Eco News

Hello Citizens,
today is the day - we are finally launching Eco 10 for you to play! Our team has put together a massive upgrade for the game, making this the biggest Update we ever made. And due to the introduction of settlements, it's also the one with the most changes to and impact on gameplay - making Eco even more interesting and collaboration focused!

What you really want to hear about, though, is probably boats - so after a quick summary for all those of you that prefer to play it right away, let's get directly into what is new.

Release Summary:

1. Boats & Coastal Construction – Boats have finally come to Eco! Discover the seas on six distinct boats with different purposes and build your ports with new, harbour-themed blocks!
   
2. Towns, Countries & Federations – Instead of one global government, you are now progressively creating settlements - from a small town, over a great country to a federation of mankind. The government system is now fully tied into the core gameplay and brings collaboration to the next level!
   
3. Culture – Create stunning pictures, accumulate culture in your settlements to expand their influence and gain new lands to claim, work together to annex settlements that pose a threat to the wellbeing of the planet and display your cultural achievements to everyone.
   
4. New Avatars and Face Tracking – Avatars and the character creator were fully revamped, offering you much more possibilities to style them to your liking. Additionally you can turn on your webcam to animate your avatar with facial expressions and your hands. Combined with lipsynching, you can interact with other citizens like never before!
   
5. Render to Horizon – With the upgraded lodding system you can now configure your world to display to the horizon, showing the curvature of the world and giving you a sense of its grandeur!

And now, let's go into the details:

[h2]Boats & Coastal Construction[/h2]

• Discover the worlds of Eco on water for the first time
  
• Build a Canoe to quickly travel around on your own or craft a Large Canoe to take a friend with you
  
• Use the Wooden Transport Boat to transport goods and trade on different continents
• Get yourself a Fishing Trawler and become a deep sea fisher
• Transport two trucks with a Wooden Barge or even up to four with an Industrial Barge
• Building in deep oceans is no longer possible, gone are the days of continent spanning bridges
  
• Swimming in deep ocean is extremely exhaustive - if you run out of calories you will drown and wake up at the shore
  
• Added new forms centered around docks to the hewn log blocksets to build your ports - or anything else you find them suitable for
  
• Added two mooring posts on land and two buoys on sea that you can lash your boats to
  
• Added five decorations fitting the nautical theme - Life Preserver, Ships Wheel, Hanging Buoys, Glass Buoys and Fish Rack

[h2]Towns, Countries & Federations[/h2]

• Players now start the game by claiming a Homestead somewhere on the world
  
• Players can join together to found Towns, Countries and even Federations
• Each settlement has their own claim stakes to create new deeds and claim papers to expand them
  
• Each of these settlement ejects influence, a circular area in which their claim papers and stakes can be used
  
• The influence of a settlement can be expanded through increasing the settlement's culture
• Laws of a settlement are only valid within its influence respectively for its own citizens - no more global government by default
  
• Settlements can make immigration policies to decide who can join them
  
• Settlements of higher tiers can annex other settlement through a difficult process

[h2]Culture[/h2]

• Create stunning in-game pictures and images by using the easel or one of multiple cameras
• Use the printing press to upload your own images onto the server
  
• Make museums and show your pictures off in a multitude of frames
• Collect reputation for your pictures and help your settlement increase its influence

[h2]New Avatars & Facetracking[/h2]

• Completely reworked avatars, supporting facial expressions
• A new creation flow to make your own avatar - saved between play sessions
  
• Customize your avatar with many new options and outfit it with many new clothing items
• Build a dresser and change your outfit on the server you currently are playing on
  
• Support for facetracking, calibrate with your webcam and animate your avatars to show your own facial expressions and hand movements

[h2]Balancing & Techtree Expansion[/h2]

• Improved world generation, ores will now generate in veins and plants spawn in localized clusters
• Rebalanced research papers and upgrade modules to require specialty investments
  
• Revamped power generation and consumption - the power network now properly prioritizes efficient power generators
  
