Before you prestige: what will you lose—and keep?
Not everything disappeared in these two tests—but the recovery steps differed. Rewritten's normal P reset kept Begin producing points. Synergism's first Prestige cleared coin producers and upgrades, leaving 100 coins and zero income but unlocking Diamond Buildings. Before confirming, check the exact layer, what the reward buys and how production restarts. Do not assume another game's rule applies.
Direct browser operations: Synergism, displaying v4.4.0, continued from our October 26 opening after an overnight return; and Prestige Tree Rewritten v1.3 Patch 1, a further normal P reset after our October 19 opening. These are not two fresh speedruns. No imported progress, hard reset, console command, promotional code or paid purchase was used.
The question is not just “how much will my number fall?”
A player/developer discussion about prestige currency asks whether keeping it follows a standard rule. The replies describe different designs, not a universal contract. Another first-prestige discussion raises a more useful practical concern: players want to know what their reward will actually buy before committing. Those discussions supply the question; the examples below are our own operations.
For someone comparing the best incremental games for their preferred session, a reset can mean new decisions or unwanted repetition. We tested what disappeared, what remained and the first action that made the returned state useful. We did not time how quickly either game regained its previous peak.
Synergism: a first Prestige is not another coin upgrade
Our first-million opening route ends before Prestige. We continued that same save here, buying the remaining coin-producer types, more Accelerators and Multipliers, and the other four initial coin upgrades. The overnight return is part of this save's history, not a required waiting step.
- Read the Prestige preview before pressing it. It explicitly listed coins, coin producers, coin upgrades and crystals as reset items. At a checkpoint with only 6.40e15 spendable coins, the requirement showed 1e16/1e16 and Total Ever showed 1.00e16. Do not confuse this observed reset-progress requirement with an ordinary purchase requiring that many coins currently held.
- Read the confirmation too. It repeated that coin upgrades, coin producers and crystals would reset and said the first Prestige unlocked new features. We confirmed this normal Prestige, not Delete savefile.
- Inspect the result before buying anything. All five coin-producer counts, Accelerators and Multipliers were zero. The bank was 100 coins and the coin rate was +0.00/s. Our actual returned reward was 126 diamonds; Diamond Buildings and Runes were now available. The first Worker upgrade that had been bought before reset again showed its 1e6-coin cost without BOUGHT.
Before: 128 Workers, 60 Investments, 34 Printers, 23 Coin Mints, 16 Alchemies, 20 Accelerators and 12 Multipliers. The displayed coin rate was 1.09e14/s.
After: 100 coins, no coin producers and zero coin income; 126 diamonds and a new Diamond Buildings section. Total Ever remained displayed at 1.61e16. A lifetime counter remaining large did not mean its coins were still spendable.
126 diamonds is our outcome, not a recommended reset target. Production continued while we inspected the preview and confirmation, so the final reward differed from the earlier preview. The save also included a long offline return. We did not establish a fastest reset time, an optimal waiting point, a reward formula or a representative Offering payout.
How we restarted income after that Prestige
- Open Buildings → Diamond Buildings. Our first Refinery cost 100 diamonds. With 126 available, we bought one; 26 remained.
- That Refinery displayed 2.00 crystals/s. The panel separately described crystals as multiplying coin production. The first loaded reading after purchase showed 0.65 crystals and a 1.18 multiplier; these were changing readings, not fixed rewards for everyone.
- Return to Coin Buildings. The starting 100 coins could buy the first Worker again. We bought one instead of assuming the new diamond balance was itself a coin producer.
- Coin income resumed. One Worker initially showed 15.12 coins/s; a later checkpoint in the same recording showed 29.10 without another Worker purchase. Crystals were still accumulating. This is evidence of a functioning new production chain, not proof that the previous 1.09e14/s peak had been recovered.
If your diamond reward cannot afford the purchase you intended, this exact recovery sequence does not apply. Read the alternatives and their costs before choosing another reset. We did not compare all first-Prestige spending strategies, buy automation, spend Offerings or test Transcend.
