Today we are releasing Update 8.3.0, an update that was entirely focused on internal changes in order to improve performance short and long term.

Performance Improvements:
Our developers have been working hard on countless internal changes for this update in order to increase the performance of Eco on a wide range of different hardware configurations. We have noticeably reduced memory consumption on clients, optimized network code, reduced the frequency of FPS spikes (micro lags) during movement and you should now have a smoother experience playing Eco. Please note that there is still more to come in the 9.X updates, as we do have other optimisations prepared and in mind that require more work and / or breaking changes that are better to be introduced in a major update.

Relay Servers:
For this update we added relay server support for cases where connections between client and server cannot be established in a normal way. This should fix most of the connection issues some players have experienced.

The Network.eco config file for servers has the new option “RelayAdress” where a custom relay server can be configured (available for download as docker image from strangeloopgames/relay-server:latest). If no "RelayAddress" and no "RemoteAddress" is specified for a server then it will auto-discovery the relay server with best ping from a list of official relay servers and use it as fallback for clients who fail to connect the regular way.

Other Improvements:
Added auto-run function. It is disabled by default, but you can go to Key Bindings and assign a button. It works both for the character and for vehicles.

Bugs fixed:

• Fixed an issue that caused players to fall through rendered ground with their vehicles when above mines.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused changed keybindings for the moving keys to not be saved.
  
• Fixed an issue that made trees non-interactable or vanish during slicing and collecting.
  
• Fixed an issue with the french localization in regards to player currency.
  
• Fixed skid steer no longer interacting with tree debris.
  
• Fixed several server crashes.
  
• Fixed ModKit Issues.

Update 9.0 is actively being worked on in parallel and the first non-public staging versions are soon to be released. Stay tuned for more news on that at a later date.

We added Vivox proximity voice chat to the game. Now you can talk with your fellow citizens about the latest news, in town debates or just barter with them directly. The chat is based on proximity, so you’ll only hear people that are near to you. Of course, you can also disable the voice chat completely or mute specific players. With that, we also introduced a new face animation for people talking.


On popular request we have improved and redesigned the controls for the excavators and skid steers and made sure they are explained understandably. The excavator got a new UI toolbar, you can look around freely in both skidsteer and excavator now, the skidsteer tool is now activated by default when you mount it and we changed how the general controls work. They also should work much better than before for mining purposes, though they still need some further polish.

Demo video https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EhzRYzZvCyR5GJHY9CGsvesuh8TuSiA7/view

Being well aware of the performance problems we have done a lot of work to improve the matter. Starting with this update you should see highly increased performance in chunkloading, especially for faster computers, so driving with a truck should no longer make you fall through the world. We also fixed several potential causes for memory leaks and performance should no longer degrade as much over time as it did in the prior version. We also improved performance when loading the minimap, claiming land and closing the map while it is still loading. We still have quite a way to go, which we’ll do in the next update 8.3 and all the updates thereafter.

• Added command “/addimpacthours <hours>” to control meteor impact time after the world was started, both positive and negative values are possible.
  
• Added explaining tooltips to graphics settings.
  
• Added a shortcut for starting a new world.
  
• The configuration option “MeteorImpactDays” now changes the remaining time for the meteor to impact even after world creation.
  
• Improved buy / sell notifications to reduce confusal.
  
• Removed the “where item is” condition for “Drop Garbage” due to being irrelevant and potentially causing crashes.
  
• Added a few facial expression emotions, like /smile.
  
• Configuration files are now no longer overwritten, instead a template config file is delivered that contains all the current existing config variables.
  
  • WARNING: This could lead to steam removing existing configuration files once, please backup your configuration files!
• Increased the range you can shoot animals.
  
• Improved the error message that shows when the account is temporarily blocked due to too many login attempts, disabled or not eligible to play Eco.
  
• The mining tutorial can now be completed by mining either Sandstone, Limestone, Shale or Granite.
  
• The food tutorial now checks for nearby food and adapts to the food sources available in the area of the player.
  
• Added a hit memory for pickaxes, they now remember the last 5 hitted blocks to track mining progress on those.
  
• Local save games are now sorted in descending order from the most recently to the least recently played.
  
• Added an error message when trying to generate a world with invalid dimensions.
  
• Campfires and Workbenches can now be crafted at a workbench to avoid a potential progression lock.
  
• Otters now provide a carcass instead of meat.
  
• Improved IP validation for direct connect.
  
• Lavish talents now apply to crafting projects immediately after selecting, it is no longer needed to remove and restart the crafting projects.
  
• Eco now automatically selects which server binary to use depending on world size to prevent out of memory issues when loading large local worlds.
  
• Holding the start camp will now show the deed overlay to give new players more information on where a good, unused location would be.
  
• Filters set in the minimap will now save and be displayed when the minimap is reopened.
  
• The configuration option “DisplayAdminCommands” now has several levels:
  
  • None: No admin command logging or display in the chat. (Same as “false”)
    
  • LogFile: Logging admin commands to a file.
    
