[2020] Solo Mode

Update 9.0 adds new configuration sliders to make you able to configure your difficulty more in-depth as Caz said. Though, if you don't like playing with other people, i'm not totally sure why you chose Eco. I mean, i'm glad you bought our game, but i had the feeling we were stating quite extensively how Eco is mainly a multiplayer game in the description, given stuff like "Government" and "Economy" - our main features - make no sense in solo play.

We're not dismissing solo players, but the focus of Eco and the whole reason it exists has always been multiplayer. We do not plan to add features that are specific for singleplayer, but we will try to make Eco as configurable as possible so everyone can configure it to his specific playstyle and having fun with it.

On SP you are actually just hosting a server :)
If you still got an issue with connecting, feel free to send me the logs to investigate.

And while you can simply create the biggest world possible - you will be missing out on most of what Eco is, as pollution will be no no threat at all. You still can do it. But we're not developing it for being used like that.

It can be played singleplayer without issue.

And a single option just won't work, as we already have a single option for it, called NoCollaboration, but while a lot of people are fine with that, for others it's way too difficult. And for others too easy. The issue is that different people have different playstyles and like different things - we cannot provide one solution to rule them all, it's impossible.

No Collaboration is our singleplayer setting, most people are fine with. For those that are not, you can change additional settings to tune it to your needs.

No, i'm not questioning why you bought the game, i'm stating that Eco has been developed with multiplayer in mind from the very beginning and that Eco at its base uses features that only make sense in Multiplayer. Singleplayer was added very late in development before Steam release and only due to people asking us for it, it wasn't a planned feature. Hence it's simply a multiplayer server on your local PC. And i'm only being honest with you when telling you that our focus is a multiplayer game that can be played singleplayer and is highly configurable, but not specific singleplayer modes or features. We've been stating that forever and doing so is fair - as people then know what they buy.

I'm very happy that you like so many aspects of the game, but ultimately this game has a vision, a design and a goal - and that is not singleplayer and never will be and we're confident that this has been clear from the very beginning. So this is nothing new. It's also nothing new that we try to provide configuration options for singleplayer and are working on better out-of-the box configurations that fit for a wider singleplayer audience. This is hard though, as playstyles differ vastly between people and amount of players also changes the game massively. Different playstyles in a group of unknown people makes it being extremely difficult as we cannot offer > 100 presets for everyone.

Eco is pretty much the very opposite of a drop-in drop-out game - on nearly all servers it's played in tight timecondensed cycles of 14 - 21 days. So you are effectively criticizing me for telling you what game Eco is and not changing it to what you want Eco to be. And that's why i asked why some people buy a game that seemingly doesn't fit what they want at all, requesting the game to change to something the game is not supposed to be. We, for our game, made very clear what Eco is supposed to be and that we will work with the community to reach this goal. But we are working to reach _this_ goal, not a different one. We simply cannot make Eco a different game than we wanted it to be and advertised it to be.

But playing in singleplayer is very possible even if it needs a few configuration changes for some people, depending on what playstyle they prefer and hence it's marked as singleplayer as it got one. Steam does not specifiy anything in regards to what they consider 'has singleplayer'.

You CAN play Eco your way. Eco is perfect for playing your way, as it can be configured. But not every way is one we do actively support. Our limitations on resources wouldn't allow that even if we wanted to do that.