• Changed the Steam Engine to provide mechanical power instead of electrical and notably reduced the amount of mechanical power that the Water Wheel and the Windmill generate
  
• Added the Industrial Generator for late game power generation
  
• Improved Stone Roads - they now fully support form fill types like their asphalt counterpart
  
• Improved Shovels - each tier of shovel now can hold an increasing amount of dirt
  
• Rebalanced countless crafting recipes and increased the shelflife of seeds
  
• Added a new plant to the techtree and incorporated it into the lumber recipes - flax

[h2]Miscellaneous[/h2]

• Added a "Trust Landlord" option for renting, allowing landlords to freely change property with residents on them, improving Quality of Life for players playing together on shared property
  
• Executive actions now support to target single deeds and allow to change reputation
• Reputation now provides for configurable daily limits and a "Speak Well of Other" bonus to incentivize its usage
  
• Settlements now also have a reputation contingent usable via laws and executive actions - reward your citizens for helping your settlement improve its culture
  
• Improved animal pathfinding to be less likely to collide or get stuck

[h2]Twitch Extension[/h2]
To support our amazing streamer community, we've created a unique plugin that will allow viewers to interact with the worlds a streamer plays in!

• Viewers can vote in elections (up to a defined percentage of total votes based on settings)
  
• Displays graphs of ecosystem and economy data to analyze the big picture
• Shows all relevant info about the server and allows viewers to join based on configurable settings

We’re also starting a Twitch Drop campaign today, so watch Twitch streams to get your Update 10 nautical themed unique items, you can find all information on our website: https://play.eco/twitch-drops



Thanks a ton from all of us at the Strange Loop team for all our old and new Citizens, this release marks our biggest so far, and there’s still lots more to come.

-John K, CEO Strange Loop Games

Important Info for the Update:
- Migration from Update 9.7.13 should work in most cases, but incompatible data will be removed in the process, changes to the world generation will not be available and the settlement feature can't be turned on for migrated worlds.
- A world created on Update 10 with the settlements feature disabled can only turn it on when there is no civics in the world. Disabling the settlements feature is not possible once it was enabled at any point without restoring a backup from before it was activated.

Good day Eco Citizens,
we have a big announcement today: after over a year in the making, Eco 10 will be released on December 12th 2023!

This is our biggest update ever, and will be a huge addition to the game. We’ll have some more blog posts giving details about what’s in it, but today I’m going to give you a look at our new Towns/Countries/Federations system.



Overview of past and coming up blogs:
- Boats and Trade
- Coastal construction
- Face tracking avatars
- Photography/painting
- New graphical improvements
- Expanded tech tree
- Twitch plugin
- Towns, Countries and Federations (This blog)
- Culture


Prior to Eco 10, there was a single global government, and laws and decisions it made affected everyone globally. No longer. With this update, the world starts with no governments, and you must band together with your fellow Citizens to create them.

Each Citizen begins with the ability to create their own homestead. This is essentially a Tier-0 settlement, population 1. It allows a Citizen to claim a small amount of property around them, with no other government’s laws or taxes able to apply them. While this gives you total freedom to do as you wish (pollute up a storm if you like), it comes at a cost, because you’re limited in how much land you can claim. There’s only so much land that can be managed by a singular person.

Every Citizen can run their own independent homestead.


To take the next step up and start claiming more land and create laws and taxes, a Town must be formed. To do so, you’ll need to find fellow Citizens who wish to create a Town with you, a minimum of 3. You’ll need to build a Town hall on new property to form the center of the Town, and you’ll need to ratify a Town Constitution which the majority of the initial Citizens agree to. From there, you can found your Town with a flourish:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]A Town is founded!

Once founded, a Town will carve out an area of Influence, which is a new concept in Eco 10.

Settlements cast influence into the world, which represents the location where its government applies and where property can be claimed.