  • LogFileAndNotifyAdmins: Logging admin commands to a file and notify admins in the chat.
    
  • LogFileAndNotifyEveryone: Logging admin commands to a file and display them to everyone in the chat. (Same as “true”)
• The configuration option “MaxRepFromOnPerson” is now correctly called “MaxRepFromOnePerson”.
  
• Property claims can now be used as a backing item in the mint.
  
• You can now specify a bank account into which the minted funds should go.
  
• Fish traps now must (and can!) be placed underwater to function.
  
• Choosing a skill will now show a warning that the skill can not be refunded after it has been chosen.
  
• The bed in the starter camp can now be used to sleep.
  
• Increased spawn rates of bisons and most desert plants.
  
• Removed the display of no longer available species due to the removal of the wetlands.
  
• The configuration option “RequireAuthentication” has been removed as it was intended for debugging and caused steam players to be displayed as long hashes.
  
• Alt-Enter switching to fullscreen now restores the previously used fullscreen mode.
  
• Exclusive fullscreen mode now constrains the mouse to the game window.
  
• Improved avatar walk animation while moving slowly.
  
• Improved avatar moving and tool blending in general.
  
• Vehicles will now display “Drive” instead of “Use” as action.
  
• Ramps are now carryable items and have a weight.
  
• Ramps can now be placed underwater.
  
• Ramps are now picked up as a whole again by using a hammer or a shovel (for dirt roads only).
  
  • This fixed several issues with laws regarding roads and ramps as well as a balance issue (crafting ramps, placing and digging up roads from them was cheaper than producing roads).

• Fixed a crash related to the chat.
  
• Fixed tree parts loosing their targetability and becoming unchoppable.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused graphs in the web interface to be incorrect.
  
• Fixed several issues with stockpiles that allowed duplication of items.
  
• Fixed bank and registrar not having room requirements.
  
• Fixed an issue with the object filter when left clicking a stockpile with a pickaxe.
  
• Fixed an issue with authentication on objects when trying to move items via a tool instead of using the GUI.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the player to not be able to pick up items with left click while holding a hammer.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur when editing the store list.
  
• Fixed line breaks not showing in law descriptions.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented to propose a law when “redefine districts” was selected and then deselected.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused item icons in contracts to not show when not using english as game language.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused white sparkles to appear.
  
• Fixed an issue that allowed the player to see distant terrain through unloaded chunks.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the crane to be not synchronized between players in multiplayer.
  
• Fixed an issue that could cause a redirect to a non existing page after proposing a law.
  
• Fixed an issue with harvest contracts that caused the deposit marker to be missing.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the chosen currency in world objects to reset to the world's default currency.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused miners to only consume calories when the block was destroyed. Now they consume calories on every hit. This also applies to the durability of pickaxes.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the excavator to be unable to move when re-fueled while driving.
  
• Fixed a rare issue that could cause the house value tooltip to show no contents.
  
• Fixed an issue with bad looking shadows.
  
• Fixed several server crashes that could occur due to concurrency.
  
• Fixed the “Focused Work Flow: Milling” talent.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur when two people try to move the same item at the same time.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused certain talents to not affect certain recipes they should affect.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused tall grass to not be removed when digging with an excavator.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the ping to be displayed as infinite or a negative number.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the player to be able to accept more than one of the same repeatable contract at once.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the authorisation dropdown being unusable after unclaiming and reclaiming a property.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused all servers to have the mods of one server when multiple servers are hosted on the same machine and all are started at the same time.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the mouse to no longer be usable when pressing “ESC” while the language selection dropdown is opened.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented to add multiple clauses to a law when the server language was not set to english.
  
• Fixed an issue with worlds that contained non-english characters in their name.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur when the client login failed.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Lavish and Frugal talents, they now will apply to tables that have the most recipes requiring the talents skill
  
• Fixed an issue with Lavish talents, they now correctly reduce the resources needed to craft.
  
• Fixed an rounding error that occured for some recipes.
  
• Fixed an issue with the display of the world objective when it was too long.
  
• Fixed an issue with text on skill bars, they now will always take one line.
  
• Fixed an issue with a missing sound when hitting a mineable block.
  
• Fixed an issue with flickering blocks during blocks which can’t be removed in one hit.
  
• Fixed an issue where tools were not correctly displayed in third person mode, they also will now display immediately after switching to third person mode.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused players to get stuck inside trees when the tree loaded after the player already stood on its place.
  
• Fixed an issue with switching to windowed mode, resolution settings are now correctly applied.
  
• Fixed several issues that allowed to take more items from a distribution station than allowed or to take items from it despite the age requirement for the player account was not met.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the player to stay in record mode until the game was restarted when /record was used while in fly mode.
  
• Fixed an issue with the field of view of the meteor tutorial video when replaying it.
  
• Fixed an issue that could cause the currency dropdown lists to no longer be synchronized with the available currencies.
  
