of digging, waiting, and finding a new spot.
It was beautiful. When I went out every Friday or Saturday night I would leave the program idling for the better part of 6 hours. My account never timed out because the mouse cursor was right there, moving around and mimicking all the hard work that a normal, honest player would do. On a good night I would net somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 coins. Within a month I was a millionaire.
But day-to-day life in a game like Club Penguin quickly becomes meaningless once you accrue this much wealth. I felt as though my actions were having a net negative effect on the global Club Penguin economy, and I became too wracked with guilt to keep it up. My onslaught ended at around 1,500,000 coins, an amount I wouldn’t be able to fully spend if I tried (I mean, I definitely COULD have, but I liked having a big number on my player card more).
With the game now defunct, I have no way to capture any more footage of the autominer in action. I’ll leave you with the only recording I ever took.