The Turnip is proud to bring to you a story from the Protostar project (Saladin expansion):

Of course, we can’t talk about the physical founding of Protostar without mentioning VladvonSpacestein. Self-described odd bean, Vlad was a newer player who had initially settled on Boucher, but decided between the taxes and the increasingly crowded market for consumables that he’d rather run away to the frontier.

A one-way trip: Arriving on Saladin five days before our own swarm of colony ships [^1]

So, he searched up the planet with the highest fertility, saw it was in the middle of nowhere, saw it wasn’t listed under the colonization registrations (it was listed, but he neglected to do more than ctrl-f ‘saladin’), either sold or loaded everything he had into a ship, and headed out with a dream of isolation, self-sufficiency, and lucrative cotton prices.

I was initially convinced he was trolling us, the odds of him showing up at just that perfect moment to ruin our explorer’s grace period by accident seemed ridiculous. But we decided to give him a shot after he offered to liquidate in an effort to reset Saladin’s explorer’s grace period for us. Any troll with that kind of generosity is the kind of troll we want around.

While it’s too early to say ‘it all worked out in the end’, things started working out from there. Turns out due to Saladin’s earlier colonization and subsequent abandonment, it’s explorer’s grace period as well as it’s happiness was shot to nine kinds of hell. Vlad’s preemptive settlement actually saved the fleet two weeks of the worst population reports.

Vlad now consoles his vanished dreams of isolationism with the piles of money rolling in for his currently cornered and very local market for RCO, and the rest of us are happy we’ll actually get more pioneers when the next population report rolls around.

[^1] Image Courtesy: https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/023/443/large/jin-ah-park-0000000000.jpg?1456139947