• Fixed an issue that could cause rooms to no longer be considered room when adding or removing objects nearby.
  
• Fixed a rare crash related to world objects consuming liquid.
  
• Fixed an issue with shift-scrolling on Mac OS.
  
• Fixed rubble playing Portal 2.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused trees to vanish while in fast-forward mode or sleeping.
  
• Fixed screen settings not always applying during startup.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused inserted fuel to go to the storage instead of the fuel tab for some vehicles.
  
• Fixed an issue with UI scale that caused crafting numbers in recipes to be offset and therefore unreadable.
  
• Fixed an issue with corrupted configs that caused the camera to be unable to move.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the player to teleport up a bit when digging and placing dirt.
  
• Fixed an issue with the house value calculation when adding or removing rooms.
  
• Fix an issue that allowed ramps to be placed without checking occupancy.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the world to convert to a new format even though there is no new format.
  
• Fixed an issue that could cause the world to corrupt when commands like /level were used.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused combustion generators to produce sewage when not operating.
  
• Fixed an issue with excavators that could cause them to behave like a ragdoll.
  
• Fixed several issues with water pipes, causing incorrect flow.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the wrong currencies to show for clients in an exchange.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused new old growth redwood trees to appear.
  
• Fixed an issue with placing and removing blocks underwater.
  
• Fixed an issue with a talent in the self improvement skill that didn’t grant as much increased carry weight as intended.
  
• Fixed an issue with the scrollbar in the skills window.
  
• Fixed several issues with localization, especially missing strings.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the species dropdown to not function correctly on servers using a different language than english.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the water filter to work and generate compost permanently despite no linked sewage generating objective was actually active.
  
• Fixed an issue that could cause garbage bags to not convert into garbage blocks.
  
• Fixed an issue with using shortcuts to move items that lead to permissions not being respected in the distribution station and contract storages.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the sweeping hands talent to also apply to vehicles. (We might introduce a specific talent for vehicles later on!)
  
• Fixed an issue that could cause the minimap to not show, instead only the filters were displayed.
  
• Fixed an issue with laws that could cause clients to crash and being unable to reconnect to the server.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the information about what will be pickuped when targeting a stockpile to not be available when holding a tool in your hand.
  
• Fixed an issue that cause the player to be put into a not fully generated map when he pressed the tab button before world generation was completed.
  
• Fixed several minor UI issues.

Hey everyone,
for the first time ever, Eco is on sale in Steam. Get your 10% discount while the sale lasts and support charitable organisations with your purchase.

Hey all, for this week I want to go into some big ideas we have for Eco 9 with levels of government.

We’re exploring ideas about how to bring multiple levels of government to Eco, and how their growing and combining would work within the game. Along with that comes a new approach to property. Check it out and let us know your feedback, this is an initial concept so lots more to be designed still.

Eco will be changed to have the following new features:

• Multiple governments will be allowed in tiers: individuals, towns, nations, global.
  
• Governments start bottom-up, with growing towns merging into nations, and nations merging into a global government.
  
• Property is controlled by the governments (no longer affected by reading skillscrolls).
  
• Multiple governments will compete for citizens, offering incentives when new players spawn into their region, or when other players move to them.

The results on the player experience these changes are intended to bring are:

• Players are ‘wanted’ in the world. Having more citizens in your town / nation / global community should be a big benefit. When a player enters the world other players should respond ‘thank goodness you’re here’. Mutual benefits to sharing the same town / nation / globe should abound, such that players will work to overcome their differences to better achieve their goals better and collaborate more effectively.
  
• The game arc will feature growing and merging governments. It will begin as a collection of individuals, with big events as they form towns together, then merge towns into nations, then merge nations into a global government. The same way that it’s currently an interesting event in the game when players move to a common currency, merging governments and building hierarchies of governments should be even more interesting.
  
• Conflict and resolution of ideas should be the ‘PvP’ of the game. In this way, it should be much better for both parties to resolve their differences and merge together, but if they can’t there will still be a prolonged/difficult/costly process to force another individual or group to your whim, such that both parties would much prefer a resolution. In this sense, it’s not the typical winner/loser pvp of video games; instead win/win and lose/lose situations are possible

New objects will be created for different levels of government: a ‘Town Hall’ for towns, a ‘National Constitution’ for nations (can replace the existing Constitution) and a ‘Global Charter’ for global governance. These objects will be known as Government Sources, each with a different tier of government associated with it. Additionally, a new ‘Home Claim’ marker will be used for each individual, which marks their residency, and is essentially a level 0 government containing just the player.

When placed and meeting building requirements, a Government Source will create a radius of influence around it, competing with all the other governments at the same tier.

Example: a couple individual plots in the world. The triangles mark where they have placed their home markers, and all their property must be contiguous with that marker.



The red player then builds a Town Hall at the starred location. This extends a circle of influence (yellow circle), which envelops part of the green player’s territory. The size of this circle depends on the housing value of the Town Hall. It encircles both the home markers of Red and Green, so they can both become citizens of Yellow Town.


