Eco - A game about the ecosystem and economy

General
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http://www.strangeloopgames.com/eco/

I started playing this with @nafen about a week ago and I’m really enjoying it. The developers behind it have done a variety of educational games and this one is similarly aimed for use in schools to help kids understand how our actions affect the world, but that doesn’t make it less of a game. The voxel based landscape and building will immediately make you think of minecraft, but it plays very very differently.

Most survival games threaten you with death if you do something wrong but this is often trivialized by being able to respawn, and harsher punishments tend to hurt the enjoyment of the game. Here you can’t die, instead it’s the entire planet that is at risk, and as you play the game on a server (sharing the planet with other players) ruining the world ruins it for everybody.

As well as pollution and animal / plant populations being simulated one of the more unique features in the game is how food works. It’s directly linked into your skill point gain in a really clever way. All food gives you calories which you need to do any work, but they also have different nutritional values split across carbs, protein, fat, and vitamins. The more balanced your diet and the higher quality your food is the faster you gain skill points.

On the subject of skills and progression, skill points are gained in real time so there is no way of grinding to get all the skills as soon as possible, even with the best food possible it will take a long time to get enough points for everything. Specializing in a trade is very useful and there is a built in economy system to trade for what you need.

There will be an update to the game in the next few days and the server we are playing on will have a map reset. If anyone is interested in joining us now is probably a good time as you will see a world develop from day 1, and be able to carve out a niche for ourselves.

Edit: I neglected to mention the fact that it is in alpha, and a bit expensive for an unfinished game. It’s well fleshed out for what it is though.

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I remember seeing the Kickstarter for this back in 2015.

I don’t have much time for gaming these days but it sounds really interesting. Yes a bit expensive but it’s in line with their original Kickstarter tiers.

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I got it, but haven’t got round to actually playing it yet. Seemed like a great idea, but not sure I’d manage the time investment it seems to want

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Depends what you want to specialize in. If other people have got the labour intensive work covered you can almost play “afk”. Skill points are gained in real time even if you aren’t online, and crafting jobs take time as well. Que up some jobs at the crafting benches and come back later to collect the goods.

There’s obviously more that you could be doing, but working as a group can alleviate a lot of it.

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Hmm. Guess I’m gonna have to give it a try

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We are playing on the GreenLeaf server, which should be easy enough to find on the list. You can add to your favorites by ip address but I think the owner is moving everything to a new server today. Give us a shout on Discord if you join and I’ll come find you.

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Server IP: 45.76.95.78:3001

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If enough people are interested we could club for a four pack to get a discount.

@dekaku will vouch for the fact that I didn’t run off with the $65 he sent me to back the Kickstarter on his behalf :slight_smile:

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Initially I was a little confused how they managed to get a square grid to work as a sphere without there being obvious stretching or seams in the world. They do some trickery to make the map look like a globe and if there is a game that supports the flat earth theory nonsense this is it :stuck_out_tongue:.

The map is actually completely square with a kind of fish eye lens effect warping the landscape so it curves away from you, and when you hit one of the borders it just teleports you to the other side of the map. The minimap has a similar effect applied to it. If you were able to see the back side of the globe in the minimap it wouldn’t make any sense, but its nicely hidden from view.