ECO Server Log: Day 3

Time flies ridiculously fast when playing ECO. That's not necessarily a good thing, though, given the massive meteor planning to crash into the planet in 27 days.

Our Keen and Graev Community server is doing pretty well, I think! In this server journal entry I want to highlight a few of the events and happenings as well as some plans we've put into motion.

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The Blight On Our Land

The most interesting thing to happen so far has been pollutants. Certain things will put out pollution into the ground, water, air, and surrounding area of not dealt with properly. 

Our first encounter was with coal. Turns out you can't just put it on the ground otherwise it begins to damage the ecosystem. I realized this after placing it in my stockpile with my wood and ore. After I realized it was damaging the surrounding soil, I quickly moved it into a cart for temporary storage.

Now the problem of byproduct... when smithing, there's something called "tillings" that have to be discarded properly. Basically, when you smelt ore into ingots there's a waste product that has to be stored "inside" or in some sort of protected landfill. 

Being me, I simply took it my the shovel full and uh... innocently dumped it in the nearby hills. That's fine, right? Well, it started to kill things.

Confessing what I had done, and now having a few tons of this stuff, we moved it to a mountainous stone area where we built a stockpile to hold it and surrounded it by stone. Awesome! A stone-laden landfill! 

Well, it turns out you have to use the right kind of stone and be smarter about it because the ton of waste product killed pretty much the whole mountain. We've since rectified the issue, and will take soil samples tomorrow.

Technology & Advancement

I'm advancing at a decent rate. I've learned basic engineering and smithing, and dabbled in a few other specialties in order to gain access to materials and crafting components. My ultimate path will be deep in the engineering tree.

I want to make factories and machinery, ultimately building up some of the technological advancements we'll need. 

Despite the game ultimately needing us to blast that meteor out of the sky with lasers, it's not enough to think I can do it by myself. Not at all.

Choosing a Specialization

Advancing into specialties begins to ramp up in skill point costs at an exponential rate. The first specialization may be 5 points, then 15, then 50, then 150, etc. It's basically a way of soft-capping your ability to play the game effectively all by yourself when in a multiplayer environment.

We need someone to specialize in hunting, tailoring, masonry, engineering, carpentry, etc. People need to dedicate their time and resources towards these specialized tasks in order for us to survive. We're starting to work out way toward these chosen specializations.

It has become quite clear that a server economy of sorts may happen, but we may simply remain utopian and just trade freely. On other servers where people act in their own self-interest with currencies and resources, ours is more of an open community of survival. After all, the point of the game is to blow up that meteor, right?

I'm excited to keep going and share more with you all soon!

P.S. I'll add lots of pictures tomorrow.

  • I’m excited to join you guys and help out with hunting/engineering, but the paycheck was short (low hours) this time so I won’t be able to join you just yet :(. Keep up the posting, though. The game sounds wonderful.

  • I love the idea of this game, except for the part where it sounds like it forces you to play multiplayer.

  • Tailoring is now one of my specialties. I’ll be able to make things like running shoes that increase move speed. Or work boots that provide calorie efficiency. Either one will help us all progress faster but we’ll have some choices to make!