A player told me my game punished you for playing it. He was right.

Fissure went up on Play in August. A week later someone on r/incremental_games told me that after three or four prestiges there was nothing left to want, and that you actually got punished for ascending.

I did not love reading it. But the second half was a measurable claim, so I went and measured it, and he was right. Income really did collapse once you stopped one-shotting rocks. The game was quietly worse at exactly the moment it asked you to start over.

So 1.5.0 went at it directly. You can now stop the automatic descent and farm a layer for as long as it pays. Any depth you already reached this run is one tap away again. And every tenth depth from 30 down carries an Obsidian Boss, worth twenty-five ordinary rocks, which is the only way to earn prestige currency without ending your run.

Then I put analytics in, because I was tired of guessing. The numbers came back last week and they were not what I expected. Of everyone who dug deep enough to unlock prestige, every single one pulled the lever. 29 out of 29. And across the same window there were 284 prestiges, so the people who get that far are doing it around ten times each.

That was the useful part. It means the loop is fine and almost nobody is finding it. Which is a much better problem to have, and a much more annoying one.

The one rule the whole game hangs on, if you want the short version: a digger too weak for the rock in front of it does not chip away slowly. It does exactly zero damage, and it prints TOO WEAK on itself and stops. The entire pit stops with it. So merging is not an optimisation you can skip.

Free, no in-app purchases at all, nothing to buy. Three ads exist and you have to go tap them on purpose.

Voting is open this week if you feel like it.