Solo Viability

Just to give a perspective, of the players playing in the last 12 months only 2% played only or majorly in singleplayer, with more than 70% playing only or majorly on public servers - the rest played either on private servers, passworded servers or coop. The amount of posts of different channels can very rarely be used for any sort of statistics, as it often leads to incorrect conclusions.

And no worries, we do work on all these bugs, but as is common in development we work on multiple things at the same time, especially as not every staff member and staff type can do everything.

The main reason why players abandon multiplayer servers as of our statistics and recent surveys is the fact that they cannot compete with others, especially groups due to their self-sufficiency in later game and a satisfied market. The increase in profession variety and new maintenance features being introduced actually help solving this problem and aren't the cause of it. Other notable reasons do include unhappiness with governance, community, admins, server modifications and progression - but none of those were mentioned nearly as often as that main reason or "Life happened, had to stop".

We'll definitely look into new default settings for singleplayer and small servers once all the professions we wanted to have are in the game. It is already freely configurable, so admins can adjust rates based on their expected audience, though. It is very important to do that, as Eco simply plays differently when you are just one, five, 50, 100 or 300 active players and while for the lower scale the amount of professions is a challenge, for the higher scale it is a godsend in variety so everyone of those players stays actually useful. It is very important to configure the settings in a fitting way, as there simply is no easy solution that would just work for every type of server without any configuration necessary.

Originally posted by Knightmare: this last update was very annoying in that I had to majorly re-organize my base in order to get all my tools to work again, things like re-plumbing the water pipes, additional materials needed to forge things and that's on top of learning/researching a new skill and making new equipment.

And really sorry for this, we tried to make sure players know about the option to stay on the older version in the release notes and had announced the date it is dropping a week earlier in Discord, our main communication channel, as well - so people that would not want to deal with it could react accordingly. We will try to keep changes at a minimum, but with more and more stuff being introduced and polished to work together, there will be necessity to make changes that affect existing base layouts. We will still ensure all worlds are migratable during minor versions, though.

Originally posted by Inspektor: also because if u start in midgame u start as a cavemen. While everyone else is digging stones with skid u can try to gather 0,05% of what they can, with your stone pick.

We did add a setting for retroactive experience gain in the last Update. Many servers also provide different kinds of leapfrogging through making skill scrolls available to new players via government or distribution stations.

We always release important information in the respective changelog as well, and so it was also noted in the Update 10.2 changelog here on Steam.

In general Discord is our main communication channel and as such non-essential information isn't getting published here on Steam, given Steam users tend to expect news on Steam to be limited to the most important information about the game and aren't very fond of other news. I recommend joining the Discord if you want to be kept up to date on everything - there is also a channel that shows recent development changes.

The different pipe types - next to allow you to choose between whatever material you currently have in abundance - exist so you can lay pipes next to each other without connecting them.