General:
- Fixed: A rare issue that could prevent migration of worlds, making them fail to load in Update 10.2.
- Fixed: Repeatedly and quickly applying fertilizer could lead to the client being disconnected from the server.
- Fixed: Adding unrestricted claim papers received through Difficulty.eco settings to a claim stake wouldn't allow to claim more land.
- Fixed: Interacting with a claim stake containing unrestricted claim papers or adding such to one could lead to the client being disconnected from the server.
- Removed: Deprecated config variables for Exhaustion in Balance.eco.template.
Balance:
- Fixed: Recurve bow was using the wrong specialty for repairing.
- Fixed: Small court had too many law slots - it now has three (one more than in Update 10.1).
- Fixed: Bunting recipes in the automatic loom were missing their board ingredient.
Civics:
- Fixed: Dirt ramps were an option for the law trigger "open".
- Fixed: Dirt ramps could not be used with the "pick up and place" and "construct or deconstruct" law triggers.
UI:
- Fixed: Dropping an item on the menu buttons next to the minimap would break the UI.
- Fixed: Some hints were still mentioning the border control settings to be found on the embassy desk instead of the settlement foundation.
World Objects:
- Added: On / Off switch for the lighthouse lamp.
- Fixed: Sitting on the new cast iron furniture was not possible.
The main changes in this update are a new Blacksmith profession, tons of improvements for the Exhaustion system, legal 'Injunctions', settlement polish, civics polish, lots of audio polish, and a multitude of bug fixes and balance changes.
Blacksmith Profession
Eco 10.2 introduces the first of the new specialties we have planned from our Roadmap to 1.0. The Blacksmith is intended to fulfil the manufacturing side of metalworking and takes over a lot of recipes that were so far handled by smelters.
The update comes with five new workstations (Blacksmith Table, Power Hammer, Fletching Table, Grindstone and Pottery Table), two new decorative objects (Lighthouse Lamp and Town Bell) and four new items:
- Clay Mold - Used as a new ingredient by Smelting. (Crafted by Gathering)
- Ceramic Mold - Used as a new ingredient by Advanced Smelting. (Crafted by Pottery)
- Ink - Used as a new intermediary resource by Paper Milling.
- Printing Supplies - Used as a new consumable for creating copies and printing textures in the Printing Press.
Most of the recipes of the Blacksmith require multiple different tables to be in the same room, similar to how the Mechanics and Industry specialties work. Some recipes from Smelting, Advanced Smelting and Pottery now also use this mechanic. A list of related balance changes can be found under "Balance" in the release notes below.
Improvements to Exhaustion
The Exhaustion feature allows you to define how much time players can spend doing work in the game, allowing server hosts to create worlds that prevent people who have much more time to commit from running away with progress and leaving less frequent players in the dust. When exhausted, you can still play in the game (socializing, planning, setting up contracts, etc.), but you can't do certain calorie consuming tasks.
Based on community feedback (special thanks to Mighty Moose and Le Village communities) we have iterated on the exhaustion feature and given it some major improvements:
- Administrators will now be able to fine control the exhaustion time per each weekday, hence being able to for example set different playtime limits for weekdays and weekends that will be shown in the server information card when selecting a server.
- They can now also set a one-time starter bonus granted on the first login of a player or configure retroactive exhaustion gain which will give players joining later in the cycle the amount of hours they would have had if they had joined on the first day - only limited by the configured maximum bank capacity for saving hours. "Rollover" can now be turned on or off, allowing servers to use this feature for sole maximum playtime limiting per day or giving players the ability to carry over unused hours up to the maximum bank capacity, for example for saving time during the week for the weekend.
- The time when exhaustion is refreshed can now be decoupled from the in-game time and instead be set to a constant real time that is not affected by server downtimes. The Update also comes with a long awaited filter to only display servers that have exhaustion turned on and a new server card only for servers that have exhaustion turned on.
- Administrators can decide for each separate vehicle if it should be affected by exhaustion limits or not and players no longer need to log out when being away for a bit to save their time - they can now just sit on any of the furniture in Eco to stop the timer.
- Last but not least we also fixed some issues with the system, made tooltips more clear and easy to understand and added an Ecopedia page that shows a detailed explanation of the system and a rundown on the configuration on the server the player currently plays on.
Injunctions
In this update the Large Court object additionally to holding laws offers a new feature: Injunctions. They allow higher-level settlements (countries and federations) to influence the laws of their member settlements.
If the constitution of such a higher-level settlement allows, authorized office holders can issue an injunction against laws in member settlements. An injunction can block certain triggers, certain legal actions, and specific targeted laws in other settlements. Ignored elements are no longer executed, meaning an ignored law is treated as it wouldn't exist and ignored triggers and legal actions will be skipped - but all other parts of a law will still continue to function.
This allows countries to have more power in determining the legal actions of the member towns, so when towns are forming the constitution for a country they need to think long and hard about how to grant the power to issue injunctions, or if they want to disable it entirely!
Release Notes
Audio
- Added: Engine sounds for fishing trawler and transport boat.
- Added: Support for sound combinations during block placement, allowing to adjust sounds based on the surface an action is executed on.
- Added: Harvest sounds for all pickup actions with animation.
- Improved: Replaced fishing trawler horn sound.
- Improved: Sounds at game entrance are now smoother.
- Improved: Performance of the sound system.
- Fixed: Sounds related to character movement were sometimes delayed.
- Fixed: Sounds for placing and destroying blocks weren't playing.
- Fixed: Sounds for picking up rubble weren't playing.
- Fixed: Some sounds didn't play in the correct variant for the selected sex of the character.
- Fixed: Sounds for elevators could get stuck, replaying endlessly.
- Fixed: Sound of the torch could get stuck after switching to another item in the hotbar.
- Fixed: Tools could suddenly stop playing their sounds.
- Fixed: Multiple issues with sounds playing double or in a weird way for block interactions.
Avatar & Camera
- Improved: Leaving the avatar display camera mode will bring the camera back to the exact position and rotation it had before entering that mode.
- Improved: Portrait camera for user pictures was readjusted, it will no longer cut off the display of the head.
- Improved: Rotation of the avatar during avatar creation is now faster.
- Improved: When mounting a vehicle, some camera angles could lead to clipping of the avatar - the camera angle was limited to prevent that.
- Improved: Entering the avatar display camera mode didn't always work correctly, sometimes keeping the current camera view with partly invisible tools.
Balance
Recipes- Added: Fur Pelt can now be turned into Leather Hide and Tallow.
- Added: Raw Fish can now be turned into Fish Oil and Fish Stock, serving as variants of the already existing recipes for Oil and Meat Stock.
- Added: Hewn Logs can now be turned into Charcoal.
- Changed: Pots and Wet Bricks are now crafted on the new Pottery Table.
- Changed: Barrels are now crafted on the Rolling Mill using Advanced Smelting.
- Changed: Bows are now crafted on the new Fletching Table using Hunting. (Wooden bow remains on the Tool Bench)
- Changed: Arrows now have two recipes, one on the Tool Bench and another one on the Fletching Table.
- Changed: Pottery Upgrade Module recipe was moved to the Pottery Table.
- Changed: Paper Milling Upgrade Module recipe was moved to Small Paper Machine.
- Changed: Dendrology Research Paper ingredient was moved to Basic Upgrade 1.
- Changed: Gathering Research Paper ingredient was moved to Basic Upgrade 2.
- Changed: Replaced Cellulose Fiber ingredient for Recurve Bow with Linen Yarn.
- Changed: Increased craft time of Basic Engineering Upgrade.
- Changed: Electric Machinist Table recipe now requires Mechanics labor.
- Changed: Steel bars now use iron concentrate instead of iron bars and require more ingredients, but also yield more product.
- Changed: Rebar, Rivet and Steel Pipes now require the new Power Hammer present in the room to be crafted.
- Changed: Bloomery and Blast Furnace now require to be placed inside a room to function.
- Changed: Bloomery now uses Basic instead of Advanced Upgrades.
- Changed: Food Variety bonus maximum cap was lowered to 1.55.
- Changed: Total calories required to be eaten of a single type of food to be included in variety bonus increased to 2000.
- Changed: Bows now require hunting specialty for repairing.
- Fixed: Variants of the Cotton Bunting on the Automatic Loom were only costing labour, but no ingredients.
- Fixed: The ingredient cost of boards for the handplow was unintendedly high.
Civics
- Added: New game value "Direct Citizen", allowing to check if a player is a direct citizen of a settlement.
- Added: New option "Allow any unaffiliated homestead deed to expand within our influence" for the border control feature that now also is the default setting to prevent hostile takeover of settlements by surprise.
- Improved: The game value "Property Owned" can now also count only plots that are in or out a given settlement.
- Improved: Players can now join a settlement without removing their homestead support papers as long as they add a sufficient amount of settlement papers before joining.
- Improved: Players are no longer prompted to remove their homestead support papers or add settlement papers when trying to join a settlement if the inserted homestead support papers aren't actually needed to keep up the currently claimed area.
