The Research Lab: five permanent upgrades, and what each is worth
Everything in the boost shop runs out. Nothing in the research lab does. It opens at level twenty and sells five lines of permanent improvement, each with a level cap and a price that climbs as you buy.
It is the first system in the game that asks you to plan rather than to spend, because the caps mean a line you finish is finished for good and a line you neglect stays where you left it.
The five lines
Tap Power Boost adds two per cent a level up to twenty levels, so a finished line is forty per cent more from every tap, for good. Energy Regen adds three per cent a level up to fifteen — forty-five per cent at the top — and it is the one that decides how many taps a day can hold at all.
AutoTap Efficiency adds four per cent a level up to fifteen, sixty per cent finished, and it does nothing at all until you own automatic tapping. Event Rewards adds five per cent a level up to ten, and it raises what the three daily the daily events pay and what passive income earns a minute. Prestige Gain adds three per cent a level up to ten.
Read as ceilings rather than as steps, the five are worth plus forty per cent tapping, plus forty-five per cent regeneration, plus sixty per cent automatic, plus fifty per cent on events, and plus thirty per cent on prestige. Nothing in the lab expires, and nothing in it is lost when you reset.
What a level costs, and why the price climbs
The first level of tap power costs 1,200 points and every level after it costs thirty-five per cent more than the last. By the twelfth level that is 32,574 points, which is the figure on the picture above. Energy regeneration starts at 1,401, automatic tapping at 1,800, event rewards at 2,202 and prestige gain at 2,601, and all of them climb at the same thirty-five per cent.
The climb is what makes the caps mean something. Finishing tap power costs far more than half of it did, so a player who spreads across five lines and a player who finishes one end up with genuinely different accounts.
The prestige tree can make all of it cheaper: Research Efficiency, in the economy branch, takes two per cent off every research price a level, up to ten per cent. That is one of thirty skills and one of the few that pays back on something you were going to buy anyway.
Where it sits in the game
The lab is the first of the eight entries in Advanced Systems, and at level twenty it is usually the first one a player ever opens. The panel above the list shows your points, because the only currency here is points.
Six of the hundred achievements count research specifically, and the end-game dashboard reads the lab as one multiplier among six. On a real account with eleven levels of tap power the dashboard shows it as times 1.22.
Nothing in the lab is bought with real money and nothing in it is sold anywhere else. What can be bought with money is listed, in full, on the premium offers page.