Eco News

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 [email protected]

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