- Improved: When leaving a settlement that has a parent settlement, players can now choose to remain citizen of the parent settlement instead of losing all citizenship.
- Improved: Made the descriptions of immigration settings and law actions easier to understand and more clear.
- Changed: The influence radius of a settlement is now fixed once it is founded and cannot be moved, foundations themselves can only be moved within a limited, configurable circle around the original position.
- Changed: Cultural deeds must now be located within an existing influence circle plus tolerance of a configurable percentage belonging to a different cultural deed. If a chain of cultural deeds loses continuous connection towards the settlement's foundation at any point, all cultural deeds no longer connected in this way will be disabled after a timer runs out.
- Changed: Notifications about property crisis no longer display the required amount of claim stakes and papers that need to be inserted into the foundation to avoid confusion due to the notifications not being able to update themselves - the correct and current information is now always available in the tooltip that appears when hovering the foundation deed.
- Fixed: A client disconnect when viewing government bank accounts in a treasury on a server that has settlements disabled.
- Fixed: Treasury bank accounts weren't being destroyed when the settlement was, becoming visible for mayors of any settlement.
- Fixed: It was possible to edit the constitution without needing amendments.
- Fixed: Child settlements didn't always correctly influence deeds created with claim stakes of parent settlements.
- Fixed: Ignoring authorization for vehicles wasn't possible.
- Fixed: Creating contracts with multiple nested clauses would disconnect the client from the server.
- Fixed: Distribution stations weren't functional when the settlement system is disabled.
- Fixed: Resources gained on annexation weren't correctly distributed to all eligible citizens of the annexed settlement.
- Fixed: Repeatable contracts could be accepted and finished multiple times despite only fulfilling them a single time. (For example, a contract requiring to place X blocks would consider the same placed blocks fulfilling all accepted copies instead of requiring placement of new blocks for every contract copy)
Exhaustion
- Fixed: The tooltip for the exhaustion bar didn't display correctly.
- Fixed: The icon for the exhaustion tutorial was missing.
- Fixed: Picking up rubble was possible even when exhausted.
Interaction
- Fixed: Cancel action triggering another action when using multi-block placement mode.
- Fixed: Targeting edges of blocks wouldn't work when using multi-block placement mode.
- Fixed: A potential cause for showing the harvest animation while only hovering a plant.
- Fixed: Holding e when opening the Trash Pile UI would cause it to open and directly play the animation to close it.
- Fixed: Trying to use the handplow while seeds are selected in the hotbar would sometimes lead to the seeds being eaten.
- Fixed: Fertilizing would remove the fertilizer from the first stack found in the hotbar, not the currently selected one.
- Fixed: Objects placable in water would display wrong occupancy highlight when doing so.
- Fixed: Clicking outside of the soil sampler tool ui would close the ui and immediately retrigger the soil sampler and hence open the ui again.
- Fixed: Diagonal building for the forms "HalfSlopeA", "HalfSlopeB", "SlopeSide", "RoofSide" and "BasicSlopeSide".
- Fixed: It was possible to pick up garbage in deeds without authorization.
- Fixed: When trying to fell a tree its stump was highlighted as valid target for the tool despite it wasn't.
- Fixed: Trying to remove claim papers from a homestead via shift-click would disconnect the client from the server.
UI
- Added: Ecopedia page for seeds.
- Improved: Moved Beans, Camas Bulb and Rice to the "Produce" section of Ecopedia.
- Improved: The submit button in the distribution station does no longer disappear when the configured number of an item is the same as the currently saved setting, but instead becomes uninteractable.
- Improved: Updated the icons displayed in the work order tutorial.
- Improved: The picture viewer was updated to make the preview frame serve as a slot to drop a picture onto at the same time and is now universally used both on the settlement foundation and printer ui.
- Improved: The notification about needing to finish a draft contract before being able to create a new one is now displayed as a pop up to be easier noticeable.
- Improved: The spawn selection screen will now prioritize suggesting settlements that still need citizens as they are smaller as other ones.
- Improved: The skill ui now highlights the selected skill with a yellow border and the confirmation popup when learning a new skill will now say explicitly which skill was selected and is about to be learned.
- Improved: Profession icons shown in the level up animation now have a higher resolution.
- Improved: The tooltip of rentable deeds will now show a notice if the option "Allow property changes while renting" is enabled for that deed.
- Fixed: Deleted vehicle deeds would still show up as reference in user tooltips.
- Fixed: When using shift+left-click on an item with amount 1, 5 or 10 the respective transfer option in the slider would be shown twice.
- Fixed: Five-digit amounts of an item weren't displayed correctly in the store ui.
- Fixed: The settlements view showed the line "Government of name" when no settlement was selected.
- Fixed: In the annexation list, not every mention of a settlement provided a tooltip when hovering over it.
- Fixed: The bug report ui didn't reset its contents after a bug report was sent.
- Fixed: When reading a skill scrollall skill experience bars would change their color, wrongly indiciating that all experience would have been gained in the current play session.
- Fixed: The store ui didn't show the currency icon, but instead displayed a line of code.
- Fixed: The notifications for a dissolved settlement wouldn't link the dissolved settlement and hence not allow hovering it for a tooltip.
- Fixed: The waterwheel showed internal item codes instead of linked item names where it informed about things obstructing its rotation.
- Fixed: Scrolling in the texture review panel didn't work reliably.
- Fixed: Some generators displayed a wrong power type in the "Consumes:" line on their tooltips.
- Fixed: The icon for claim papers in the annexation ui was not displayed correctly.
- Fixed: Deleted settlements could appear as potential spawn point, leading to a black screen on selection.
- Fixed: Notifications for experience gained could appear on photos.
- Fixed: Icons on the map moved when the map was moved.
- Fixed: When zooming in on the fullscreen map, players far away could appear as big icons at the borders.
- Fixed: An issue where depending on the player's locale the correct decimal separator was not recognized and couldn't be entered into respective fields.
- Fixed: Recurring transfers displayed in player tooltips didn't update on changes until a server restart.
Notifications
- Fixed: Wrong error message when building in multi-block placement mode when not having enough building materials stating "Not attached to the ground" instead of "Need x more blocks".
- Fixed: Authorized players accessing a distribution station would cause a wrong notification in the newsfeed for every access attempt.
- Fixed: Notifications when not being able to interact with something were triggered twice in many cases.
- Fixed: When attempting to add items to a full inventory the notification erroneously displayed "Inventory too heavy" instead of "Inventory is full".
World Objects
- Improved: Lighting furniture now functions again outside of rooms.
- Improved: Green electricity generators no longer automatically turn off when they are not needed, retaining their animations.
- Fixed: Force-enabled computer lab and lasers no longer require electricity to be used.
- Fixed: Electrical pumps didn't have a flow rate of 4 as it is intended.
- Fixed: Stores that were owned by a title did not recheck if the bank account can still be accessed by the title when a title holder lost the title - if the title can no longer access the bank account at any point it will now be reset and if the title has no holders at all anymore the store will be disabled.
- Fixed: The water wheel could rotate in the wrong direction in relation to the water flow.
- Fixed: After transferring ownership of an object, the original owner could still grant authorization for it.
- Fixed: The warning about imminent drowning when getting hungry while swimming was sent to everyone instead of only the affected player.
Miscellaneous
- Added: Method for mods to track text changes of signs. (Thanks to JulianMa)
- Added: A confirmation popup when resetting the tutorial.
- Improved: Increased ecopedia font to 22px size.
- Improved: Animal behaviour when fleeing or wandering and when stuck.
- Improved: The dev tool can now remove blocks through water, to target water blocks CTRL needs to be held.
- Fixed: An issue related to claim papers that could corrupt and prevent a world from loading.
- Fixed: A crash that could occur when exiting to the main menu while a world was loading.
- Fixed: Elevators could get desynced, displaying at a position above their base.
- Fixed: An issue that could lead to a disconnect with error "Failed to handle RPCResponse" when eating food.
- Fixed: Vehicles in elevators could appear as levitating to other players, this fix freezes vehicles like on boats.
- Fixed: Multiple display issues with water, especially at "corners" of water.
- Fixed: Kelp, Clam and Urchin didn't spread correctly.
- Fixed: Boats could "fly" when driving where there were placed blocks above it.
- Fixed: Barges would play their ramp animation before showing the correct ramp state when the chunk the barge is in is reloaded.
- Fixed: Crafting recipes that have variants for their form instead of their material would yield unexpected results when not choosing a specific variant.
Server & Configs
- Added: A setting that allows to give players a retroactive experience gain when joining the server later.
- Added: Commands "/adddems" and "/removedems" to assign a demographic to or remove a demographic from a player permanently, ignoring the demographics' requirements.
- Improved: The "/help" command now displays the number type and "(optional)" instead of "*" for optional parameters.
- Improved: Ground levelling for the "/bt" and "/bm" commands is now an optional parameter.
- Fixed: The "/road" command now also works again with asphalt roads.
