Hey all, for this week I want to go into some big ideas we have for Eco 9 with levels of government.We’re exploring ideas about how to bring multiple levels of government to Eco, and how their growing and combining would work within the game. Along with that comes a new approach to property. Check it out and let us know your feedback, this is an initial concept so lots more to be designed still.Eco will be changed to have the following new features:

• Multiple governments will be allowed in tiers: individuals, towns, nations, global.
  
• Governments start bottom-up, with growing towns merging into nations, and nations merging into a global government.
  
• Property is controlled by the governments (no longer affected by reading skillscrolls).
  
• Multiple governments will compete for citizens, offering incentives when new players spawn into their region, or when other players move to them.

The results on the player experience these changes are intended to bring are:

• Players are ‘wanted’ in the world....

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Hey folks, this week I wanted to show you the fancy new mining system we’re creating in Eco:





There are now three steps in processing ore from mines. Each step produces different products and byproducts, requiring different skills and equipment, and each creates various levels of pollution that must be dealt with. The new steps are crushing, which generates crushed rock and crushed ore, and concentration. Concentration produces ore concentrate, and either wet or dry tailings depending on the machine and ore. The step we’ve always had, smelting, will now produce slag as a byproduct instead of tailings.With the addition of wet tailings, we have one of the most dangerous pollutants yet, which will be especially catastrophic if it leaks into the water supply. Concentrating iron ore without water will be an option, but gold and copper concentration will always produce wet tailings. The amounts generated here will be enough that a waste management plan will be needed to keep the surrounding a... Read more

This week I’d like to dive into the core of Eco’s design a bit, and talk about the principles that guide the design and development of the game. These are things that go way back to the beginning ideas of what Eco would be, and are used to this day to determine what we choose to bring next in the game. Game Mission
Eco’s design mission is to have players “Solve the Tragedy of the Commons,[en.wikipedia.org]” taking place among real people. That means creating conflicts among people with the same end goals, where a collection of self-interests is not enough to succeed, you need some representation of collective interest.To implement that, the game exists within the intersection of the game's design pillars: Economy, Ecology and Government.The role of these pillars in the game is as follows: Economy Encompasses the efforts and progress of humans. Manufacturing, creating infrastructure, building, harvesting, performing research, specialization, trade. Collaboration and competition is a b... Read more

Eco is a game that has a huge scope, covering a massive section of human development and history, and through that time humanity’s powers have increased exponentially. That’s what we want the arc of Eco to be: the progression from powerless to massively powerful, and the increasing need for management of those powers to prevent them from becoming self-destructive.The driver of this progression is technology, and as an Eco world advances in technology their ability to impact the world increases massively, for better or for worse. With each advance in technology, you gain the ability to do everything you already do in greater quantities. And with each step in technology, the challenges become greater, making those powers very necessary to continue advancing. This manifests in gameplay in the following ways.

• Gathering resources becomes faster. Your tools get more powerful and you can gather more. New resource types are unlocked like oil. You move from handheld manual tools to powerful...

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Hey all, for this Friday’s Eco Peak I wanted to talk about the new government system I’m working on for Eco 9.0.The high-level idea is that in the current version of Eco you run a government. In 9.0, you will build a government.First thing you’ll need to do to create a government is form a constitution, which will be an object placed in the world. The value of the building it’s placed in will determine how much influence the government has, and whichever government has the most influence will dictate the rules for the world. Overthrowing the Government This means that governments can be overthrown by making a more powerful one, represented by a more valuable building, and players will need to create fantastic palaces to ensure the legitimacy of their government and prevent being overtaken. (Later, we will allow multiple governments to co-exist and compete, but for now there can Be Only One).I wanted to add the ability to overthrow a government because it fits thematically – if a g... Read more

It’s been over one year since we launched Eco on Steam Early-Access, celebration! But in the long-game, it’s just the beginning. Eco: The First Three and a Half Years
Eco was born out of the core idea of ‘Tragedy of the Commons: The Game’ where all your resources come from the ecosystem, and all economic and governmental actions happen through real people. That’s a huge, seemingly impossibly scoped game, and I believe we’ve made incredible progress.The above screenshot comparison (between our Kickstarter and today) is crazy to look at. We’ve been working on the game nonstop since 2015, and it’s improved continuously, incrementally, until it looks like a totally different game. Through that, the core idea has remained constant: a society simulator inside an ecosystem. With the strength of the team and the community that has supported us throughout we’ve been able to do some really fantastic things, and we have much more we want to do. What to expect from Early Access We haven’t set... Read more

We're blown away, it's so great to see people 'get' what we're going for with the game, and this is just the beginning, still in Early Access, so much more to come.https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/27/jeff-grubb-game-of-the-year-2018/"Eco made me realize that games are actually crucial for understanding our relationship to all kinds of natural and man-made systems. The thing that gives me chills is that I think it is only in games that we can play with economic systems. And I walked away from my experience in Eco feeling like I learned so much even though we had no instructor. No one was connecting the dots for us. We simply learned through play." Read more

After many long months of work, Eco 8.0 is released! We’ve got a ton of new stuff in this update, resulting in a very different feel to the game overall. New World Generation
World generation has undergone a variety of changes and improvements.  Many new parameters have been added to world generation, such as land/water balance, number of continents and islands, sizes of biomes, and number of water features such as rivers and lakes.  All of these parameters may be tweaked within the world generator config file. As a result, worlds are much more varied with specific resources only being made available within specific biomes. I addition, we have reworked the world geology, by adding an assortment of rock types like Sandstone, Granite, Shale, and Limestone. Certain rock types appear only in specific biomes and at specific depths. These rocks all h... Read more