A run that drafted 11,000 perks crashed the build before it crashed the player
The fix for a run that technically never ends usually isn't a bigger number. Sometimes it's refusing to offer the same card twice.
Climbing past the Summit means a perk draft at every leg border — pick one of up to three, out of a pool of 16. The first version of that pool let a card come back around once a player already held every perk once. It seemed harmless: a run that lived long enough would just start handing out duplicates.
What a duplicate actually does
Several perks are flat stat bumps — a bit more bounce, a slightly wider sweet spot. None of them have a cap, because nothing before Beyond the Summit ever ran long enough for one to need it. Letting them repeat meant a sufficiently good run could draft the same bounce bonus, or the same sweet-spot bonus, over and over, each one stacking cleanly on top of the last.
Beyond the Summit is specifically designed to let strong runs go long. So one did. In 12 simulated minutes, a single strong-skill run climbed about 2.9 million pixels and drafted the same handful of perks:
The run didn't end because the ball fell. It ended because the process holding its state ran out of memory.
The fix is a sentence, not a formula
Perks a run already holds are no longer offered. A draft shows fewer than three options once fewer remain, and once all 16 are held, the leg border stops offering a draft at all and the climb just continues. No stacking to cap, no growth curve to tune, no ceiling to re-measure every time a perk's numbers change.
It does mean a very long run eventually runs out of new perks to find — a real question for later (letting a held perk level up, with diminishing returns, is the obvious next step), but not one Beyond the Summit needed answered on day one. The bug wasn't in the math any perk did. It was in trusting that "offer a card again" was harmless, in a mode built specifically to make "again" happen thousands of times.