So, you want to play Prosperous Universe, you created an account, and hit the Play Now button. You will be greeted by the Apex Company Creation Assistant, on the starting package tab. As I said above, for the purpose of this guide, we will choose the Victualler starting package. If you find the screenshot below too small, you can click on it for a larger version.

On the next tab, starting location, we choose Hortus - Promitor (VH-331a). Why that one? There are 3 criteria here: One is the table in the lower right corner, showing that the closest commodity exchange, Hortus Station, is "in system", and thus can be reached relatively quickly with just slower-than-light flight. The second is the concentration of water on the planet, which is very important for farming. The third is soil fertility, which is obviously also important, but the exact value here is less important than the fact that there is soil fertility at all. You can't farm on planets without any soil fertility.Now you can go to the company details tab, and enter a name for your company, and a 3- or 4-letter code. If you try to be clever and use something like FOOD for your 4-letter code, you'll find that somebody else already thought of that. Finally there is the last tab, Early Access Disclaimer. On this tab you need to click on "Click here to confirm that you have read and understood this disclaimer.". Then you can hit the Create button. If at this point in time nothing happens, you need to go back to the company details tab and choose a different name and code. This section is still being worked on as I write this, so you might not get a proper error message telling you what exactly went wrong, but it usually means you tried a company name or code that is already in use. Once you found an original name and code and hit Create, the following screen appears:The box with the header "Welcome licensee!" is a short tutorial on the APEX user interface. I would very much recommend you actually read what it says in those 12 boxes and follow the instructions. We are going to use that information later in the guide to create some new screens. After that, we are going to create our first base.As it says in the Hints box, you need to press the START BASE button at the bottom of your starting planet's info tile. That would be the mostly blue tile in the middle. And the button is lower down than what you can see on this screenshot. So you need to scroll that tile lower, until you find that button:After clicking on START BASE, another window opens, on which you click BUILD BASE. Congratulations, you are now an inhabitant of this planet. Before we go any further in expanding our base, we are going to make a new screen that will help us manage our inventory. For that you need to press the ADD button on top of your screen, next to the SCRNS button. You type in a name, description is optional, and press CREATE, and you will land on a large, empty window. Hover your mouse over the gear symbol in the upper right corner of that tile, and click the vertical bar to split the large tile vertically into two smaller ones. Than do the same with the horizontal bar on both new tiles, to create a total of 4 smaller tiles. Now press the INV button in the sidebar to the left. A new buffer window opens up. Buffer windows aren't permanent, so you now drag the inventory by the blue bar on top to the upper right of your 4 tiles. Close the now empty buffer, and click on one of the three OPEN buttons of the list of inventories. That opens one of your inventories, which you can now again drag and drop into another one of your 4 tiles. At the end you will have created a useful screen with information about all of your inventories:As you can see, everything you own is in the cargo spaces of your two ships, and your base inventory is open. So now you drag and drop each one of the colored squares onto the square marked ALL in your base inventory, that only appears while you are dragging. The final result should look something like this:While doing this, the Construct Building Hints window will pop up. The important part here is that it reminds you that you have choses the Victualler starting profile, and that the buildings recommend to build are 2 HB1 pioneer habitations, 1 RIG to produce water, 1 FRM farmstead to grow crops, and 1 FP Food Processor to turn those crops into basic rations RAT. In this case I would recommend minimizing that buffer window, because before we construct these buildings, we will first prepare one more new screen in the APEX user interface. Like before, ADD screen, call it something like Planet (because Base is already taken), and split it into 4 tiles again. Press BS on the bar to the left. Press View Base and drag the resulting base overview holding the blue bar on top onto the first empty tile.

Now we have a construct button, with which we can construct our base. Press it and build a pioneer habitation, twice (not more!), on the Infrastructure tab of the construct window. Switch to the Resources tab and build a rig. The hint to start producing pops up, but you can minimize that. Then switch to the Pioneers tab and build both a farmstead and a food processor. Your base screen should now show 120 pioneers working. Press the buttons Workforce, Experts, and Production, and drag the new tiles that open by their blue bar into the empty tiles on your screen. Your screen should now look something like this:

If you have further questions, feel free to write them in the comments section below, or open a new buffer in game, type USR Tobold, click CONTACT USER and chat with me in game.