I can see how to some gamers Prosperous Universe doesn't even look like a game at all. There is very little in the way of graphics, and absolutely no action. You're not mashing buttons on a controller to achieve your goals; instead you carefully plan for your goals days ahead, and very slowly put things into motion. You start out with a company that is given some starting assets, and as far as I can see now, it will take me about a month just to double the value of the assets from that starting point. On the other hand, the amount of hours that I would need to be online in the game during that one month is limited. Yeah, I have that habit of letting slow games like this run in the background all day, but after the initial planning is done I could probably log into the game just once or twice per day for a few minutes and be fine.

For me, the lack of need for reaction-based skills is an advantage. But I guess that everybody enjoys the kind of game that he has a talent for. I didn't get the full enjoyment out of Elden Ring, because I don't have a talent for pressing the right buttons on a controller within a time window measured in milliseconds. I do have a talent for careful long-term planning, and planning an action that takes a day in real time, where getting it wrong means you have to wait another day or two for a redo, doesn't scare me. I can see myself playing this game for many months to come, because simply playing Prosperous Universe just for a few days wouldn't even make sense. You can do most things in the game for free, but I did pay 7 Euro per month for 3 months ahead for a "PRO license" which gives me access to local markets.

While you can develop your company to do anything you like, there are different starting packages available in Prosperous Universe. I took a very basic one, the Victualler, specialized in growing and processing food. So my starting base consists of two pioneer habitations to house my workers, a rig to extract water from the planet, a farmstead to use the water to grow crops, and a food processor to transform for example these crops into basic rations. Pioneers are just the bottom class out of 5 classes of workers. Every class of worker needs different goods, which affects their satisfaction and thus efficiency. For pioneers, two of those goods are basic rations and drinking water, both of which I can make myself with my setup. That makes the Victualler a good choice for starters, as you are unlikely to run out of these very basic goods you need, and there is always a steady market for them from others. The game also tells you whether there is currently low, average, or high demand for this starting class, and there weren't any classes in higher demand.

However, I made some other choices at the start that aren't what the tutorial videos and other help documentation recommends. There are planets that are suitable for farming which are in the immediate vicinity of a station with a commodity exchange, allowing you to get your goods to market with something like a 2-hour flight of one of your space ships. I figured that the recommended planet would be full of people following that advice, and prices at that commodity exchange would be low. So I chose a planet that is much farther away from the next station, with no farming planets very near to that station. Ergo, better prices for the basic rations I produce. But at the slowest possible speed (which is the most fuel efficient) it takes me a day and a half to fly to that station. That takes more careful planning of my shopping trips. There are over four thousand planets in the game and they all have different conditions and resources for different industries. So the possibilities are nearly endless. And everything you can make is used by yourself for further processing, or can be sold to another player in a huge player-driven economy. To me, that is a lot of fun.

I also like the completely editable user interface. You can create a series of screens, and on each of these screens you can place a number of tiles of varying sizes. Then you can fill each tile with the command that gives you the information you are looking for. At the start you have one screen for your base and one for your financials, but you can easily create a whole series for different functions, from different chat windows to an overview of local market contracts. It takes a bit of work to set up, but in the end you get exactly the user interface you want.

I don't expect many of my readers to be enticed by this sort of very slow game being played over the course of months. But if you do play Prosperous Universe, you can use the "USR Tobold" command in game to find me, with the option to chat with me.