Tobold's Blog
Thursday, November 24, 2022
 
Prosperous Universe - 7 months later

7 months ago I started posting about an indie MMO game called Prosperous Universe, and wrote a series of posts about it. As I am still playing, albeit with much lower intensity, I thought I'd give you an update.

First things first: Am I still having fun? Not so much anymore. Which does have to do with what my particular desires for this game were: I wanted some sort of space trading game. Now, Prosperous Universe does have space trading; but you only have a very limited number of ships, two from the start, and after 7 months I still am far from being able to afford a third one. Two ships, rather limited cargo capacity, and flight times of a day or more make for a very slow trading experience. All that wouldn't be so bad if the market was big enough; but unfortunately the actual number of players is rather low, with concurrent online players between 200 and 400. Which results that sometimes you produce a good that has a high price, but then find out that there is actually no demand for it at all.

I started Prosperous Universe with a base that produced mainly basic consumables, food and water. That was a very good idea, and although profitability goes up and down, the base is always doing something useful. My second base in comparison was a complete disaster, and I am in the process of winding it down. I had found a less hospitable planet with a good yield of titanium oxide. So I set up my base there, extracted the titanium oxide, and smelted it into titanium. After a few weeks it became clear that my one titanium base was producing more titanium than the demand for the stuff was in the whole universe. Price crashed 80% and never recovered. I then used the base to make more basic goods, but because the base isn't very close to a commodity exchange, and the planet is less hospitable and needs special building materials, the whole thing wasn't really profitable.

My third base was more of a success. When looking for metals with some actual demand, I found that aluminium was a better bet than titanium. Iron is needed to make the lowest level of building prefabs, while aluminium is needed for the second level. And building prefabs have a pretty constant demand. So in this case going to a less hospitable planet paid off: I am making aluminium in the Moria space, where it is less common, and turn it directly into high-value building prefabs. That means I don't need to ship that much stuff from and to the base, and what I ship sells quickly and for big bucks.

When I started Prosperous Universe, it had just released on Steam. That Steam release brought a huge influx of players, which didn't last. My fourth base is a testament to that, it is on Moria - Vallis, which is one of the starting planets. Each planet has a limited number of plots, but starting players can build "excess" bases beyond that plot limitation. So when there are a lot of players, the starting planets all not only have no available plots, but are in fact hundreds of plots over capacity. The fact that I recently was able to find an empty plot on Vallis shows how many players have left.

What I am basically doing now is moving my second base to Vallis, going back to three bases. With Vallis having iron, I can then build basic prefabs there, and the next level on my aluminium planet. All that supplied by my food and water planet. All very basic stuff. Prosperous Universe has a large tech tree, but due to the low number of players, once you move away from the basic stuff, there simply isn't enough of a market there to buy and sell. People who want to move up the tech tree vertically integrate their production with their guild, but I didn't want to play that way. And as a single-player game, Prosperous Universe, like it's bigger brother EVE Online, has serious limitations. Right now I am playing with very low intensity, like 5 minutes once per day; but I expect I will stop playing by the end of the year.

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- posted by Tobold @ 9:50 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Tuesday, July 26, 2022
 
Multiplayer Tech Trees

There are a lot of single-player games which have a crafting tech tree, think anything from Don’t Starve to Valheim. You start out being to collect only a few basic materials, but can then craft those into tools that allow you to access more advanced materials. Often the discovery of new recipes is part of the game. In Prosperous Universe, and similar space trading and crafting multiplayer games, the tech tree is known to all players from the start. But other than that, the main difference is one of scale: Single-player games are designed so that a single player can gather all the resources and do all the crafting for a large project by himself. Multiplayer games usually have projects that need collaboration. In Prosperous Universe players group together to do large projects, like building space ships.

In Prosperous Universe there are about 400 planets in the galaxy, from which you can extract 34 different basic resources. As there are only a few resources on any given planet, and your number of bases is limited, you will never be able to extract all 34 resources. The idea is that different players cover different parts of the resorce gathering and subsequent crafting tech trees, and then trade with each other. I have been playing Prosperous Universe for three months now, and found that for many basic resources and basic crafted items this system of trading works reasonably well and is fun to me to plan and execute. But that is at the lowest out of five levels of workers, pioneers. When I explored higher level crafted goods, I quickly observed something: The markets for these goods are very “thin”, with not many players buying and selling these goods, and not much trade going on. As you can’t realiably find buyers and sellers, the corporations (guilds) trade these goods among each other, away from the public markets, which then makes the market even thinner.

And then I realized that if you have a given size of tech tree and a given capacity of each player how many diferent goods he can produce, you need a certain number of players to create an active market for all goods. Prosperous Universe, being quite a niche game, doesn’t have more than a few thousand players. And that is only enough to cover the lower end of the tech tree, and not the complete tree. There simply aren’t enough players out there to create enough supply and demand for higher level goods. Prosperous Universe isn’t badly designed, it just has a design that would work optimally with a much larger number of players.

One example I have been exploring is Hardened Structural Elements, a material needed to build anything on a planet with high atmospheric pressure, like the one I chose for my second base. These HSE need the second and third level of workers to produce. They also need Stabilized Technetium, which is another complete branch of the tech tree, so it would be extremely hard to extract the Technetium Ore and refine it and make everything else needed to produce HSE alone without trading. So I tried with trading, and now I have a production that depends on me being lucky and finding people selling the intermediate materials like Stabilized Technetium that I need. Sometimes the production just grinds to a halt, because the market is empty. And once when I tried to sell a batch of my production, somebody simply bought everything, and then tried to resell it for twice the price, because there was so little supply.

