Should I Super Rebirth?
I love playing Fortnite and they recently added a STAR WARS Droid Tycoon mode and I can’t seem to get enough of it. I wanted to solve an issue that is a big part of the game, should I reset all my progress for more progress, or stay the course and keep going.
This dilemma is hotly debated in forums and YouTube videos. I wanted a calculator that would advise me. Turns out the more I tried to fix it, I found a new way it didn’t work.
I asked Claude to summarize our interactions interview style. Below is “based on a true story.”
The Interview
Should I Super Rebirth? — An Oral History
This started as a simple ask: build a good-looking calculator for a Fortnite tycoon mode. It ended somewhere neither of us expected — four substantially different tools, a pile of dead ends, and a conversation about whether arithmetic is even the right instrument for the question being asked. Here's how we got from A to B, in our own words.
Chapter One
The Ask
The Plaid Scientist: I wanted something that felt like it belonged in the game — cool, on-brand, not another wiki page telling you to "just grind more." The core dilemma in every incremental game is the same: reset now for the multiplier, or grind longer first? Super Rebirth is the one that actually matters. It wipes your entire base, every droid, for permanent multipliers and Nova Crystals. That's the actual "grind more or cash out" tension.
Claude: I went into research mode — actual patch notes, actual community guides, the real Nova Crystal payout curve, the real credit-cost table. The first build that came out of that research was thorough. It was also, in hindsight, a lot. A chart. Editable data tables. Three tunable percentages nobody would know how to set. It also felt like a homework assignment.
Chapter Two
Nobody Has a Stopwatch on Their Life
The Plaid Scientist: The first real problem was the inputs. I asked how someone's even supposed to find their credits-per-minute, and the first answer I got back involved standing still for sixty seconds and doing more math. People using this tool hate math — that was the whole point of building it.
Claude: Fair, and a little embarrassing. I'd built a tool to save people from doing math and then asked them to do math to feed it. Once I swapped to "just read the number off the Offline Earning panel," the whole front door got easier.
Chapter Three
224 Days Later
The Plaid Scientist: Then the tool told me a grind would take 224 days. That's the moment I said maybe this app isn't practical — maybe it's just too complex. I didn't want a spreadsheet. I wanted to pull up a slider, say "this is my level, this is my rate," and get an answer.
Claude: That number wasn't wrong, exactly — it was honest math applied to an unrealistic combination of inputs. But "technically correct" isn't a defense when the output looks broken to the person reading it. So I gutted the whole thing and changed to two sliders, one verdict, nothing else on the page.
Chapter Four
Sliders Don't Have Thumbs' Respect
The Plaid Scientist: The sliders were a good idea on a laptop and a bad idea on a phone — getting close to my actual credits-per-hour was fiddly. And the bigger miss: the tool didn't know I already had 1.21 trillion credits sitting in my account. That number should shorten the wait significantly. It changes the decision. I asked for three plain boxes instead — level, rate, credits owned — each with a dropdown for the K/M/B/T suffixes so nobody has to count zeros.
Chapter Five
Show Me the Receipts
The Plaid Scientist: By this point I had a suspicion: past level 12, does this thing ever actually say "wait"? Or does it just always tell people to reset? And is it even accounting for the fact that every new level comes with a better droid fleet — more income, not the same income? I wanted real numbers, not a vibe. Run a hundred simulations. Go find people online actually asking this question.
Claude: Good instinct to check for bias instead of trusting my own intuition about my own tool. The research turned up something I didn't expect: there's no public consensus on this at all. One guide site argues for fast, early resets. Another calls early resets "genuinely painful" and pushes for grinding further. Two experienced sources, same game, opposite advice. As for the simulations — with realistic inputs, the split was close to even, roughly a coin flip.
Chapter Six
The Realization
The Plaid Scientist: When I heard no one had a clear answer, I realized it was more than math. I decided this experiment was one that didn't work out. I am bummed, but also realize that it's perfectly fine. I started this process to learn, and learned so much along the way.