The green player now has the option to become part of the shared town; the option appears on their home marker. If they choose to become part of the town, they will become members of the automatically generated ‘Yellow Town Residents’ demographic, which can be configured to give specific benefits. Many other benefits to being in the same towns will be added over time (knowledge sharing, boosts to skill growth, etc).

If they choose NOT to become residents, they will stay as an individual. The red player can force them to become a member of Yellow Town by paying a large cost (say, 500 wood), having a much more powerful town hall (housing value is a multiple of the housing value of green), having a larger town population (say 2 or 3 people), and waiting for a delay (a day or two).

In this case, we’ll say green decided to join the town voluntarily.


Now that the town is formed and has a population of 2, additional land can be claimed, and Red and Green have claimed more property. Each resident will have additional claims granted to them on their home marker, benefits from Yellow Town. As residents, they can claim property anywhere within the influence of the town, even non-contiguous blocks.

The number of land claims they get depends on the population and power of the town. As the value of the property in the town increasing (measured by housing value of all property) and as the population increases, more claim markers are released. This provides an incentive to players to increase the power and population of their town, with specific ‘immigration tools’ being introduced to help players find new residents.

Government is unlocked with the creation of a town, and the new government objects can now be placed (Bill of Rights, Election Office, etc), which will determine the town government, allowing laws that affect any player within the yellow radius (whether or not they are ‘residents’ of this town). The laws created will override some (but not all) of the individual rights of the town population (property rights will be meta-protected, so players can’t troll others and steal their property this way).

Later, a neighboring town is created, Blue Town:


They begin to push on each other’s borders, affecting what area can be claimed by an individual (although already claimed land won’t be lost by this pressure). They can either continue fighting for influence, increasing the value and populations of their town to exert border pressure on each other, or join together into a nation.

Yellow Town builds a National Constitution in a fabulous palace at the east of their property (which is still considered Yellow Town territory because Red Player is a resident of Yellow Town):


This creates a very large circle of influence, which envelops all of Blue Town. Just like with individuals, the government of Blue Town can decide to join the nation, or resist. If they resist, they can still be absorbed if the nation pays even larger penalties and has even larger influence/population as described above. For our example, blue town decides to become part of Gray Nation. Much rejoicing and celebration takes place. Festivals with fabulous elk tacos are thrown to welcome the two groups. Now all the area in the extra-large gray nation radius can be claimed, and residents of the nation will again gain extra claim papers.

Now laws of Gray Nation can impose restrictions on both towns. Gray Nation can even revoke laws and titles assigned by the town governments, as the nation’s government supersedes the town governments. It can also offer more powers not available to towns, like new kinds of laws (property revocation could be one, more kinds of tax, etc). Going up in tiers in government allows groups to have more powerful controls, and new types of government get unlocked at each level.

This process can repeat at an even higher level with Global Governments. These would envelop multiple nations, and have a large enough possible radius to cover the whole world, imposing laws and taxes worldwide.

The benefits to joining into towns and governments are:

• More claimable property per player for larger governments.
  
• More governmental powers are unlocked for upgraded governments.
  
• Wider influence of laws, more ability to control actions of the population.
  
• Shared benefits to residents – boosts to skill points for town buildings like libraries.
  
• Increased levels of trust between fellow citizens, promoting more shared work projects, which will be another area of development.

Governments will have their power grow with their populations, so having more residents will allow for more progress and upgrades. For example, a town will need a population of say, 10 people in order to found a nation (configurable). To incentive growing populations, towns can create ‘immigration centers’, which will provide resources and possibly land claims or land deeds to new joining players, communicated in the server browser, and available for selection on the spawn page (a new feature will be added to let players choose if they want to spawn in an available immigration center or in an unclaimed land somewhere). Note that governments won’t necessarily require greater populations to gain more powers, they can also be gained by more buildings and house value.

This feature would be a big addition to the game, and turn what was previously automatic (everyone is in the same society) into something that is built. I believe this will go a long ways towards shifting the game to a more collaborative one, where players are building trust and community through expanded growth, with interesting political maneuverings required at each stage of expansion. New debates surrounding immigration that mirror the real world will be added to the game, the tradeoffs between the additional resources required to support new residents and the benefits they provide. The conflict it introduces will add more complex situations to navigate, with complex solutions required that go beyond yielding a winner and loser. All within the high-stakes of a vulnerable ecosystem facing an existential threat from a meteor will create a very unique experience.

Hey folks, this week I wanted to show you the fancy new mining system we’re creating in Eco:









There are now three steps in processing ore from mines. Each step produces different products and byproducts, requiring different skills and equipment, and each creates various levels of pollution that must be dealt with. The new steps are crushing, which generates crushed rock and crushed ore, and concentration. Concentration produces ore concentrate, and either wet or dry tailings depending on the machine and ore. The step we’ve always had, smelting, will now produce slag as a byproduct instead of tailings.