- Fixed: The "/teleport atob" command would teleported players onto the head of the target, which wasn't very healthy.
- Fixed: The spawn selection screen appeared despite the config variable "InitialSpawnSelection" being set to false.
- Added: "RetroactiveExperienceRate" config variable, determining an experience rate that players joining a server after start will be assumed to have had for all the time they were not on the server yet and be granted retroactively - defaults to 0 for disabled.
- Added: "ExhaustionTimeEnabled" config variable, determining if the exhaustion feature is active - defaults to false.
- Added: "RefreshLocalHours" config variable, determining the hour of the exhaustion refresh in local time - defaults to 0.
- Added: "RefreshLocalMinutes" config variable, determining the minute of the exhaustion refresh in local time - defaults to 0.
- Added: "MondayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on mondays - defaults to 3.
- Added: "TuesdayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on tuesdays - defaults to 3.
- Added: "WednesdayExhaustionRefreshHours": config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on wednesdays - defaults to 3.
- Added: "ThursdayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on thursdays - defaults to 3.
- Added: "FridayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on fridays - defaults to 6.
- Added: "SaturdayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on saturdays - defaults to 6.
- Added: "SundayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on sundays - defaults to 6.
- Added: "AllowPlaytimeSaving" config variable, determining if unused exhaustion hours can be saved for a later day - defaults to true.
- Added: "MaxSavedHours" config variable, determining how many exhaustion hours can be saved at maximum - defaults to 15.
- Added: "AllowExhaustionPauseOnRest" config variable, determining if resting on any furniture stops the exhaustion timer, defaults to true.
- Added: "BonusHoursOnExhaustionEnabled" config variable, determining an amount of bonus exhaustion hours granted for the first login - defaults to 2.
- Added: "BonusRetroactiveHoursAfterStart" config variable, determining if players joining the server later get the exhaustion hours of days they missed granted retroactively up the maximum amount that can be saved - defaults to true.
- Added: "Vehicles" config variable, determines for every vehicle in the game on if it is affected by exhaustion limits or not.
- Added: "BaseInfluenceRadiusFoundationMovementAllowedAfterFounding" config variable, determining the range around the original position of a foundation in which the foundation can be moved after founding as a percentage of its base influence (without culture) - defaults to 50.
- Added: "CultureDeedLinkPercentRequirement" config variable, determining the percentage of a cultural deeds' influence that is added as tolerance for valid placement of additional cultural deeds in a chain - defaults to 30.
- Added: "HoursBeforeInvalidatingCultureDeed" config variable, determining the amount of hours ticking down as timer before cultural deeds with invalid placement get disabled - defaults to 2.
As always let us know feedback on our Feedback Tracker[feedback.play.eco] or Discord[discord.gg] and be invited to read up on our plans for V1 and exiting Early Access in our earlier blog post.
Enjoy!
- Strange Loop Team]]>
- Fixed: Wheelbarrows didn't move correctly.
- Fixed: Loan contracts could not be accepted.
- Fixed: When admin assigning a settlement as member to another one, the parent settlement could lose all the already existing child settlements.
- Improved: Claim papers vanishing from a deed due to the settlement they were issued from being dissolved led to unsupported property being unclaimed immediately - it will now instead provide a grace time to replace papers or decide which parts of one's deed to unclaim to be within the limits again.
With our biggest update ever - ‘Eco 10’ - out the door, it’s time to set our eyes on the next big milestone: Eco V1, exiting Early Access!
Early Access has been an amazing way to develop this experimental new genre of a living government/economy/ecosystem mashed together and run by real people, we’ve got so much great feedback from the community, as well as funding to let us build out the extent of our vision. Now, with the bulk of features added (minus a couple big ones coming this year), we plan to spend the year building and then Early Access at the end of the year/beginning of next year.
To achieve this, we have a ton of work to do over the course of the year, and we have set a roadmap based heavily on player feedback. Our goal with V1 is to produce a highly polished, performant, accessible, and long-lasting gameplay experience. This means that we are putting the focus on improving and polishing existing systems rather than introducing new ones. We’ve based this decision on player surveys and stats from reviews, and the results were a clear mandate: make what we have more polished, and smooth it all out.
From that we’ve compiled a roadmap of what we hope to achieve, which can be divided into several main categories:
Bugs and Performance
Top focus is fixing anything and everything that annoys the player and delivering a highly performant build at v1. We’re focusing on user feedback from reviews and surveys and user-study sessions to set our priorities here.Professions
- More Professions. We intend to flesh out professions with lots more options to choose from and paths to take within those skills, to create a greater spread of possible careers, thus creating more ‘niches’ for players to specialize in and become valuable members of their community. We will scale this with collaboration settings so that small servers can still cover everything needed.
- Infinite star spend. Right now, there comes a point when you’ve spent all the stars you can, and thus the need for high-tier food and homes dries up. By V1, we will have added many more ways to spend stars, such that there will always be a need for stars no matter how developed your society is, and thus there will always be demand for these core professions. Part of this will be the ability to spend stars on talents (the upgrade choices you get as you level up), with branching paths that you have to choose creating further niches driving more collaboration, as well as spending stars on objects to upgrade them.
- Maintenance. Everything will wear down and, if not maintained, break over time. This creates a constant need on professions to supply parts and perform repairs on these objects, preventing professions from going obsolete when all the needed objects are produced.
- More upgrades. One of the best ways to prevent that feeling of grind is to have continuous upgrades in your ability to do things. That means you will only be digging with a shovel/swinging a pickaxe for a short time before you get upgraded tools and vehicles that make this action obsolete and allow collecting much more resources with much less effort. We will be analyzing every profession to ensure that upgrades in abilities become available frequently, which we believe will greatly reduce any feeling of grind. One example we intend to produce is explosives for mining, allowing much greater bulk collection of ore.
Ecosystem Impact
For V1, we want to make interacting with the ecosystem much deeper and more impactful:- Garbage. All crafting will create garbage, which must be dealt with by putting into trash containers, which can then be picked up by a trash service run by your settlement, funded perhaps from tax dollars. If garbage is left out, or left in a trash can too long, it will begin to pollute the environment. This creates a mechanic that will both impact ecosystem and economy (trash collection and funding for it).
- Oil Spills. Connected to the maintenance task above, we will add the possibility of pipes to burst when not maintained, and for vehicle transport of oil or other pollutants to spill when driving on unmaintained roads or with an unmaintained vehicle. This creates a scalable difficulty for major disasters, as oil spills which will have a disastrous impact on the environment and require a lot of work to clean up. We’ll also make tainted water affect any housing systems that rely on it.
- Challenges Beyond the Meteor. We plan to add more end-game disasters and challenges beyond the meteor, challenges that will arise and face society over time. We’ll be deciding on what to target and designing it out with citizen input over the year.
Accessibility and Learning Curve
This is about making the game easy to jump into, flattening the learning curve so you can interact in rich and interesting ways without having to understand a lot of complex mechanics. It's also about making the game have deeper ‘emotions’: representing the beauty of the natural and man-made worlds, taking care of animals, and general coziness that makes it very comfortable to spend time in. Additions include:- Animal Husbandry. This will be our marquee launch feature, which will include raising animals for meat, milk, eggs, and wool, as well as pets, which will give a home bonus. All animals in general will get an upgrade as well, making their pathfinding and behaviors highly polished.
- New User Experience polish. Making the initial flow for new users through the tutorial and connecting to a community seamless and fun. We’re doing user studies on new players to see the sticking points and address them.
- Outdoor Housing Decoration. Adding a new scoring category for outdoor land, so that you can decorate your space beautifully and get rewarded for it, making for quaint and pretty villages.
- Off-grid placement. Some items will be able to be placed on surfaces off-grid, i.e. setting objects on tables and shelves, to decorate your space in greater detail. It will also allow hosting dinner parties with placed food, which can have a cultural reward.
- Canny-voted items. We’ve integrated a system called Canny that allows citizens to propose and vote on what they believe are the important issues for them here[feedback.play.eco]. We’ll be tracking this and fixing top-voted items continuously, especially ones that are low effort + high impact. Feel free to hop in and make suggestions and vote on existing ones.
- Expanded culture system. With Eco 10 we introduced the culture system, which allows you to earn points for creative works. We plan to expand into other systems and deepen its impact on the game, as it serves for a great evergreen goal.
It’s worth noting that once we do exit Early Access, things will not slow down, in fact they will likely speed up, as we have lots more plans we want to do after that. (Trains for example will be a big one post v1, which was neck and neck with Animal Husbandry as the marquee feature, but we decided it’s better to stay focused on just one of the two and so will make Trains in an early update post v1).
So stay tuned, tons more to come and it’s going to be an exciting year!]]>
Civics:
- Fixed: In specific circumstances annexation didn't work due not consuming the necessary resources.
- Fixed: When a bank account on a bank was destroyed due to the linked settlement dissolving, its owner received double the amount of currency they had on the bank account to their personal account.
- Fixed: Joining a settlement by placing a homestead with the respective option enabled was not possible when foreign property ownership was disallowed in the immigration policy.