Much of the fun in Prosperous Universe has been about planning my economy for the weeks to come. While market prices moved up and down, there always *was* a market for the low level goods I was trading in. Now I realize that this liquid market doesn’t exist for higher level goods, unless Prosperous Universe suddenly attracts a much larger number of players, which is unlikely. I could play the game in a very different way, integrating my economy into the larger economy of my corporation. But I have grown wary of MMO guilds, and prefer to play mostly solo. So I am currently not sure how much longer I will continue to play Prosperous Universe. Anyone know another MMO which is mostly about crafting and trading, without combat?

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- posted by Tobold @ 2:06 PM Permanent Link  (7) comments
Tuesday, July 05, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-07-05

While my main base on Verdant hasn't changed since the last journal entry, my profits are down 20% to 22k net profit per day. Pretty much everything I produce has gone down in price, presumably because the wave of new players coming in through the release on Steam didn't last very long. Prosperous Universe remains a niche game and player numbers are down again.

My second base, on XG-326a is up and running, but not yet very profitable. The added materials needed to deal with the hostile environment (Hardened Structural Elements against high atmospheric pressure) make every building much more expensive, and thus payback periods are far longer. However, I do hope that with time the abundant mineral resources (limestone, silicon ore, titanium ore) will make up for this. I also hope that the carbon and oxygen I produce on Verdant can be profitably employed by a smelter operation on XG-326a to turn those ores into more valuable silicon and titanium.

I play Prosperous Universe on a PC, using a browser instead of the Steam client. Those two are pretty similar, but the browser allows some addons in the form of Chrome extensions. There is also a much reduced client available when using a browser on a mobile platform, like my iPad. Now, as usual, I will spend three weeks in July on my summer holidays, and I won't take any PC with me, just my Switch and iPad. So my Prosperous Universe activity will by technical necessity be much reduced. I'll try to stock up on things and just accumulate profits over that time, but things could easily go wrong and my production could come to a halt. To be continued in August.

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- posted by Tobold @ 1:02 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Saturday, June 18, 2022
 
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.

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- posted by Tobold @ 7:29 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Tuesday, June 14, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-06-14

At a rapid pace I am approaching the point in time where my first base on Verdant uses up all of the 500 area I have. I already use 434 of that area, and with the 21k of net profit I make per day, I can fill up the rest rather quickly. Now in theory I have the choice between spending a base permit to add another 250 area on Verdant, or spending a base permit to add a second base with 500 area. Now if you remember my last post, I was talking about the incredible growth rate of my economy, 26 million % annualized. This growth rate takes a hit whenever I arrive at a cap that prevents me from further expanding my bases. At some point I will need to acquire more base permits, and that requires upgrading my HQ, which is basically a money sink. Expanding my base by 250 is the "quick fix", but I will more quickly hit the area cap again, and then base permits are the ultimate obstacle to further growth. So, building a new base is probably the better option. I will just need to decide where and what.

When I first looked at the profitability of my Verdant base with all 500 area used, I thought I would end up with a base that made over 30k net profit per day. Today that looks a bit too optimistic, 25k is more like it. The main reason for this is that my main product is drinking water, and the price of drinking water dropped from over 80 NCC to under 60 NCC. Thus the interest of making a range of products instead of concentrating on just one. Besides drinking water I am selling basic rations, carbon, oxygen, raw water, and occasionally prefabs, when I don't need them for my own buildings.

That brings me to my side project, the second account on which I am testing different starting packages and options in which way to grow a base. That second base on Montem is currently my test case for a base that is producing in different production lines that don't have synergy. I have 2 extractors, 1 smelter (need another one), 2 refineries, and 2 prefab plants. The extractors, smelter, and prefab plant are in one part of the tech tree of the game, while the refinery is in a completely different part of that tech tree. And the refinery needs settlers, which need different consumables. The result is that on my Verdant base I only need 5 goods which I import regularly; on the Montem base I need to import 16 different goods regularly. That is interesting, but it turns out that it isn't actually more profitable, and the logistics are a lot more complicated. For a beginner, a start that concentrates on just one part of the economy, and is partially self-sufficient (like my Victualler start on Verdant) is a lot easier.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:58 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Friday, June 10, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-06-10

A base in Prosperous Universe uses some goods every day, some as consumables for the workforce, some as materials of input for the production buildings. If any of these materials aren’t available, production stops, or at least slows down. Thus a large part of the game consists of shipping your products to market, selling them, buying the goods that your base needs, and shipping those back to your base,

I currently have over two weeks worth of input materials on my base on Verdant. Since I also increased storage space, I could easily not log on for a week or more, and my base would keep on running. Great, isn’t it? Well, maybe not. After looking at it closer, this amount of inventory might actually be already too much.

The “problem” is the incredible growth rate of the economy. My Verdant base has a payback period of under 20 days, which is to say that the value of my base doubles every 20 days, or 18 times in a year, to 2^18 times or 26,214,400%. 26 million percent annual growth is incredibly fast, and not comparable to anything in real world economics. As a consequence, any capital held in inventory is basically dead capital that isn’t growing. I would be considerably better off if I had a much smaller inventory, and used the money on constructing more production buildings instead. Note that this growth rate is just my current rate, annualized. Exponential growth like that isn’t sustainable over long periods, and growth will slow down when I hit certain limits, like number of base permits and area per base.

