Video Game / Prestige Tree

Shown: Prestige, Boosters, Generators,
Time, Enhance, Space.

Prestige Tree is an Idle Game by Jacorb90 released in 2020. Initially, you click on a node with "P" on it, claim prestige points, and buy prestige upgrades once you have enough of them. As you play, more nodes show up and become accessible, which feature more things that let you progress further, like boosters and generators, though these reset your prestige points and upgrades until you gain the ability to not make them reset earlier stuff. Can you reach e1e11 points?

The game proved to be influential enough to start The Modding Tree engine for games based on the initial idea, attracting a decent modding community who made plenty of them. An official remade version called Prestige Tree Rewritten has been made in that engine featuring different upgrades, new nodes and altered mechanics for certain tree nodes.

The original game (retroactively titled Prestige Tree: Classic) can be played here, while Prestige Tree: Rewritten can be played here.

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The original (and usually Rewritten as well) provides examples of:

• All the Worlds Are a Stage: The final unlockable hindrance for the 5th tree, "The Final Stockade", contains all the previous hindrances at once with the exceptions of "Slowed To A Halt" and "Anti-Enhancers". Later, there's "The Truly Final Stockade" that contains all the hindrances, including those two.
• Cap: Time Capsules have a limit for how much Time Energy they can produce based on how many of the former you have.
• Challenge Run: The hindrances, which involve an attempt to reach a certain point total with a restriction (like no third tier resources) or slowed down progress (like Prestige Point gain has a power of 0.01). Completing them gives a stat increase for the main game.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: There's a decent number of softcaps in the original, while Rewritten has so many that it needs a whole tab to track where one starts and how much it weakens resource gain/effect. Without softcaps, Classic breaks down due to inflation roughly when you reach Super Prestige or Hyperspace, while Rewritten does so at Quirks.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The game originally lacked shading/outlines and had a much more elliptical reset button for layer resources.
• End-Game Results Screen: The end screen shows how long it took to beat the game.
• Export Save: You can export the 3KB+ save into the clipboard and import it into a window that pops up.
• New Game Plus: Exaggerated; starting over is your first action, converting your starting ten Points into one Prestige Point. Progression consists entirely of resetting all previous tiers to gain an upgrade that makes you progress faster. As you go down the tree, you find things that let you make those things not reset previous tiers.
• Notice This: Nodes are given a subtle grey outline when a reset is possible or a sinister red outline when an upgrade for them is available.
• Reset Milestones: Almost every layer has a certain number of milestones unlocked by getting enough of its respective resource. They make lower resets affect nothing, automatically gain specific resources/buyables, or not lose specific upgrades upon resetting.
• Skill Point Reset: You can reset Space Buildings/Hyperspace Buildings/Mastery Buildings so you can buy different ones, but that performs a space/hyperspace/mastery reset as well. Later you get the ability to destroy Space Buildings by one and not have them consume Space, making that one superfluous.
• Tech Tree: The whole game focuses on a tree of this sort, where you have to click on nodes and upgrade things in them, which tend to affect the things above or reset them.
• Timed Mission: The "Slowed to a Halt" hindrance makes time slow down over time, coming to a stop in 10 seconds. This effectively puts a time limit to reach 1.0e16,500 before things stop.
• A Winner Is You: Beating the game doesn't net the player much more than congratulating them for reaching e1e11 points and asking them to retry for a speedrun or continue their current session.

Rewritten provides examples of:

