Franchising & Brand Stars

Franchising is the moment Velra shifts from a single-mart hustle to a spreading retail empire. Sell your location for Brand Stars, carry those stars permanently into every future run, and watch each fresh start compound faster than the last. This guide explains the mechanics in precise detail so you can time your resets and spend your stars with confidence.

What franchising does

Franchising — also called prestige or resetting — is the act of selling your current mart location to the Velra brand. The option becomes available once you have completed Area 3 of your current town (the franchise unlock requirement confirmed in prestige.ts). You trigger it from the pause menu or by tapping the "For Sale" sign on your mart.

When you franchise, the run-scoped progress resets: your money, all in-run unlocks, milestones, expansions, areas, and staff are cleared. You start the next run from scratch in a new town with only your starter cash and whatever Corporate upgrades you have already purchased. The mart plays a brief packing-up animation, a Velra van pulls away, and the map advances to the next town.

What you keep is everything that matters in the long run. Brand Stars carry over permanently. The Corporate tree (every node you have ever purchased) persists. Collections, research, and achievements are never lost. Settings, save state, and lifetime statistics all survive the reset. The point of franchising is not to discard progress — it is to convert run-scoped growth into permanent power and then grow faster on the next attempt.

Brand Stars: the prestige currency

Brand Stars are earned at the moment of franchising, calculated from your lifetime run earnings using a square-root formula:

Stars earned = floor( 10 × sqrt( lifetimeRunEarnings / 1,000,000 ) )

The square root is intentional and genre-standard. It means early stars are cheap to earn — a first run earning around $1–3 million yields roughly 10–17 stars — but later stars require exponentially more lifetime income to accumulate. This keeps the "when should I reset?" question genuinely interesting throughout the game: there is always a point where marginal star gain per extra hour of play is better served by franchising sooner rather than grinding further.

Stars are a spendable integer balance. Your lifetime stars (total ever earned across all runs) are tracked separately from your current spendable balance. If you spend stars on Corporate upgrades, your spendable balance falls but your lifetime total never decreases. A free respec is available at any time from the Corporate screen: it refunds all spent stars back to spendable, so there is no permanent cost to experimenting with different Corporate builds.

Reputation: passive income from unspent stars

Every Brand Star you own — regardless of whether it has been spent or not — contributes to a passive global income multiplier called Reputation. The value is +6% global income per Brand Star (the exact constant reputationPerStar = 0.06 from prestige.ts). The total multiplier is:

Reputation multiplier = 1 + (totalStars × 0.06)

This means even a modest collection of 10 Brand Stars after your first franchise raises every sale in your next run by 60%. At 50 stars the multiplier is ×4.0. At 100 stars it reaches ×7.0. Reputation compounds with Corporate price multipliers and milestone bonuses, so the absolute income difference between a first run and a tenth run can be several orders of magnitude before factoring in NG+ tier scaling.

Because Reputation counts your total lifetime stars rather than just unspent ones, spending stars on Corporate nodes does not reduce your Reputation. You get the permanent income bonus and the Corporate effect at the same time.

The Corporate tree: where stars go

The Corporate tree is a permanent skill tree accessed from the Velra HQ screen. It has three branches — Operations, Logistics, and Brand — each containing nodes you buy with Brand Stars. Every node purchased persists across all future runs. The tree is your primary lever for making successive runs progressively shorter and more powerful.

Operations branch (head start)

Operations nodes give you a running start at the beginning of each new run. The four nodes in this branch are:

Seed Capital (1 star) — start every run with $250 in hand. A cheap first purchase that eliminates the dead seconds at the very start of a run.
Pre-hired Grocers (3 stars, requires Seed Capital) — start with the grocery-aisle Cashier and Stocker already hired. Skips two of the first hires you would otherwise make.
Bakery Ready (6 stars, requires Pre-hired Grocers) — start with the second aisle already open. The Bakery Aisle unlock cost is effectively pre-paid.
Dairy Ready (11 stars, requires Bakery Ready) — start with both the second and third aisles already open. Combined with Pre-hired Grocers, you open a run three major milestones ahead of a fresh start.

Logistics branch (offline power)

Logistics nodes improve what your mart earns while the tab is closed. Two independent ladders are available:

Cold Chain (4 levels, base cost 3 stars, growth ×2 per level) — raises offline earnings efficiency from the default 50% up to 60%, 70%, 80%, and 90% at max level. Each level roughly halves the gap between online and offline income rates.
Warehouse (3 levels, base cost 5 stars, growth ×1.8 per level) — extends the offline earnings cap from the default 2 hours to 4 hours, then 6 hours, then 8 hours at max level. A longer cap is the single highest-leverage improvement for players who check in once or twice a day rather than every hour.

A third Logistics node, Global Logistics (24h), is listed as Coming Soon — a one-time purchase reserved for a future update.