With the addition of wet tailings, we have one of the most dangerous pollutants yet, which will be especially catastrophic if it leaks into the water supply. Concentrating iron ore without water will be an option, but gold and copper concentration will always produce wet tailings. The amounts generated here will be enough that a waste management plan will be needed to keep the surrounding areas safe. Since these facilities might be located in different places, transportation becomes in issue. In general this change will increase the depth and fidelity of processing mined ore, and set the stage for connections to other aspects of the game (skills, buildings, transport, pollution, treatment, and so on).

What's Next
We’re continuing on 8.2 which we plan to release ASAP, and will contain tons of performance updates as well as in-game voice! And after that we’re full speed ahead on Eco 9.0, which you can read more about the government update here

Thanks and as always let us know feedback on Discord, Github Suggestions, and email (john@strangeloopgames), great to have your support.

This week I’d like to dive into the core of Eco’s design a bit, and talk about the principles that guide the design and development of the game. These are things that go way back to the beginning ideas of what Eco would be, and are used to this day to determine what we choose to bring next in the game.


Eco’s design mission is to have players “Solve the Tragedy of the Commons,” taking place among real people. That means creating conflicts among people with the same end goals, where a collection of self-interests is not enough to succeed, you need some representation of collective interest.

To implement that, the game exists within the intersection of the game's design pillars: Economy, Ecology and Government.

The role of these pillars in the game is as follows:

Encompasses the efforts and progress of humans. Manufacturing, creating infrastructure, building, harvesting, performing research, specialization, trade. Collaboration and competition is a big goal of this pillar, to connect players together in productive (as well as adversarial) creation. The features of the economy should be grown to support these features, as well as influences from the other two pillars. Key goals of this pillar are:

1. Asynchronicity, allowing players to collaborate across time and space,
   
2. Discoverability, making it easy for players to find the information they need about how to participate in the economy.
   
3. Involvement, incentivizing players to work together, especially between different levels of experience.
   
4. Organization, allowing players to organize labor seamlessly through the interests of many parties, with lots of data on progress and economy state.

The substrate of the player experience, this is the ‘reality’ that they are forced to contend with. It is both the source of their solutions and problems. Our emphasis when building the Ecology simulation is a feature-set that both affects and is affected by human actions. That is, resources that are useful to the economy, and systems that are vulnerable to pollution and over-harvesting.

Beyond that, the ecology is a goal in itself, and the beauty of the ecosystem has natural value in the game outside of any human purpose.

Key goals of this pillar are:

1. Visibility, players should be granted powerful tools (the stats system) to understand how the ecology system works and how players are influencing it.
   
2. Impact, simulated features are highly reactive to the actions of players.
   
3. Diversity, promoting the usage or more far-spread regions of the world, increasing needs for transport and collaboration, and allowing for myriad complex effects from different biomes.
   
4. Existential Threat, the ecology needs to be capable of dying and creating a losing world for players due to their actions.

Government in Eco serves as a tool to manage and dictate the relationship between players in the economy, and between the economy and the environment. It needs to be powerful and flexible enough to express a rich variety of governmental structures, and still easy and fun to understand and build (I see these two goals as supportive of each other rather than opposites). Government must be necessary to win the game, allowing players to dictate the interactions that happen with the environment.

Key goals of this pillar are:

1. Ease of use. All players should be capable of understanding and using the system.
   
2. Power. Many different and deep structures of government should be possible with the system.
   
3. Created by Players. Government should be both run and constructed by players, allowing them to form it as a solution to their problems in the economy and in interactions with the ecosystem.
   
4. Meta-Game Support. Promotes the positive interaction of players in the meta game (active players coming and going, property arrangements, etc). Serves to handle problems that occur not just in the game but in the meta-game.
   
5. Transparent. The workings of government should be available and in fact highlighted for all players to see and participate in.
   
6. Iterative. The government should be expected to change throughout gameplay, not simply be created once and run forever that way.

The second mission of Eco is to build meaningful community, and some features may apply to this even if they don’t directly promote the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ goal. Examples of such features include:

• Meta-features for finding, hosting, and joining servers.
  
• Organization of server works among players
  
• Avatar creation and customization of appearance, custom animations for interactions
  
• Decorations and cosmetic buildings and clothes.

As we start to roll out our performance update for 8.2, we’re tasking out more features for 9.0, and we’ll be using this guide to flesh out the features and content we want to target. We’ll be putting it into a nice ‘Eco Tree’ that shows those parts visually and conceptually as they grow. The community’s feedback will factor in a lot to these decisions, so do share your feedback on our Discord, in our Suggestions Github Database, and via email john@strangeloopgames.com

Cheers and thanks for your support, looking forward to sharing all the new stuff we’ll be building.

- Team Eco

We have released patch 0.8.1.4 with the following fixes and improvements:

Fixes

• Fixed issue with elevator UI can't be opened (holding hammer in hands and pressing 'E')
  
• Fixed issue with non-working elevator buttons.
  
