v1.9.5 — New Start, and the restart becomes a decision
Players reset the game before. Sometimes to replay it better, sometimes because they got stuck without the Cu to climb back out. The old reset erased everything and gave nothing in return. New Start turns the restart into a decision — you keep your history, and you carry a permanent bonus of your choosing into the next run.
For a long time the game had a reset button that was, mechanically, a punishment. Some players used it anyway — out of curiosity, out of comfort, out of necessity when a Cu-dry stretch wouldn’t lift. The reset wiped the slate and handed nothing back. There was no reason to use it except that nothing else was working. There was certainly no reason to plan for it.
New Start replaces the reset with a decision.
🔄 New Start — what you keep, what you spend, what you choose
The structure of a New Start is three things sitting next to each other:
- What you spend. Cu, Ru, hardware, models, reputation, the model archive, the Repo — all of it goes to zero. This cannot be undone.
- What you keep. Your nickname, statistics, achievements, and every Nu you own, bought or earned. The game remembers the operator; it forgets the operation.
- What you choose. The permanent bonus you’ve been accumulating from every brain sale this run carries forward — not at full strength (there is a transfer rate), and not into some generic pool. You pick which of four attributes it feeds.
The four attributes:
| attribute | what it does |
|---|---|
| Cu income | more Cu per sale and per rental |
| Ru income | more Ru per run |
| Training speed | pretrain runs faster |
| Learning speed | models learn faster inside a run |
The bonus is additive across every New Start. The attribute you fed last restart still has what you gave it; the next restart adds to that total. Each attribute caps at +100 %. The direction of the build is your choice, cycle to cycle.
Tapping an attribute shows you how much it would gain before committing — the reset only happens on the second confirmation. There is no accidental New Start.
Where to find it. New Start lives on the IT Market screen, directly under the News tile, with its own icon.
🔥 Phoenix achievements
A new achievement series tracks the restart count: 1, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 New Starts. First one unlocks for 10 Nu; each subsequent tier pays 5 Nu more than the last. Z popela · Jako fénix · Znovuzrození · Věčný návrat · Nesmrtelný — from the ashes, like a phoenix, reborn, eternal return, immortal. The series is both for the operators who are going to run the restart loop as a mode of play, and for the ones who will meet it once, out of curiosity, and never again.
🧭 Specializations now have their own tile
Specializations used to appear in Telemetry as a row at the very bottom of the screen — and only once the player already had one. Which meant operators without a specialization did not know specializations existed. Not the discoverability we were going for.
They now get a dedicated tile in Telemetry, visible whether you have one or not. If you don’t, the screen explains how to get one (fine-tune a Medium or larger model; the chance rises with model size and with each mastered domain the specialisation path requires). If you do, it’s where you see what you’ve got. The old Best Brains tile — effectively the same data as Statistics in different clothing — is retired to make room.
A quiet aside, directed at the operators looking for one. Specializations have, until this release, been a mechanic without a permanent address — a thing that happens during a fine-tune and then goes to live in a row at the bottom of a screen nobody scrolls to. A permanent address tends to attract attention from both sides. Now might be a good moment to start spending time on them. The shape they carry on this tile today is the shape of a mechanic nobody had particular reason to look at twice; the shape it carries the next time this page meaningfully updates is likely to be a different one.
🔧 Fix
Inner voice and monologs now also fire in clicked runs. Both events were skipped entirely while a run was being tapped through, which meant the Inner Voice upgrade — including its Ru bonus — did literally nothing on an active-tapping run. It does now.
— NeuroVault Research Systems