- Improved: When a deed has more claimed plots than claim papers supporting them, there is now a timer counting down before unsupported plots will be removed.
- Improved: The error notification when an annexation fails due to not consuming the necessary resources was made more helpful.
General:
- Fixed: For users of the french and spanish language (and potentially others) spawn points on the map weren't displayed by default.
- Fixed: A potential issue that could lead to a black circle overlaying the UI.
- Fixed: The dev flood tool didn't work correctly when trying to add or remove a layer on the top of a body of water.
- Fixed: When breaking aqueducts or pipes the game could create water source blocks that were unremovable.
- Improved: The dev flood tool can now remove all connected water, this action is potentially dangerous and requires confirmation in a popup.
- Improved: Multiple small improvements to aqueducts, making it easier to build and use them. (More changes coming in the future)
Interaction:
- Fixed: The main menu wasn't displayed when the last joined server / local world was invalid.
- Fixed: Vehicles on a barge wouldn't get locked when the driver is still in the vehicle.
- Fixed: Vehicles on a barge could get locked in a flying position.
- Fixed: Vehicles could stay locked on a barge even after the ramp was opened.
- Fixed: Multiple issues with collisions at the ramp of barges.
- Fixed: Claiming via the map didn't work correctly for unfounded settlements.
- Fixed: Claim papers and stakes could be taken from a town foundation dwithout authorization when swapping them while already having any type of claim papers or stakes in the inventory.
- Fixed: An issue with the hammer that allowed to rapidly click without limitations at a storage.
Server:
- Fixed: An issue that could cause a server crash and subsequent inability to start the server related to crafting fees.
- Fixed: An issue that could cause server crash and subsequent removal of all currently running work orders.
- Fixed: Several issues that could potentially lead to server crashes.
- Fixed: The /unclaim command didn't work when the linked deed had residents.
- Fixed: Civics.eco.template was not reflecting the prolongued civic invalidity timer of 60 minutes from Update 10.1. (Make sure to adjust the config of your server if you have a Civics.eco and want to make use of this change)
General:
- Fixed: The crane was causing a client crash when used to pick items up from a storage and could afterwards no longer be removed from the world due to that causing another crash
- Fixed: Elevators didn't function reliably with vehicles, them sometimes getting stuck or falling through them
- Fixed: The Twitch plugin sometimes claimed it is disabled on the server, despite it was enabled
- Fixed: After using /ownit on a vehicle, players authorized on it could no longer be reliably removed
- Fixed: An issue that could lead to a server crash when the water of a pipe was flowing into a different chunk
- Fixed: A rare issue that could lead to a server crash and corrupt the savegame, preventing the start of the server
- Fixed: Memory required only during server connection wasn't freed after the connection finished
Civics:
- Fixed: Setting wages on demographics and titles did not correctly setup the recurring transfers for the wage, preventing them from being paid out
- Fixed: When many property changes occured, the annexation table was unable to reliably show a selection of annexable settlements and too many notifications were triggered
- Fixed: An issue that could lead to the reputation given by a law to be extremely higher than the set value
- Fixed: Adding a constitutional amendment under specific circumstances could lead to a client disconnect
- Improved: Buy orders for Homestead support papers and settlement papers can now specify their origin to be "Any settlement", making acquiring of homestead support papers easier
UI:
- Improved: Hovering over items in the work order bar at a work table will show the tooltip for that specific item again, instead of the general tooltip of the work order bar
- Improved: The game will now show separate informational error dialogues when connection to steam backend servers or our own was not possible when it was started
General:
- Fixed: An issue related to claim papers that could lead to a crashloop on servers
- Fixed: An issue related to constitutions that could lead to a crashloop on servers
- Fixed: An issue that made it possible to unlink claim stakes and papers from their settlements, allowing to use them anywhere
Civics:
- Fixed: Appointed titles wouldn't always correctly consider the holders of member titles as occupants
- Improved: Annexation notifications due to culture were still triggering too often, they will now only trigger when a culture value higher than the so far highest achieved value was reached
Interaction:
- Fixed: Vehicles driven onto barges couldn't be driven off them anymore
- Fixed: Right clicking to deposit resources into a storage one is only authorized on didn't work
UI:
- Fixed: Eating animations for some foods showed pink particles
- Fixed: Hovering over contracts in the economy viewer did not display the expected tooltip
- Fixed: Hovering over items in a "Put items into container" clause of a contract did not display the expected tooltip
- Fixed: An issue that prevented some players to join some servers
- Fixed: Even miniscule changes in culture triggered notifications for annexations, leading to spam
- Fixed: The /unstuck command didn't work correctly when used while being on a boat on the ocean
- Fixed: Vehicles that were parked on a deed were put into void storage when its owner was removed from residency of that deed
Homestead Support Papers
This update contains a new type of claim papers, called "Homestead Support Papers", which just like normal settlement papers will spawn in the settlement foundation based on the amount of citizens it has. The special thing about these is that they cannot be used within the influence of a settlement, but only to expand homesteads located outside.
Homestead Support Papers have no use for settlements - the intention is for these papers to be given away, allowing players that prefer to not be part of a town or that are farming outside of a settlement to increase the size of their homestead to a degree only limited by how many of these papers they can acquire. The value for the settlement is the income or reputation they can generate through this mechanic. Homestead support papers work anywhere they can be used, no matter from which settlement they were received. We hope that this new mechanic addresses space problems some of our players experienced while preserving the importance of settlements, but we also made other changes that should help with that.
Changes to Annexation
While monitoring the usage of this feature we have noticed that it is still used too often in a way we have not intended, especially to gain new claim papers by gaining new citizens for one's own settlement. In this Update we have changed the default requirements for annexations to cost additional materials depending on the tier of the settlement annexed. The cost will now also depend on the amount of citizens the target has, e.g. the more citizens a town has, the more the annexation will cost.
The most impactful change we made is that annexations now require claim papers to be paid to the target, both for homesteads as well as for lower level settlements, which is supposed to make annexations with the goal to increase the amount of claim papers no longer viable as they are now one of the costs.
For homesteads specifically, a town that wishes to annex it also needs to replace all homestead support papers assigned to that homestead with its own town claim papers. (Additional to the general amount they have to provide already) The homestead support papers will be exchanged with those seamlessly on annexation and be given back to the settlements they originated from. This ensures that homesteads have a way to make their annexation much harder as long as their owners are actively playing and that none of the additional claimed property gets lost when the citizenship changes. The annexation of homesteads whose owners are abandoned is completely free, ensuring that settlements aren't blocked from implementing their plans and projects by abandoned property.
It is now also easily possible to disable annexations on your server completely if you would rather not use this feature.
Release Notes
Avatars
- Fixed: When connecting to a server after having left it with the avatar sleeping, the UI would show the inside of the avatars face and prevent interactions until reconnecting to the server
- Fixed: When entering water while eating, the avatar would loose its hand animations and prevent any interactions until reconnecting to the server
- Fixed: Avatars that had invalid items could lead to the player only seeing a black screen after connection to a server
- Fixed: The avatar's backpack didn't hide when sitting on a chair or mounting a vehicle
Balance
- Changed: Decreased maximum givable reputation by laws of towns from 20 to 10 and for countries from 30 to 20
- Changed: Culture calculation now uses the lower of the artist's / the picture's reputation instead of the sum of both - this can notably reduce existing culture where it was mostly gained by artist instead of picture reputation and hence lead to influence sizes appearing smaller after updating (If this causes trouble on your server, you can increase the "SettlementInfluenceMultiplier" inside Settlements.eco to make up for this change)
- Changed: Increased shelf life of all cooking oils to match the one of Flaxseed Oil
- Changed: Reduced labour cost of seed crafting from 25 to 20
- Changed: Adjusted lumber recipe to require less Flaxseed Oil, it now yields 2 lumber pieces with only the other ingredient costs increased to match
- Fixed: Geology Modern Papers were having a static ingredient cost for glass, it is now dynamic
Civics
- Added: A setting in the immigration policy that allows determining if child settlements can annex each other
- Added: New civic conditions "Is Government Account" and "Matches Settlement"
- Added: New game value "Settlement of Bank Account", allowing to check if the bank account used in a transaction is hosted by any settlements specified
- Changed: The "Border Control" setting allowing to grant specific players or citizens of other settlements the ability to expand deeds into your own settlements' influence with claim papers that aren't of your own settlement was moved from the "Embassy Desk" to the "Settlement Foundation" and is now enabled by default for everyone
- Fixed: The influence of settlements could be projected at a completely different place than where they actually were when their foundation deed was located around the 0 coordinate wrap border
- Fixed: There was a discrepency in regard to where homesteads can be placed between the client and the server at the borders of unfounded settlements
- Fixed: It was possible to accept citizens into an unfounded settlement and then move it, keeping the already accepted citizens now no longer within its influence. When a homestead would no longer be covered by the influence when moving a settlement it will now inform the acting player that the homesteads affected by this will loose their citizenship, which they need to confirm.
