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.