PrUn Alternative Start - Fuel Engineer

Since my original First Day Starter Guide for Prosperous Universe, the company creation assistant has changed. While some information about the starting package is now less visible, other elements have improved: The screen to enter your company name and company code is now showing much better whether your chosen name and code are valid and available; and the screen to choose your starting planet now shows a rating how suitable that planet is for the chosen profession:

So for this post I am creating a Fuel Engineer. And the planet shown on the screenshot, Katoa, is the only 5-star starting planet on offer. There is one 4-star planet, but it is several jumps away from the closest commodity exchange. And all the other planets aren't suitable to make fuel at all. Easy choice thus, Katoa it is. So, as described in the starter guide, I create my base, unload my ships, and create my recommended buildings: 2 pioneer habitations, 1 extractor, and 1 fuel refinery. One look at the refinery shows the problem with this start:

The refinery is only running at 64% overall efficiency. That is because it is a slightly higher technology building than what we previously saw, and besides 60 pioneers also requires 20 settlers. Only, we don't have any settlers, nor do we have the consumables they would need. The best thing we can do early on, is to increase the efficiency of the pioneers from 79% to 100% by giving them luxury consumables (coffee and padded overalls).

Luxury consumables isn't the only thing we need to buy. There is in fact a long list. We only have basic consumables for 7 days, which isn't very long. And even worse, we have input materials for our refinery for less than 3 days, if we make both slower-than-light and faster-than-light fuel. The only material we have enough of, because we can produce it with our extractor, is galerite rock. We need more hydrogen, helium-3 isotope, and ammonia. At some point we could build a collector to gather the ammonia ourselves, but the concentration is somewhat low, so that would be not very profitable.

On the plus side, we already have some fuel we could sell, and we have 35k CIS currency. We could also consider selling some of the fuel in the tanks of our two ships. This is a bit of a high-risk strategy for other professions, selling your starting fuel to get more cash early on. But as we are already producing fuel, the risk for us is somewhat lesser. However, my recommendation would be to fly to Benten Station empty, and just spend those 35k of local currency. Because, unsurprisingly with the only fuel starting planet in the system, fuel is rather cheap in Benten, and selling our fuel there isn't very profitable.

Time to work on an alternative strategy: I buy consumables and input materials in Benten for about 2 weeks of production for my 35k, without selling any fuel. And I will use the fact that I can fly around with fuel at the lowest possible cost to increase my profit and make some extra cash. Now this is where I would say that Fuel Engineer is the only starting package where a PRO license for 8 Euro per month, at least paid once, would be of a bigger advantage than for the other starting packages. Because the PRO license, or the BASIC license you get when it expires, allows you to pick up shipping contracts. Using an external site to find the most valuable shipping contracts, we can send our second ship to work for somebody else, while our first ship goes shopping on Benten. The PRO license also allows to use the currency exchange, which might come in handy if we decide to sell our fuel in another commodity exchange than Benten, or get paid in foreign currency for our shipping contracts.

So this will be the strategy for the first week or so: Keep our base supplied with consumables and input materials, produce fuel, and use our ships for shipping contracts when something profitable pops up. Once we have produced a good amount of fuel, we will ship it to a commodity exchange other than Benten. Even with cheap fuel we wouldn't want to make that trip too often, so better to let production accumulate for a while. Once we made about another 35k profit that way, we can build our first additional building, a barracks (HBB) that offers room for 75 pioneers and 75 settlers, and we can buy the consumables our settlers need. That will boost the efficiency of our refinery and make it run at 100%.