Ascension

Primal Ascension (v0.48.0) is the game's prestige reset: once you've proven mastery of a run, you can walk through the Amber Door to start a fresh cycle — most of your save wiped on purpose — in exchange for permanent, stacking power that carries forward forever. It's the gateway to the game's whole late-game "staircase": Rift Ranks, Item Quality (the Rite of Refinement), Mutation Lines, and the Warden's Bounty Board are all gated behind an Ascension count.

Reaching the Door

What opens the Door depends on whether this would be your first walk or a later one.

First ascension: the Warden's Census

Your very first Ascension has no score requirement at all — instead, the Warden's Census must read 100%. The Census is a fixed checklist across nine categories, each a straightforward done/total count:

Category	What it counts
Skills at 99	All 13 skills at max level
Species tamed	Every one of the 57 species you've ever tamed
Museum complete	All 57 skeletons mounted (the Museum's Grand Hall)
Quest chains finished	Every quest chain in the game
Chronicles & The Sigil	All 40 Chronicles notes, including the capstone
Guardians felled	All 10 biome Guardians
Arena tiers won	All 30 Arenas pairs (10 Guardians × Gamma/Beta/Alpha)
Rift bosses felled	The 4 base Rifts boss fights (Beta/Alpha rank variants don't count toward this — or gate anything else about the Door)
Achievements	Every achievement except the two secret trials and the Ascension-track ones themselves (an achievement that requires ascending can't be required to ascend)

Every denominator above is read live from the game's own content, so shipping a new species, biome, arena tier, or rift boss raises the bar automatically for anyone who hasn't crossed it yet. The Census only has to hit 100% once — it never has to be re-cleared on later cycles.

Later ascensions: Guardians and score

Once you've walked the Door at least once, the gate changes:

All 10 Guardians must be defeated again (they reset with everything else — see below).
Your live Ascension score (see Sparks and the score below) must reach or exceed a rising bar. The bar starts at 0 and, after each ascension, is recalculated from that ascension's score as min(score × 1.3, score + 3,000), rounded to the nearest 100 — so it always climbs, but a big score jump is capped at +3,000 per cycle rather than compounding forever.

What can hold the Door shut mid-attempt

Separately from the two gates above, the Door refuses to open while you're mid-action: an active hunt or fight, a raid or siege, a Dispatch squad still out, an Excavation dig running, a Breeding pair (either pen) in progress, or a Nursery egg still maturing. Finish or cancel whatever's running first.

Walking through

The ceremony is a deliberate three-step confirmation, not a single click: Approach the Amber Door opens the confirmation screen and its full LOST/KEPT breakdown; Arm the Door is a second, explicit step that has to be taken before the final button lights up; Walk through the Amber Door executes the reset. There is no accidental ascension.

What survives and what resets

The reset is a fresh save with everything below grafted back on top. Nothing is silently dropped — the confirmation screen itemizes every single save key before you commit.

Kept forever (once earned, never touched again):

Achievements and titles, all of it
Learned Blueprints (the recipes — not the forged pieces themselves)
The Museum, every mastery level and milestone, all Chronicles and The Sigil
Pets and their find tallies, every field note
The completion log and its rank, and every lifetime counter/statistic (these directly feed your score — see below)
Rift Bazaar one-off purchases (never need re-buying) and lifetime Warden's Marks
Quality-of-life preferences (auto-eat, auto-potion, preferred food, and the like)
Your Ascension record itself — count, banked Sparks, high-water score

Reset (with the exceptions noted):

All skill levels return to 1; Amber and the Bank empty (effect-unique items — relics, trinkets, the Riftheart Relic, the Bounty Exchange uniques, and similar one-of-a-kind items — survive in a Trophy Case regardless of whether they were banked or worn; the Primal Catalyst also carries through at full stack)
Every dino leaves the stable (unless preserved by Amber Bond, below) and all worn/crafted equipment is gone
Homestead structures, the Tribe camp (workers, buildings, Material Age), Shop upgrades (unless preserved by Keeper's Ledger), and tool ranks all rebuild from nothing
Guardians, rift bosses, and rival tribes are undefeated again; biome patrol progress resets (unless seeded by Trail Wisdom); Arena ladders reset
Quest chains, the Contract Board, the Trading Post, and Weather all restart (quest rewards pay out again on the re-run — a deliberate small cycle income)
All forged gear is gone — a piece rolled from a blueprint is run power, the recipe knowledge is not
In-flight state — battle log, dispatch squads, digs, raids/sieges, fallen-gear debts — clears with the run

Before you walk: getting the most out of a run

This is the part that decides whether an ascension is worth anything. Read it before your second walk especially — the first one is gated by the Census and pays whatever your score happens to be, but every walk after that can be worth thousands of Sparks or literally nothing, depending entirely on timing.

The one rule that matters

Sparks are paid on your high-water mark, not your score:

Sparks earned = your score now − the highest score you have ever banked

If you walk with a score below your previous best, you earn zero Sparks. Not a reduced amount — zero. The Door still opens, your run is still wiped, and you get nothing for it. This is the single most common way to waste a cycle.

