I can also recommend you "Civitas" from Snepserv (will start, when version 9.5 of eco will be released). I play on an earlier cycle called "Aeternum" and it runs for over 100 days with good population. Its managed by a staff member of SLG and in my experience after 2.000 hours its important, to have activ admins.
Just to clarify: A volunteer staff member, no employee.
Most of this game relies on players having a cooperate and selfless mindset. My experience is that players tend to profit maximize, which is natural. This works fine in the real world and is just capitalism. Many players do sometimes forget that unlike the real world, people getting poor in a game means they quit and the server dies.
This also reflects to profession picking. Players tend to go for the good and fun professions, effectively making an elite of people with good professions. This again leads to the same outcome as before. The best solution is for players to pick only one good profession and then have the worse professions as secondaries. This is unlikely to happen without ingame restrictions on professions. I have tried it though, playing on a server with a admin setup government with laws restricting certain profession combinations.
It's not that different though, poor people IRL also 'quit' the society - it just has different consequences governments need to deal with and more severe ones they try to avoid with basic securities.
Read moreI love this game and have the same qualms. I'm feeling pretty motivated lately to work on a mod to try and rebalance the game, it's recipes, and professions. I really dislike how some professions like fertilizers are required but are almost completely useless. There are similar problems with tailoring. As you said, it seems to stem from everything smelting related being the main path for the game and anything that isn't related to that or food/housing is just not that interesting. Even though tailoring is obviously important to housing it's also a one time cost that basically ends in the mid game. Once people have 3 stars they stop caring about high quality housing unless they are rich and want to splurge.
It also doesn't help that mining is quite interesting. You have to dig a ramp or elevator shaft to the ore and deal with tailings. Tailors can run around and cut grass for a few minutes then sit and craft.
Other games by this point have at least one or 2 reall...
We've only lately begun to massively expand modding capabilitites and start with a documentation, as we originally didn't even plan to do that before the game would be more feature complete and stable - the downside of that is, that it is not feature complete and stable and stuff unavoidably will break often.
My colleague Jens has been working on a total profession and talent overhaul for the last months, so that's already coming, though as always expansion of some professions also necessarily goes along with adding additional content to them, which is a different thing and takes more time, especially since we got other new features as well.
Boats have already been confirmed for 10.0 (for real!) and Animal Husbandry is on the list, but does not have any planned scheduling yet.
We do not plan on introducing a thirst system to Eco. The hunger and food system is there as it has intrinsic value and links to the gameplay loop for it to provide increased skill gain speed and is supplying a whole industry on servers, while water would not do either, but rather be a menial task to do additionally to all other things with little benefit and little value. It surely could get some added importance, but it would never reach the depth the food system already has and does well, so int...
Read moreNot wanting to insunate something, but given your skill bar and the fact this is only possible to occur via admin / developer commands, they were likely not crafted or crafting was modified in a way that broke stuff.
The wood sign does no longer exist as a craftable item and has no model, as it was removed and is only left as a parent placeholder sign for development purposes, it cannot be gotten without spawning it. That also applies to some of the other signs that have variants, they all have a parent sign without model that has 'no variant' and no model, also only gettable by spawning. This is also true for other items, like tools. /give hammer will give you a generic non-variant hammer that doesn't work. For spawning it's always important to use the name of an actually craftable item, so it can be used, as commands give access to all items, no matter if they can be gotten in normal gameplay.
Will the farming update add new fruits and vegetables? Whenever I play farmer I'm sad there aren't things like onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, apples, cherries, peaches, strawberries, etc. Orchards would be so much fun to have.
The update is too far away to make any statement of actual value, so I'm instead taking it as a suggestion to the team :)
Sounds interesting. Are there any "universal likes"?
No.