Rewritten: a normal P reset kept the production unlock
If you are still at zero after your first reset, follow the tested steps to buy Begin and start producing points. In the October 19 run, our first reset left ordinary points at zero, and buying Begin started production. Our second normal P reset retained that unlock.
On October 27 we reopened the same v1.3 Patch 1 save, already owning Begin and Prestige Boost. A new normal P reset offered +302 prestige points. We used it without buying an intervening upgrade.
Before: the screenshot showed 912,811 ordinary points, zero held prestige points, two prestige points made in total, and production of 1.41 points/s.
After: the immediate screenshot showed zero ordinary points and 302 held prestige points. Total prestige made was 304, the production rate was 17.44/s, and Begin and Prestige Boost remained visibly purchased. The first subsequent text reading had already reached 4.36 ordinary points.
We did not have to rebuy Begin or Prestige Boost to restart that run. The zero in the ordinary counter was temporary; it was not the same situation as the first-ever reset before Begin had been bought. We did not buy Self-Synergy during this check.
“Same P layer” is the boundary. We did not click Booster, Generator or any higher reset. Do not carry this retention result into another Tree mod, Classic, another layer or a different version just because the button also describes a reset.
Five checks before confirming your own reset
- Name the layer. Record the game, version and exact action: normal P, Prestige, a higher layer, or a destructive save deletion. They are not interchangeable.
- Write down both the loss and the reward. Read the preview and confirmation. Separate spendable bank, lifetime totals, producer counts and upgrade ownership; a remaining lifetime total cannot buy a producer by itself.
- Find the next usable action. Can your offered reward buy the intended unlock? Will a retained producer work immediately, or will the returned starting currency have to buy one? Seeing a new tab is not proof that income already runs.
- Keep a backup before experimenting. Use the game's own save/export controls and retain the original separately. We used the manual Save controls in these tests, but did not test backup restoration. Do not use imports, HARD RESET or Delete savefile to diagnose normal reset behavior.
- Read the after-reset state before clicking again. Confirm the currency actually received, retained upgrades and production. If the rate is zero, inspect the missing producer or unlock. Do not immediately chain another reset while trying to understand the first.
If the reward, its cost or the reset scope remains unclear, pause rather than follow an unrelated game's rule. A discussion about unsatisfying prestige systems specifically objects to hidden costs and rewards. It also contains disagreement about whether spending prestige currency should reduce a held-currency bonus. The practical lesson is to inspect your actual post-spending state—not to assume that one preference is the correct design.
What these examples do—and do not—recommend
Rewritten's same-layer reset suited the part of this test where we wanted an owned production unlock to keep working. Synergism made us rebuild coin income but opened a diamond-to-crystal-to-coin relationship. These are different interactions, not a scored ranking or a claim that either game is always faster.
Some players enjoy layered resets; others dislike repeating earlier actions or losing automation. The multiple-layer discussion contains both positions and historical praise for Synergism. That does not establish current later-game balance. We have not completed either game, measured a complete recovery time, tested a higher layer or established equivalent behavior in the Steam/mobile versions.
If you want a different opening loop altogether, compare four tested browser-game openings. For a boost that changed less than expected without a reset, use the upgrade measurement checklist.
Evidence and comparison scope
The two October 27 reset outcomes above came from our own UI operations. Synergism was one continuing save with an overnight return, not a fresh timed build. Rewritten was a further same-layer reset, not a newly repeated first-ever reset. Native browser screencast fragments preserve the Synergism confirmation, result and recovery; they are not one continuous recording of the whole session. Illustrations on this page are original explanatory work.
Player discussions supplied the question and counterarguments, not our measurements. We checked the returned text of the fixed tier-list thread and relevant comments, Steam250 ranking and ten linked metadata pages, and ten related community discussions. This is a bounded comparison, not a claim to have read the entire community or every guide. See our testing method or send a version-specific correction.
Another directly tested reset: the BOXES first-Aura route follows the Flux reset, Buy Max unlock and first rebuild. Its rules belong to that game and stage, not the two tests above.