• Achievement System: There are 80 achievements, with four columns of 16 shown initially and the fifth one revealed once you unlock Mastery. Some achievements require you to progress normally, while others have a goal that needs to be reach with a restriction.
• Adapted Out: Several layers which appeared in the original like Hyper Boosters, Super Prestige, and Life have been removed and replaced with new ones.
• Adaptation Expansion: In addition to adding six extra layers after Gear & Machines, just about all the layers have been heavily expanded mechanically, where most layers in the old game just had resource gaining and upgrade buying, Rewritten added things like: the sliding boost bar in Balance, managing when to sacrifice for boosts in Solarity, judging which Nebula secondary dust combos are needed for progress, an entire Double Unlock feature for new upgrades, and revamping Mastery from the building gimmick now merged with Imperium into something that combines Challenge Run with a higher-tier form of New Game Plus.
• Cap: Stellar Clusters and Imperium Building I cap at 5, while Imperium Building II caps at 6. Justified as they unlock buyables/upgrades.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Each node has its own colour.
  • Prestige: Teal
  • Boosters: Medium blue
  • Generators: Light green
  • Time: Dark green
  • Enhance: Pink-purple
  • Space: Chalk-coloured
  • Super Boosters: Navy blue
  • Super Generators: Bright green
  • Solarity: Orange
  • Hinderance: Red-brown
  • Quirks: Dark pink/Magenta
  • Subspace: White (a brighter shade than regular space)
  • Magic: Bright pink
  • Balance: Light yellow
  • Phantom Souls: Grey-purple
  • Nebula: Midnight blue
  • Honour: Gold
  • Hyperspace: White (with a hint of very light purple)
  • Imperium: Cream
  • Mastery: Light orange (with a hint of red/pink)
  • Gears: Grey/silver
  • Machines: Brown (with a hint of grey)
  • Energy: Neon-yellow
  • Neurons: Lilac
  • Ideas: Bright yellow
  • Robots: Sky blue
  • AIs: Metallic gray (with a very slight yellow-greenish tinge).
  • Civilizations: Light purple
• Double Unlock: A few of the upgrades require you to achieve a certain milestone to unlock, and after that still require the usual tier point requirements to actually purchase.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: The Mastery layer. It's in the seventh and final row, it takes a lot to unlock it, and the gist of it is that you have to go back over every previous node and complete it again with a stricter difficulty curve. All of this would make for a great finale, but as you get near the last couple of nodes, the rewards you obtain from mastering previous nodes will unlock a new node in Row 7 and the game continues on for a while after.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The game's excessively huge numbers are too big for standard floating-point formats, requiring the use of a custom numeric system and special functions to deal with it. Occasionally, the game trips and forgets to do this, and putting these impossibly-high numbers into normal variables causes them to spit out NaN (Not a Number), completely breaking the game.
• New Game Plus: Just like the original version. A straighter example of this trope is "Mastery", which allows you to go back to previous nodes and master them by giving you a steeper curve with which to purchase upgrades, with some nodes (such as Honour and Imperium) being virtually impossible to master if you buy the upgrades in the wrong order.
• Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: While the Achievement System is largely there to act as a potential guideline for progression, plenty of the achievements provide rewards to help speed gameplay along, including small boosts to resources and effects, permanently keeping parts of layers on all further resets, increasing the limit to certain Hindrances, and other useful effects. Furthermore, for two of the aforementioned Double Unlocks, the milestone is to earn a certain number of achievements.
• The Power of the Sun: The Solarity layer has you produce solarity that generates Solar Energy that multiplies the Time Energy limit and lowers solarity requirements every second and can be spend on resources like Solar Cores and Coronal Waves.
• Shout-Out:
  • The achievement system uses images for each achievement in a similar manner to Antimatter Dimensions.
  • An upgrade called Emissary of Smash is available in the Subspace layer.
• Strategy Guide: There's a guide accessible by clicking the yellow question mark. It gives the optimal way to progress through game parts, what you should focus on purchasing, etc.
• Video Game Remake: A remake of the original, now with new layers, an achievement system, revamped Hindrances, and altered mechanics for many layers. The endgame goal has also been increased from e1e11 points to e3.140e16 points.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: The revamped version of the Balance layer introduces two prominent aspects, one being positivity and negativity providing specific buffs to features while also dividing each other's buffs, albeit the debuff is very slow compared to the buffs, while the other is a sliding bar that boosts production of each based on how far it's set to either side, with leaving it in the middle having a Master of None equal gain effect. While individually the buffs are quite strong, to get the most out of the layer you quite fittingly need to "balance" boosting both sides as high as you can, since their effects synergize strongly, and eventually you get an upgrade that makes them boost each-other's gain, so keeping them balanced makes both especially stronger.

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