Paradox and Supernova

Time Heroes has two places where you give up what you built in exchange for something that outlives it. Paradox is the first and you will meet it more than once. Supernova sits above Paradox and takes even the things Paradox promised were permanent.

Both are opt in, both show you a written ledger of what burns and what stays before you commit, and neither happens by accident.

Paradox: collapsing a timeline

The Paradox screen tells you the exact level you need. That number is not fixed. It climbs with the world you have reached, because the Paradox door and the door to your next world are the same door, so a player deep in the worlds has a higher bar than a player who just met the system.

Pressing it collapses your current timeline and pays you Paradox Cores. Cores come from two places: the pets in your hands at the moment of the press, and what you discovered during that timeline. If you choose to let it, the collapse also consumes your ship, its modules and its cargo and pays Cores for those too.

What a press takes and what crosses

This is the part worth reading twice. The wipe is wide but it is precise, and the wallet side of your account is on the safe list.

Spending Cores in the Paradox Tree

Cores only do one thing: they buy permanent nodes in the Paradox Tree, and those nodes survive every future Paradox. The tree covers pet power, resource efficiency, the colour upgrades on a pet, rarity odds and the speed of the whole hatch and craft loop.

It also holds the Time Locks. A Time Lock is a node you buy so that a class of things stops burning at the press, your cargo and hangar for example, or your research. Read the ceremony ledger before you press: it tells you which locks you actually hold. If you change your mind about how you spent your Cores you get one free respec per prestige and 200 gems for each one after that.

The mark that never comes off

A press resets your live level to the bottom, but it does not turn you back into a beginner. Once an account has pressed Paradox even once, the game treats it as a veteran account permanently.

That matters more than it sounds. The Hero Academy strip does not replay, the tutorial does not walk you through what you already know, and the doors that a prestige player is allowed to open stay open even at level 1. That status is held separately from the number of presses you currently show, so it survives a Supernova zeroing your prestige count too.

Supernova: the layer above

Supernova unseals when you are standing at Paradox 5 in your current cycle and you are at level 100. Both bars are re-earned every cycle, which makes each Supernova a summit ritual rather than a button you press once and then own.

The collapse ledger is blunt about the price. It burns every standard pet, the whole Paradox Tree and the whole Paradox climb, your level back to 1, your world back to World 1, every Paradox Core you are holding, your coins and world essences, and your shuttle with its modules and cargo. What it pays instead is Nova Shards, and nothing in your hangar is wasted: the collapse pays Shards for everything it takes.

What survives is the same wallet as before, plus more. Gems, TimeStars, gamepasses and cosmetics all cross. So do your exclusive pets, your season pets and your Nova pets. Scale pets cross by default too, and offering one at the collapse is a choice you make for extra Shards, not something the press does to you.

The Nova Tree

Nova Shards buy nodes in the Nova Tree, which is grouped into five branches: Eternity, Destiny, Radiance, Dominion and Legacy. Every node is permanent and, unlike the Paradox Tree, there is no respec at all, so the screen warns you to choose carefully.

Each press also grants 100 extra inventory slots, flat, the same amount for a player holding three permanent pets as for a player holding a hundred. It exists because the press wipes your research and your bag capacity falls back to its base while every exclusive, season and Nova pet crosses with you.