Guide: Your First Star Drive Reset

When to press the button, what to do with your Shards, and why resetting is not losing.

The Star Drive is the moment Infinite Miner players often hesitate at longest.

You have spent time building a run, pushing planets, accumulating credits, and getting attached to the shape of your current expedition. Then a button appears that tells you to wipe most of it away in exchange for Star Shards and a fresh galaxy.

That naturally feels suspicious the first time.

Prestige systems always ask for a small leap of faith. They ask you to give up something visible and immediate in return for something more abstract and long-term. If you have not used a system like that before, the first reset can feel less like progression and more like sabotage.

So this guide is the simple version.

What the Star Drive actually does

When you engage the Star Drive, your current run ends and a new one begins.

You lose your current credits, ore, miners, run upgrades, contracts, and all progress in the current galaxy. You return to planet 1 with a fresh seeded run.

You keep your Star Shards, Star Lab upgrades, mini-game upgrades, lifetime best planet, and your overall Star Drive history.

That distinction matters.

The Star Drive does not delete your long-term progress. It converts a finished run into permanent progression and a new map to explore. In other words, it is less like throwing your work away and more like cashing it in.

Infinite Miner also generates a fresh deterministic galaxy after each reset. So the Star Drive is not only a power reset. It is also a world reset. New planets, new layer combinations, new contracts, new sequence.

When you unlock it

Right now, the Star Drive unlocks once you reach Planet 6.

That is the earliest point where the game starts asking whether you want to keep extending the current run or bank it and begin a stronger one. The first answer to that question is not always obvious, especially because the current alpha still treats Star Shards as more of a foundation than a fully mature endgame economy.

That is worth saying plainly: the Star Drive works, and it is a real source of power, but at the moment it is not the most exciting long-term system in the game.

It will matter more once the custom drillship designer arrives.

How Shard gain works

Your Star Shard reward is based mainly on the highest planet you reached in the run.

Longer runs produce bigger payouts. If you beat the best point you had reached at the start of the run by a meaningful margin, you can also squeeze out a small bonus.

The exact details matter less than the practical takeaway:

1. A very short reset is usually not worth much.
2. A run that clearly pushed beyond your previous baseline is more valuable.
3. If the run has slowed down badly and you are no longer making satisfying progress, that is usually your signal.

The Star Drive is best treated as a momentum tool, not as a panic button.

So when should you do your first reset?

If I am being honest about the current alpha, I would not tell most players to rush it.

The Star Drive is powerful in the sense that it gives you permanent shards and future scaling, but the current long-term shard sink is still incomplete. Until the custom drillship designer is in, the reset layer is more useful than exciting.

So the practical advice right now is:

Reset once you have reached the unlock point, pushed a bit further, and feel the run beginning to drag.

That usually means one of two things:

1. Your next planets are taking noticeably longer and the gains no longer feel satisfying.
2. You want to bank shards, see a new galaxy, and start again with a little more permanent support.

What I would not recommend is resetting instantly at the first possible moment unless you specifically want to test the system. In the current version, patience is often fine. You are not missing some huge secret payoff by waiting a little longer.

Why resetting is not losing

The emotional trap of prestige systems is that they put all the visible, short-term progress on one side of the scale and all the invisible, long-term value on the other.

The run you are ending feels real because you can see the miners, the credits, the upgrades, and the planet count. The benefit of resetting feels smaller because it is split across future runs.

But Infinite Miner is built around repeated expeditions through seeded galaxies. A single run is not the entire game. It is one attempt, one route, one configuration of decisions and pacing. The Star Drive marks the point where that run stops being the thing you are protecting and starts being the thing you are converting into future strength.

That is why the system exists at all.

Without a reset layer, the game would only ever move in one direction. Numbers would rise, difficulty would rise, and eventually the shape of the experience would flatten. A prestige layer gives the game rhythm. It creates arcs. It lets one run inform the next.

Even in the current alpha, that rhythm matters.

What to spend your first Shards on

In the current build, I would focus on the upgrades that make the early game smoother and the next run less sluggish.

The best early-value picks are usually the practical ones:

Launch Capital

This is the cleanest quality-of-life purchase early on.

Starting a new run with extra credits makes the first stretch less empty and gets you back into meaningful decisions faster. If you dislike the feeling of a completely cold restart, this is probably the most immediately noticeable upgrade.

Quantum Drills

If you want a more direct boost to mining output, this is the sensible option. More ore production helps the whole run feel a bit less starved.

Market Sync

If your runs are feeling credit-tight rather than ore-tight, the sell value boost is a reasonable alternative. It is not glamorous, but it helps.

Efficient Rigs

This one matters more if you lean on miners heavily. It is useful, but I would generally put it behind Launch Capital and one of the broad economy upgrades for a first reset.

I would not overthink the perfect order right now. The current shard economy is not deep enough to justify obsessive optimisation on the first reset.

Should you save Shards instead?

Possibly.

Because the custom drillship designer is still in development, it is completely reasonable to treat your first few Star Drive resets as a way of stockpiling shards rather than spending every single one immediately.

That is not wasted progress. It is simply a different read on the current state of the alpha.

If you enjoy seeing the permanent numbers move now, spend a few. If you would rather wait until the wider long-term system is more developed, holding onto them is also defensible.

The real point of the Star Drive right now

At the moment, the Star Drive is doing three jobs.

1. It introduces the long-term progression layer.
2. It gives you a reason to start a fresh galaxy instead of clinging forever to one run.
3. It lays the groundwork for the systems that will make prestige more interesting later.

That third part is important.

If the current version feels a little undercooked, that is because it is. The foundations are there. The full payoff is still coming.

Final advice

If you have unlocked the Star Drive and are staring at the button, here is the short answer:

Do not be afraid of it, but do not feel rushed by it either.

Push far enough that the run feels genuinely spent. Take the shards. Start the next galaxy. Buy a little comfort if you want it. Save some if you would rather wait for the custom drillship designer.

In the current alpha, the first Star Drive reset is less about exploding into a dramatically stronger build and more about learning the shape of the game’s long-term progression.

That is still useful.

And later on, it should become much more than that.