• Fixed issue with staring big old worlds in-game
  
• Fixed crash when fast moving items to storage from toolbar with no item selected (with mouse right button)
  
• Fixed rare server crash during building SkillTree

Improvements

• Added new admin command /teleporttodark - teleports you to the opposite side of the world

Eco is a game that has a huge scope, covering a massive section of human development and history, and through that time humanity’s powers have increased exponentially. That’s what we want the arc of Eco to be: the progression from powerless to massively powerful, and the increasing need for management of those powers to prevent them from becoming self-destructive.



The driver of this progression is technology, and as an Eco world advances in technology their ability to impact the world increases massively, for better or for worse. With each advance in technology, you gain the ability to do everything you already do in greater quantities. And with each step in technology, the challenges become greater, making those powers very necessary to continue advancing. This manifests in gameplay in the following ways.

• Gathering resources becomes faster. Your tools get more powerful and you can gather more. New resource types are unlocked like oil. You move from handheld manual tools to powerful machines and vehicles that gather for you. From axe to chainsaw, from shovel to excavator. By the end of the game you have the ability - and need - to move mountains of material. Massive quantities of materials will be needed for end game content, and you will have the ability to gather that. The impact it has on your environment will be equally as massive.

• Transport becomes more powerful. At the beginning you’re moving things by hand, and slowly you gain abilities to transform your world to make moving larger quantities of materials faster and more efficiently. What once were local villages (where trade happened only within them) become global networks connected by roads (and eventually, rails). The world becomes smaller, you’re no longer limited to your immediate area, and the world begins to be shaped by the infrastructure build to move resources around it.

• Building can be performed in bulk, with new construction equipment like the crane, and the ability to transport materials easily to new places with infrastructure. Soon the habitats and industry and commerce of humans are displacing the natural environments that once thrived there, and the byproducts of that growth can affect the surrounding areas in significant ways.

We’ve got the broad-strokes for the technology arc already, but it’s something we’re continuing to build through early access. Vehicles are a huge part of this, and with 8.2 we’re tuning up the use of the existing vehicles, and in future updates we will be adding more and making them more useful and flexible.

This growth in power will put enormous pressure on the ecosystem, and thus follows the purpose of the government, to regulate and decide as a group how those powers should be used. As your powers grow, so must your regulations, ideally leading that progress rather than playing catch-up, but that is not so easy. Government, then, is a tool to manage the powers you are gaining as a society and keep them pointed towards sustainable growth. Thus, there is an arc of government that mirrors the arc of progress: from free-reign at the beginning of the game when powers are meek, to complex regulations when powers are extensive. Going through this whole process should be an illuminating experience, and different every time, with tons of potential problems coming up that you’ll need to solve as a group. With our 9.0 government upgrades, the ability to do this will become much more flexible and powerful.




We’ll need the community’s help with this as well. When we get the 9.0 test server up we’ll need lots of feedback. And ideas you can submit to our suggestion database here. So many great ideas come from the community, and developing it in tandem with them has been a great experience. We also have a dev tier available on our website for those that want to dig into the code.

Thanks for following Eco and looking forward to lots more to come.

Hey all, for this Friday’s Eco Peak I wanted to talk about the new government system I’m working on for Eco 9.0.

The high-level idea is that in the current version of Eco you run a government. In 9.0, you will build a government.

First thing you’ll need to do to create a government is form a constitution, which will be an object placed in the world. The value of the building it’s placed in will determine how much influence the government has, and whichever government has the most influence will dictate the rules for the world.

This means that governments can be overthrown by making a more powerful one, represented by a more valuable building, and players will need to create fantastic palaces to ensure the legitimacy of their government and prevent being overtaken. (Later, we will allow multiple governments to co-exist and compete, but for now there can Be Only One).

I wanted to add the ability to overthrow a government because it fits thematically – if a government no longer represents the will of the people, there is a way to overthrow it and start a new one. This is costly, as it should be, as a second palace will need to be built that exceeds the first in strength, which is difficult to do without the support of a lot of players.

Once a constitution is built, you can start adding Civics Objects to add features to it. A Constitution does nothing by itself, but once you add a ‘Court’ you can create laws, and once you add a ‘Census Bureau’ you can create demographics, an ‘Election Hall’ to allow elections, ‘Parliament Office’ to add an elected position, a ‘Bill of Rights’ to add constitutional amendments, and lots more. This way your government grows in pieces, and the selection of things you can do with it grows slowly, allowing players to dictate what kind of control they want in their world, and not overwhelming them with infinite options from the get-go.

Furthermore, the different options within those categories can be extended as well. So if you add a Lumber Licensing Office, you augment a court with the ability to create laws about logging. Additional modules can be plugged into these government objects to expand their abilities.

I’ve set a personal goal for myself this year to ‘make creating tax code fun and interesting and straight-forward’. Basically take something many people think of as one of the most boring things in the world and making it exciting and interesting. The key to doing this is to make it relevant to things that are interesting to you, IE how your Eco world functions.