Each settlement casts a base level of influence based on its tier (Tier 1: Town, Tier 2: Country, Tier 3 Federation). This influence can be seen on the map and designates where the settlement’s laws and taxes take effect. As Citizens band together and Towns start cropping up around the world, you’ll see pockets of influence with different laws, taxes, and styles of government. Each settlement also maintains a Citizen list, and once you’re a Citizen of a settlement your homestead falls under its influence, and thus you must follow any laws that apply. When two settlements are next to each other, the influences will push against each other, like so:

Towns near each other will compete over influence range, with laws that could be very different between them.

Towns also allow you to claim much more property and start new claims using spawned claim stakes. Citizens joined together are more than the sum of their parts, and the more Citizens a settlement has the more land it can claim. These can be distributed by the Town mayor (or others, depending on how the Town constitution is configured). The caveat is that the additional claims can only be used under the influence of the settlement (however, there are ways of expanding influence further using a new Culture system, which will be described in a coming blog).

New claim stakes for homesteads, towns, countries, and federations. Place one of these to start claiming land under different settlement types.


Eventually, Towns will start to feel cramped as they reach their max level of influence or push up against neighbor’s influence. The next step, once the required tech tier is reached, Citizens can start a Country.

A Country can be formed when member Towns bond together.

The process of forming a Country is similar to founding a Town, with the difference that instead of requiring a base number of Citizens to start, they require a base number of Towns. This means that in order to form a Country, you must get at least 2 Towns to agree and ratify a Constitution. You additionally must have a minimum amount of Culture to form a Country (see next blog). Getting Citizens agree enough to start a Town is enough of a diplomatic challenge, but getting multiple Towns to agree to form a Country is a huge achievement.

Multiple Towns can ratify a Constitution together to form a Country.

The country has a separate government, which is not part of the member Town’s governments; rather, it lies atop those town governments. Both governments will continue to exist, with their own influence radii, and their laws and taxes only impacting their influenced land. This means that within a Country’s influence, you may have many Towns with different laws, and a set of federal laws/taxes that apply throughout.

The influence of a Country overlaps with the influence of its member Towns, with both Country and Town laws/taxes applying together.


The final tier of settlements is a Federation, which is akin to a United-Nations-like collection of countries. A Federation must have a minimum of 2 member countries ratify its constitution, and if getting several Towns full of Citizens to agree to form a Country is a huge achievement, getting several Countries, full of Towns full of Citizens to agree requires some superhuman diplomacy.

A Federation is a collection of Countries that has agreed on a constitution binding them.

Once formed, the influence of a Federation can become large enough to cover the entire globe. At this advanced stage of a world, the ability to enforce laws globally may be critical to survival, preventing rogue Towns/countries from polluting and destroying the common resources shared among the many societies of the planet.

However, for those settlements that just won’t listen to reason, there is a way to enforce agreement once diplomacy fails.


A higher-tier settlement can annex a lower-tier settlement, meaning force it to become a member Citizen or settlement. Homesteads can also be annexed, forcing a Citizen to begin abiding by the rules of the settlement who may have been flouting them before.

Annexation does not come cheap, however. To do so a settlement must have a base level of Culture, plus more Culture than the target, more citizens, and must overlap the influence of the target by a significant amount. Additionally, a cost of goods must be paid to perform the annexation, with half of these goods going to the annexed settlement, and the other half being destroyed. In this way, annexation is always going to be more costly than arriving at a diplomatic solution, but sometimes necessary when diplomacy fails.

Rogue settlements can be forced to cooperate through the process of Annexation.

Federations can also annex fellow Federations, meaning there is no top of the pyramid where you’re totally safe from annexation. And abandoned homestead or towns are very easy to annex, making it easier to collect and reapply resources from Citizens that haven’t been playing.

As a defense against annexation, settlements can increase their culture, making it harder for them to be annexed. A future blog will explain how culture works in detail, but the short of it is that Citizen creativity has a place in civilization now.


