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Saving the world once again in ECO

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Remember ECO? It’s that sandbox game built to educate kids/people about how your actions impact the world and environment around you. Our community of friends played exactly one year ago and had a blast — quite literally. We saved the world from the meteor and had a good time building up our factories and houses in the process.

Fast forward one year. ECO’s large game-changing 8.0 patch just came out, and our community has once again purchased a server and begun annihilating the planet — saving the environment — scraping the life off the face of the earth as we strive to progress technologically to a point of sustaining ourselves while eliminating the meteor that will impact in only 25 or so days.

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Last time I played I went the route of technology and smelting. This time I’m going for wood working, furniture crafting, and things like bricklaying.

We’ve developed much more of an economy than our last go around. Last time we simply traded goods. This time we’ve all created stores using our own form of credits. We sell goods to each other in exchange for our own forms of currency, then cash those points in at each other’s stores to buy the things that person is selling. For example, I buy 1 wood log for 1 keencoin. Someone can sell me logs then buy a hewn log (used for building) for 2 keencoins. We’ll keep using this system until we have an established, minted currency and a centralized bank

Our main street is full of bustling shops and crafters hocking their goods.

A lot has changed with the game — pretty much all for the better. The best change is the skill system. Now you gain experience by simply using the skill rather than having to just wait over time for skill points to generate. So you can gain experience in mining by actually mining, and skill points are simply used to unlock another skill — that you’ll then have to use to level up that skill. It’s similar in some aspects to the Star Wars Galaxies model.

Now is a great time to play ECO if you’re looking for that sandbox / creative / building / quasi-surviving / game-meets-sim experience. The 8 or so of us playing on our server all recommend it.

Join our Discord Server and say hello. We have a private channel for all our ECO talk, but if you hang out in general and express your interest we can discuss allowing access for more people.

  • This game has a great balance. It is relaxing enough to play while watching TV, yet engaging enough to be able to get caught up for hours. Simple enough to teach your child to play, and complicated with its global variables. Come work for- um… play with us!

  • I liked the wait-for-your-skill-points system. It struck a good balance between min maxers who would twink out their house to get the most points per day, and people who just played normally. Not allowing them to advance leaps and bounds ahead of other people who weren’t min maxing, but still letting people who wanted to try hard see results is a difficult thing to achieve and Eco had it, I felt.

    It also had interplay with the very unique and interesting balanced-diet food system. I wonder what they’ve done to make eating a balanced diet important, because it used to be important solely because you would get more skill points per real world hour if you had a stomach with optimal contents.

    • I feel like the spirit of the prior skill system is still maintained, the difference now is you gain a number of specializations with the exp gained from houses and a balance diet, but individual increases in level specialization require you to work to become the most efficient. I wish however they allowed you to unlearn a specialization, as I feel after picking some they are just so much worse than others, lumber jacking in particular.

      I’d say 8.0 has some bugs but overall its better than it was a year ago. I enjoy all of the additions, but wish they would improve the performance.

  • Everything I’ve read talks about economy and a month before a meteor hits… is there anything here for someone who plays with usually just one other person (sometimes two)? I’d play on a server with others, except that I don’t usually have the time to keep up with others on the server (basing this on joining Patreon minecraft servers). Or does this game truly require a good group of people and a month commitment before the meteor hits? It looks great, I want to love it… 🙂