To allow creating both simple and powerful laws, we’re moving the law and government editor into the game. Here’s a preview of it still in-progress:



You can see there are lots of options available everywhere, but the simple things are still easy to do. If you want a very basic cause-and-effect law (when people chop down a tree, tax them), you can easily slot that in to the ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ lists by just picking from dropdowns. If however you want something much more complex, you can do that too by displaying the Advanced Properties in these options and plugging in different values into the different fields. In the above case are three logging-related causes that lead to a conditional effect: if the user is high-skilled, they can perform the action without even needing authorization. If they’re not, then they pay a tax related to the population percent of the species in the world.

We’re still working on this, the icons aren’t in yet and we have some more things to do to simplify it, and it'll be something we continue to expand and grow for all kinds of possibilities (think mortgages, contracts, rental agreements, ad infinitum). It will be the foundation of all kinds of complex civics and economic experiences you can create in the game, with the goal of making them all both simple and powerful, with lots of help text guiding you along the way.

Here’s a look at the ‘causes’ drop down that shows a lot of the different things you can use to trigger a law:



Once you pick one, you can mouse over it to see the properties that you can tie into the law:



These are all values that you can slot into other parts of the law, letting you make very generic laws that depends on what kind of trigger happened. It’s like programming in a way, with to-the-moon intellisense turned on to prompt you at each step.

Also since this is all generically created, it’s incredibly moddable. Every piece of it can be modded and extended easily, opening the door to lots of intricate government structures.



Can’t wait to see the brilliant and crazy stuff that players build with this. 9.0 is still a few months out, and we’re currently staying focused on polish and performance for 8.2, but following that we hope to roll out 9.0 not long after.



Cheers and say hi in Discord. Discord.gg/eco @johnk

It’s been over one year since we launched Eco on Steam Early-Access, celebration! But in the long-game, it’s just the beginning.




Eco was born out of the core idea of ‘Tragedy of the Commons: The Game’ where all your resources come from the ecosystem, and all economic and governmental actions happen through real people. That’s a huge, seemingly impossibly scoped game, and I believe we’ve made incredible progress.



The above screenshot comparison (between our Kickstarter and today) is crazy to look at. We’ve been working on the game nonstop since 2015, and it’s improved continuously, incrementally, until it looks like a totally different game. Through that, the core idea has remained constant: a society simulator inside an ecosystem. With the strength of the team and the community that has supported us throughout we’ve been able to do some really fantastic things, and we have much more we want to do.

We haven’t set a solid date for the end of Early Access, but we expect it to be within a year, give or take. Mainly we want to keep on the path we’ve set, fully delivering on all the many features of the game to make a very polished experience. This will include:

• A focus on the legal system, with the addition of a constitution players create, and much richer law and tax support for v9.0. We want Eco to be an incubator for social experiments, with enough richness that some very deep, sophisticated scenarios can emerge fully from the governmental and economical designs of the players.
  
• Ecosystem enhancements, making deeper pollution mechanics and ecological systems, and the need for joint large-scale projects for v10.0. We want to continue building out the depth of the simulation, and doing so in a way that everything is visible and accessible to players, and can be used to make decisions about the world.
  
• Further economy enhancements, that will tie to the government as well. Building residency, a rental market, mortgages, equity markets, stocks, all kinds of financial instruments. This opens the door for more complex government features like location-based representatives, laws on interest rates, central banks, etc. Managing a thriving economy and government should be one of the main challenges of the game, and that should be a very challenging and interesting thing to do.
  
• We plan to continue extending our mod support, which we see as critical to long-term replayability, and the potential to create total-conversions of the game. We’ll introduce more mechanical-type objects like switches and tolls, which will let players create some pretty interesting creations. The law and economy systems will be fully moddable, one of our most unique features, creating the possibility for modded games that do really unique and interesting things with player governments and economies. We fully intend the Eco engine to be a platform, both for future games we make, and modded experiences that the community creates.

Release won’t mark the end of Eco development, not by a long shot. Eco is a forever-game for us, as long as we have the community’s support, and we intend to continue increasing the depth and reach of the simulations indefinitely. There’s really no limit to how much depth we can put in the game, and there are tons of areas we’d like to explore: geological change, evolution, health systems, flying vehicles, you name it. This stuff is still far out so it hasn’t been planned, but we’re taking our time building out the tech right so it can support it. The game may radically change over time (as it changed in the last three years that you can see above), but the core will remain the same: a society simulator in an ecosystem.

Within those confines there are infinite avenues to expand, and I expect we’ll never run out of systems to expand and make deeper, connecting each to the other so it remains a whole and cohesive package, not just a collection of features.

In the Strange Loop office we have this amazing graph on the wall with the plaque ‘Eco Graphs, 2030’:



It’s an illustration of how much depth we want to add to the simulation, and a vision to lead us there.

At the same time, we will keep improving the engine we run, expanding the size of worlds and how many players they can support at once. We’ll be looking at connecting multiple servers for a single world, so the capability to host massively populated worlds becomes possible.

