Ice Tycoon 2 Rebirth Planner

Every upgrade has a payback time, which is its cost divided by the cash per second it adds. That number alone is what the upgrade order tool ranks on, and it is the right answer when you are staying put. A reset changes the question, because the upgrade only exists until the reset. So the planner runs two tests on each one: can you save up for it in the time you have left, and once you own it, is there still enough clock left for it to repay what it cost.

Failing either test drops it. Dropping one changes everything after it, since the cash you did not spend brings the next purchase forward, so the whole sequence is simulated again from scratch after each drop and keeps going until every remaining upgrade clears both tests. The saving-up simulation is the same one the upgrade order page uses, which is why the two pages agree on how long a purchase takes to reach.

Which is the best rebirth upgrade to buy first?

Usually the shortest payback, because on a tight deadline that is what fits. But payback is only half the test. An upgrade you cannot afford in time drops out no matter how good its ratio is, so on a low income a cheap fast-payback upgrade can lose its place to a slower one you already have the cash for. With a long window before the reset the expensive ones come back into the plan, which is why the answer moves when you drag the minutes slider. If you want the same upgrades judged on their raw strength instead, the upgrade tier list sorts them S to C by the bottleneck they fix.

When resetting beats buying anything else

Once nothing left on this six-upgrade list can repay itself in the time left, spending on it is a donation to the reset. That is the moment the planner flips to a reset verdict, and it is a verdict about this list rather than about every purchase in the game. Note what else it does not claim: it does not predict what your income will be after you come back, because that depends on how fast you rebuild and this site has no measured figure for it. What it does report is the income you reset with and what a single permanent 1.2x does to that number.

The six upgrade costs and income boosts are the same seeded figures published on this site's upgrade order page, reconstructed from public community sources. They are approximate, they shift with updates and with your tier, and they may be incomplete or wrong. Six upgrades is also not the whole shop, so a plan that runs out of things to buy has run out of things in this list, not in the game. The same caveat covers the mechanics quoted in the FAQ below, the 1.2x per rebirth, gems and secrets surviving a reset, and trophies resetting unless a Laboratory upgrade holds them. Those are the figures this site already publishes, reconstructed the same way, and they carry the same risk of being incomplete or wrong. The one game constant used in the math here is the permanent 1.2x per rebirth, which is the same multiplier the rebirth calculator projects with.

The planner has no separate field for gems or secrets. Those boosts are permanent and a reset does not take them, so there is nothing to decide about them here, but they are already inside the number you type into the income field and they do move the result through it. If you are chasing those instead, the gem checklist and the secrets tracker cover them, and the beginner guide covers what to build before any of this matters.