Can Em All when to sell factory comes down to one rule: sell after you have triggered the ending, and never after you have bought the final exit key. The sale is the prestige reset: it wipes your normal upgrade tree and pays out permanent upgrade tokens that survive every future run. Do it in the wrong order and the exit key stays flagged as unlocked, no trucks spawn, and the run cannot progress.
Can Em All when to sell factory: the short answer
The order that works is: buy every normal upgrade, take the ending through the elevator, then accept the sell-factory email. Both the ending and the prestige come from the same place — the final upgrade and the email that arrives once your normal tree is complete — and they are not mutually exclusive. You can finish the game and still sell for tokens afterwards.
The short version:
- Buy every normal upgrade so the sell offer can arrive.
- Clear the debt — buy the 666,666,666 final upgrade and take the elevator — before you accept the offer.
- Accept the offer and spend the tokens on the permanent tree.
- Never sell after buying the key unless you are ready to reload the save and redo the run.
What a sale wipes and what it pays out
A sale does two things at once. It resets the normal in-run upgrade tree you have been building, and it pays out permanent upgrade tokens.
What survives is the permanent tree and the tokens attached to it: permanent damage upgrades, permanent creature upgrades, and the permanent earnings multipliers. What disappears is everything in the normal tree — the machines, the belt and vacuum upgrades, the multipliers you bought this run. The normal tree starts again from scratch.
The permanent tree is small. After a single sale many players already hold more tokens than there are permanent nodes to spend, which is exactly why the earnings multipliers are the real payoff of a reset: they make every later run faster. The prestige guide lists what is in the tree and how the multipliers stack.
Clear the debt first, then take the tokens
Players call the final upgrade the debt, because it is the last thing standing between you and the elevator. Clearing it beats the game, and it does not stop you selling afterwards:
- Buy every normal upgrade except the final one and wait for the sell-factory email.
- Do not accept it yet.
- Earn the 666,666,666, buy the final upgrade and take the elevator behind the upstairs exit door. The ending plays and Freedom at Last unlocks.
- Return to the main menu, choose Continue, and go back to your factory.
- Now open the email and accept the offer. You keep the tokens and the ending.
The step-by-step route through the elevator is in the ending guide.
How the sell-factory email works
The offer arrives by email, and the timing is the part that catches people out.
- The email only appears once you have bought every normal upgrade, and only if you have not bought the final one.
- It can arrive a long time after the upgrades themselves. One player had a complete normal tree by around day 3 and did not receive the offer until day 23.
- Until you open the email and accept it, nothing happens. The factory is not sold by buying the upgrades.
- Hold the tokens until you have roughly 5,000 of them, so the next permanent node is still affordable.
- Buy every permanent upgrade, which pops The Perfect Employee — and resets the counter of fed children, so rebuild the feeding totals afterwards.
The full sequence for spending the tokens is in the Perfect Employee guide.
The one mistake that bricks your exit key
Selling the factory after you have already bought the final upgrade leaves the key flagged as unlocked for the rest of that save. You cannot rebuy it, you cannot use the exit, and because the run cannot move forward, no trucks arrive to bring more creatures.
The flag only clears when the game is actually closed or reloaded, so switching to the main menu and back may not be enough. Quit the game, start it again, and run the cycle over from the beginning.
If you are already in that state, the stuck in the endgame guide has the recovery steps.