Eco is made for experiences on public servers, where there is indeed people around all the time. If you're into such systems and like to get into added complexity beyond the bare vanilla experience, the official server "White Tiger" starting tomorrow is a good start - it makes extreme use of government and civic systems, but also has a pretty complex setup to do so. You can find all information on it on our discord:
https://discord.gg/eco. This specific official server has specific progression and a endgame recipe that is extremely difficult and requires all of the hundreds of players to get together until the very last day. You also get Universal Basic Income for a easier start and consistently being able to follow your own goals as well. Noone is able to rush the game there (progression is organized by a governmental "university") and even if you can only play on four days during a cycle, you can still provide some goods to the end goal and have to do with usually very helpful people. But beware, political debates are heavy there.
And believe me, people spend a "insane amount" to participate in exactly that - nearly 24000 hours total in 30 days for last cycle of White Tiger, to be exact.
You should notice quite quickly on any bigger public server (there is other, community, servers that do similar things as well) that Eco can be extremely interesting on them and that the steps towards the common goal and everything that is needed to get to that are very meaningful. Each player needing to build their house or rent for example is a major part of economy (funding other players providing the goods for that) and hence very important - it doesn't need NPC's at all to make it :)
The civilization you build is the server community, and there is some really great ones in Eco.
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