You start with more big buttons, which acts as the main spawning point for buttons, a base upgrade that creates buttons with higher values, friends that collect buttons for you, and passive income that generates additional buttons every few seconds. Upgrades can be purchased multiple times, each one increasing the cost of the next purchase until reaching a known maximum level.
However, this is only the beginning, because the real progression comes from prestige points. These are earned by protecting your main button generator from invading gnomes. They appear randomly, steal your buttons or attack your main button, and need to be taken out by quickly moving your mouse cursor over them and smacking them several times.
Every eliminated gnome rewards you with one prestige point (more at later stages) that stays with you permanently and also fills the upgrade bar. Once the bar is full, you get to choose one perk from a random selection of three options. If you do not like the choices, you can spend resources to reroll them. After some time, though, the challenge increases as you have to defend yourself against large waves of enemies. The attack timer lets you prepare, and you can always switch to idle mode, which stops gnome attacks and allows you to focus on collecting buttons. However, this strategy will not be enough forever, because surviving all waves is the ultimate goal needed to complete the game.
Gnomes become stronger with every wave, and eventually your main button generator will lose all its health. This is not just a failure, but also the way the game pushes you forward and unlocks new content. You gain prestige points from each run, but you also lose all temporary upgrades and perks, meaning every new attempt starts from zero. The only exception is prestige purchases, which remain permanently unlocked between runs.
There are 18 prestige upgrades in total. Some are affordable early on, while others are expensive upgrades designed for later runs. The good thing is that each one only needs to be purchased once to unlock it forever. The first major unlock you will probably aim for is the tech tree, which allows you to improve different parts of the game using buttons. These upgrades include getting more buttons from defeated gnomes, finding rarer and more valuable buttons, reducing costs, and many other improvements.
Other prestige options include police that automatically attacks invading gnomes, duplication that doubles collected buttons, increased smack power, free button bundles every 10 seconds, and more. Prestige upgrades become part of the normal upgrade system, meaning they still require buttons to activate after being unlocked.
But just like other temporary upgrades, all button based purchases connected to prestige upgrades reset after a failed run. This means tech tree improvements disappear, along with upgrades to auto collect, which improves automatic button gathering speed, and laser cannon that attacks incoming gnomes.
The nice thing about incremental games is that progress is designed to speed up over time. Since you can earn around 100 prestige points in a single run, and a few hundred more at higher difficulties, you do not need to repeat too many cycles before unlocking all prestige upgrades. Once that is finished, the game becomes much more comfortable. You can activate idle mode, leave the game running for a few hours, return to buy all available upgrades, and prepare yourself for the final gnome waves, and repeat this three more times.