PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-05-21

My base on Verdant is still growing. I executed the plan I mentioned in my previous post to add a prefab plant, so now I have that plus 4 pioneer habitations, 1 oxygen collector, 4 water rigs, 1 farm, and 2 food processors. I am using 380 of 400 possible pioneers, but only 193 out of 500 area, so I still have a lot of room to grow. Still my overall net profit is just grown slightly to 11k, because the stuff I am selling got cheaper, while the stuff I was buying got more expensive. On the plus side, I can now make the prefabs that I need to expand further, and had only to import the granulate, which is very cheap right now. Also my shipping traffic to and from Verdant is now a lot more balanced, because I have heavy imports now.

I still have to play the second account as Constructor for another week before I can liquidate the company again and try out a new starting package. With every liquidation the forced delay until the next one increases, which makes my original plan to try out and blog about all starting packages somewhat impractical. Anyway, I played the Constructor long enough to be sure now that I made a mistake: The only good location for a Constructor starting base is Montem, as it has both limestone and iron, and is close to Moria station. While I am happy to have tried out the method to build a starting base on a planet that is *not* a starting planet, by moving before building the base, my choice of planet wasn't great. Having silicon ore instead of limestone and iron ore is suboptimal, and the fuel cost to Moria are greatly cutting into my profits. That base never really took off, I am barely breaking even, and still haven't built a single expansion building yet.

Part of the problem was that the Constructor option looked nice on a spreadsheet, at prices which turned out to be historically high. Once prices had stabilized to a more "normal" level, the profitability wasn't all that great anymore. Would have worked on Montem, but lower prices combined with my suboptimal choice of planet pretty much killed that project. The good news is that any regular player, who isn't already on his third base, can liquidate his company faster if he ever made a mistake like that. Anyway, I'm not going to try Constructor again, I think I learned a good amount of what that career is about, and will rather try something completely different.

On Verdant the big question is how to continue to expand my base. The previous long term vision was to make mostly rigs and food processors to make drinking water, as drinking water was more profitable than making basic rations. That difference is profitability has mostly melted away. In a way, the markets in Prosperous Universe follow standard economic theory are are somewhat self-correcting: If a good is exceptionally profitably, people will make more of it, until supply meets demand and lowers prices. Still my base on Verdant is very good, because it has multiple different streams of revenue: Drinking water, basic rations, oxygen, and now prefabs. I think I will look at a better balance between drinking water and basic rations, so that I am not too dependent on one or the other, and can be more flexible going after one or the other when the opportunity arises.

This week I didn't spend much time playing Prosperous Universe, as I was busy for 3 days with a seminar. The good news is that PrUn is exceptionally well suited to real life situations like that. If you set up consumables in advance to not run out, your base is happily producing in your absence. You just need to ship your product to the next commodity exchange and cash in, which is always fun. Depending on how your base is set up, you could even thrive during much longer absences, being eventually stopped by either inputs running out, or outputs filling all of your storage space.