What every pause costs, to the click
On a short run, stopping is not really an option, so nobody thinks about it. On a hundred-second run it is the central decision, and it happens to have an exact price. Click steadily at some rate for all but a few seconds, do nothing for those few, and your final score is that rate multiplied by the fraction of the run you were actually working — because the divisor never changes.
Written out: final CPS = rate × (100 − pause) ÷ 100. The table lists the cases that come up in practice, with the click count each pause throws away.
| Rate while clicking | Pause 1s | Pause 2s | Pause 5s | Pause 10s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 CPS (600 clicks if unbroken) | 5.94 · −6 clicks | 5.88 · −12 clicks | 5.70 · −30 clicks | 5.40 · −60 clicks |
| 8 CPS (800 clicks if unbroken) | 7.92 · −8 clicks | 7.84 · −16 clicks | 7.60 · −40 clicks | 7.20 · −80 clicks |
| 10 CPS (1,000 clicks if unbroken) | 9.90 · −10 clicks | 9.80 · −20 clicks | 9.50 · −50 clicks | 9.00 · −100 clicks |
Two readings are worth taking away. The first is that a pause is cheap in score and expensive in clicks: one second off at 10 CPS costs you a tenth of a point but ten clicks, and you will have to find those ten clicks somewhere. The second is that the price scales with how fast you were going, which produces the counter-intuitive result that the faster you click, the more each pause costs you. At 6 CPS a five-second break costs 30 clicks; at 10 CPS the same break costs 50.
That is the whole strategic argument for pacing on this length. A rate you can hold unbroken beats a faster rate you have to interrupt, and the table tells you exactly how much faster the interrupted rate would need to be to break even.
The only length where one click moves the last digit by exactly one
One click is worth 0.01 CPS here, which is exactly the smallest number the display can show — so every two-decimal score between two whole numbers is a score this length can actually produce. Over ten seconds a click is worth 0.1, so the last digit of the score is always zero and the two-decimal display is half decoration. Over one second a click is worth a full 1.00 and both decimals are decoration. The lengths in between are the interesting comparison: at sixty seconds a click is worth 0.0167 CPS, so the second decimal genuinely moves — 420 clicks is 7.00, 421 is 7.02, 422 is 7.03 — but it moves in steps of a sixtieth and skips most of the values on the way. Fifteen and thirty seconds behave the same way, in steps of 0.0667 and 0.0333. Only at a hundred seconds is one click worth precisely one unit of the last digit printed.
That fine resolution is also what makes this length the most sensitive comparison on the site. A change of 0.05 CPS is five clicks — small enough to be noise on a short run, but across a thousand-click run it is a real, if minor, difference. If you are testing whether a new mousepad or a new grip genuinely helps, this is the length that can see it.
Pacing a hundred seconds
The instinct is to start at whatever rate feels comfortable and hope. The better approach is to decide your click total first and work backwards. Six hundred clicks is 6.00 CPS and is comfortably sustainable for most people who can already click steadily. A thousand clicks is 10.00 CPS, which is ten clicks every second, a hundred times in a row, with no gaps at all — read that way it stops sounding like a warm-up and starts sounding like the serious commitment it is.
- Pick a click total before you start and let the arithmetic set your rate. Divide by a hundred to see it; that number has to still be true at second ninety.
- Open below your target. The first twenty seconds should feel too easy. Every long run that ends badly started too fast.
- Never stop to check the counter. Glancing is fine; stopping costs the clicks in the table above, and it is the most common self-inflicted wound on this length.
- Shift the work, do not pause. If your index finger is failing, alternating two fingers halves the rate each one has to produce — that arithmetic is laid out on the spacebar click test page and applies just as well to a mouse.
- One attempt per session. A hundred seconds of hard clicking is enough. Doing five of them back to back is how people end up with a sore forearm and a worse score.
An honest warning about the long run
This is the length where strain reports come from. Players widely describe hand, wrist and forearm fatigue from sustained fast clicking, and some describe pain. Those are player reports with no medical finding behind them, and this site is not qualified to tell you what is safe for your body. Treat a hundred-second run as a one-off challenge, never a training routine; stop the moment anything hurts, whatever the clock says; and take the question to someone qualified if discomfort persists. If you want the same challenge at less than two thirds of the cost, the 60-second click test has the same character in a minute.