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

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. Twenty-five 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 15 perks

Sparks buy permanent perk ranks — purchasable only after your first ascension, since that's also when you first earn any Sparks to spend. Every perk's total catalog sums to exactly 40,000 Sparks to fully max.

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
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: the number of dinos you can carry through the Door is min(rank + 1 + priorAscensions, rank + 5) — at rank 1 you always keep just 1 (your very first walk) up to a max of 5 after four more cycles; at rank 3 (max) you start at 4 and cap at 8. Preserved dinos keep their veteran XP, imprint, 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.

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 (rival-raid relics, the Depths relics, quest-reward trinkets, the Rift Standard and Riftbound Trinket, the Riftheart Relic, the Bounty Exchange's unique gear, the Completion Log's Banner of the Vale) survives automatically, whether it was sitting in your Bank or equipped when you walked through.
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.