Dear licensees,
as the inevitable Big Crunch of the universe draws ever closer, we’d like to huddle together with all of you to discuss our plans for the next Big Bang. We would love to hear some more of your feedback on this run and we’re going to reveal some of the changes we’ve come up with.
Save the date! You can already follow us on Twitch and enable notifications for when we go live, but I’ll also post some reminders on Discord and Twitter. 
The stream will be saved on our channel and I’ll do a write-up of the most important bullet points here in the forum. 
We’ll be live here in 16 minutes!
Thanks a lot for stopping by yesterday, everybody! We had a great time on stream and we hope you did as well.
Those who didn’t make it can now watch the stream here. A slightly cut down, permanent version will be going up later today.
The upcoming changes announced on stream are:
Game World reset
The next run will start some time in March, resetting the world. Some of the changes discussed here will go in effect then (mostly balancing changes), some others will be patched in throughout the upcoming game run.
Universe, factions, markets
The three factions you’ve come to know will stay. Each will have exactly one market this time around, but you will be able to choose from a bigger variety of starting planets. Vital tier 1 resources will be distributed across all of them, encouraging trade in all systems rather than just Montem and Promitor.
Fuel
Fuel is currently hardly attainable at all. To change that, the Castillo-Ito space will feature a starting planet with Galerite. There will also be a new starting profile named “fuel engineer” (working title) who will get a Refinery, and STL fuel will become a tier 1 product. FTL fuel will remain in tier 2, but its weight has been reduced to facilitate transport.
Tier 2
Up until now, resources produced by tier 2 have not been useful to tier 1, making the leap to tier 2 extremely risky to individual players. That is why, after the reset, tier 2 will produce luxury consumables which will be required to get tier 1 workforces to 100 % productivity. The time required to reach tier 2 has been reduced, and so has the time it takes to settle on new planets.
New company set-up
The company set-up now has three steps: Starting package; faction and planet; company name and ID. Players are able to go back and forth between them. Unfavorable combinations of package and planet trigger a warning. There are recommended packages based on the current economical situation, influenced by the community and curated by the devs. There will also be additional tool tips on all three of the screens.
Free and Pro License
Prosperous Universe was going to become a free-to-play game (with a monthly subscription fee unlocking all features) once Early Access started. However, we have decided to move the Free/Pro distinction into the near future (into First Access) in order to get more players into the game rather sooner than later to really get the in-game economy going. Those owning a First Access key, including everybody who is already playing right now, will obtain access to all Pro features throughout the entirety of First Access. Pro players will receive a player rating (as seen on our roadmap), allowing them certain actions not available to Free players. A player’s rating will reflect a player’s trust level and their company’s liquidity determined by a variety of factors. All this will not happen right away with the next reset; Pro features will be added gradually throughout the upcoming runs.
Local markets
Aka bulletin boards, they will be implemented at some point throughout the upcoming game world run(s). Local markets will be the first and one of the most important Pro features. They will somewhat resemble Craigslist and allow players to trade on planets without a Commodity Exchange. Although they are public, there are many differences to regular Commodity Exchanges, such as: 1. Players will be able to directly accept a certain offer. 2. They are just an unordered list of player-created offers and requests. 3. Bulletin boards are planetary projects, meaning that they can be set up on a planet as collective projects accessible to all inhabitants of that planet. 4. They are unregulated; players can break their side of an agreement. 5. Down the line, they will not only allow for the purchase of wares for money, but also for the exchange of commodities for other commodities or currencies for other currencies.
Miscellaneous updates
We hope you guys like the direction the game is going with all this. The reception on stream has been very positive, so we feel like we’re on the right track with most of this. Only one way to find out, though! We’ll let you know when the reset hits as soon as there is a concrete date.
These changes sound good to me.
Can you guys post the details of the building costs, starting packages, etc, once they are finalized, so that we can start planning?
At this point I’m just waiting for the reset, so I hope it comes soon.
One comment on the new T2 luxury goods needed by T1 workers:
Are the amount of T1 resources consumed by the pioneers going to decrease to compensate? And/or is the base production going to increase, such that without those luxury resources, it works like it does now, but with them added it makes your T1 more productive than before?
I found that it was very hard to run T1 industries and actually make a profit before, after factoring in food, water, etc for your workers. If their production and costs are nerfed by this change even more, it will just get even harder. If its an optional bonus for advancement that can let you get more than before, then thats cool.
This is subject to change since the rebalancing is still being worked on, but here’s what I know so far.
The output of facilities is going to be generally higher and reaching higher population tiers as well as establishing new bases should be faster and more achievable than it used to be. The missing ~20-30 % of productivity of tier 1 workforces will put a damper on that, but it should not negate the overall increase in speed. As soon as tier 1 luxury consumables become available (pushing productivity to 100 %), the game will become even faster.
However, I can’t say that any of that will make the game easier per se. It’s a player-driven market after all, so if (for instance) we reduce the amount of RAT and DW required for a workforce to operate relative to a Farmer’s output, there will be fewer Farmers required and competition in the Farming sector will be steeper. Whether or not you struggle to make a living will still depend on your decision-making in the market (so I personally will probably go bankrupt again regardless of balancing adjustments 
).
I like it!
I think I’ll be aiming for production of the T1 luxury goods as my first goal.
And probably too many others will too, so we’ll all lose money 
