CRK Special Episodes Guide: Quills, Catnip & Free Soulstones

Updated 17 October 2026: An earlier version of this guide said Cookie Odyssey lets you clear only 10 missions a day, a floor of 20 days per chapter. Devsisters' September 23, 2026 update removed that daily limit. It also listed HUNTR/X Show in the Cookie World as an episode you could still unlock; it was a time-limited collab that closed in May 2026.

Apart from the time-limited HUNTR/X collab, the Special Episodes in this guide do not close when their update ends. Their stages stay replayable, their quills keep refilling, and each Catnip Cookie shop keeps its Soulstone stock — Legendary lines included — until you buy it out.

Those shops sell Sea Fairy, Black Pearl, Frost Queen, Moonlight, Pitaya Dragon and Camellia Soulstones for a currency that costs you nothing but attention, and the quills that unlock those stages refill themselves whether you log in or not. This guide covers each episode's unlock condition, how the quill economy actually works, the difficulty setting that stacks your first-clear rewards, the Soulstones in each Catnip shop and what a full buyout costs, and why Cookie Odyssey follows an entirely different rulebook.

What Special Episodes actually are

Special Episodes are a story-centred game mode introduced in the Legend of the Red Dragon update (v4.5). Each one tells a side adventure that happens alongside the main story, and each one plays like a compact, self-contained World Exploration map: areas, battle levels, story beats, and a shop at the end of it.

Three things define the six Catnip-shop episodes this guide covers:

• Every episode has its own quill. Dragonscale, Rock Festa, Lunar Coral, Frosty, Coral, Yellowbird — these are separate currencies with separate timers, separate caps and separate daily ad attempts. Spending one does not touch another.
• Every episode has its own Catnip Coin and its own shop. Clearing stages and quests pays out that episode's coin, and Catnip Cookie converts it into Soulstones, Crystals, Toppings and materials.
• Episodes are permanent, the HUNTR/X collab aside. A completed episode does not close. Quills keep accruing, stages stay replayable, and you can come back at any point and keep farming the shop.

Cookie Odyssey is the odd one out. It launched in May 2022, a year before this system existed, and was folded in as a Special Episode later. It shares the "quill" vocabulary and little else — more on that below.

Every Special Episode and how to unlock it

The table covers eight episodes. Seven have a free unlock condition tied to progression somewhere else in the game. The eighth, HUNTR/X Show in the Cookie World, was a time-limited collab episode: it ran from April 8 into early May 2026, and when it closed, leftover Idol Quills and Idol Catnip Coins were converted to Coins.

A newer episode, Grandberry Festival, arrived in the v7.6 mid-update on July 16, 2026. The wikis do not yet list its unlock condition or shop, so it is left out of this guide.

Note the dependency chain at the bottom. Three of the seven permanent episodes open the moment you clear Crispia 3-25, but Legend of the Red Dragon is gated behind finishing Cookie Odyssey Chapter 3. If Pitaya Dragon Soulstones are the reason you are reading this, your real starting point is Cookie Odyssey.

A Mermaid's Tale hangs off Touc's Trade Harbor, which you want built out anyway, and Summer Soda Rock Festa wants 10 cleared Tropical Soda Islands. Neither is a real detour.

Two crystal spends to skip

Any permanent Special Episode can also be bought outright for 3,000 Crystals. During its own update window, that same unlock costs 300 Crystals.

That is a 10x price difference for showing up on time, and it makes buying an old episode one of the worst crystal spends available to you. The free unlock conditions are all things you were going to do anyway — clear a story stage, upgrade a harbour, finish some islands. Paying 3,000 Crystals to skip Crispia 3-25 is paying premium currency to avoid playing the game.

There is a smaller version of the same trap inside the episodes. The 12-quill top-up can be claimed either by watching an ad or by paying 300 Crystals. Take the ad. If you are running a tight F2P crystal budget, those 300 Crystals buy roughly eight hours of quill regen you would have gotten for free by logging in tomorrow.

How Quills really work

The numbers are the same across all six Catnip-shop episodes:

• Regen rate: 1 quill every 40 minutes.
• Cap: 100 quills.
• Daily top-ups: 12 quills, claimable 3 times per day, per episode.

Do the arithmetic and it is more generous than it feels. Forty minutes a quill is 36 quills a day passively, plus 36 more from the three daily top-ups — a ceiling of 72 quills per day per episode if you claim everything. And because the pools are independent, that ceiling applies to each episode simultaneously.