- Fixed: Editing deeds via the map didn't take into account the setting for if a settlement allows foreign property ownership, enabling non-citizen players that already owned a property in a settlement to continue to expand their deed even when foreign property ownership was disabled since acquiring that property
- Fixed: Foundations with the default "Everyone" permission did not always correctly prevent players from taking claim papers out of it, which is supposed to only be possible by the Mayor with that permission set
- Fixed: It was possible to edit or remove the citizenship demographic of a settlement, leading to the settlement becoming invalid
- Fixed: Removing a citizen from a settlement while it was offline caused a server crash
- Fixed: Trying to remove a citizenship application on a settlement that was assigned as child of another settlement via admin tools lead to a client disconnect, all applications will now be removed when a settlement is assigned to be a child settlement this way
- Fixed: Multiple civic related server crashes that appeared in unforseen edge cases
- Fixed: Trying to place a capitol on a server that has settlements enabled or placing a foundation on a server that has settlements disabled caused a server crash, placing will now correctly provide an error in the UI
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, civic objects wouldn't allow their usage until forceenabled as they were considering themselves to not be within jurisdiction of a settlement
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, civics weren't considered valid and removed themselves after the invalidity timer ran out
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, claiming would sometimes show an error saying the action would not be valid due to not being within a settlements influence
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, when unclaiming the last plot of a deed would crash the server
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, it was not possible to sell claim papers
- Fixed: With settlements disabled, it was not possible to use the treasury
- Improved: Constitutions can no longer become invalid, preventing players from being stuck with an invalid constitution they cannot edit despite valid options to do so would be available
- Improved: Settlements can no longer become invalid due to missing or invalid civics, only by failing their base requirements
- Improved: Settlements will now automatically try to repair invalid entries by resetting them - this can also be done manually by using the new admin command /resettle
- Improved: Invalidity warnings for civic objects are now sent multiple times during the duration of the invalidity timer to make it more likely that players notice them, additionally the default invalidity timer has been increased from 20 to 60 minutes.
- Improved: Invalidity warnings are now only sent to the creator of the civic object and any players that have authorization on the deed the object is located on and could hence actually solve the problem
Interaction
- Fixed: Interacting with a felled log using a soil sampler caused a client disconnect
- Fixed: Interacting while in third person didn't always reliably work due to the interaction origin being tied to the camera, instead of the player
- Fixed: The skid steer was accepting items it is not intended for that when placed by the skidsteer would create a unremovable white square
- Fixed: Grass that had grown on tilled soil couldn't be removed by tilling it again
- Fixed: Claim stakes defaulted to a vehicle deed if that was the last remaining deed
- Fixed: Stone roads did not have a default form selected when using the hammer
- Fixed: Plants highlighted already harvested fruits when hovering them
- Fixed: Objects displayed and set to be available for purchase in the world couldn't be bought due to an authorization issue
- Fixed: When trying to mount a vehicle multiple times quickly or during lag the player could end up driving a vehicle in the passenger seat
- Fixed: When placing blocks in a multiform with the hammer the error message "Not attached to ground" could wrongly appear when the actual problem was the building range being invalid
- Fixed: Mounting a vehicle in first person view would always rotate the camera to face north
- Fixed: Transferring ownership of a deed to a different player, title or demographic caused a client disconnect
- Fixed: The ramp of the barge could be opened despite not being authorized to do so
- Improved: Paintings can now be added to and removed from frames via simple shift + right click
UI
- Added: The game will now show a information message when connection to the authentication servers isn't possible, informing the player about our status page and the support mail
- Added: Notifications for sales made with the "For Sale" feature
- Fixed: Contract acceptance confirmations didn't show the requirements to fulfill the contract
- Fixed: Crafting orders could show a "Halted" hint in their tooltip despite that wasn't the case due to not taking into account upgrades reducing the required amount of ingredients for a recipe
- Fixed: Holding food in ones hands while in third person view and interacting with something could lead to the food additionally appearing on the screen as it would in first person
- Fixed: Draft settlements were showing in the government UI, clogging up the view
- Fixed: The "x" button to remove applicants for citizenship didn't do anything
- Fixed: Hovering over a link in the notification menu could show the tooltip for something the player didn't hover
- Fixed: The settlement picture area wasn't correctly showing in the foundation UI
- Fixed: The password entry dialogue when trying to join a server was not displaying the mouse cursor
- Fixed: Tooltip parts added by mods weren't reliably displayed due to a loading order issue
- Fixed: Settlement influence wasn't shown on the map until turning the setting off and on again
- Fixed: Map settings weren't saving the selection for settlement influence between play sessions
- Improved: The notifications for removed claim papers will now explain why they were removed
- Improved: Reworked the game entry flow, making the entry to the game menu more smooth
Objects / World:
- Fixed: Grass was spreading onto tilled soil
- Fixed: The fishing trawler was catching fish even if it wasn't moving
- Fixed: The ramp of the barge wasn't correctly synced between all players
- Fixed: The settlement crafting table had wrong occupancy values, it now fits its size
- Fixed: The plastic buoy had wrong occupancy, it now fits its size
Miscellaneous
- Fixed: The game was crashing when trying to join a server on old CPU's that do not support SSE 4.2 / AVX 2, we have implemented a workaround for that
- Fixed: An issue with the chat that could lead to a severe decrease of performance
- Fixed: Twitch integration causing connection issues that slowed the game down when enabled
- Fixed: Branch occlusion in third person wasn't working correctly
- Fixed: Shadows were not moving smoothly with the sunlight
- Fixed: Additional causes for rubble teleporting
- Improved: Multiple changes to animal pathfinding to make it more smooth
- Improved: Added a new volume slider for weather sounds
- Improved: Only unclaiming (instead of also claiming) is now restricted by default when a property has residents on it - the option that can be set by the landlord to enable property changes and warn potential residents about this before agreeing to a rental has been adjusted respectively to reflect that
Server & Configs
- Added: A setting that automatically scales influence sizes of settlements with the world size, enabled by default
- Changed: Changing the property owner of a deed via admin commands will no longer turn off objects on that deed like a regular transfer would
- Fixed: Server restarts were resetting the available item count in work orders to 0 until the linked storages were updated, despite items were available to continue crafting
- Fixed: Changing the anonymous voting setting for the basic default election caused an error in the server ui
- Fixed: The server changed the "AFKOccupancyBeforeAFKKick" config value back to 0 when restarting the server, overwriting the configured value in the config file
- Added: "CraftingQueueQuantity" config variable, defining the number of work orders a crafting table can hold at the same time - defaults to 5.
- Added: "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsDisabled" config variable, defining the number of claim stakes (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are disabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
- Added: "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsDisabled" config variable, defining the number of claim papers (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are disabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
- Added: "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsEnabled" config variable, defining the number of claim stakes (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are enabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
- Added: "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsEnabled" config variable, defining the number of claim papers (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are enabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
- Removed: "GiveStakesAndClaimsEvenWhenSettlementsAreEnabled" config variable.
- Removed: "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumed" config variable.
- Removed: "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumed" config variable.
- Added: "ScaleInfluenceBasedOnWorldSize" config variable, determining if settlement influence scales automatically with world size - defaults to true.
- Added: "MayAnnexSameLevel" config variable, determining if settlements can annex other settlements of the same level - defaults to false.
- Added: "MayAnnexSubSettlements" config variable, determining if settlements can annex other settlements of lower level - defaults to true.
- Added: "HomesteadSupportClaimsPerCitizen" config variable, determining how many homestead support papers are spawned per citizen - defaults to 5, 5, 5.
- Added: "HomesteadSupportClaimsPerAbandonedCitizen" config variable, determining how many homestead support papers are spawned per abandoned citizen - defaults to 3, 3, 3.
- Renamed: "ClaimStakesPerCitizenPastFirst" to "ClaimStakesPerCitizen".
- Renamed: "LandClaimsPerCitizenPastFirst" to "SettlementClaimsPerCitizen".
- Renamed: "LandClaimsPerAbandonedCitizen" to "SettlementClaimsPerAbandonedCitizen".