Super excited to get this update out to everyone and see all the dynamics play out with the other new features of 10. For example, boats can make the value of an isolated island town high as it becomes a trading hub, but perhaps applies a harsh tax, triggering annexation pressure from neighbors looking to drop taxes.

Also exciting is that this update will bring government features to a much wider set of Citizens: now you can start a Town with just three people, making each Citizen potentially a major part in the decision making process of the Town, drawing them into global affairs among Countries and Federations as the world grows.

More updates coming soon. Thanks all and can’t wait to share it with you.

-John K, Strange Loop CEO

Greetings Citizens!

Coming soon to Eco 10: ports! With the introduction of Boats, coastal infrastructure will be crucial to opening up trade and travel between continents. We’ve added lots of new block types you can place directly on water like docks, and other decorative elements to give you that nautical appeal.

Port towns will be very important to the overall economy, and become hubs of trade as resources pass through them between land and sea, connecting far-flung towns with the resources they need from the other side of the world.

Overview of past and coming up blogs:
- Boats and Trade - Coastal construction (This blog)
- New avatars
- Face tracking avatars
- Photography/painting
- New graphical improvements
- Expanded tech tree
- Twitch plugin
- Towns, Countries, and Federations
- Culture



[h2]Docks[/h2]
Original concept art for hewn log docks

We've created a set of dock-specific forms in the Hewn Log blocksets. These specialized blocks were designed for building and expanding your coastal creations, but we aren't going to judge you if you find other creative uses for them.


We’ve also made blocks have much more detail in their close LODs, and we’re going to retrofit all our old blocks to do this as well. This will give us the ability to create more interesting building pieces for you to create with.


As we add more forms to blocksets, we will be looking at ways to improve the UI and UX of form selection. Please feel free to leave feedback related to this, we plan to be giving a lot more time to blocks in future updates.



[h2]Buoys[/h2]
Moorage Posts can be added to your docks so they are locked in and can’t drift away. These can be crafted from both wood and steel.

Wood Mooring Post

Steel Mooring Post

We’ve introduced two floating buoys that can be placed in the water and used for navigation, additionally these can be used like the moorage posts to stop your boats drifting away.

Steel Buoy

Plastic Buoy

[h2]Nautical Decorations[/h2]
We have also added a series of decorative, nautically themed objects to dress up your coastal areas.

Life Preserver

Ships Wheel

Hanging Buoys

Glass Buoys

Fish Rack

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to explore upcoming features for Update 10. If you have thoughts, questions, or stories to share, connect with us through our Discord channel. We're eager to see the coastal constructions you'll create in the Eco 10 update.

Hey Eco Citizens, Art Director Milenko here,
in this blog we will be talking about new avatars, the avatar creation system we are trying to implement, looking back at multiple increments of the avatar development during the game production so far and reminiscing a bit about the game and thoughts we had while making it.

Overview of past and coming up blogs:
- Boats and Trade
- Coastal construction
- New avatars (This blog)
- Face tracking avatars
- Photography/painting
- New graphical improvements
- Expanded tech tree
- Twitch plugin
- Towns, Countries, and Federations
- Culture

Let's get right into it.


If we start from the beginning, ECO was started as a pitch for an educational game. The pitch was done by a small group of people back in 2014 when we started putting together a demo for an educational game that would use a popular voxel style and teach about the impact of industrial and society progress on the environment people exist in.

Considering the scope of the project we had in mind, and the resources available, we opted to go with the overall simple style, with just a bit of a unique flavor in order to make sure we can put it all together on time and make it work. Focus was on the gameplay and the experience, and the graphics were (barely) catering to it.

So, with a small team, we made choices to keep everything simple and somewhat generic, in order to be able to produce assets necessary to populate the game with everything needed on time.

[h2]Old avatars in earlier versions[/h2]
Image of an Eco avatar without beard at the very beginning.

Image of an Eco avatar with beard at the very beginning.

In its initial stage, the game was played from the first-person perspective, and we just went with a simple representation of other players/avatars as we did not consider it the focus of the experience.