The cap is the part that costs people rewards. Going from empty to 100 takes 4,000 minutes — 2 days, 18 hours and 40 minutes. Every minute you sit at cap past that is regen thrown away. If you are actively farming an episode, touching it every couple of days is enough; if you have gone a week, you have already lost quills.

Then there is the interface trap. The Play menu only shows the quill count for one episode, so a low number there tells you nothing about the others. Open each episode individually — they have independent recharge timers, independent quantities and independent ad attempts, and you can run all of them in parallel.

Always play the hardest difficulty you can clear

The newer episodes let you choose a difficulty per level. A Mermaid's Tale and Icicle Yeti's Winter Song offer Normal or Hard. Song of the Night Sea and The Flower City added a third tier — Story, Normal or Hard. And the rule in every case is the same: clearing a higher difficulty also clears every difficulty below it, and pays out the First Clear rewards from all of them.

So there is no reason to climb the ladder. Bring your best PvE team, open the level on Hard, and collect the whole stack of first-clear rewards in one run for one quill spend. If Hard walls you, drop a single notch and you still bank everything underneath it. Running Story, then Normal, then Hard on the same stage spends three runs' worth of quills on First Clear rewards one Hard clear would have paid out.

The two oldest episodes work differently: Legend of the Red Dragon and Summer Soda Rock Festa have no difficulty picker, but completing either unlocks a Dark Mode — harder stages, better rewards. Treat Dark Mode as the real farm and the base run as the tutorial.

Catnip Coins are the actual reward

Stage clears pay Coins, Kingdom EXP and Cookie EXP, which is fine and forgettable. The reason to run a Special Episode is the Catnip Coin — Dragon, Osmanthus, Coral, Frosted, Underwater or Rock Festa depending on the episode — and the Catnip Cookie shop it buys from.

Two things make the shops worth planning around:

1. Stock is finite. Every entry has a limited quantity. This is not an infinite grind; it is a fixed pile of loot with a price tag on it, and once you have cleared it out there is nothing left to buy until Devsisters restocks it.
2. Overflow is not wasted. Once you have bought the shop out, every further Catnip Coin converts straight into 100 Coins each.

Add up the documented shop tables and a complete buyout runs like this:

Those totals shift when Devsisters restocks a shop during a rerun update — Pitaya Dragon's Soulstones were topped up once already in v4.6 — so treat them as the floor, not the ceiling. For context on the pace: the story quests in Song of the Night Sea alone hand out 5,600 Coral Catnip Coins across 15 quests, so quests cover roughly a sixth of that episode's buyout before you have farmed a single repeat stage.

One footnote that saves disappointment: if the Cookie whose Soulstones a shop sells is already at max promotion, the shop swaps the remaining Soulstones for Soulcores instead. Nothing is lost, but do not plan a farm around Soulstones for a Cookie you have already maxed.

Which Soulstones each shop sells

This is the table to screenshot. Prices are per purchase; stock is how many times you can buy it.

Camellia is the most expensive Soulstone line in the table at 1,800 Osmanthus Catnip Coins a stone, and The Flower City is also the priciest of the six documented buyouts — which is why it belongs at the back of your queue unless you specifically want Camellia or the Osmanthus pair. Summer Soda Rock Festa also stocks a Super Epic Soulstone choice chest covering five Cookies at 1,000 Rock Festa Catnip Coins, stock 2, which is the most flexible Soulstone purchase covered here.

The rest of the shelf is genuinely good filler, not padding: 500 to 600 Crystals per pack, 300 Rainbow Cubes, 100 Radiant Shards, 20 Topping Pieces, Treasure Tickets, Magic and Special Cookie Cutters, Soul Essence, EXP Star Jellies, Pristine Skill Powder chests, and — in the Dragon City and Summer Soda shops — Aurora Pillars, Bricks and Compasses at 200 coins or less, which is a quiet second faucet for the Rarities your Landmarks eat. Buy the Soulstones and the Crystals first, then the Cookie Cutters, then everything else.

Cookie Odyssey plays by different rules

Cookie Odyssey is not on the 40-minute clock and has no Catnip shop. It runs on Odyssey Missions:

• There are 200 Odyssey Missions per chapter, in a fixed order. Each one pays Odyssey Quills plus a second reward.
• Until the September 23, 2026 update, only 10 missions could be cleared per day, which set a floor of 20 days per chapter and 60 days for all three.
• Devsisters' notice for that update removed the daily limit, lets missions be completed without time or attempt limits, and reduced mission difficulty, so the calendar no longer sets how fast you finish.