The current plan is that all future games we create, after Eco’s 1.0 release, will be built in Eco’s engine, and be connected to Eco, meaning you can travel between Eco and the future worlds that we will create. With multiple games sharing the same technology, we can really invest in and continue building it, with each new game will come engine improvements that affect all previous games. We already have some prototypes of new games, but we’re still focusing on building out Eco to its full potential before we start scaling them up, but can’t wait to share them with you. Long term, I see the future of Strange Loop as building out a universe of connected games, each connected to the others and allowing players to move between them, build on the common platform of the Eco tech, with each game being connected to education subjects, simulation focused, and highly collaborative with real players forming institutions.



All of these plans for Eco also fit into another more subtle (but loftier goal) of our work here, and that is to change the dynamic of how we play and learn in virtual worlds.

With Eco we are creating a game where the conflicts and struggles you face are unique in that they are not violent ones. That is a topic that has been explored endlessly in games, while there are vast landscapes of unexplored possibilities lying at our feet: conflicts that arise from cases of competing economies, government philosophies, and human greed. Violence is really the least interesting conflict in the mix there, and well-covered by other games. I want to create a game where players need to save the world not from an alien threat but a financial crisis that threatens to collapse the world’s food supply, by player-run corporations that twist regulations into their favor with political influence and destroy the biosphere for profit, by well-meaning individuals acting in their own self-interest, unable to see the destructive biases they possess.

These are much deeper and more complex problems to solve, and it is now in the realm of video games to let player solve them, with real people, in worlds running complex simulations. The tools that you use to solve these problems are not guns, but scientific analysis and debate, economic growth, taxes and regulation, leadership and collaboration. These are your ‘weapons’ in the game, and your foes are rarely ‘villains’, but well-meaning people like you, carrying opposites views and biases, whose resolution you must find to succeed. The world in video games is often extremely black-and-white: good vs evil, good guys saving the world from bad guys. We aim to create games that exist in a much more complex world, illustrating how even people with the same urgent interests and goals (like a meteor incoming), can fall into conflict, and just as in the real-world, simplifying that problem into good-vs-evil is not sufficient.

I firmly believe that the character of our virtual worlds is going to matter immensely over the coming decades, as they become more and more merged with regular life, and we spend more and more time in them. Indeed, I believe they represent our future as a species, and their character thus far has been excruciatingly focused on violence. I don’t believe that is our decided destiny, we can choose to create another option. There are much more interesting worlds for us to occupy, that let us achieve higher ideals. With our little project here, we hope to create a demonstration of that, and to grow that idea. And most of all, to welcome in supporters of that movement, the players, who are also the contributors.



Taking this approach to our games opens up a huge opportunity: applying games to education. I believe the education system, especially in America, is in vast need when it comes to preparing students for the future. It’s saddled to an outdated system training students for an era that no longer exists in the present, let alone for the future they will enter. Specifically, education still focuses primarily on the acquisition and demonstration of knowledge, but we live in a world where knowledge is ubiquitous: anyone can learn virtually anything they want from anywhere.

The more valuable role of education is inspiration, context, application, meaning. Giving you reason to care, and a community to care with. While there are many incredibly passionate teachers who understand and give this to their students, the underlying educational system doesn’t value that, instead relying on the pressure of tests to ensure learning, upon which their future success rests.

Enter video games, which are the opposite: they are motivation-machines, shared worlds of achievement where players are inspired and self-driven. Unlike homework, game players do not need to be compelled to play a game with external consequences, games are their own motivation. They are natural use-cases of the ‘Four C’s’ of what’s needed in contemporary education: Critical thinking, Creativity, Collaboration, and Communication.

I believe the integration of games into education is a major part of the answer to the problems education faces. Games answer the question of ‘why do I need to learn this’, by providing shared, collaborative worlds where the skills they learn are needed to succeed. Rather than providing raw knowledge, they provide a need for that knowledge, and the resources the existing education system provides them to retrieve it (teachers, books, the internet) suddenly become essential and relevant to their lives, and thus interesting and desired. Knowledge is infinitely more useful to person when it is pulled than when it is pushed.

And so with Eco and our future titles we aim to provide this platform for education. This year we are focusing on building extensions to the game that make it work seamlessly in a classroom, taking care of hosting, billing, world management, curriculum generation, teacher dashboards, and more. We will begin pilot testing of this later this year, and will be calling on our community to help find teachers who can join us in this project. We believe this will provide a needed and underserved value to the education system, with the potential over the long term to start changing ideas about how we prepare students for the future.

And that’s where the community comes in, as supporters of this movement and new approach to education, we can’t do it without you. The support we have received from our growing community thus far has been phenomenal, and we’re just at the beginning. If we succeed, it will be because of those that supported us from the beginning, and saw the potential and far reaching impact that can come from games with purpose.

It’s going to be a busy year for us at Strange Loop, and it’s great to have you along for the ride with us.

-Team Eco