[2022] Unpopular Opinion, a change to help the trains and boat cause.

On public servers people spread a lot, often way more than they should. It's in opposite much more a problem that people tend to live so much away from each other that it becomes problematic. (But we're actually incentivizing that local community spread with the biome restrictions, as we want them to use trucks to drive to others - I just see people spreading that wouldn't need to as well)

I'm not sure how boats (I omit trains, as that's not going to happen during EA) can help with that exactly, given it will be unlikely there is water access to everyone and boats will be distinctively slower than trucks - which will also get trailers as an addition for road transport. Trucks can be put on a type of boat, though, the idea is indeed the mass storage, I just personally never understand why people want that, given it seems many people cheat their stacksizes up anyway. I'm not sure those would swap to boats. And if you just up the stacksizes, you certainly don't need them at all.

Let me extend on that. For all features we add we of course have an idea what they're supposed to do - but given Eco's "Framework Style" the most interesting part is what players will actually ultimately do and come up with on their own.

The hype about boats is massive, so massive the idea behind it seems to be much more limited than the expecations for change via boats actually seem to be to a degree I'm personally not super sure what everyone is ultimately going to do with them that improves their life so much.

A main, very obvious point from us is boats for fishing, that's what we wanted to do. Another is early game get-around quickly with the row-boat instead of swimming or having confusing ways with ramps only. But once infrastructure kicks in, Trucks will be typically more useful aside of when you really want to transport a lot (like multiple trucks with the ferry boat) to specific points reachable by ocean. I just don't see that happen very often or be needed on public servers I visit, no matter if stacksizes are scaled up or not.

For White-Tiger I have kind of an idea how I will use them to fit into its concept, but roads will still be the main thing.

I just mean the distribution of resources in the world, which is intentional for that purpose and going to be expanded further in the future. We want to encourage people to settle in different biomes depending on what they do, but not really to just move as far away as possible due to 'land ownership' concerns, as many people do. The forming of local communities that need to interconnect was the general idea.

The maximum world size has already been limited to 2.56 km² in Update 9.5, so that is already in effect. As usual you can make as big worlds as you like and happen to technically work, but anything beyond that is not supported and doesn't provide the intended gameplay boundaries and for purposes of coming ecology changes probably never will - you can still play on whatever size you want though.

The swimming change is something I can imagine to happen and would surely help the row boat out a lot, I do fear that some players will not like that additional limitation of their options though. It's an idea I personally like a lot though.

Valheim Stability rules is something I like a lot as well, but given we do want to support the many extreme monumental builds we have, making a system that effectively prevents weak bridges while not limiting the monumental creative builds would prove difficult or impede each others goal. In the end, we would still want bridges to be possible if correctly supported, so the main effect of this would be a higher cost and longer time for infrastructure to be ready. But it is possible, as on many servers it is already required that bridges and stuff need to look realistic.

In regards to the Map Generation I do not think we would change anything that makes the generation more specific, but given you explicitly mentioned it as an option for such a world that people could choose, that would be very possible.

All those ideas are actually great!

For trains it is a bit hard, as the very basic idea for trains that are so far away is them being massive community projects that are set in an endgame we don't have yet.

Maybe due to you probably actually playing on smaller servers with about recommended world size, while many servers use way too big worlds, plus the ones mentioned by the other comment on yours about bigger servers that use bigger sizes, but as recommended size?

If there isn't much room, people are more or less forced to live together (that's the intention of the small sizes on all official servers but White-Tiger for the very reason of what I'm talking about here, otherwise they would be bigger given their usercounts), but once there is more room, my experience has always been the same: People settling as far away from each other as possible (probably to exactly not have someone claim their free space), leading to issues with infrastructure needs to get to everyone else, but also ultimately over the course of the cycles leading to several towns as we had intended.

It's not about the technological progression IRL mirrored in Eco though, but rather about the collaboration efforts balance-wise and to somewhat display of the impact of them given our abstractions in the game, where a full train would likely literally transport a whole town to another place.

The first (and maybe only) train I'd imagine we'd have would likely be an electric one at current development level. It might be rather unlikely we'd make several of them, as Eco is not a train simulator and the impact of several train classes would not play well with the idea behind them.

But given there is no plans for trains during EA that's all pretty moot, as there is no design work going into them anytime soon.