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We unfortunately have no plans for that, but you can vote for it on our feedback tracker: https://eco.canny.io/feature-suggestions/p/single-player-npcs

We have dropped that position with the rise of AI technology and decided to keep the suggestion on our then new feedback tracker for it open, but for a realistic chance to be implemented it not only needs to get into the top voted items, but in evaluation must also prove to be implementable with much more reasonable effort than it would have taken back then.

Eco is a game inherently made for multiplayer experiences, revolving around interaction with other players and while the addition of NPC's could improve the singleplayer experience, the resources necessary to implement that in a viable way so far would have been extreme and notably higher than for any other major feature so far - for a very limited benefit, as there is only a very small percentage of Eco players that mainly play singleplayer.

As I noted, NPC's are still not planned and we still do not consider them a good fit for the intended Eco experience - but with potential options coming up making their implementation less of a massive task it is simply no longer excluded. The interest in them has also increased a bit from the absolute rare niche requests in the past. There is no doubt that they could potentially provide an interesting experience for singleplayer and the suggestions have shown that the desired implementation can range anywhere from simple crafting assistants to fully simulated towns - with vastly different implementation cost. It simply doesn't hurt to keep it open to maybe revisit at a later point. But I don't see anything happening in that regard any time soon, so there is no effect on development for the forseeable future.