published on October 19, 2026 in devlog
In this week's devlog Michi prepares the upcoming release, fixes two bugs and talks about marketing and servers.
Michi (molp)
The shipping route release draws closer. You can find the current release notes here and also check out the handbook page about routes, if you haven't done so yet.
Alongside the release preparations, I also fixed two bugs that players reported.
The first affected infrastructure upkeep contracts. Even when the upkeep was already in storage when an upkeep phase started, timing issues could cause it to be consumed a fraction of a second later. That put the service level at 99.99% instead of 100%, so contracts with a 100% service level objective counted as not fulfilled. The release will fix this. Until then, I'd advise against creating upkeep contracts with a 100% service level objective.
The second bug was in the workforce distribution. Bases with housing but no jobs for a workforce level, with jobs but no housing, or with all their jobs already filled were still counted when workers were handed out. Each round of the distribution needs one worker per base, so these bases could stall it: some bases stayed short of workers while unemployed workers sat around on the same planet.
I also spent two days at simulogics HQ this week, where we mainly talked about influencer marketing. As you might know, we sponsor YouTube creators from time to time to include a segment about Prosperous Universe in their videos. We've tried other types of marketing, but integrated ads on YouTube have been the most successful so far. In the past, we did this entirely by hand: we searched for videos about games related to PrUn, then contacted the creators individually and negotiated a deal.
For a while now, Martin and I have been testing a tool that automates the search part. It's basically a database of content creators that fills up with the results of the searches we run, so instead of us wading through YouTube results by hand, the tool does it for us. We've had our first successes finding creators who might be a fit for a sponsored ad, but we also want to try something else: mass outreach, where we contact creators who might be interested in PrUn and pitch them the game or tell them about recent releases. To do that, we needed a bit of plumbing, so we created a new project that lets us send these emails through our existing email infrastructure.
We also briefly talked about the current state of our cluster (the group of servers that run PrUn) and how we manage it. Unfortunately, the way we currently manage it is being deprecated, so we have to look into alternatives. Switching over will likely mean a few server restarts in the coming weeks.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!