Eco Dev Tracker

Not before release from Early Access - the latest survey we did was in favour of Animal Husbandry. We also don't think there is too much senseful use for trains in the constraints of Eco's worlds for them to deliver notably fresh content for players design-wise currently. They're definitely still on the plans, but currently even selling electricity did surpass it on the feedback tracker - so they are not in any active development.

I think I hit the mark quite well.

I mean it's not a stream solely on the Marketplace, but it's there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NxDXp6hUu4

Migration between Update 10 and 11 should work fine in most cases.

We have a feedback tracker for that: https://feedback.play.eco

That depends a lot on the settings and how well they are adjusted to the participants of a server. But yes, more disasters of different types are something we'd like to do - though they'd not primarily be any sort of "endgame goal", but rather variety in challenges that players need to deal with on the way there (or after).

I usually try to target around ~ 15 CE(S)T for releases since I'm responsible for them, but this release requires staff from multiple areas to work together due to the deployment of fully new backend services (plus website) - hence I'm not able to commit to a clear goal time for this specific update. It's more of a it goes out when everything looks good, which makes the time a bit flexible. I'd guess anywhere between 15 and 21 CE(S)T.

White Tiger actually only serves as civics, technical and stress test - given the server is modded (and gets things during release builds that may make it into the next game update), it's not suitable for all cases of game mechanics testing - it's also a very concepted server, but the popularity resulting from that makes it the perfect choice to find as many bugs and issues as any possible that any server could stumble over when doing whatever we didn't forsee.

While the marketplace is specifically targeted towards existing players wishing to support the game, I can assure you that the feedback on it was just as mixed as everywhere else - though that was expected to begin with.

Eco revolves around playing with a large amount of players and also friends - the only way to reliably prevent players from placing blocks for others would be to disallow them to do so on any property that they don't own (and transferring any property they own) - which isn't viable and detrimental to the play experience. We also want players to be able to share their cosmetics with friends, as it is usual in other sandbox games - like Space Engineers. That is especially relevant for the share of coop players, but no less on multiplayer servers.

When we talk about gameplay advantages the scope naturally is always only the game mechanics. Eco doesn't revolve around any competetive artistic aspects as you mentioned, such activity results from personal player goals and interests of formed communities, but is not relevant to success in regard to the game goals, as such there is no gameplay advantage. Players can also have extremely different personal goals - not rarely such that...

Yes, of course, it was reported in playtest and already addressed in a PR yesterday.

Block shapes are made specifically per blockset, so they already have differences for most base sets. The introduction of paid skinned variants of base blocksets also doesn't mean we wouldn't add some shapes to base sets every now and then, as we have done in the past.

It is correct that we do consider these variants to be cosmetic. The gameplay value in the building mechanics is created by the economic and tier value of the base sets and the necessary requirements of having a specific tier and the linked material cost. Paid blocksets will always be variants of a base set with identical properties - not introducing any form of new crafting material or having a different tier - they are hence mechanically identical. How they look or how many shapes they have is not relevant to the gameplay loop, but solely cosmetic.

We had no plans to introduce additional blocksets to the game without them following a function, given that is their actual purpose and for the current g...

That should not be the case, the setting is just for allowing using items you have - but do not own the blue print for.

Yes, you can completely turn the marketplace on your server off, if you don't like it. You also cannot trade marketplace items or use them as non-owner unless you specifically enable either of the options - which is displayed to the user on the server list.

As for the reasoning I refer to plenty of other threads all around to not circle through all the same arguments for and against again.

Mind noting in detail what parts they did and how they implemented that via current systems? (I guess some manual admin interaction would be part of that?)

So you basically want to avoid the "hard" gate in server progress that the idea has? I guess it could be possible to balance spread mechanics in a way that power players are sufficiently migitated, but I think that would be very hard - especially when thinking of the system needs to work on different server sizes and with different compositions of players.

The general idea of knowledge spread between settlements is something I also considered, though, so thanks for that feedback :)

I have that tag because I work for SLG, but that does not mean that everything I say somewhere (especially when I specifically note "I" instead of "We" - I cannot on demand turn that tag off, unfortunately) is a direct SLG statement just because I work for it. Many members of our staff are around on some channels and engage with players on a regular basis, much of that interaction happening in our free time. Providing some insight and personal opinions by people working on a game can be very interesting to players, even if it is for some reason not for you - Reddit is ultimately a discussion platform, one of its very purposes is to exchange opinions. You posted an interesting thesis, I was intrigued and asked to find out what is behind. You asked me questions - I answered. I asked you questions - you answered. You brought up feedback - I made sure the team hears it.

I am not sure what your exact expectation was, given the company stance has been provided long before our dis...

Water wheels create mechanical power and only in low amounts - you are supposed to switch to a steam engine later on and then over to the electrical power generators. A way to convert electrical to mechanical and the other way around is planned. (And then you can profit off wind turbines and solar generators)

As for hydroelectric turbines there is unfortunately no such plans. You can add it here, though: https://feedback.play.eco

Sorry to hear you are disappointed by that. Have you tried using aqueducts for your project? We recently fixed some wrong behaviour with aqueducts in Update 10.2, they should be pretty viable for most projects - though there is a few more issues tracked and also a task to make it easier to fill those up completely without needing to resort to some magic trickery as is sometimes necessary.

As for general water behaviour there is unfortunately no current plans to expand that beyond the capabilities it already has, which are similar to minecraft and for the purposes of Eco with the aqueduct available were the goal. We did discuss about a few concepts how that could be expanded, but for now decided against that in favour of other development goals.

When it's already up for debate, let us know your opinion specifically about some of the parts, if you want to:

• Global and personal tasks that provide towards global research progress and could replace tutorials and help people that are "What am I supposed to do now?"
• Research being dependant on whole server progress and freely pickable once unlocked for everyone
• Different things contributing to research progress - raw production, cultural efforts, ecologic state, economic power and potentially positive diplomatic interaction (which was not mentioned in the original post)
• Settlements as option to specialize on specific kinds of production, granting boosts to them and penalties to others
• Victory Conditions (including hidden ones) based on the achievements of the whole server
• The ability of the system to naturally make maximum efficiency and rush at singular people less valuable, also incentivizing them to focus on other thin...

Also - please feel free to hit me up if anything ever feels weird to you via DM or whatever way you prefer. I certainly do not want to confuse people and the situation of me working effectively two jobs at the same time is definitely not great - but if you hint a mistake or improvement option at me, I will most certainly try to improve.