How can I speed up the game?

I would like to increase the tick rate of my kitten simulation. I've tried changing gamePage.rate = 10 in the console, which should double it (it starts at 5) but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

Is it possible to increase the tick rate?

You should not mess with the tick() or rate too much. The game is optimized to work more or less smooth on the 5 tick per second, and you are expected to have significant performance impact on 10 and more.

What you can do, however, is get some paragon points (even 100 or 200 would make noticeable difference) by the means of reset or console. Paragons multiply all your production rates which is basically the same as faster update rate.

I still welcome if someone else can get this done a more natural, idle-oriented way... But here's my solution so far.

This does involve some console vomit, with the following function:

var skip = function(min, sec) {

  // if we click skip while paused, we want to
  // remember that and re-set it
  var wasPaused = gamePage.wasPaused;

  // unpause the game so tick() operates properly
  gamePage.isPaused = false;

  // should replace 5 with gamePage.rate but it doesn't
  // seem to change anyway, so whatevs
  var tix = (min * 60 + sec) * 5;

  // run the loop tix number of times
  while(tix --> 0) {
    // perform the tick
    gamePage.tick();

    // i kept killing my kittens, so i put this in here
    // to protect me a little bit - it's just a general safeguard
    var food = gamePage.resPool.get('catnip');
    if(food.value / food.maxValue < 0.05) {
      gamePage.isPaused = true;
      alert('warning: food low - aborting early');
      return;
    }
  }

  // assuming we didn't return early because of
  // a famine, return the game's paused state to
  // whatever it was when we started
  gamePage.isPaused = wasPaused;
}

Open up your dev console (press F12) and paste this code in and hit enter. You need to do this every time you reload the game.

Then I make some bookmarks, like one named "5 sec" with the link javascript:skip(0,5) and "1 min" with the link javascript:skip(1,0).

Note if you skip too much you're going to miss your celestial events. But you can use it to 'idle' for a few minutes at a time and is very, very useful to me!