Now if I ever ran out of anything, it would take at least 3 days to make the trip from Verdant to Moria and back to restock. Running on less than 3 days of inventory is dangerous, and with some safety margin a week’s worth of inventory is probably a good compromise, but not more. So the plan for the coming weeks is to draw down my inventory and work on a slimmer “just-in-time” model for faster growth.

Having said that, this is just a game, and while growth is certainly a good goal for the first months of playing, it isn’t everything. Different players spend different amounts of time in the game, and a somewhat more relaxed and slower pace of growth can be fun too. Especially if a player wants to spend less time optimizing, and to log on only once every one or two days. During my 3 weeks of summer holiday for example, I will not have access to a PC, and the PrUn user interface on a tablet is limited; so I might want to stock up on materials for that.

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- posted by Tobold @ 3:56 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Monday, June 06, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-06-06

In the previous entry of my Prosperous Universe adventures we finished with the open question on whether to build a hydroponic farm to grow coffee beans, which can then be transformed into "caffeinated infusion" aka coffee in a food processor. Lately coffee has been expensive and in short supply, and because this is one of the first luxury consumables many people use to make their pioneers more efficient, that might be both a good source of income and another step towards self-sufficiency.

After running the numbers through a spreadsheet, it appears that the profitable step in that operation is to make the coffee from the coffee beans. Growing the coffee beans, which needs settlers, and thus special habitation and consumables, is both rather more complex and much less profitable. The better solution would be buying the coffee beans, but they aren't always available, and prices are all over the place. Then, just as I had cashed in from a shipload full of the produced goods over the last days, I say a nice stack of coffee beans on the commodity exchange for a reasonable price. I went a bit overboard and bought 50 coffee beans, enough to make 150 coffee, while the daily consumption of my pioneers is 3.

On the plus side, I now have coffee for 50 days (or a bit less if I further grow my pioneer population). But what I realized maybe too late is that this purchase ties up a lot of my capital for a rather long time. And as coffee prices are already going down again, that was probably not such a good idea. If I had put the money into more production buildings instead, it would have been more profitable. Well, I'll slowly brew all that coffee, and then see where the coffee prices went. If they go up again, I can still make a nice profit selling that excess coffee. On the other hand, coffee is a *luxury* consumable, which means it increases efficiency, but isn't absolutely necessary to get pioneers working, so above a certain price people simply stop buying it.

As I mentioned in my series on starting packages of Prosperous Universe, I have permission to run a second account for blogging purposes. The idea is generally to frequently liquidate the company of that second account and try a different starting package. My latest restart was to make a metallurgist base on Montem, but I quickly realized that there isn't much money in just smelting iron, and Montem, in spite of being recommended, isn't actually all that great for the iron part. However, Montem does have limestone, and the combination of limestone and iron is great for making prefabs. So my "metallurgist" base pretty much immediately turned into a "metallurgist / constructor" base.

What I wanted to do was run that base as a regular player would for a couple of weeks, and see how good that starting package turns out to me. And then my plans got perturbated by strange events. You see, I did take a supporter package with 1 month of subscription for the second account; both as thanks to the devs for allowing me to run this for the blog, and to try out the "basic" license that you get after your "Pro" subscription runs out. As such I can take on shipping contracts, which I do, because that would be a typical secondary income of a new player. I am using the FIO Shipment Finder website to find profitable shipment contracts. And there I saw something unusual: Another player offering a whopping 110,000 AIC for a shipment in the Antares sector. Now Antares is pretty far from the Moria sector where the rest of my operation is. But the highest amount I ever got for shipping was 20k, so 110k is hard to resist. So I planned it properly (you need to take some extra FTL fuel for such long trips), accepted the shipping contract and set off. There was an obvious risk that this was some sort of error or hoax, so I admit it helped that I was on that secondary blog account.

In the end I did the shipment, and it did turn out to be an error on the part of the player who had posted it; he had simply added one zero too much at the end. But as he was very nice, and actually able to pay that much money, he paid me anyway. Which opened up a whole lot of opportunities for that account to try out some more things for the blog. First of all being what you do with a large pile of cash in a foreign currency with your ship far from home. Now there is a currency exchange market, but it is somewhat cumbersome, and you need a PRO license to access it. The easier solution is to buy goods in the foreign market with the foreign currency and ship those home. This also opens up possibilities for arbitrage, with for example aluminum being cheaper in the Antares sector than in Moria. However, I obviously wanted to spend most of my foreign cash without buying more goods than my single ship could transport. So in the end I took a mix of 100 aluminum and 4000 fuel, which is now on the long way back home. Well, at least I won't run out of fuel on the way back.

So the next good question is what one would do if one gets a large cash injection into a starter base operation. The safe and boring option would have been to just multiply the operation I already have, but that wouldn't have been of any interest for the blog. So instead I thought it would be good to answer a question I had heard on a recent Twitch stream: If you choose a certain starting package, in how far does that determine your future options to grow your base? Are you stuck with the "career" you chose at the start? The answer is no, you can build production buildings of different careers on your starting base, although for some careers you are limited by the natural resources you can extract on that planet. Montem has little water and fertility, starting a farming operation there wouldn't make much sense.