It also means rebuilding is never itself profitable. Getting your skills back to where they were last cycle returns you to roughly your old score, which pays nothing. Sparks come only from the margin above that line.

Why some progress counts every cycle and some doesn't

Score is measured once — at the instant you walk. What happens to each row afterwards is what makes the difference:

13 rows survive the Door. Mastery levels and milestones, Museum skeletons and wings, field notes, Chronicles, the completion log, pets, blueprints, achievements, lifetime Amber, lifetime Marks, and Primal casts are all kept permanently. They are already banked — they will be in your score at every future walk without you touching them, and they only ever grow.
10 rows are wiped. Skill levels, skills at 99, patrol clears, Guardians, the Arena ladder, rift clears, Rift Ranks, quest steps, Camp Material Age and rival tribes all reset. Each cycle these have to be re-earned from nothing, and they count only at the moment you walk.
3 rows ride with your dinos. Veteran levels, bloodline depth and niched species travel with whatever you carry through on Amber Bond — see below.

The practical consequence: the kept rows raise your floor a little more each cycle, but the wiped rows are the ones you actively choose the timing of. Beating your old high-water means arriving at the Door with the wiped rows at least back where they were plus whatever the kept rows have gained since.

What to push before you walk

Roughly 9,900 points sit in rows that the Door destroys. Ranked by what they are worth at a full run:

What	Points at full	Notes
Skill levels	2,548	13 skills × 98 levels × 2. The single biggest block, and the slowest to rebuild
Skills at 99	1,950	150 each. The last few levels of a skill are worth far more than the grind suggests — level 98 → 99 is worth 152 points, not 2
Arena ladder	1,800	60 per pair, 30 pairs. Often the most under-farmed row
Guardians	1,200	120 each. You have to beat all 10 to open the Door anyway
Rival tribes	1,200	80 each, 15 tribes. Cheap points if the ladder is already climbable
Rift Ranks	640	60 per Beta first-clear, 100 per Alpha, 8 total
Camp Material Age	600	100 per Age, 6 Ages

Everything on that list is gone the moment you walk, so finishing a nearly-complete row first is close to free Sparks. Finishing the Arena ladder, mopping up the remaining rival tribes, and pushing a skill sitting at 97 up to 99 are the three that most often get left on the table.

By contrast, there is no urgency at all on the kept rows. A skeleton mounted the day before you walk and one mounted the day after are worth exactly the same, because the Museum does not reset.

Choosing which dinos to carry

Veteran levels, bloodline depth and niche all ride through the Door on the dinos you pick, so Amber Bond slots are worth spending on the animals that carry the most score, not just the most combat power:

A deep mutation line is 15 points per mutation on your best bloodline, and rebuilding one takes many generations.
A niched species is 25 points, and niches are per-species — carrying five different niched species banks more than five of the same.
Veteran levels are 1 point each, which is small per dino but real on a long-serving animal.

You get two slots free with no perk at all, so this decision applies to every player from their first walk onward — not only to people who bought Amber Bond.

A note on the bar

The rising bar is calculated from the score of the walk you just made, not from your high-water mark. A deliberately low-score walk therefore lowers the next cycle's bar — but it also earns you nothing, since it is below your high water. There is no useful exploit here; the two numbers simply move independently, and the one that pays is the high-water mark.

Sparks and the score

Every point of your Ascension score that's a new all-time high pays exactly 1 Spark the moment you walk through the Door — rebuilding a stat back to where it used to be pays nothing, only genuinely new progress does (see Before you walk above for what that means in practice). Twenty-six separate categories feed the score, each worth points per unit:

Category	Points per unit
Skill levels (sum across all 13)	2
Skills at 99	150 each
Mastery levels above 1	0.2
Mastery milestones	40 each
Museum skeletons mounted	25 each
Museum wings completed	200 each (+400 flat for the finished Grand Hall)
Patrol clears (capped per biome)	2 each
Guardians felled	120 each
Arena tiers won	60 each
Rift patrol/boss clears (capped)	4 each
Rift Ranks conquered	60 per Beta first-clear, 100 per Alpha
Field notes found	10 each
Quest steps completed	15 each
Chronicles notes	12 each (+300 flat for holding The Sigil)
Camp Material Age reached	100 per Age
Rival tribes bested	80 each
Completion log entries	2 per item, 6 per species
Pets found	50 each
Blueprints learned	8 each
Veteran dino levels (levels above 1, stable + stasis)	1 each
Achievements earned	10 each
Lifetime Amber earned	√(total ÷ 1,000)
Lifetime Warden's Marks	total ÷ 50 (once the Bounty Board is live)
Deepest bloodline (Mutation Lines)	15 per mutation depth (once live)
Lifetime Primal forged casts	75 each (once Item Quality is live)
Niched species kept (stable + stasis)	25 each (once Niches is live)

The last four rows are zero until their own systems unlock (Rift Ranks at your first Ascension, the Bounty Board and Mutation Lines and Item Quality each at their own later Ascension gates) — nothing scores before the system that produces it actually exists for you yet.

