PrUn Alternative Start - Changing your mind

I am running a second account in Prosperous Universe, with permission from the devs, which I regularly restart and try out different starting packages to write about on this blog. Prosperous Universe has a generous restart mechanic with the COLIQ command, which allows you to completely start over from scratch. The only limitation is that after every restart the delay before you can restart again goes up. But you can do the first restart directly, and the second restart 3 days later, so hopefully by the third time you figured out what you want to do and how to do it. This enables you to make choices you aren't sure of on your first start, and wipe the slate clean if those choices didn't work out. A lot of players COLIQ'd at least once. But there might be scenarios in which that isn't your best option when you change your mind.

So as an example, I am taking my current setup on that blog account. I started out as a Metallurgist with an extractor and a smelter, and expanded that into making prefabs. And then I tried out something completely different and started making fuels in a refinery. So what if I now decide that I really like making fuels, and find the whole extracting, smelting, and making prefabs business boring? I could COLIQ, but a complete reset would also wipe out any profits I made up to now; the big advantage of a COLIQ is the ability to change planet, but there aren't really any great fuel planets in the Moria space.

Thus, I am now running an experiment: I demolished my extractors, smelters, and prefab plants. On demolishing a building, you get some of the building materials back. If that building is only a few weeks old, you get most, but not all materials back. In this case I had enough materials to build a third refinery immediately. And then I still have a lot of excess prefabs, just that the mix is wrong and I will have to sell some of one type and buy of another to build a fourth refinery.

I did, of course, have some losses from demolishing my existing buildings. And I now have to do some inventory management, sell the stuff I needed for the old buildings, and buy more materials for the refineries instead. But in a few days I will have a fully operational base with 4 refineries, which is a lot faster than what I could have achieved if I had done a COLIQ and restarted as fuel engineer.

The main limitations to the demolishing method is that you can't change planet that way. If I had wanted to switch to, let's say, Victualler, the planet I am on, Montem, is rather unsuitable, and a COLIQ would have been the better option. But a lot of careers in Prosperous Universe are about transforming materials, not extracting them, and thus are somewhat independent of the planet you are doing them on. COLIQ is certainly the better option if you messed up your first attempt and didn't make much money, but if you did make good profit and just changed your mind, the demolish method sure is a viable alternative in some cases.