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When to install Just Natural Expansion
A question often asked is when is the proper time to install Just Natural Expansion on top of your existing vanilla experience. This is a personal question but I will attempt to provide some guidance. There certainly isn't any wrong time to begin using it, and you should play the game however you find to be fun.
Typically I would not recommend Just Natural Expansion for early game players (players who have not yet ascended). While Just Natural Expansion won't really interfere with the early game you may find it frustrating to find so many things locked behind later game content. Starting the puzzles early game will quickly come to a screaming halt. While some of the minigames add value for new players they are typically built with mid or late game players in mind.
Mid game is a pretty good balance for when Just Natural Expansion starts to show its colors. After 700 cursors you will start to see access to some of the upgrades and achievements that were the original intention of Just Natural Expansion. The extra milk provided from these achievements (assuming you are not using shadow mode) will make the late game a little less bogged down. The mini games will start to become usable and more fun to interact with. You will likely have enough of the game unlocked to progress through most puzzles (Mysteries of the Cookie Age will warn you if anything needed is still locked).
This is where Just Natural Expansion was designed to be used at. It was intended to extend the late game by adding more heavenly upgrades, achievements, upgrades, and content so the game doesn't hit a wall. If you wait too long in the end game you may notice you are instantly awarded a number of achievements just for installing the mod, while certainly not a problem you coasted by some of the early intentions of the mod.
You can certainly install it at end game and feel like you are still getting a lot of content, Just Natural Expansion is designed to extend the game and that easily happens at the end game. I do not typically recommend you wait until you have 100%'ed the game as some of those final vanilla achievements can drag out and can be worked on alongside the JNE achievements and goals. Waiting till you get 27,777 golden cookies means you are clicking cookies while missing out on a lot of other content.