However, as we kept on fleshing the world and the game mechanics out, we started realizing that the look of the avatars can bring much more to the overall experience. Also, once we got avatars in the game, some people (me included) wanted to play the game in third person, seeing your avatar on the screen and identifying with it.

So, we decided to invest time and effort in making avatars a little bit bigger part of the overall experience. That led us to the version of the avatar present in our early access builds up to the 9.x release.

An example picture of how an avatar could currently look like in Update 9.

As the rest of the game kept evolving, and the visuals and the art style getting upgraded and more intricate, we decided to have another look at the existing avatar designs.

Watching streamers creating little roleplay scenarios made us realize that we should and can do much more with the system.

Shortcomings of the current system became obvious- variety was very limited, art was too simple and clunky, and the system was very modder-unfriendly.

So, we started looking at options available and improvements we can make with our, still limited, resources.

We proceeded to make a wish list of features we would like to have and see how many of those we can bring to life.

More ideas were added as we continued with the process.

A concept sketch showing body shapes during very early development.

A concept drawing detailing facial and head features during very early development.

A concept sketch detailing facial expressions during very early development.

Concept art showing an avatar with backpack and multiple tools during very early development.

Then we looked at technologies available that would help get us as close to our wish list as possible, while still considering time and team limitations.

[h2]New Avatars in Update 10[/h2]
So, we revised the existing avatar look, brought our assets to blender 3D software, built a new blender rig that would be more accessible by the modding community and used the UMA system to create more options for customizations. Process took months of research and work by a team of 3-5 people and finally we ended up with the prototype that was giving us the most of what we wished for.

A prototype of the new avatars in blender - not the final version.

At the same time, we looked at the other technologies available such as face and hand tracking, and experimented with that too, in order to add more personality and connect players with their in-game representation more. It is an ongoing process, so as the technology improves, we will play with it more on our end.

We also wanted to give a bit more of a spotlight to the avatars and decided to introduce them at the front end of ECO experience, giving people the opportunity to create their own persona before they dive into the world. In order to do that, we had to revise a whole onboarding experience, starting the game with the avatar creation process.

The new avatar creation UI allowing you to customize your characters to a whole new level.

Adding the new camera feature to the game itself allowed us to consider adding the “selfie” feature to the avatar creation, so that players can take a photo of their avatar and use it as an identification in the game as well as taking it out of the game and using it as an avatar icon wherever they want.

Multiple players around a town foundation, another new feature in Update 10.

Regarding the physical appearance of the avatars, we wanted to add more variety to the face and body shapes, facial features, skin decorations and to finally make hairstyles work with hats.

The new avatars support multiple facial decorations.

Hairstyles on the new avatars now work with hats!

We also wanted to infuse more life in the facial expressions and represent the mood of the avatars better, so we went and created a variety of blend shapes allowing players to show off how they feel in the game.

The new avatars support multiple facial expressions to show display a player's feelings.

Regarding the clothing we made sure to increase the resolution and add much more variety to the existing clothes, add new styles and make sure everything looks nice and clean. We made it possible to use multiple tints on any of the clothing assets, so players can get much deeper into the customization and making their representations unique.

Clothes for the new avatars now support multiple tints.

Also, we made sure that adding new styles and more of everything is possible within the system.

We also revisited backpacks and tools to match the new look and added body features such as makeup, face/body paint and tattoos.

Backpacks were adjusted to the new avatar system, supporting the display of different tools.

It is an expanding system, and we tried to make sure it is modular enough so we can keep on adding new features as they come up on our radar and become technologically available.


Visual style wise, it is an iteration of the existing avatar (9.x version), where we maintained similar proportions and volume, but are adding more resolution in the face and body, and exaggerating some of the facial features, so they work better with the expressions system we are implementing.
We opted out of making characters more realistic and kept the style simplified and stylised in order to keep us away from the uncanny valley effect which plagues a lot of the games trying to implement similar techniques on realistic looking characters.

