When to prestige, and when to move city

What a reset costs you

Prestiging clears your coins, your generators, your automation and your active quests. It keeps your stars, your region, your character buffs, your achievements and premium. Every new run opens with enough seed capital to hire one Intern — without it there would be nothing to trade and no way to earn — and the Head Start buff adds a real cash cushion on top of that.

A reset is also when the city re-prices itself. The market phase is read at that moment, so the run you are about to start may be cheaper or dearer than the one you just finished — see the market phase section of the main guide for the three phases and what to do in each.

The critical detail is that automation goes with the generators. Money you spend automating in the last hour of a run is money you will not see again — see the automation guide for why that changes what you should buy near the end.

The square root changes everything

Stars are √(lifetime earnings ÷ threshold), rounded down. Lifetime earnings means the coins earned in this run — the counter resets with everything else.

A square root punishes long runs. Doubling your earnings multiplies your stars by only 1.41. To double your stars you need four times the money. Turned around: to go from N stars to N+1, you need (2N+1) × threshold more lifetime coins. The first star in New York costs 10 million. The sixth costs another 110 million.

Six separate runs that each stop at the threshold hand you six stars for 60 million total. One heroic run to six stars costs 360 million. In pure coins, short resets win by a mile.

Why you should not just reset constantly

Because coins are not the currency you are actually spending. Time is, and time does not scale with coins at all.

The opening of a run is the slow part: you are placing trades by hand, buying your first Interns, waiting to afford automation. Once the floor is automated and you are into the upper tiers, income compounds and the last 90% of a run’s earnings can arrive in a fraction of its wall-clock time. Resetting the moment the threshold lights up throws you back into the slow part, over and over.

The useful rule is a plateau test, not a number: prestige when the next tier you want costs more than you can comfortably earn in one sitting. That is the point where the run has stopped compounding and is just grinding. In practice that usually lands somewhere between 2 and 4 stars in a region — well past the threshold, well short of heroics.

Moving city: the easy decision

Stars have exactly one use. They are not spent on upgrades — character buffs are bought with gems — so stars do nothing at all while they sit in your total. There is no reason to save them.

Which makes this the one decision you cannot get wrong: move to the next region the moment you can afford it. Each region is a permanent ×6 on all income, and it survives every future reset.

Note how the star costs steepen while your stars per run grow more slowly — that gap is intentional, and it is why each region takes more prestiges than the one before rather than fewer. The devlog on the prestige curve explains the arithmetic and the bug that made it collapse the first time round.

The buff that compounds with all of this

Star Collector adds 20% to stars earned per prestige, per level, up to five levels — a flat doubling of every star payout for the rest of the game. It costs gems, not stars, so it never competes with region progress, and it applies after the square root rather than before it, which means it is worth the same proportion whether you reset early or late.

If you are going to buy one meta-upgrade before your first serious push up the ladder, buy that one. Head Start is the runner-up: it shortens the slow opening of every future run, which is exactly the cost that makes frequent resets painful.