diff --git a/workspace/_targets/01_prep_targets.R b/workspace/_targets/01_prep_targets.R
index 5c93112e679498ae93cfb4d8986027bb83f1132b..ec98d9ad90e489d7c71ed7fca1e145adab84fa92 100644
--- a/workspace/_targets/01_prep_targets.R
+++ b/workspace/_targets/01_prep_targets.R
@@ -69,7 +69,9 @@ list(
   tar_target(rpu_vpu, read.csv(system.file("extdata/rpu_vpu.csv", package = "hyfabric"), 
                                colClasses = "character")),
   
-  tar_target(vpu_codes, unique(rpu_vpu$vpuid)),
+  tar_target(vpu_codes, if(length(domain) == 1 && grepl("^[0-1]", domain)) 
+                            unique(rpu_vpu$vpuid[grepl(domain, rpu_vpu$vpuid)]) else 
+                            unique(rpu_vpu$vpuid)),
   tar_target(all_rpu_codes, unique(rpu_vpu$rpuid)),
   tar_target(full_cat_file, data_paths$fullcats_table, format = "file"),
   tar_target(full_cat_table, readRDS(full_cat_file)),
diff --git a/workspace/_targets_runner.R b/workspace/_targets_runner.R
index f0786c2497258098741820c7f255c1c76f3758a1..b5e17ad6c73a2abdf029975537e8ace52bb24792 100644
--- a/workspace/_targets_runner.R
+++ b/workspace/_targets_runner.R
@@ -12,12 +12,16 @@ file.remove("temp/GagestoCheck_GageLoc.csv")
 Sys.setenv(TAR_PROJECT = "01_prep")
 
 # step 1: gage selection 
+# do not run if gages aren't of interest
 tar_make(gage_selection_map_report)
 
 # step 2: vpu prep
-# iterates over vpus
+# the vpu_codes target controls how many VPUs worth of data are prepared
+# set the "domain" variable to an HU02 in "R/user_vars.R" to restrict
+tar_make(vpu_codes)
 tar_load(vpu_codes)
 
+########## Debug help ################
 if(FALSE) { # this won't run if you just bang through this file
   # To debug a given vpu, first run all to get the dynamic branches established:
   tar_make(vpu_base)
@@ -37,7 +41,9 @@ if(FALSE) { # this won't run if you just bang through this file
   
   tar_make(callr_function = NULL)
 }
+########## Debug help ################
 
+# if running many processing units, parallelization is possible
 workers <- 12
 
 # run branches for a given target in parallel if you have enough memory
@@ -48,8 +54,19 @@ tar_make(rpu_vpu_out)
 # make sure to run all too!
 tar_make()
 
+# see what you've done with:
+tar_visnetwork(targets_only = TRUE)
+# and 
+View(tar_meta())
+
 Sys.setenv(TAR_PROJECT = "02_POI_creation")
 
+tar_make(vpu_gpkg)
+
+# can see what we are going to run through
+# the POI creation workflow loops over these
+tar_read(vpu_gpkg)
+
 tar_make_future(huc12_poi, workers = workers)
 tar_make_future(gage_pois, workers = workers)
 tar_make_future(te_pois, workers = workers)