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:
- [*]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!
[*]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!
[*]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.
[*]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!
[*]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!
Boats & Coastal Construction
- 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
Towns, Countries & Federations
- 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
Culture
- 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
New Avatars & Facetracking
- 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
Balancing & Techtree Expansion
- 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
Miscellaneous
- 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
Twitch Extension
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
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.
