Did a blind playthrough of the current demo and uploaded the result over here:

As other players have mentioned, being able to return to main menu from the defeat screen would be good.

Being able to pay 1$ to receive a resource pull that was guaranteed to be at least 5$ seems like a debug or testing feature, or placeholder values. Perhaps as planet stability decreases, the cost can increase. I have a feeling I read something about that on the page or during the tutorial somewhere.

I'm not sure what the emotional support checkbox does in options but I enabled it during the playthrough.

Cheers

Played this one in one of the last DDs, so i knew what i was getting into.

Now im wondering, if the Hardlight Array was always like this? Paying incrementally more power to get 1 power for also paying money seems new to me and a bit pointless. Since everything needs more and more power, the 1 power you get from it already gives diminishing results here, so this seems way too punishing. Softlocked myself a few times because of that. For instance, you can let the player almost bankrupt himself by just right clicking the array until he has nothing left. After having no chance to achieve my quota, i was rightfully fired. Unfortunately there was no option to start a new game or go to the menu, so i had to close and restart the game. In general it needs some kind of "Back to Main Menu" option.

Told you last time already that i like the flavour of the game and its nice to see a bit more of it. The score in the top right alternating between current balance and the goal quota is both nice and sometimes annoying since you cant always get the information you want at a glance and need to wait. Its not that bad however, since the game puts no pressure on the player. The planet selection could use some little addition that makes it clear you have to double click. I clicked only once to start and wondered if it takes a second to load or something.

Are the second building actions new in this build? Cannot recall if they were there last time, but i like it.

Other than that, i dont have much to say. Its mostly the same game i played before and i became even worse at it.

It has some potential. Mechanics are simple and it's not a matter of gameplay tutorial, but the power mechanic scaling needs an in-world explanation to make it perfect, something like power grid load. Other flavor texts would be nice too, like selling power could be skimping out on lighting, and you could even make it affect the background art to let you directly see the result of your actions. With minimal effort additional flavor text could push it from doing semi-abstract actions to actual immersive storytelling.

I don't think the hover tooltips should have a delay. Time is critical when you first boot up the game and quickly try to learn all the resources and buildings. It doesn't bother after that initial stage though. Buildings could have their names always visible.

The game could scale really well with new mechanics since you can get away with anything as long as it's intuitive (anything business or industry related). It doesn't feel like there's much complexity right now so a greedy strategy works just fine.

I couldn't change the game mode in the options so I assumed only one was implemented, but it actually is random after booting it up again.

the quota to reach is pretty low. on the third planet i just made a two star data, sold it and already reached my quota.

i hope you will add some sound effects for the next build, the silence is deafening.

enjoyable little game

I beat the  hardest difficulty, all you really need to do is pull all the resources and then sell them, then run the 2 power -> $25b until you're done.
I do get all the other mechanics but some buildings are just worth more than others, like steelworks produces $5 of effective sell value over the raw resources but making data from it produces $7, which could be fine... If it was hard to make data. It's incredibly easy to fulfill data's requirements.

So I'd say:
1. Make raw resources worth a lot less. You can remove the $1 selling cost and just make resources worth less so the math is easier, too. This means the refined/merged resources are actually necessary. Same with drawing, the $1 cost could just be taken away from the sell value of raw materials.
2. Make some buildings have much harder requirements. Data making's requirement of 3 same-quality materials is basically free and
3. when you can keep drawing to fill up the board the other requirement is too easy too, it's not really satisfying and there's no suspense of waiting to see what you'll draw next, because you'll just draw everything. So there needs to be a reason you can't just draw everything. That would be stability but that ramps up way too slowly and also, I'm not sure about stability when I saw it... Doesn't it just force you to interact with a resource? That just forces the player to do what the game says. "Sell this now or swap it out". Maybe if stability interacted with specific resources, like it could lock down areas and you need to use iron or steel to make the area usable again... I don't know, that's a tough design problem.

I like that this game is very focused on it's main mechanic.

My thoughts:

It would be cool if there were more resource specific facilities like steelworks.

I like the idea that energy is a "mana-like" resource but at same time you can also directly sell it for money. Seems to enable different kinds of "builds".

Powering buildings feels a bit redundant, they could just consume power on use. Command hub could just grant "Next use is free" buff.

It would be nice if price of resources always showed on hover, I found myself constantly clikcing trading hub to check prices.

Depart from planet could show somewhere how much resources will sell for in total.

You can't actually buy power from headlight array because after first free use you need to pay more than one power to use it but you can only buy one power. So you will always loose power with it no matter what.

Overall it's pretty interesting, I enjoyed it. Randomisation of what resources you get forces you to adapt and think carefully what to do instead just doing the same strat every time which I found cool. I also liked that facilities had two different abilities focused around the same mechanic.