So my plan now is to build up my base on Montem into a completely different direction, fuel production. That has absolutely nothing to do with what I already have on the planet. And because a refinery needs settlers, I will need settler habitations and consumables. It will be the most complex business venture I tried, and the idea is to use the blog account to show whether extreme diversification is a viable business strategy in Prosperous Universe, or whether the logistics are too much to handle. It is the polar opposite of the business strategy on my main account, which is very much vertically integrated and leaning towards self-sufficiency.

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- posted by Tobold @ 9:41 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Thursday, June 02, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-06-02

I pulled off the investment plan that I had mentioned in my previous post, and now have an incinerator, just produced the first carbon. So my base is now using 590 out of 600 pioneers, and 320 out of 500 area, bringing in a net profit per day of 16k. Even 17k temporarily, when the next shipment of coffee beans arrive, because coffee right now is very expensive, so turning coffee beans into coffee is profitable. Well, at least turning the batch of coffee beans I have is profitable, because now the price for the beans has gone through the roof as well. I might need to reconsider that hydroponic farm ...

I also made good money in the most counter-intuitive way: I am always talking about Verdant as a planet to make drinking water and rations, so you could assume that on Verdant itself there is very high supply and little demand for these. That turned out to be not completely right: I sold several bundles of drinking water and basic rations on the local market for about the same price that they would have fetched on Moria. Few other people use the Verdant local market to sell drinking water and rations, and apparently some players are on this planet mostly for the oxygen, or maybe carbon, and haven't gone into food production themselves.

The effect of that was that I needed my ships less for exporting my goods, and so was able to make some side money with shipping contracts. However, shipping fuel prices on Moria are very high right now, at 13 or above, while previously I could sometimes grab fuel for below 10. That means 30% higher fuel cost when I do shipping, so some of the shipping contracts on offer simply aren't worth it anymore. In my post about the fuel engineer starting package being a good combination with shipping activity, that is even more true today.

Whatever production I want to build next on Verdant, I will need to build another habitation module first. But I guess I will have to make a decision, as I could build either a normal pioneer habitation, or a mixed habitation, Barracks, for both pioneers and settlers. I am kind of leaning towards sticking with pioneers for this base, and considering settlers only for the second base. Unless the universe is sliding into a full-blown coffee crisis, where a hydroponic farm would actually be worth it.

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- posted by Tobold @ 3:39 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
 
PrUn Alternative Start - Metallurgist

Thanks to a friendly account reset by the developer, I was able to try and blog about yet another Prosperous Universe starting package: The metallurgist. This profession extracts ores and then smelts them (usually with carbon and oxygen) to make metals. The starting planets either have iron ore or aluminum ore, so there is a decision to make. One good choice, shown as 5 stars (great) in the Company Creation Assistant is Deimos in the Antares system. Decent concentrations of both aluminum ore and oxygen, and not too far away from the Antares commodity exchange. Only that in the "square" of the 4 main commodity exchanges, Antares is the opposite corner from the most populous region of this universe, Moria.

In Moria, another 5-star option is proposed, Vallis. Less oxygen here, but good iron ore concentration, and right next to Moria station. However, the online handbook recommends Montem. Which is a bit weird, as the Company Creation Assistant only gives Montem 4 stars, and the iron ore concentration is much lower. So, which advice do we follow? Now Montem is one of the most popular planets in this universe, and it has a good concentration of limestone. So instead of choosing the more conventional option of Vallis, I decided to go for a variation and chose Montem. Because I messed up my start as a constructor, starting as metallurgist on Montem is actually a opportunity to do both. My previous attempt had taught me that limestone is an important limitation of starting as a constructor, and with the other material needed being iron, that obviously combines well with metallurgist.

So I started on Montem with the recommended set of buildings: 2 pioneer habitations, an extractor, and a smelter. And then I immediately went off script, and started extracting limestone, rather than iron ore. Montem really is bad for extracting iron ore, and it is cheaply available in large quantities at Moria station. I set the smelter to make iron, however there are two possible recipes, and I am missing the flux for the more profitable one. Time to do some shopping.

With the building materials for extractor and smelter, the metallurgist starting package has somewhat fewer prefabs than other packages. That is compensated by a bigger pile of cash, 45k to start with. Which is great news: Even with buying the iron ore instead of extracting it, and buying basic and luxury consumables for a week, and buying the carbon, oxygen, and flux for the smelter, I still have plenty of cash. So I can buy the building materials (76 MCG, 3 BBH, 3 BDE, 4 BSE) for a prefab plant immediately. And my base even has room for the pioneers that prefab plant needs, so it just takes one trip to Moria station and back before I am in both the metallurgist and the constructor business. That is some quite decent profit, even in the Moria system, where there are a lot of other metallurgists and constructors.

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- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Monday, May 30, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-05-30

The development of my base on Verdant is accelerating. That has to do with the curious economy of Prosperous Universe: While there is a large section of the tech tree that needs higher level workers, there isn't a whole lot of trade in those higher level goods. A lot of that activity is invisible, private deals between members of the same corporation working together. So when I looked into what buildings that needed the next level of worker, settlers, would fit with my current food processing business, and were profitable, I came up empty. Yes, you can construct a hydroponic farm to grow coffee beans and turn those into coffee, there just isn't much money in that. So I just bought a bunch of coffee beans and went for more pioneer level buildings instead.

