[2023] Singleplayer Trader

No, Eco does not have NPCs.

We have no current plans to introduce NPC's as the game is about cooperation and specialization of multiple players, with all benefits and challenges that comes with :)

Eco offers a government overthrow mechanic for when players are unhappy about the government on public servers. Any government also first needs to be ratified by a voting majority to enact a constitution on all vanilla servers. It is part of the game for a government to be agreed on, formed and enacted - players need to actively agree with any specific government system to have it pass on vanilla servers. It's always up to the majority of the community to enact a government and making sure voting is possible or the government has not too many permissions by not agreeing to a constitution that one is unhappy with, as last resort being able to overthrow it to replace it with a new one, This was done with full intention, but if players let pass a government with ultra powers or does not make the effort to overthrow it, that is part of the intended gameplay, including when the majority of people is happy with the government.

We do not plan the ability to have multiple characters under the same client, given this could easily be abused to gain advantages through playing with several characters on the same server which is generally frowned upon.

You can play with multiple characters on the same server if you have multiple Eco licenses. That works both via multiple steam accounts or multiple website purchases or multiple Steam-Linked SLG accounts given you can start the Eco.exe not going through Steam multiple times manually and log in with different SLG accounts. There is surely ways to login with multiple Steam accounts the same time as well or use different computers for it. The only thing that doesn't work is logging in multiple times with the same Steam, SLG or Steam-Linked SLG account.

Nontheless I want to note again: Most servers, including the official servers, prohibit multi-accounting and will ban players doing so.

Just wanted to make you aware so there is no surprise if anything happens. Ultimately Eco has built in systems to limit governments, overthrow them and make sure that the server population needs to agree on what is proposed, having ways to stop governments with setups they don't like before they even come into effect. A second account is not needed for balanced gameplay with all options. I see that you might be able to do some interesting stuff with additional 'dummy' characters, but that's not how the game is typically played or what we want to achieve with the game, so development resources on that wouldn't necessarily be well spent and come with major drawbacks like potential for easy multi-accounting.

It was just important to me to stress that there is plenty of ways to deal with rogue governments and that it's in the hand of the players to begin with if such one can even start to exist. Eco is intended to show you that your vote also comes with a responsibility, so checking the suggested constitution is always a good thing to do. And going through with a cycle where the responsibility of players failed can also be a very teaching and interesting experience, just as Eco offers many different of those.

Dealing with other people, good and bad, is the point of the society simulation that Eco is, though.