Save-the-world sim Eco's 1.0 plans include oil spills, garbage collection and a bustling art scene

04.03.2024 - 13:33 / rockpapershotgun.com

Eco is a very ambitious, wildly reactive multiplayer survival game in which you try to save the world without accidentally destroying it. There's a meteor scheduled to slamdunk the planet in 30 days, and in that time, you and your fellow players must progress from raising log cabins in the woods to building the means to develop technologies that might somehow avert the apocalypse. The trouble is, pioneering said apocalypse-averting technologies might itself bring about disaster in a gameworld that simulates things like habitat death, species extinction, air pollution and catastrophic flooding.

Players must thus walk a careful line between resource exploitation and self-inflicted calamity by monitoring their impact on the overall simulation, founding the right kind of government, and passing laws or devising economies (including player-created currencies) that don't flip the ecosystem upside down. The Steam reviews teem with anecdotes about people waking up to find their oil wells underwater, and it sounds like things will only get knottier when Eco releases out of early access around the end of this year.

The associated developer roadmap is a fun mixture of the usual 1.0 plans for final polishing and various enthusiastic descriptions of how they're going to make life worse for would-be meteor-survivors. On the one hand, you can expect more fleshed-out player professions "with lots more options to choose from and paths to take within those skills, to create a greater spread of possible careers, thus creating more 'niches' for players to specialize in and become valuable members of their community". On the other hand, they're adding a degradation mechanic, partly with a view to ensuring that certain vocations don't run out of things to do. "Everything will wear down and, if not maintained, break over time," the post explains. "This creates a constant need on professions to supply parts and perform repairs on these objects, preventing professions from going obsolete when all the needed objects are produced."

Eco 1.0 will seek to avoid grinding by increasing the frequency by which ability upgrades or new tools and vehicles become available. "We will be analyzing every profession to ensure that upgrades in abilities become available frequently, which we believe will greatly reduce any feeling of grind." the post explains. "One example we intend to produce is explosives for mining, allowing much greater bulk collection of ore." It will also, however introduce the problem of garbage, with crafting producing litter that must be placed in bins which must be scooped up by bin-collectors, who might need to be appropriately recompensed for their labours according to a tax-funded public sector - assuming