With every building I add, my daily profit grows. But the next building still costs about the same, so I can expand faster and faster. So I made a plan for a whole set of buildings, which will culminate into me branching into another business: Carbon farming. I am now up to my 5th water rig, and my 6th pioneer habitation. Next I want to build my third farm, followed by my first incinerator. The incinerator will turn a mix of plants from my farm into carbon.

Why carbon? Because I was thinking about my second base, and I might go into the metallurgist business with that. I am already producing oxygen on Verdant, and to make iron you need that, plus carbon, plus iron ore. And there is a planet with a good concentration of iron ore close to Verdant. So those two would integrate with each other really well, as Verdant is also consuming iron to make prefabs.

I also added one more new building to Verdant, a storage facility. The 1,500 tons/m3 of base storage were getting a bit cramped, and one storage facility adds 5,000 more tons/m3 to that. So right now I occupy 280 out of the 500 area on Verdant. I have 500 pioneers working, with living space for a hundred more available, which will be enough for the coming farm and incinerator. At today's prices my net profit per day is 14k. The plan is to grow that some more, until I approach the 500 area on Verdant. And then instead of using a permit to grow Verdant by 250 more area, I'd rather use it for that second base, which will have 500 area. That will need some saving up, I have to consider over 150k for a second base.

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- posted by Tobold @ 8:29 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Sunday, May 29, 2022
 
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%.

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- posted by Tobold @ 2:42 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Thursday, May 26, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-05-26

I built a third food processor on Verdant, which pushed my need for pioneers up to 420. As I only have 400 housing for them, a fifth pioneer habitation will be next. Not having enough housing gives you a proportional reduction in efficiency, so right now everything I do is only 95% as efficient as it will be when I add more housing. The big advantage I have now is that because I built a prefab plant, I can produce all the prefabs needed for new buildings myself.

Previously I was in the habit of producing goods, flying them to the closest commodity exchange (Moria), selling my goods, buying building materials and prefabs, and flying those back home. The sooner I got my building materials shipped home, the sooner I could expand my production. So obviously I was interested in selling my goods fast, and buying goods fast, because sitting in the commodity exchange with cash or unsold goods means capital that isn't working. My prefab plant has taken away some of that time pressure, and that has advantages too.

In Prosperous Universe the commodity exchanges work like a stock market: People put in buy and sell orders. If somebody who is trying to sell offers his goods at a price equal or lower to the highest bidder, the sale happens immediately. Same if somebody is trying to buy and offers to pay equal or more than the lowest asking price. But you frequently have a "spread", a difference between the lowest ask and the highest bid. For example, currently in Moria, people are willing to pay around 70 for oxygen, while sellers are willing to sell oxygen for around 90.

So if I arrive at Moria with a cargo of my oxygen production, I could sell that oxygen immediately for 70. Or I could post it for a cent lower than the lowest ask, 89.99, and hope that somebody comes and buys it before somebody else underbids me. Or I could post it for 80, hoping that other oxygen sellers are unwilling to lower their prices that low. The more money I ask, the longer it will probably take to sell my oxygen, but up to 20 credits more per unit of oxygen means significantly better profits.

One useful tip in PrUn is to rent a warehouse, because at just 100 credits per week rent that is rather cheap. And with a warehouse, you can sell goods with no ship present. That dead capital held in cash might come in useful after all, because just like I can sell oxygen possible for more if I wait a bit, I can also wait for the things I am buying. For example limestone has been moving a lot lately, going up from 120 to over 150, then falling to 100. I haven't gone as far as trying to speculate, just buying and selling the same goods to and from the warehouse. But I sure am taking a bit more time now, waiting for the goods that I am selling to be relatively high, and the goods that I am buying relatively low.

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- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
 
Prosperous Universe Giveaway

You know of these YouTube channels that do large giveaway promotions? That isn't me, this blog doesn't have the budget for that. :) Fortunately, because on YouTube there is now a new scam ongoing where scammers contact everybody who commented on such a giveaway video, telling them "you won, please send me $15 in shipping fees", pretending to be the channel owner. Oh, humanity!

But yesterday a reader of my blog contacted me in Prosperous Universe. Which made me very happy, because I wasn't totally sure anybody is actually reading my PrUn posts. I noticed that this reader was on a trial account. I had 3 keys in my possession for 1 free month of PRO account, which I got when I bought one of the supporter packages of Prosperous Universe. So I asked him whether he wanted one of those keys, and he accepted. A PRO account has access to local markets, which can be helpful at the start if you can find some decent shipping contracts that pay more than the cost of fuel. And there are minor quality of life features as well, like the ability to set a production to "recurring". It's not a huge advantage, but it is nice to have.

So I thought it would be a good idea to check with you whether there are other readers playing Prosperous Universe, who would be interested in a free key for 1 month of PRO. If you are, please contact me (USR Tobold) in game. If there are more than 2 people who want a key (which I would consider unlikely), the first 2 readers with a trial account who contact me in game will get the keys.

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- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Saturday, May 21, 2022
 
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.

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- posted by Tobold @ 7:22 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
 
All models are wrong

In order to better understand complex realities, people frequently use models. Some models are very complex by themselves, but more frequently people use much simpler modeling tools, for example spreadsheets. A spreadsheet with all the income and expenditures is a simple model for the business venture it represents, and a lot easier to understand. However, that spreadsheet is most certainly wrong. If you had two similar businesses, e.g. two coffee shops in the same area, spreadsheets could tell you that one of them was doing better than the other. But chances are that the spreadsheet can't tell you why, because that might depend on complex factors that aren't in the model, e.g. one of them having friendlier staff because the boss is treating his employees better. The very reason we use models, to simplify things and make them easier to understand, always result in the model stripping away complexities, and thus not being ablet to explain everything.