We wholeheartedly hope that the majority of the existing and a lot of new players will enjoy these new revisions as improvements on our existing system, and we will keep on tweaking and improving all the aspects of this new upgrade until we reach the full release stage.

As always, we hope you enjoy ECO and our effort to keep on adding polish and improvements to everything from the art side gets noticed and enjoyed by all the people playing the game.

Love you all :)

- Milenko Tunjic, Co-Founder & Art Director Strange Loop Games

Hello Eco Citizens, big news: the long-awaited Eco 10 update is finally in playtests!

We've added a ton of features (over a full year's worth of work), and we're introducing a lot of brand new systems as well as lots of polish.  Release date is currently 'when it's ready', but goal is well-before the end of the year.  With all the new additions, we want to adequately test it with large groups to make sure they're balanced.

So over the coming weeks we're going to be doing blog posts on all the new things to expect. Here's the agenda:

- Boats and Trade (This blog)
- Coastal construction
- New avatars
- Face tracking avatars
- Photography/painting
- New graphical improvements
- Expanded tech tree
- Twitch plugin
- Towns, Countries, and Federations
- Culture

We’ll kick it off with the first blog on Boats!

[h2]Boats and Trade in Eco 10[/h2]

One of our most anticipated additions, and for good reason! Boats will not only introduce a whole new way of getting around the world, but will introduce the need for new trade gameplay, as its combined with our resource-spawning upgrades also shipping in 10.

[h3]Isolated Resources[/h3]
With Eco 10 we’ve totally changed how plants and resources spawn. Previously, they were pretty spread out all over the map: if a plant could grow somewhere, it would. No longer, now things will spawn in clusters around the map, which may be just a few spaces, or even one.


As visualized on the screenshot above, clusters are representative of an area where plants are allowed to populate on the initial world generation, these contain the individual groups of plants and as the red indicates, this is the distance limitations between each group inside the cluster.

We now have the ability (as do you players since these are all set inside the individual plant) to add more dynamic restrictions and scarcity of each plant species on a whole new level then what was technically possible in previous iterations.

This means that there may be resources that are native to a specific island or on the other side of the world, and to get access you’ll need to build trade ships and sail to distant locales. And these islands will certainly lack resources from the mainland, so you’ll have much to offer in trade.

Combined with the new Towns and Countries system, very interesting things can happen. A town might gain exclusive access to a resource, like oil or gold, or a rare plant that’s needed for research. That resource is then beholden to the laws of the town, and the town can wield a lot of trading power in the wider world. You see this in real life in places like oil-rich countries, the scarcity of a resource can greatly impact the cultural fabric of the societies built atop them. Really looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.

And connecting them all are a progressive series of boats, here’s the line up of what you’ll be able to sail the seven seas of Eco with:


Small canoes are the carts of the oceans, allowing you to transport a medium amount of goods while you discover the oceans of Eco. They are the first type of boats available to you.


The large canoe is an upgrade to the small canoe, holding more storage and allowing two players to go on a journey together.


Wooden transport ships have the storage capacity of a truck with decent speed and are very suitable for transportation purposes.


The Wooden Barge can hold up to two trucks and is very useful to transport your goods from one island to the other.


With the introduction of the Medium Fishing Trawler you will be able to fish comfortably and directly on the oceans.


The Industrial Barge is an upgrade to the Wooden Barge and our currently biggest ship, it can carry up to four trucks at once.

To make boats more useful, we’ve introduced limits to swimming as well. You can now ‘drown’ and wake up exhausted on the shore if you run out of calories while swimming, and swimming itself will expend calories.



This means no more swimming across continents (and you can’t eat while swimming, you would get a stomach ache as everyone knows). This will make boats and coastal port towns very important to global advancement, as they may be the only route to circulate an important resource to the rest of the world. Note that this can be disabled, like all new systems we will add, so players can configure the world their community wants to play in.

Stay tuned for more updates as we build up towards launch, and feel free to drop us a line in the discord!

- John K, CEO Strange Loop