Prestige progression in Starvester can either be incredibly fast or painfully slow depending on how you approach research and resource scaling. Many players unknowingly create bottlenecks that drastically slow down future runs, while others take advantage of certain mechanics to generate effectively infinite resources.
This guide explains how to avoid common mistakes, maximize research efficiency, and use the current infinite resource strategies discovered by the community.
Prioritize Research Before Building Drones
One of the biggest mistakes players make during a prestige run is building drones too early.
Many worlds feature scaling resource costs, meaning each additional harvest becomes more expensive. If you start investing heavily into drones before unlocking key research upgrades, your progression slows dramatically.
Instead, focus on purchasing:
- Research upgrades
- Quantity upgrades
- Resource production research
- Any available efficiency upgrades
before committing large numbers of drones to a world.
Research upgrades provide much better long-term value than early drone investments and significantly accelerate future progression.
Satellite Building Tips
Satellites are another area where poor planning can cripple a run.
They can be constructed at:
- The Moon
- Triton’s Eye
When unlocking Triton’s Eye, you’ll eventually gain access to research that dramatically reduces satellite costs.
Because of this, avoid purchasing large numbers of Triton satellites immediately.
A good strategy is:
- Build around 10 satellites initially.
- Focus on unlocking the satellite cost reduction research.
- Max out the research before expanding further.
Doing so can reduce costs from millions or even billions of resources down to only a fraction of that amount.
Building Toward Infinite Trade and Spice
The first major infinite resource strategy revolves around trade and spice production.
Step 1: Upgrade Aeolus
Focus on maximizing Aeolus upgrades, especially quantity-related bonuses.
After upgrading, assign at least 29 drones to the world and begin accumulating trades.
Avoid spending them immediately.
Instead, allow trades to build into the tens of thousands.
Step 2: Maximize Cybele
While trades accumulate, move to Cybele.
Purchase available upgrades and increase drone investment to maximize Spice generation.
Your goal is roughly:
- 400+ Spice
- 50,000+ Trades
before proceeding.
Step 3: Mass Purchase Trades
Once you’ve reached the required thresholds, begin purchasing trades in bulk.
If done correctly, trade values can eventually reach extremely large scientific notation values.
At certain points, players have reported trade costs resetting instead of continuing to scale normally.
When this occurs, trade generation effectively becomes unlimited.
Infinite Research and Drones
After achieving the trade loop, players can begin generating enormous amounts of research.
Research can then be converted into:
- Research Drones
- Special Drones
- Standard Drones
Because research acquisition becomes effectively unrestricted, drone production scales alongside it.
This allows players to generate huge drone quantities much faster than through normal progression.
Infinite Stardust and Silicon
The same resource scaling behavior can affect other systems as well.
Once infinite trade production is established, players can rapidly generate:
- Stardust
- Silicon
- Research
which significantly reduces progression barriers during future prestige cycles.
Hyper Infinite Resources
With sufficient Spice production, players can eventually push additional resource categories into similar scaling situations.
Community reports suggest that resources such as:
- Gold
- Fuel
- Precious materials
can also reach effectively unlimited production under the right conditions.
This dramatically speeds up late-game progression and prestige recovery.
Why Does This Happen?
According to community speculation, the issue may be related to numerical overflow.
When resource costs become extremely large, the game may reach the maximum value supported by the underlying number system. Once that limit is exceeded, the cost calculation appears to reset instead of continuing to increase.
As a result:
- Costs stop scaling properly.
- Purchase prices can become effectively free.
- Resource generation becomes unlimited.
While the exact cause hasn’t been officially confirmed, many players believe it is tied to numerical overflow behavior.
The most important lesson for prestige progression is simple: prioritize research before drones and avoid overspending on satellites before unlocking cost reduction upgrades.
For players looking to push progression even further, the current infinite trade and research strategies can dramatically accelerate resource generation. Whether these mechanics remain in future updates remains to be seen, but for now they provide one of the fastest ways to progress through Starvester’s later stages.
Credit: This strategy was originally discovered and shared by lordrahmo. Full credit goes to the original author for documenting the infinite resource methods and prestige optimization techniques.