Prosperous Universe is a game that can be played with a rather small number of clicks and keyboard entries per day, if you consider only the actual game client. But the list of community resources has a lot of tools and spreadsheets which you can use to model your virtual company, with the goal of optimizing it. I'm using the first spreadsheet on that list, called Rain's Master Base Planner. You enter the data of your base, like what buildings you have, what recipes you are producing, and what efficiency bonuses you have from various sources, and the spreadsheet tells you how profitable your base is. So when I have some cash accumulated, I can use the spreadsheet to simulate an expansion: Should I buy another water rig, one more farm, or rather a food processor? Depending on my situation and the market prices, the spreadsheet will tell me the best option. A good part of "playing the game" thus happens on the spreadsheet, not in the game client.

After some hits and misses using the spreadsheet to plan bases, I realized why in game some of the base builds that the spreadsheet said were fine didn't actually work out all that well in the game: The model of the spreadsheet was based on market prices, as if those markets had infinite capacity and frictionless trades. Apparently the previous "universe" actually had commodity exchanges on planets, so people on these few select planets could directly trade between their base warehouse and the market. And if you are a new player, and make a relatively common product in small quantities, your trades aren't going to have a huge impact on the market price. So the spreadsheet "worked" as a model to some extent.

In the current universe, commodity exchanges are now on orbital stations, so even people on planets in those systems have some shipping cost. And the further away you are from the 4 main commodity exchanges, the more important shipping becomes. You can actually design a base full of PP1 prefab plants a few jumps away from the next market, and the spreadsheet would tell you that it is very profitable; only that the amount of iron and limestone you would need to import is actually more than you can handle with your two ships, so the base isn't really working. You can also, on the spreadsheet, design a very profitable base mass producing some rare item; but if you actually did that, you'd find that there isn't all that much demand for that rare item, and your real profit would be much lower, or even non-existent. The spreadsheet also uses prices as they are right now, so unless you start overriding those market prices manually, market risk of changing prices isn't well covered.

Once you understood the limitations of the model, you can still put the spreadsheet to good use. You just need to look out for more things than just net profit: Import and export volumes, an "off sheet" estimation of shipping cost, manually putting in some alternative prices to check sensitivity to price variations, and the like. But the question I am asking myself is how limiting it is to the model that intermediate goods are considered to be at market price. That is not something that a real world company necessarily does: It is often much easier to treat intermediate parts as being worth whatever it did cost to make them, rather than being worth what the market would pay for them.

One example in Prosperous Universe would be the production chain leading to padded work overalls PWO. Now PWO are a so-called luxury consumable, but for the most basic form of workers, pioneers. Thus a very large number of people use PWO to increase the efficiency of the workforce. Only that if you run the numbers in a spreadsheet, the production of PWO from cotton fabric COT is not profitable at all. However, that is because there is no liquid market for cotton fabric. It seems most people who make cotton fabric, a material you need more advanced workers (settlers) to make, also have the less advanced building that turns COT into PWO. One would arrive at a better model for the profitability of the whole chain by treating each intermediate (water -> raw cotton -> cotton fabric -> padded work overall) as costing only whatever labor cost goes into them. By treating the intermediates as "cheap", all the profit of the overall chain appears on the last step, the production of PWO, which is the good you actually sell.

My observation in Prosperous Universe is that when I am trying to find a production that involves settlers using the regular base planner spreadsheet, none of them are really profitable. Which is counterintuitive, because obviously there are a lot of final products around that involve settlers in one of the steps. I just haven't figured out how to make that more clear in the spreadsheet / model that I am using.

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- posted by Tobold @ 9:29 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Monday, May 16, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-05-16

My main base on Verdant is looking pretty good: 4 pioneer habitations (which is already 1 more than I actually need), 1 oxygen collector, 4 water rigs, 1 farm, and 2 food processors. The whole thing is balanced so that I use most of the raw water, making drinking water my most valuable export, supported by oxygen and rations. Net profit is 10.6k per day.

For the blog I have special permission to play around with a second account, going through all the various starting packages. The latest is a Constructor base, which is making building materials. On paper, or rather on spreadsheet, the profits are nice for a starting base, 3k net profit per day. In practice, the thing is rather complicated, because the net profits are the result of 10k revenue per day balanced by 7k cost per day. The daily cost of my Verdant base, which is much bigger and more profitable, is just 1.2k, because I am largely self-sufficient. The shipping activity of Verdant is mostly about exporting, with the most valuable export, drinking water, not even being the one taking the most shipping space. On the return trip, I tend to carry very little, just the few consumables I'm not making myself, the beans I don't grow because they are so cheap, and occasionally some building materials for the next expansion project. On the Constructor base I import more weight than I export, and I make exactly those building materials for base expansion.

Hmmm, about merging those ideas?

So my next expansion idea for Verdant is to build a Prefab Plant MK1 there. While those prefab plants are nicely profitable, in practice I probably wouldn't export much, but instead mostly make building materials for myself for a good deal cheaper than the cost of importing them. The addition of the prefab plant to Verdant would perfectly balance my import and export shipping volumes. That is interesting, because everybody else on Verdant has more exports than imports, so that there are a lot of shipping contracts from Verdant to Moria, but none for the return trip.

