Experience doesn't go up

Experience gain for stars is time based, only experience towards levelups in skills is based on crafting / work. Improve your experience modifier by eating balanced, good food and adding furniture to your home.

Skill Cost Multiplier determines the amount of experience needed to the next star, the higher the more, the lower the less. It doesn't change your experience rate at all.

The premade experience settings have not changed in the last two years. Without seeing how many stars you already have and what your experience rate is I unfortunately cannot say much more, feel free to send that information to [email protected], so they can look into it deeper.

You should really try to increase your food and housing experience, with five stars a rate of 54 isn't that great.

It indeed is. You possibly had manually configured "SkillGainMultiplier", which you can now find in Steam/steamapps/common/Eco/Eco_Data/Server/Configs/Balance.eco. That multiplier affects the experience rate, but has never been part of any of the defaults.

Well, that modifier does the same as SkillCostMultiplier, just with a different approach. One lowers the amount of XP needed for the next star, the other increases the amount of XP received. They are not recommended to be used in conjunction, but as long as it does what you want :)