I'm pretty sure this has been asked a while before, but I'm too lazy to go through the archives to find it :P To navigate it, is there a pattern, or is it random? And why do I sometimes randomly get a cookie at the beginning but sometimes I don't?

It is random which way is the correct way. The cookie is needed to pass through the fields or else you will get attacked by a polar bear at a certain point, although if that happens, you may get that said polar bear as a battle challenger.