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- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Friday, May 13, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-05-13

You are only allowed to have one account on Prosperous Universe. But for the blog and my series on the different starting packages, I got special permission for a second account. Of course I don't cheat, and the two accounts don't "trade" with each other. But it turns out that from a learning the game perspective, a second account has been an advantage.

The most important lesson from my experiment as a Constructor was that you need not only look at how profitable a certain production is, you also need to check how much import and export it necessitates. The more cargo you need to transport back and forth between your base and the commodity exchange, the more important the distance between the two becomes. So for Constructor a base in the Moria system is a huge advantage. Fortunately for my main account, Victualler on Verdant, being 5 jumps away from Moria is not a big problem. A lot of what I produce, like water and agricultural products, is used directly on my base to make higher-value products. And I don't need to import very little, mostly consumables, and even there I make two of them myself.

But in my previous log, I was hesitating between building another water rig, or building another oxygen collector. With what I learned since, it turned out that making a lot more oxygen would not have been a good idea. While a single collector on Verdant at today's prices makes over 2k profits on its own, it also produces 40 tons per day of oxygen to export. If I scaled my base up to maximum oxygen production (for an area of 500), I could run 19 collectors, but would produce 750 tons of oxygen per day. With a ship holding only 500 tons or 500 cubic meters of cargo, and needing 3 days for a round trip to Moria, I simply wouldn't have the shipping capacity to do that.

On the other extreme, if I built up my base to maximum drinking water production, with 21 rigs and 9 food processors, I would make about the same profit (40 k net profit a day for a full base), but only need to ship 50 tons of product per day. I'm not demolishing my collector, but for the moment I'll rather build more rigs. With the profits I made since the last log, I am now at 1 collector, 3 rigs, 2 food processors, and 1 farm. And while previously my food processors were making drinking water only 17% of the time, that production is now up to 55%. And I am still producing and excess of basic rations, that I can sell as well. So my net profit per day with this setup is 9k, which is already pretty nice for a company that is only 20 days old.

I must admit that joining a corporation helped. With my base only needing one ship for import and export, my second ship is frequently doing shipping contracts for other players in my corporation. And my corp mates pay better than the shipping contracts available on the free market. The additional income from shipping helps me to finance the next building faster, and that sort of growth is self-accelerating. After accumulating production for a few days, I have a ship on the way to Moria with 50k worth of cargo. I'll need to restock on 12k worth of consumables, but I can still afford another rig and a 4th pioneer habitation from that.

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- posted by Tobold @ 8:02 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Thursday, May 12, 2022
 
PrUn alternative start - Constructor

This is part of my ongoing series of comparing the different starting packages in Prosperous Universe. This time I will talk about my start as a Constructor. Which I might have messed up, but hey, that's the way one learns. The reason why I was interested in the Constructor career is that they make construction materials and prefabs, which are needed to make new buildings. Since the Steam Early Access release of PrUn, a lot of new players have joined the game and played through their first week or two, so they now buy a lot of these construction materials to expand their starting bases. Prices are high, and that makes this an interesting career choice, at least for the moment.

Now the first starting planet recommended for constructors is Montem. And in hindsight that is where I should have started. But instead I was kind of trying to combine testing constructor with testing the option of taking a starting planet that is not on the list by flying there before building a base. I looked at Montem, saw that the concentrations of resources wasn't great there, and decided that I could find a better starting position. I found a planet just 3 jumps away that had a really good concentration of SIO, which is one component of making gravel. A constructor starts with iron, limestone, polyethylene, and silicon ore as starting materials, so I thought that being on a planet rich in SIO would be a great start.

Well, it wasn't. I should have stayed on Montem, for the limestone, which is used more than SIO. But more importantly I should have stayed to be in the same system as the next commodity exchange, and not 3 jumps away. As it turns out, a lot of the stuff you need as a constructor is rather heavy. And as I mentioned in my previous post that means that you can't load very much onto a ship, and thus have to fly back and forth more often. This is an interesting change of pace from the Victualler, who has longer production chains and lighter goods, making shipping less frequent.

I would consider Constructor a more difficult start than Victualler. As a Constructor you only get two buildings, Basic Material Plant BMP and Prefab Plant Mk1 PP1. So you don't extract any resources at the start, but need a lot of materials to make goods. And the starting package doesn't last very long, just a day or so, depending on what you make. So the early game as a Constructor absolutely needs a spreadsheet to calculate what materials you need to buy to just make it over the first week, and then it turns out you don't even have enough money for a week's worth of materials. So you need to sell your production quickly, and fly several times back and forth the commodity exchange just to keep the wheels turning.

Having said that, the initial profitability making MCG and BSE, at least with current prices, is higher than that of the Victualler. And, having two ships and *not* using them to do shipping contracts for other players this time, I decided to not sell my goods at Moria station, but go for Hortus station, where the prices for the prefabs I make are higher, and the cost of food and water is lower. The different factions are designed to have a role in this universe, Moria is about heavy industry and construction, Hortus is the breadbasket. So for optimal profit, I need to buy my consumables in Hortus, and the metals and minerals in Moria.