The quills you earn unlock story parts inside each Day. You can spend them freely, some stories reveal others, an Odyssey Quest can appear after certain beats, and story choices can permanently close branches. When a Day completes, anything left unopened becomes unavailable. If you have painted yourself into a corner you can reset a Day: quills spent on unfinished quests come back, stories you already opened reopen for free, and your mission progress and overall graph are untouched.

The headline payout is Crystals. Each chapter pays 300, 500, 700 and 1,000 Crystals at 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% story unlock — 2,500 per chapter — and a fully-completed chapter unlocks in the Tower of Records for another 1,000 Crystals. That is 3,500 a chapter, 10,500 Crystals across all three, plus leftover quills converting at 10 Crystals per Odyssey Quill once a chapter hits 100%.

Two housekeeping notes. The Tower of Sweet Chaos has been discontinued, and every Odyssey Mission that referenced it now asks for Stamina Jelly usage instead — so no, you are not missing a mode. And if you were rationing Odyssey at ten missions a day, you no longer have to.

Which episode to run first

Assuming everything is unlocked, run them in roster order — chase the Soulstones you actually need:

1. A Mermaid's Tale, if Sea Fairy or Black Pearl are missing or under-promoted. It is the only shop in the table with two separate Legendary Soulstone lines.
2. Icicle Yeti's Winter Song, if you want Frost Queen. It is also the cheapest of the six documented buyouts at 29,600 coins.
3. Song of the Night Sea for Moonlight plus nine Star Coral Soulstones — the largest single Soulstone line in the shop table.
4. Legend of the Red Dragon for Pitaya Dragon, Aurora Rarities and a Dark Mode to farm afterwards. Gated behind Odyssey Chapter 3, so finish Cookie Odyssey first.
5. Summer Soda Rock Festa for Shining Glitter and the five-Cookie Super Epic choice chests.
6. The Flower City last, unless Camellia or the Osmanthus twins are a priority. At 46,600 coins it is the most expensive of the six documented buyouts.

And underneath all of it, work through Cookie Odyssey until all three chapters are done. Fold the quill top-ups into your daily checklist for whichever episode you are actively farming — three ad claims add 36 quills, doubling that day's passive regen.

Common Special Episode mistakes

1. Judging your quill supply by the Play menu. It shows one episode's count; every other episode has its own separate pool.
2. Grinding the difficulty ladder from the bottom. Clearing Hard grants every lower difficulty's First Clear rewards. Start high.
3. Paying 3,000 Crystals to unlock an old episode. The free condition is ordinary progression you were doing anyway.
4. Paying 300 Crystals for 12 quills. That is the ad reward. Watch the ad.
5. Sitting at the 100-quill cap. Anything past 2 days 18 hours of full storage is regen you never got.
6. Ignoring Cookie Odyssey because it is mostly story. It is 10,500 Crystals and the free unlock for Legend of the Red Dragon.
7. Buying the cheap filler before the Soulstones. Stock is finite, and every Soulstone line in the table caps out at two or three purchases.
8. Farming Soulstones for a maxed Cookie. At max promotion the shop swaps them for Soulcores — fine, but not what you were planning for.

Quick Action Checklist

• Clear Crispia 3-25 in Story Mode to open three episodes at once, for free
• Never pay 3,000 Crystals for an episode outside its own update window
• Open every episode individually and check its quill pool separately
• Claim all three 12-quill ad top-ups daily on the episode you are farming
• Never take the 300-Crystal quill top-up — the ad gives the same 12
• Play the highest difficulty you can clear; it grants every lower tier's First Clear rewards
• Unlock Dark Mode in Legend of the Red Dragon and Summer Soda Rock Festa, then farm that instead
• Spend Catnip Coins on Soulstones first, Crystals second, Cookie Cutters third
• Do not farm Soulstones for a Cookie already at max promotion
• Keep buying after the shop looks done — overflow coins convert to 100 Coins each
• Work through Cookie Odyssey's missions — the daily cap is gone since the September 23, 2026 update
• Clear Cookie Odyssey Chapter 3 to unlock Legend of the Red Dragon for free
• Bank the full 10,500 Crystals from Odyssey before you plan your next big pull