Culture for Property
Creating amazing buildings has always been a big part of Eco, and with this update we’ve made it tie into gameplay directly by allowing architecture to generate culture and housing points.
By placing down a plaque, other citizens can give reputation to your construction. If it’s on a cultural property, that will translate directly into additional culture. However, if it’s on residential property, that will translate into additional housing points with a multiplier, meaning the skill rate you get for housing can be significantly increased when you create a beautiful construction that gets appreciated by your fellow citizens.
Painting
Following directly from that, we’ve added the ability to paint blocks and later this will also extend to objects (vehicles and tables) to really customize your towns and make them your own.
Towns can now look really unique and different from each other, giving a lot of variety in the visuals of the game.
Paint is created by collecting dyes and mixing them together at the new Mixing Station.
Paints can then be used with one of the new paint sprayers, applying varying levels of coating to blocks.
Dyes require different ingredients, some of which are more rare than others, so there will be a variety in values of paint. Since paint is an item that can be sold in stores as well, you’ll start to see people setting up paint stores offering a variety of colors.
In a near-future update we'll add the ability to paint world objects too (vehicles, crafting stations, etc).
Outdoor Rooms
In the same vein of making your spaces beautiful for game benefits, we’re introducing Outdoor Rooms.
Now the outdoor section of a property will be treated as its own ‘room’ for purposes of housing points, and a number of new outdoor housing object have been added to support it. It supports the above architecture bonus as well: beautiful outdoor spaces now have a game incentive through architecture and housing bonuses.
Together, these three changes culture points for architecture, painting, and outdoor rooms takes a step towards aligning game success with creative endeavors. Eco's design principle is creating systems that interact with each other, and the game emerges from their complex interactions; this addition follows that by connecting the creation of a beautiful space to the skill system, through housing points.
Maintenance
One issue that we wanted to address was the number of specialties that are really important for creating a specific object, but once that object is created there’s not much more use for them. With the addition of maintenance, parts will need to repaired and replaced within tables, using the same specialties that created the original object.
When these parts break down, the object will cease to function, and you’ll need to get them repaired or replaced. which leads to our next upgrade:
Repairs
Now you can use multiple different repair materials to repair an object, and each one will reduce the max durability in varying rates.
Some repair materials may be more expensive, but make your tools and parts last longer, so it will be a tradeoff to consider. Eventually, after many repairs, the durability of objects will drop so low that they have to be replaced, creating further demand in the economy.
The skills of the citizen doing the repair will also impact the change in durability and how much material is needed, so a repair market will be incentivized as specialized craftsmen can repair their fellow citizen’s tools and parts.
We'll also be connecting this to the economy and government in an update shortly after 11, so that a repair person can find and repair other people's tables for money, paid either by the table owner or the government. This will make a new type of 'quest' that requires unique skills and materials and will appear in the economy viewer (and is also disableable if people prefer a world without maintenance).
Eco Marketplace
As you’ve probably noticed, many survival crafting games these days have microtransactions, which shifts the financial incentive from purely selling new copies to also supporting your long-term players. As we start approaching the end of Eco’s Early Access, we wanted to find a way to introduce them that suits Eco and will be a value-add for players. Specifically, the goal is to- Avoid giving direct gameplay advantage (they are cosmetic only and can’t be traded or used by others by default).
- Not allow access to mechanically-different items (all cosmetic items are skins of regular items).
- Support the Eco community (proceeds shared with server hosts and eventually others).
- Support the ethos of Eco (shared with charity).
- Be fully optional (hosted servers can disable them entirely).
A Blueprint will allow you to build one copy of an item, and many blueprints are sold in packs. The premium variants appear in the crafting UI as variants under the main product and will be functionally identical to the base item. When you buy a Blueprint, you can use it in all servers indefinitely (unless restricted by host admins), and the count resets each server cycle within an individual server.
Because so much of Eco’s value comes from the community, we wanted to find a way to share that value with them in an interesting way. To do that, we’ve implemented percentage-share from every Eco Credit transaction that goes to the value creators in the Eco ecosystem.
To start with, server hosts will get a percentage of all credits that are spent in their world, and we will provide a way to pay for hosting services with Eco Credits, thus allowing an active community to fund its own world through the transactions in the world.
In the vein of supporting all the value-contributors in the Eco universe, we wanted to include Earth and the real Ecosystem itself, through a percent of all transactions going to the charity The Ocean Cleanup. This charity is doing a phenomenal job using advanced technology to clean up plastics from the ocean on a massive scale, and thus fits the theme of Eco very well. So with every transaction in Eco Credits you’ll be supporting both Eco, the server host of your world, and the Earth itself.
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Later, we plan to include other sources that provide value to the Eco universe, including approved modders that will earn a percent of all transactions in a world, as well as streamers that promote worlds earning a cut of proceeds in those worlds. Long term, we plan to allow approved server hosts creating amazing experiences to withdraw Eco Credits..
Eco’s had a long, long incubation period in Early Access and has an amazing, dedicated community of players and creators, and we’re very aware that introducing microtransactions can cause a lot of disruption, but hopefully players will see this as a good thing for the game long-term, giving us another way to fund it with a source different than only new-players, and introducing new support to the community surrounding Eco as well. On top of that, for those players categorically against microtransactions (which we respect), we’ve allowed servers to disable it entirely and they can play without it, which will be displayed in the server browser.
Adobe Blockset and Balance Changes
One of our goals for v1 Eco is to make a much smoother entry experience for new users, and we’re taking a step in that direction with the creation of a new building tier, Adobe Blocks.
Adobe blocks will be easier and faster to construct than hewn logs, making them an easy and fast way for new players to get setup in the world with a home, as they learn the other mechanics of the game. We’ve rearranged the starting table requirements so that some will function in this new Tier-0 style building.
Offline Play
There have been some cases where our account servers went down and prevented play, which understandably upset a lot of players who wanted to be able to play without DRM. Good news for them, Eco can now be played offline, meaning even if our auth servers go down, or if you don’t have internet access at all, you will still be able to play.And More
Along with these major updates we’ve added a large number of minor improvements, performance optimizations (we’ve fixed the slowdown that happens after a few hours of play!), an account system full-upgrade, and much more. We’re hot on the path of Eco v1, check out our Roadmap to Eco 1.0 blog post detailing what we have in store. And as always thanks for the great support from our Eco citizens, much more to come.Streamer Event
In celebration of the launch, we're hosting a Streamer event that makes use of the unique features of Eco: ????️Socialism vs Capitalism????! We'll have a few worlds for different languages running on a two week cycle where citizens will be separated into separate camps, socialist and capitalist, and will build societies that embody those values. Eventually, they'll have to cooperate to destroy the meteor and save the planet. Will make for a really interesting social experiment as well, so check that out on streaming this week. We'll also have some themed twitch drops for viewers, follow the event on our website.
Important Info for the Update:
- Update 11 introduces new backend services that are deployed in multiple stages. While we do our best so you don't notice anything about that, please bear with us in case of problems and reach out to support@strangeloopgames.com if you notice any account issues.
- Some features are temporarily not available during the deployment phase: Buying tiers & invites on our website, sending invites via the website as well as tier benefits (cosmetics and icons) and twitch drops.
- Servers in Update 11 need to login to an SLG account, that can be either done directly in the window the server executable will prompt you with or with the commandline parameters --username="