I didn't have a perfect start as Constructor, but I will still try to play that career for a bit and try to turn it around. The Victualler starts with a building more, and doesn't need much cash at the start to get going, so he can build a 4th building relatively quickly. But as Constructor I can make the construction materials to build a 3rd and 4th building myself, as soon as I have stabilized my economy and accumulated a comfortable buffer of materials and consumables. The start is more difficult, but I might still make it!

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- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Monday, May 09, 2022
 
PrUn alternative start - The weirder options

In my First Day Start post I am describing a typical start in Prosperous Universe: You select a starting package and a starting planet, then build a base and set up production. But that is just the recommended and usual start. PrUn is very much a sandbox game, and you aren't actually limited to play like that. You have other options, and that includes not building a base straight away.

What if you don't like any of the starting planets on offer? Well, no problem, as you don't start the game with the starting planet already settled. Everything you own is loaded onto your two ships, and you can fly them elsewhere. Obviously you don't have the materials to settle on planets with harsher conditions, like low/high temperature or pressure. But that leaves over a hundred possible planets you can start on, and only 19 of those are official "starting planets" you can select from the company creation menu.

Of course all those other possible planets aren't next to a commodity exchange, but neither are all of the official starting planets. I would consider up to 6 jumps away from a commodity exchange to be still manageable, you just need to plan your trips a bit more carefully. With my second "test stuff for blogging" account, I am currently trying this strategy to start on a planet with higher silicon oxide concentration than any starting planet, just 3 jumps away from Moria Station. Planets with good resource extraction make for a good start, and the higher the concentration, the bigger the profits.

There is an even more extreme alternative: How about playing Prosperous Universe with no planetary base at all? The building materials for your starting base can be sold instead of building that base. And that would give you a nice chunk of cash to start a career as a space trader. Buy low, ship the goods elsewhere, sell high. You can always build a base later if you change your mind, as long as you haven't lost your money.

It has to be said, however, that as a space trading game, Prosperous Universe is quite risky. If it takes a day or two to fly to the commodity exchange where you want to sell, the high price for your cargo there might have dropped before you arrive. Other players see the same opportunities as you do. And trading goods between commodity exchanges not only costs time, but also fuel, so you need to make a certain minimum profit with your cargo to just break even. Also, each good has a volume and a weight. For example iron oxide weights 5.9 tons per unit, so you can only fit 84 into your hold, which is limited to 500 tons or 500 cubic meters, whichever is smallest. With iron ore also being rather cheap, it is pretty much impossible to make more money than the fuel cost by hauling it from one exchange to another.

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- posted by Tobold @ 7:46 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Saturday, May 07, 2022
 
PrUn Log - Stardate 2022-05-07

Prosperous Universe is a game in which much of the fun of "playing" comes from planning things. The actual execution of the plan is inherently slow, and thus not so exciting. But at the end you see whether your plan worked. In my previous post I was talking about a series of transactions that enabled me the materials to construct two more buildings on my planet. A second food processor, and, because that one pushed my need for pioneers to 210 and I only had space for 200, a third pioneer habitation. So, now the materials have been delivered to my home planet, Verdant, and the buildings constructed. Great!

The one thing that isn't so great is the unpredictability of the player-run economy. It tends to be self-correcting: If prices for something are high, more players get into that business, which then drives prices lower. So in my previous post I had announced that having identified the most profitable option for me to expand my base, my net profit per day would go up to 7k. But by the time I actually did the expansion, my net profit per day now is a bit lower already, 6.5k, with prices for the goods I am making trending downwards. Anyway, it's still an improvement, I'll just have to fiddle around more with optimization.

My base now has 3 habitations, 1 water rig, 1 farmstead, 1 oxygen collector, and 2 food processors. The food processors can either turn the crops from the farmstead into basic rations, or the water from the rig into drinking water. But the water from the rig is also used to grow those crops. And the production from just 1 rig and 1 farm is more than 1 food processor needs, but less than the consumption of 2 of them.

So the first thing I did was to optimize my farmstead. I make rations out of a mixture of beans, grain, and vegetables. But for some reason unknown to me, beans are a lot cheaper on the market than the other two. So I switched my farm to grow only the more expensive grain and vegetables, and I am buying the beans at the commodity exchange and ship them in.

The more difficult part was optimizing my food processors, determining the best ratio of rations vs. drinking water to produce. I ended up with 83.3% RAT to 16.7% DW, which is a double-recipe of RAT and a single recipe of DW, both set to recurring. At this production, I am using up only slightly more grains and vegetables than I produce, and with the reserves I accumulated from the time I only had 1 food processor, I have grain and vegetable reserves for over 70 days. Going high on rations means I consume less water, but I am still consuming 7 units more than I produce. Again, I have reserves from earlier, so I have 26 days of water left at this rate.

The more obvious pathway of further base improvement would be to build a second water rig, as this is clearly the missing resource I could most easily produce right now. And with a second rig, I could change the RAT:DW ratio to something like 2:1, and produce more of the more profitable drinking water. However, there is currently a huge spread between drinking water ask and bid price, and it isn't obvious at what price I would actually be able to sell by the time I improved my base, produced, and shipped that drinking water.

So another option might be to first invest in a second collector, to gather more oxygen. That production has absolutely nothing to do with my food processing chain. But oxygen is used in various smelting processes, and Verdant is closest to Moria Station, which is a central hub for the metallurgy industry. Basically my oxygen production is me diversifying away from just doing food processing, and up to now has good profitability on its own. I might do the rig first, simply because it is the cheaper investment.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:11 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
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