13. Exit and Legacy

A company ends in an Exit, and the Exit pays Legacy. Legacy buys permanent perks and opens new Ventures, which change the rules of the next company. This is the idle game prestige pattern (Influences). Ventures and Mutators keep each company different, which answers the Upload Labs complaint about repetition.

Exits#

The table is for a founding multiplier of 1. The multiplier is the Venture's Legacy multiplier times one plus the sum of the Mutators' shares (Ventures, Mutators).

The square root is the common prestige curve. Each Exit is worth more than the last, but not exponentially more, so the player keeps a reason to improve rather than repeat (Balancing).

What resets. Cash, Insight, Dev Hours, users, research, the board, the team, and Equity.

What stays. Legacy, Legacy shop purchases, Playbooks, achievements, Challenge results, unlocked Ventures and Mutators, and the engineering glossary entries the player has discovered.

The Legacy shop#

The twelve perks cost 1,563 ★ in all. Costs grow so that a full shop takes several Exits, which is the target for 80 to 150 hours.

Playbooks#

A Playbook is a saved sub-design: Nodes, links, Stacks, and settings. It plays the role of a Factorio blueprint (Influences).

• The player saves a selection on the board as a Playbook.

• Placing a Playbook places all its Nodes in one action, if the player has the Cash and the research. Missing research shows as ghost Nodes.

• Playbooks survive Exits. The second company's first hour is faster because the player places a known-good Garage design in one action.

• Playbooks export as a text string, so players can share them.

Playbooks remove the post-prestige tedium that Upload Labs players report (Influences).

Ventures#

A Venture is the kind of company the player founds. Each Venture changes the request mix, demand shape, constraints, and incidents. The default Venture is unlocked from the start. Others cost Legacy or come from achievements.

Every Venture has its demand shape and its rule. Developer platform, Healthcare, Ad tech, and Government contract also have their signature incident. So do the other Ventures, with one exception: Bootstrapped indie's row names Runway, which is a figure rather than an incident, so it has none. Four of those eight enforce the rule their row names: Bootstrapped indie's no-funding rule, and the three below. Consumer social's celebrity post is the Hot key incident, and its own row names what the player meets.

What each Venture starts with:

All twelve Ventures start in the Garage, and the Head start perk still opens Pre-seed.

The game owns Cash, Equity, the demand curves and amplitudes, the market and value multipliers, the mix boosts, and the Legacy multipliers. This document sets the rest: the unlock costs, the 100 ms bid deadline, the Java-or-C# rule, calendar-day procurement, Series A residency, the no-naive-retry rule, the Series B SLA, realtime regions from Series A, scarce GPUs, and the signature incidents. The SLA's one SLO level and the AI startup's two GPU Nodes are the game's own.

Each signature incident hits for a few minutes:

• A hot shard costs three times the CPU per query.

• A premiere lifts video four times.

• A launch day lifts realtime six times.

• A flash sale lifts checkouts ×20.

The rule of each Venture is enforced where the player meets it. Developer platform refuses naive retries on a Link (retryRefusal). Healthcare refuses to place a data Component outside the home region from Series A (venturePlaceRefusal). Ad tech's requests earn nothing once the kind's mean latency passes its deadline (earnsInTime). Government contract refuses a runtime that is not Java or C# (runtimeRefusal), and a bought Component runs a calendar day after it is paid for (placedLife).

Three of the older Ventures have their row's rule too. B2B SaaS signs its SLA from Series B: the availability target it is held to moves one level above the Era's (sloOf), so its error budget is the contract's and a missed week is a breach. With Enterprise sales researched, that breach pays credits back at 10% of subscription revenue while the week is short (Economy). Game backend keeps one Realtime Hub per region from Series A (venturePlaceRefusal): realtime is served where the players are. AI startup may hold two GPU Nodes, whatever their size, and resizes them rather than buying more (venturePlaceRefusal): GPUs are scarce.

The other four rows name a rule that is not a refusal or a target. Each runs in the Simulation:

• Consumer social's constraint is its market shape: half the value per request and twice the market (value 0.5 and market 2 in catalog/ventures.ts, read by features.ts), and viral spikes come twice as often (spikeWeight).

• Streaming media's egress dominates the bill: four times the video is four times the egress, and every byte leaving the Design bills three times the price (egress). The Egress Shock achievement asks for the bill.

• Fintech's compliance fine charges 20 times the value of a request for each stale answer to a money kind (read, write, buy), as fines on the Ledger, taken from Cash beside Burn.

• E-commerce's sale is on the calendar: every 30 calendar days, at noon, for two calendar hours, buy demand is ×20 (saleOf in calendar.ts). The Flash sale stays the Venture's signature incident, at the same ×20.

A signature incident weighs four times as much for its own Venture (SIGNATURE_WEIGHT) and keeps a weakness of 2 (SIGNATURE_WEAKNESS), so it can fire on a well-built Design. Six incidents exist only as signatures: Latency regression, Deadline day, Big tenant hot shard, Premiere spike, Launch day and Flash sale. No other Venture's weakness can start them. Retry storm, Audit finding, Hot key, Double charge and GPU shortage stay general incidents, so Developer platform, Healthcare, Consumer social, Fintech and AI startup meet theirs four times as often.

Ad tech serves the bid request kind the design names (value $0.001, Apdex T 100 ms, ×10 volume). The kind arrives with the Series A mix at a 1% share and Ad tech multiplies it tenfold, so its Earn per request follows from the kind rather than from a page/read stand-in. Its 100 ms deadline is still checked against the mean latency of every kind it serves, and the bid kind's own Apdex target is that same 100 ms.

Each Venture has its own Legacy multiplier (1.0× to 1.5×), shown before founding.

Mutators#

A Mutator is an optional rule that makes a company harder in exchange for more Legacy. Four Mutators open on the first Exit: Legacy monolith, One region forever, Shared tenancy, and Tight budget. The other six come from achievements (Challenges). Each one adds a Legacy multiplier.

"Postgres for everything" is a real engineering argument, and this Mutator lets the player make it. Postgres can serve q-search with full-text search, ai lookups with pgvector, and queues with SKIP LOCKED, each with a lower ceiling than the dedicated Component.

Company history#

Each Exit adds a row to the company history: the Company's name, Venture, Mutators, time played, peak users, Exit type, payout, Legacy earned, final Stack mix, and a snapshot of the board. The history shows how the player's engineering changed over time.