General:
- Fixed: Under specific circumstances it was possible to place blocks outside of the allowed height limits, breaking the savegame and leading to a black screen with HUD for all players on the server
- Fixed: Using the "Approve all" function for pictures deleted all pictures that were supposed to be approved
- Fixed: Approving a picture that was already approved deleted the picture
Civics:
- Fixed: It was possible to override the permission to transfer properties outside of law jurisdiction
- Fixed: Laws that use "Citizen Timer" were able to affect players outside of law jurisdiction
Server:
- Fixed: A memory leak related to room calculations
- Fixed: An issue that could cause the server to lock up, halting crafting timers and breaking interaction
We are currently working on a bigger patch addressing lots of issues that aren't as critical, scheduled for release within the coming days.]]>
- Fixed: Shooting down the meteor could lead to an achievement related server crash
- Fixed: Pictures in a invalid state (having no creator assigned) could crash the server and corrupt the save game, this fix will scan pictures on server start for this state and assign them a creator to fix save games retroactively
- Fixed: Some other server crashes that could be caused by pictures
- Fixed: Achievements were not properly storing progress and some were hence unobtainable
- Fixed: The levelup animation didn't display its graphics correctly
General:
- Fixed: Multiple usability problems with tools, especially the bows and the fishing rod
- Improved: Canoes should feel more responsive to your interactions when steering them
- Improved: Adjusted temperature and moisture ranges for "Flax" plant to have better habitability
- Removed: The network multiplier for reputation was removed, it was causing confusion to players and is no longer necessary with the new settlements system
Civics:
- Fixed: Towns founded by citizens that lost their prior town due to the civics invalidity timer showed a property crisis mentioning deeds that were part of their prior town and do no longer exist
- Fixed: Custom stats that due to the name of the settlement or its founder had special characters in their full internal name were causing database issues that could lead to a multitude of strange effects
- Fixed: The law trigger "First Login" wasn't hidden on worlds with settlements turned on, as is intended
- Improved: Performance on scanning properties when changing laws, this notably improves civic performance
Technical:
- Fixed: It wasn't possible to create a new world with randomized world generation through the game client
- Fixed: It was possible to generate invalid worlds with a height over 160, leading to players seeing a black screen with HUD when joining them after a while. The world generator will no longer generate worlds with a height going over this limit.
- Fixed: Some players could get stuck at around 80% of loading when reconnecting to a server
- Improved: Multiple improvements to face tracking, including better webcam detection
Singleplayer:
For singleplayers (and dedicated servers with settlements turned off) we have added back the ability to gain claim papers (and now also claim stakes) when they read a skill scroll, as it worked in Update 9. These claim papers and stakes work anywhere and are not bound to a settlement. This is enabled by default when a singleplayer world is created with the "No Collaboration" setting and on dedicated servers that have settlements turned off.For this to work on singleplayer worlds that were created in Update 10, the configuration needs to be adjusted - the easiest way to do this for singleplayers is to create a new world in the client with the default "No Collaboration" setting, adjusting advanced settings as desired, then load their currently played world again - configs apply to all worlds currently and are not saved per world.
The new configuration options are found in Difficulty.eco file:
- "GiveStakesAndClaimsEvenWhenSettlementsAreEnabled" (Default: false, other than for "No Collaboration" where it is true - Determines if unrestricted claims and stakes are also granted on worlds with settlements enabled, which is the case for all singleplayer worlds newly created in Update 10 and not the case for all singleplayer worlds migrated from Update 9.)
- "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumed (Default: 1 - Determines how many unrestricted Claim Stakes are granted when reading a skill scroll.)
- "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumed" (Default: 1 - Determines how many unrestricted Claim Papers are granted when reading a skill scroll.)
The last two settings also control the gain for dedicated servers with settlements disabled.]]>
Civics:
- Fixed: Bank accounts created since the last server restart would display a "Dual Permission" error and be unusable
- Fixed: Homesteads were able to be placed outside of a settlement when joining that settlement before placing it down
Crashes:
- Fixed: Changing the owner of a vehicle was causing a crash
- Fixed: Opening the "Influence" page in the Ecopedia was caushing a crash
- Fixed: Immigration policies could become invalid and cause a crash when a player tried to leave a settlement (or was made to)
General:
- Improved: The claim tool will now auto-select the deed with the closest plot among those owned everytime it is selected. Once a manual selection is made, this behaviour stops for the rest of the play session
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.]]>
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
Homesteads
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.Towns
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: 
Once founded, a Town will carve out an area of Influence, which is a new concept in Eco 10.
Influence
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.Countries
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.Federations
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.
Annexation
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.
Coming 12-12!
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]]>
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
Coastal Constructions in Eco 10
Docks
Original concept art for hewn log docksWe'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.
Buoys
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 PostWe’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 BuoyNautical Decorations
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 RackStay 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.]]>
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.
New Avatars in Eco 10
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.
Old avatars in earlier versions
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.
New Avatars in Update 10
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]]>
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!
Boats and Trade in Eco 10
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.
Isolated Resources
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]]>
Civics:
- Added: A limit of 5000 characters for election speeches was added to prevent errors in the server log for too long text.
- Fixed: Triggering a law that records a custom stat with a name length of less than three characters would disconnect the client from the server.
- Fixed: As a landlord, changing the bank account a rent goes to had no effect until the renter left residency and rented it again.
- Fixed: An issue with specific laws that caused the boot time of the server to become extremely long.
Art & Effects:
- Fixed: Texture and highlight for urchin plants were not displayed correctly.
- Fixed: Sound effects were not playing when moving through plants.
- Fixed: Harvest animations were not playing for plants.
- Fixed: Trees did not have wind animations.
Gameplay:
- Fixed: Debris and plants were not slowing down players and vehicles as intended.
Interaction:
- Fixed: Several issues with tree trunk physics that could have a multitude of potential negative effects, from them falling underground to catapulting players to space.
- Fixed: An issue that in specific circumstances could lead to the creation of untargetable ghost rubbles.
- Fixed: The interaction area for papaya plants was too small.
UI:
- Fixed: In specific circumstances food items in storages would not show or show a wrong shelf life bar until they were moved around.
Server:
- Fixed: A cause for vehicles teleporting across the world was identified and fixed.
- Updated: ModKit.eco.template was updated.
Miscellaneous:
- Fixed: Players that had specific special characters in their name would get a unity crash when joining a world.
- Fixed: Crafting and repairing items did not work when a player with a single-letter name existed in the world.
- Fixed: Debris and some plants could get rendered at a position they don't exist, leading to invisible debris and plants at the place they actually exist and untargetable debris and plants at the place they pretended to exist.
As an immediate response, this night we already had replaced Update 9.7.11 with a newer build to prevent the issue from appearing on yet unaffected worlds. Unfortunately that also had the drawback of causing a bit of confusion, as servers had to be updated to the new build without it having a new main version. This update should fix the issue on already affected worlds and restore version continuity.
The root cause for the issue in Update 9.7.11 was a bug that allowed certain objects (rubble, logs, trunks, vehicles, etc.) to drop into invalid, largely negative positions. Only once that actually occured the physics engine malfunctioned, leading to the issues you were experiencing, which is why not everyone was affected and the reports on the problems appeared unusually late. This update removes any objects with such positions.
Additionally the following issues have been addressed:
- Fixed: Notifications for changed votes weren't sent globally as intended.
- Fixed: It was possible for players being unable to exit vehicles that got stuck, but didn't fall over.
UI:
- Fixed: The shown currency of the store owner didn't update immediately after a change, leading to wrong values being displayed.
- Fixed: The soil sampler showed wrong yield values for trees that aren't 100% mature.
Server:
- Fixed: Some players were unable to join servers (on the first try) due to view errors.
- Fixed: Server logs were reporting errors for physics, despite that should only be enabled in development versions.
Miscellaneous:
- Fixed: The interaction range of skid steers and excavators was way too high and caused major usability issues.
- Fixed: Players could crash when harvesting if they didn't skip the tutorials.
In the coming days after the easter holidays we plan to make an early development version of Update 10 available for public testing on the playtest branch. Please note that the official playtest on official server White Tiger will start independently from that a bit later and that this branch may be updated very frequently, up to several times a day. The branch will not guarantee migration yet, neither from prior versions nor between playtest versions. All further information about the playtest will be available on our official discord: https://discord.gg/eco.
We're sorry for the slight delay. Good luck on your egg hunts and please find the changelog below:
Optimization - Client
- Improved: Optimized plant rendering, making plants faster to appear and more lightweight for the engine.
- Improved: Heavily optimized the minimap, also addressing several issues with and caused by it.
- Improved: Several optimizations for chunk, network and view updates - removing duplicate and unnecessary updates, reducing and optimizing sent data.
- Fixed: An issue that caused micro-freezes on harvesting plants.
Optimization - Server
- Improved: The amount of notifications sent was vastly decreased by accumulating notifications where possible, removing unnecessary notifications and displaying notifications only to affected players where they are not relevant for anyone else.
- Improved: Mod file uploads have been limited to one at the same time per user to prevent overwhelming the network. Additionally a configurable limit for how many players can be served with mod downloads at the same time has been added.
- Improved: Small optimizations for the login queue.
Icons
The way to display icons without background has changed, it is no longer possible to use lowercase identifiers to achieve this. Instead, the code for icons now has a parameter type="nobg" that can be added to make the icon have no background. Additionally, icons without background do no longer show a border.For example, <icon name=SawmillItem" type="nobg"> on a sign will create this:
Avatar
- Fixed: The land claim stake was displaying as a untextured white object on the avatar.
- Fixed: The avatar would hold an arrow in its hand when the player went to sleep while having a bow selected.
- Fixed: Removing a tool from the hotbar that exists a second time in the hotbar as currently selected tool led to the avatar showing its hands as empty, despite the selected tool still existing.
Civics
- Improved: Civic name length limit was increased.