The 16 perks

Sparks buy permanent perk ranks — purchasable only after your first ascension, since that's also when you first earn any Sparks to spend. Buying every rank of every perk costs exactly 41,000 Sparks.

Perk	Effect per rank	Max ranks	Total cost (Sparks)
Echoed Reflexes	+4% action speed	5	10,000
Deep Memory	+5% all skill XP	4	4,200
Amber Affinity	+10% Amber gain	4	3,250
Warden's Favor	+15 flat expedition score	4	2,250
Amber Bond	Preserves chosen dinos through the reset (see below)	3	2,200
Trail Wisdom	Seeds early biomes with full patrol credit (Guardians still must be fought)	3	2,100
Patient Earth	+2 hours offline progress cap	3	2,100
Elder's Cadence	+2% Tribe worker and hired-hand speed	5	4,850
Packmate's Vigor	+5% dino injury heal speed (separate from Sturdy Bandages)	5	3,000
Swift Roots	+3% Foraging/Logging/Mining/Fishing speed	3	1,300
Forgekeeper's Eye	+3% Cooking/Crafting/Smithing/Alchemy speed	3	1,300
Steward's Gate	Auto-turns away low-tier camp wanderers, rank by rank	3	1,050
Keeper's Ledger	Shop capacity upgrades (Satchel, Vault) survive the reset	1	900
Second Cradle	A second Nursery crib — two babies grow at once, so a finished clutch stops queueing behind the one already on the clock	1	1,000
Broodmother's Pace	+5% Taming and Nursery maturation speed	2	800
Ancestral Kit	A starting materials-and-Amber bundle on your next run	3	700

Amber Bond in detail: two dinos come through the Door for free, with no perk bought at all — the perk only raises that floor. Each rank sets a base of rank + 1, every ascension you have already completed adds one more, and the total is capped at rank + 5 (and never falls below the free 2):

Ascensions completed	No perk	Rank 1	Rank 2	Rank 3
0 (your first walk)	2	2	3	4
1	2	3	4	5
2	2	4	5	6
3	2	5	6	7
4 or more	2	6	7	8

Preserved dinos keep their veteran XP, imprint, bloodline and ID, but arrive unequipped (their gear is run power) and land in the Stasis Vault of the new run rather than a stable stall directly. Because bloodline depth, niche and veteran levels are all scoring rows that ride along, the choice of which dinos to carry is worth real Sparks — see Choosing which dinos to carry.

Trail Wisdom at rank 3 seeds Grasslands, Redwood Wilds, Murkwater Swamp, Cavern Depths, Scorched Badlands, and Coral Shallows with full patrol credit — the run's back half (Frozen Wastes onward) still has to be cleared normally, and every Guardian anywhere still has to be fought regardless of rank.

The 5 free tiers

Alongside the Spark-bought perks, your Ascension count alone auto-grants a free, stacking tier bonus — no Sparks spent, nothing to buy:

Ascension count	Tier name	Effect
1	Echo of the Door	+5% all skill XP
2	Keeper of Seasons	+2 hours offline progress cap
3	Friend of Wardens	+5% Amber gain
4	Tamer of Cycles	+10% Tribe worker/hired-hand speed
5	Warden Ascendant	+5% all skill XP again — active only while you currently hold The Sigil

These stack additively with the matching perk above (e.g. a maxed Deep Memory plus both XP tiers is +30% skill XP, not a smaller compounded number).

Trophy Case and heirlooms

Beyond the Spark economy, two categories of items are simply immune to the reset:

The Trophy Case — every one-of-a-kind effect item in the game survives automatically, whether it was sitting in your Bank or equipped when you walked through. That is 57 items in total: the rival-raid relics and tribe banners, the Depths relics, quest-reward trinkets, the Rift Standard and Riftbound Trinket, the Riftheart Relic, the Bounty Exchange's four unique pieces, the Completion Log's Banner of the Vale, the twelve Tyrant relics (v0.59.0 — a first kill can never be earned twice, so the Trophy Wall walks through intact), and the three Rift Bazaar keepsakes (v0.60.48).
The Primal Catalyst is the one ordinary consumable that carries at full stack — its only use (aiming a Mutation Lines clutch) unlocks two Ascensions after you can first collect it, so hoarding one before you can even spend it was always the point.

Achievements

A dedicated Ascension track, all six tier 3 (none count toward the Census that unlocks your first walk, since a walk-gated achievement can't gate the walk):

Through the Amber Door — ascend for the first time.
Keeper of Seasons — ascend a second time.
Friend of Wardens — ascend a third time.
Warden Ascendant — ascend a fifth time while holding The Sigil (also grants the Warden Ascendant title).
Every Spark Spent — buy every rank of every perk, the longest chase in the game.
High Water — bank a high-water Ascension score of 30,000.

See Achievements for the full list.