Brand branch (income multipliers)

Brand nodes boost your earning rate during active play:

Global Marketing (4 levels, base cost 4 stars, growth ×1.7 per level) — applies a flat price multiplier to every sale: ×1.05, ×1.10, ×1.15, and ×1.20 at max level. This stacks directly on top of Reputation, milestone bonuses, and run-scoped price upgrades.
Hype Engine (2 levels, base cost 6 stars, growth ×2 per level) — reduces the cash thresholds at which products hit price milestones to 90% then 80% of their base values. Milestones arriving sooner means the price compounding that drives late-run income starts earlier.
Golden Touch (3 levels, base cost 8 stars, growth ×1.8 per level, requires Global Marketing) — increases golden-customer spawn frequency by ×1.25, ×1.5, and ×2.0 at successive levels. Golden customers pay premium prices and are a disproportionate share of total revenue in a well-optimised run.

Towns and the franchise loop

Velra has ten hand-designed towns, each with its own palette, layout, and product set. Every franchise moves your mart to the next town in sequence: from the opening farm town through fishing villages, mountain lodges, and beyond. Town 10 is the "credits" moment — completing a run there marks the end of the designed content.

After Town 10, the game does not stop. Franchising from the last town wraps back to Town 1 and increments the Expansion Tier counter, entering what the game calls NG+. Every subsequent playthrough of the same town set happens at a higher tier, with all costs, prices, and star rewards scaled accordingly.

NG+ Expansion Tiers: the infinite loop

Expansion Tiers are how Velra keeps scaling past the designed content. The tier counter (starting at Tier 0 for the first playthrough) increases by one each time you complete all ten towns and wrap back to Town 1. Three constants define what each tier change means, confirmed directly from prestige.ts:

Costs ×10 per tier — every in-run expense (unlocks, staff, upgrades) costs ten times as much at Tier 1 as at Tier 0, a hundred times as much at Tier 2, and so on. This ensures that Tier 0 Corporate investments do not trivially short-circuit higher tiers.
Prices ×7 per tier — every product sells for seven times as much per tier. The deliberate gap between the ×10 cost multiplier and the ×7 price multiplier is intentional: each tier is designed to take slightly longer than the previous one, keeping prestige mandatory rather than optional. You cannot outprice the cost curve; you must franchise again.
Star rewards ×4 per tier — the stars earned from a given run grow by a net ×4 factor per tier. The underlying formula scales star-per-dollar yield upward so that a Tier 2 run of equivalent real-time length yields roughly four times the stars of the same run at Tier 1.

These three multipliers are applied as exact powers: at Tier t, costs are 10^t, prices are 7^t, and the star yield factor is 4^t relative to Tier 0. The formulas are computed in full big-number precision (the game uses a Decimal library internally), so the numbers remain accurate even at Tier 100 or beyond. The maximum supported tier is 1,000.

In practical terms this means Tier 1 prices are 7× higher but costs are 10× higher, so each run at Tier 1 is longer in raw earnings terms but rewarded more generously in stars. By the time a player reaches Tier 3 or 4, the Reputation multiplier from accumulated stars typically offsets much of the increased cost, creating a satisfying flywheel.

When should you franchise? The best time to reset is when your marginal star gain per hour of continued play starts to slow noticeably — which typically happens once your run income has been flat for 20–30 minutes and further Corporate upgrades are more than a run away in cost. A first run at roughly $1–3 million lifetime earnings nets 10–17 stars; those stars immediately grant 60–102% global income in Run 2, making the second run substantially faster. Do not wait for a round number or a specific milestone: the square-root formula means diminishing returns set in quickly, and the sooner you bank those stars, the sooner Reputation starts compounding your next run. If in doubt, franchise early and often — you can always respec the Corporate tree for free.

Putting it all together

A well-optimised franchise loop looks roughly like this. Your first run earns a moderate number of stars; you spend them on Seed Capital, Pre-hired Grocers, and a level of Cold Chain or Global Marketing — whichever fits your play style. Run 2 opens faster, earns more thanks to Reputation, and ends with more stars than Run 1. Each subsequent run widens the gap: more stars means more Reputation means more income means more stars on the next reset.

The Operations branch rewards players who want runs to start quickly and feel snappy. The Logistics branch rewards those who leave the game idle for hours at a time. The Brand branch rewards players who are actively engaged and want each online session to produce maximum income. Most long-term players end up with a mixture of all three, but if you are just starting out, a first spend of Seed Capital followed by one level of Cold Chain or Global Marketing is a solid foundation.

Once you reach NG+, prioritise the star-reward side of the equation: more stars per run means faster Corporate completion, which in turn makes every tier after that shorter. The Golden Touch node in the Brand branch is especially strong in higher tiers, where golden-customer revenue scales into the billions and beyond.

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