- Fixed: Revised civics would not correctly remove the addition of "Revision" after passing when the law name was too long.
- Fixed: Old civics that were revised would get multiple "Old" added to their names instead of just a single one and a number.
- Fixed: Some contract clauses would become invalid in repeatable contracts after it was accepted the first time, preventing players from accepting it several times as intended.
- Fixed: Contracts could show up with missing description and all entries invalid on contract boards.
- Fixed: Performing specific actions when creating a contract with nested clauses could lead to a client crash.
- Fixed: Repeatable contracts could disappear until a server restart after it was completed for the first time.
- Fixed: Not repeatable contracts would sometimes still be displayed on the contract board despite they were already accepted.
Economy
- Fixed: Trading with a store which had set a bank account that was deleted in the meanwhile led to a client crash.
- Fixed: When claiming new land for a deed, the bank account of any stores on the deed was reverted to the one of the owner of the deed.
- Fixed: Stores owned by an elected title reverted to barter mode and turned off after changes were made to the owning elected title.
- Fixed: Deeds for sale on a real estate desk were not removed when the deed was deleted.
- Fixed: Deeds listed on a real estate desk were removed when the deed was owned by a title and there were changes to the holders of the title.
UI
- Improved: Trees on the edge of the minimap now disappear smoothly.
- Fixed: After opening the chat while the map is in full screen mode, the map could no longer be closed with the "ESC" button.
- Fixed: Text in store tooltips could overlap for long item names.
- Fixed: Hovering over the amount of people with a specific level of a profession in the skill UI would not show a tooltip.
- Fixed: Several tools were not showing their descriptions.
- Fixed: Players were receiving a hint to switch their residency to a deed with allegedly more housing value than their current residence, despite that not being true.
- Fixed: The soil sampler could show wrong info on growth times when growth rates were changed in the configs.
- Fixed: Food items would sometimes not accurately show the spoilage level until moved.
- Fixed: Property layer on minimap was not activated by default as intended.
- Fixed: Shadow placement preview could show objects with wrong colorization.
- Fixed: The popup that appeared when being kicked from the server due to inactivity showed buttons to report a bug.
ModKit
- Added: A way to define food items as not spoiling. (Thanks to nid)
- Added: An option to toggle a vehicle's world object state while driving.
- Improved: Expanded availability of marked up usernames. (Thanks to nid)
Balance
- Changed: Harvest yield of kelp was increased by 1.
- Fixed: Harvesting kelp was not affected by the gathering skill.
Miscellaneous
- Improved: The camera for cart driving was adjusted to remedy a possible motion sickness cause.
- Improved: Carts do no longer collide with animals.
- Fixed: The "Clear Vegetation" tutorial could sometimes not be completed.
- Fixed: Some animal species, like alligators, tended to die out quickly after server setup.
- Fixed: Food items would sometimes not turn into rotten food despite the remaining shelf life being 0%.
- Fixed: Under specific circumstances it was possible to interact with world objects through walls and windows.
- Fixed: Players were unable to leave their vehicle when it fell over and turned upside down.
- Fixed: When using specific mods it was possible that food items picked up did not start with a shelf life of 100%.
- Fixed: Plants would sometimes not show fruits, despite being fully mature.
- Fixed: Some dolphin can be mounted again, also fixing an issue that could lead to players being unable to join an very old migrated worlds.
Server & Configs
- Added: Command /network setpassword to set or remove a server password during runtime.
- Fixed: Normally unobtainable settlement objects in a savegame would crash the server.
- Fixed: Players trading with shop carts caused unnecessary warnings in the server log.
- Fixed: The command /land remove removed all blocks but the specified blocks instead of the other way round as intended.
- Fixed: Players sometimes could get stuck at downloading mods.
ModKit.eco
- Added: "MaxNumberOfDownloadRequests" config variable, defining the number of players that can be served mods at the same time - defaults to 10.
Civics:
- Fixed: Contracts would show an accept button for the creator if they were an admin and cause errors when the payment clause was used.
- Fixed: Custom Stats containing absurdly high numbers could lead to the server no longer booting.
Server:
- Fixed: Wrong initialization order that in specific circumstances could lead to the server no longer booting.
- Fixed: Issues with memory allocation and garbage collection, especially on AMD CPUs with many cores and a tighter memory budget, that could lead to major lags and server crashes.
Miscellaneous:
- Improved: Clarified description for "GrowthRateModifier" server setting. (Note: There is a known issue with the soil sampler showing incorrect growth times, this will be fixed in Performance Update 3.)
- Fixed: Usability of legacy GameValue API for mods restored, it will be completely removed in Update 10.
- Fixed: Removed rooms were never truly removed from their deeds, using unnecessary memory.
Civics:
- Fixed: Contracts would sometimes not pay the intended person, but someone totally unrelated.
- Fixed: Contracts showed a button label that is only intended to be visible for developers.
Server:
- Improved: Mod files exceeding 32 MB are now supported.
- Fixed: Large data transfers for mod downloads could make the server unresponsive and increase the time needed for players joining massively.
- Fixed: Joining players' mod downloads could lead to lags for all other players on the server.
- Fixed: An issue that could lead to players joining a server only seeing a black screen, being unable to play.
Miscellaneous:
- Fixed: A cause for random crashes that some players experienced.
We’re going to be demoing the features as we build up to this launch with live streams, here’s the schedule, with each livestream from various Eco devs typically happening on Fridays at 21:00 CET / noon Pacific Time. You can watch the demos on Twitch[www.twitch.tv], YouTube, Facebook[www.facebook.com] or directly here on our Steam store page. We’ve put together a calendar you can sync with if you’d like to keep track of these, click here[calendar.google.com].
Schedule:
Twitch Election Plugin – February 3rd
We’re building a custom plugin for twitch that will let users cast votes in a streamer’s elections and view and interact in other ways with the game. Streamers are a huge part of the Eco community and we want to make some really interesting ways for them to interact with their audience and blend the barrier between creator and audience.
Avatars with Facial Animation via Webcam – February 17th
We’ve got brand new upgraded avatars coming into the game, with much more expressive and customizable faces, hair, and clothes. On top of that we’ve got lip-syncing based on your microphone and facial animation based on your webcam (both optional of course). This means that as your avatar is giving a speech or interacting with others you’ll see the actual facial expression the real human player is making applied on your avatar. With the depth of role-playing we’re seeing in Eco and the potential for live events like town halls, campaign speeches, etc, we’re expecting this feature to add a ton of depth to your characters identity and how you connect with others.
Boats Demo – March 3rd
The long awaited boats feature will be at last shipped in 10! We’ll be demoing all the new boats in the game, from row boats to industrial barges, and how they work. We’ll also show the other systems that support boats like new dock blocks, new placement systems, new swimming systems, etc.
User Pictures Demo – March 10th
We’re adding the ability to take pictures of what you see in game, and then use that on the sign, as icons for your avatar, and much more. This will further connect our new avatar feature, allowing you to take a picture of your avatar and use that for your presentation to users in chat as well. It’ll also be a part of the new culture system we’re building, you’ll be able to make a museum of pictures from other players around the globe to create culture points for the new settlement system.
Render to Horizon Lodding Demo – March 17th
With our performance upgrades for 9.7, the stage is introduce lods to render the landscape all the way out to the horizon, at 60fps on recommended hardware. You’ll be able to see the curvature of the world clearly, see distant cities and mountains, and really get a feeling for the scope of the world that’s being shared with everyone in it.
Settlements Demo – March 24th
The new Settlements system will allow the creation of towns, countries, and federations. Towns contain multiple citizens, Countries contain multiple towns, and Federations (think United Nations) contain multiple countries. Each has their own overlapping governments, complete with laws, taxes, treasuries, etc. Each casts ‘influence’ based on their culture (another new system) where their laws apply. The property system will be completely transformed too, based on population rather than skill upgrades. This is going to be a giant change to the feel of the game and looking forward to community tests and feedback! We’re also keeping support for the old style without settlements, which players can disable in the server if they like.
These are the major feature demos, but on the other Fridays we’ll have livestreams showing other features, and a chance for feedback from players.
We’re all super excited to get this version of Eco out to you all, its going to be like a new game. We got a ton of work to do still, so back to it! See you soon.
- John K, CEO Strange Loop]]>
Civics:
- Fixed: A failed attempt to overthrow the constitution would nontheless lead to all laws on the server being removed and the web ui no longer displaying prior elections to some players.
- Fixed: After a failed vote to ratify a constitution in some circumstances it was not possible to try to ratify another one.
- Fixed: In specific circumstances it was possible to change demographics instantly without having permissions to do so.
Server
- Fixed: In some cases migration of a world from Update 9.1 could fail.
- Fixed: Migration of a world from Update 9.5 could fail due to "ghost" districts that were not part of any district map.
- Fixed: When placing unavailable technical items that can only be spawned by admins (accidentially), the server would crash and no longer boot. (These items are going to be removed from the list of spawnable items)
- Fixed: An issue with LiteDB that could lead to corruption of the statistics database.
Miscellaneous
- Fixed: Some trees frequently had their cut logs being hard to target as their hitbox was offset.
- Removed: Holiday theme for spruces, storage boxes and elks.
UI
- Fixed: Some map icons didn't show their tooltips for some players.
World Objects
- Fixed: On migrated worlds some tree branches were displayed wrongly or missing.
Miscellaneous
- Fixed: In specific circumstances the tutorial could lead to a server crash.
- Fixed: A very rare issue that could cause an invalid state in the savegame, leading to the server becoming unresponsible whenever someone tried to mine.
Starting with this update you should no longer need to restart the game after longer play sessions to restore your FPS. Naturally, our playtests cannot test every single possible hardware and settings configuration, so your feedback will be key going forward to fix any potentially remaining issues.
There will be a third update in the series expanding on the improvements already made in the new year and we'll soon be ready for more news on Update 10 as well. For now, all that is left for us to say is a big thank you from the whole Strange Loop Games team for your support during this year - we wish you and your families happy holidays and a healthy new year 2023!
Optimization - Client
- Fixed: Transforms update time (those updates happen for every position, rotation and scale change) increased over time and led to reduction of FPS during play sessions.
- Fixed: Rendering time for minimap objects increased over time due to leaking graphics command buffers, which also led to reduction of FPS over time.
- Improved: All trees were rewritten to optimize creation and rendering performance, got mesh based LOD (Level of Detail) and now use static meshes for rendering instead of animated skinned meshes, decreasing the rendering and chunk loading time.
- Improved: In some cases repeating errors getting written to the log files in very high amounts could decrease performance, error logging has been limited so that this doesnt happen while preserving our ability to investigate and address them.
Optimization - Server
- Improved: Stockpiles were generating too many block updates, trying to set blocks of stockpiles that didn't change.
- Improved: Introduced caching to some of the initially sent views, notably reduces lag when players join a server and the loading time for those players.
- Improved: Client updates are now faster, objects that aren't visible to the player are no longer checked as often.
- Improved: The network thread in some circumstances got overloaded, we moved some heavy work to a different thread, this notably reduces the amount of server lag (disconnect symbols) especially on bigger servers.
- Improved: Sped up calculations for predators by searching for potential prey from their own collection, instead of a collection that contains all physical objects.
Civics
- Fixed: It was no longer possible to create civics before a constitution was passed and hence there was no way to pass a constitution with additional civics as a multi-election right from the start.
- Fixed: Default demographics could be edited ingame.
- Fixed: Laws would sometimes show a "Ignoring Trigger as that would result in a recursive law" message despite the law not being recursive and the action completing successfully.
- Fixed: Hands were no longer available as a tool for civic triggers.
- Fixed: Civics showed options related to an unreleased feature.
- Fixed: Contracts no longer showed their description on the contract board.
UI
- Fixed: The skid steer could highlight itself as interactable when mounted.
- Fixed: The improved highlighting for selected items during avatar creation didn't apply to all parts of the avatar.
- Fixed: The claim highlights did not display white borders between deeds anymore.
- Fixed: The claim highlights in some cases displayed a color that is different from the set one.
- Fixed: The tooltip for "Citizen" didn't work correctly.
- Fixed: The title of work orders in their tooltips could change to a generic name.
- Fixed: The tooltip for titles displayed "Wages Source Bank Account" in the wrong color.
- Fixed: The position of a player joining the server on the map could be displayed at 0,0 instead of the correct coordinates.
- Fixed: The map UI could break, leading to the player only moving the icon layer when trying to move the whole map.
- Fixed: Empty slots in the "public crafting stations" tab of the economy viewer wrongly showed a empty tooltip.
- Fixed: The tooltip for an election ratifying a constitution didn't update the players eligibility to vote until a server restart.
- Fixed: Depending on world size, the icons displayed on the minimap could be too big.
World Objects
- Fixed: Framed Glass windows that weren't connected to a different block had no collision.
- Fixed: Redwood signs used the texture of saguaro wood.
- Fixed: Shadow placement of glass with glass refraction setting turned on showed only a bright white block instead of the glass block.
Ecopedia
- Fixed: Ecopedia showed hidden items that are unavailable.
- Fixed: Links in Ecopedia lost their color that hints at them being clickable.
Balance
- Changed: Copper plates now require a machinist table nearby to craft.
Miscellaneous
- Added: Holiday theme for spruces, storage boxes and elks.
- Improved: Animal collision with players has temporarily been disabled until their AI is reworked.
- Fixed: The message when hitting the shell of a tortoise with an arrow claimed it bounced off, dealing no damage despite it dealing reduced damage.
- Fixed: Claim highlights on worlds with some specific sizes, such as 120x120, were showing misaligned. (This might need a new world to take effect)
- Fixed: After reloading a chunk, fish could hover above blocks where players built structures over water.
- Fixed: The candle in the starter camp disappeared when sleeping - but it's flame did not.
- Fixed: The player avatar held their empty hands up in third person view after the player ate something.
- Fixed: Multiple visual issues with animal movement when the player has high latency.
- Fixed: Adding labour to crafting projects was sometimes not possible without restarting the project due to the players skills not being properly detected.
- Fixed: Players could be locked in vehicles and on mountable objects by loosing authorization while mounted.
Server & Configs
- Added: The commands dealing with profiling, administrators, bans, whitelist and mutes can now be executed via RCON.
- Added: A new system to automatically kick idle players always or just when the server capacity is occupied to a set percentage and someone tries to join. Idle players will receive a popup warning when they reached the set idle time threshold. Admins are exempt from idle kick.
- Fixed: A rarely occuring issue that could lead to crashes and objects being removed at server start.
Difficulty.eco.template
- Added: "SkillbookCraftCost" config variable, taking the values "Normal" and "Expensive" - the latter making the recipes for skillbooks harder, which was priorily part of the "EndgameCraftCost" setting.
Network.eco.template
- Removed: The setting "MaxConnections" was removed as it was replaced by "DefaultSlots".
Users.eco.template
- Added: "RequiredOccupancyBeforeAFKKick" config variable, taking a value between 0 and 100 to determine how full the server needs to be (when a maximum amount of slots is set) in percent for kicks for idling to be executed. If 0, idle players will always be kicked - that is also the default.
- Added: "TimeRequiredForAFKMinutes" config variable, taking any value in minutes to determine how long a player needs to be inactive to be kicked. The default is 0, which disables the feature.
- Changed: The setting "UsersWithReserverSlotsAtQueue" was renamed to "UsersWithReservedSlotsAtQueue" due to a typo.
Optimization
- Improved: The /profiler command for server profiling was improved and it is now possible to start all important profilings with /profiler everything.
- Fixed: Some players, usually with a cpu with a low amount of cores, would experience FPS drops when moving.
Civics
- Fixed: Stores using the treasury would close after a server restart.
Tools
- Fixed: The sound for a broken tool was no longer playing consistently.
- Fixed: The display of tool durability showed wrong values.
- Fixed: The durability bar of tools would vanish after a tool was moved.
World Objects
- Fixed: Housing points for multiple, repeated rooms did not get reduced properly.
- Fixed: The Futon Couch was missing its model in the world.
Miscellaneous
- Fixed: The game would take a long time to close or crash during the closing process.
- Fixed: In rare cases a client could get kicked from the server when trying to place a Steam Truck.
- Fixed: In rare cases players could crash shortly after joining a world.
- Fixed: A blank entry appeared in the minimap selection settings.
- Fixed: The details for a work order would sometimes not be shown in its tooltip.
- Fixed: In rare cases servers could become unjoinable, instead displaying an error until a restart.
- Fixed: The /unstuck command would fail in some cases when being underground and no longer dismount the player from vehicles.
Playtest
The work in progress second major part of the 9.7 Performance Update series is currently on the public branch "playtest", accessible via Steam by right clicking Eco in your library, choosing Properties -> Betas and selecting "playtest" in the drop down. You're invited to join our test server White Tiger, and help us out with getting feedback and data for further improvements. You can find all details about the playtest, how to join and how to profile your performance on our discord: https://discord.gg/ecoAlso for those of you interested in our Eco Meteor Plushie - we're at half time and half funded, let's get it over the goal line together: https://www.makeship.com/products/meteor-plush
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The Meteor Shard is inspired by the well-known in-game item that all Alpha Backers received for supporting us early (thank you so much!), comes with the iconic chain for hanging and is only available as limited edition via this Makeship campaign until December 23. The campaign basically works like a crowdfunding: We need to reach 200 orders until the end of the campaign for the plushie to be produced starting at the end of December and shipped in March 2023 - which Makeship does worldwide! If we don't reach that amount, you get your full money back, there are no risks involved.
Additionally, everyone that orders a plushie and once it arrived sends us a photo of where the plushie found its new home to support (at) strangeloopgames.com together with their SLG ID will get a unique user icon for their Eco accounts to show off ingame.
Eco players are experts in collaboration and saving the day, so we'll manage that easily, right? Let's make it happen together!
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