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  Just what is Early Access Survival Game #34923789? quote:A fully simulated ecosystem bustling with thousands of growing plants and animals living their lives. Build, harvest, and take resources from an environment where your every action affects the world around you. An imminent meteor strike threatens global destruction. Can you save the world without destroying it in the process? Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/ Dev Site [and purchase, 2 packs and 4 packs]: http://www.strangeloopgames.com/eco/ That's the dev spiel. A few things set this game apart from the rest in meaningful ways: Crafting Depth & Cooperation Lookit all these breads.  There are a bunch of layers to crafting an end product - think games like anno/settlers. To make a humble loaf of bread you need: a farmer who has invested skill points in getting good yields; a miller to process the wheat into flour, and a baker to actually bake the bread. But the miller needs a mill, which needs a stonemason to build. It needs power, which takes engineering skill to construct a waterwheel or windmill. The cook needs an oven which takes a mason to make the brick, or a metalworker for a fancy one. The metal oven needs iron bars which are smelted and the whole thing needs people gathering raw materials! Sheesh. Point is, the game is super focused on cooperation and no one person or even one group can efficiently (though you might be able to do a bunch of things very inefficiently) do everything needed to stop the big rear end asteroid from killing the planet. For the stuff you can't do there are job boards that automatically handle paying players for constructing a road of x width from a to b, harvesting your fields or delivering a certain amount of logs. Laws, Politics and Science Looks like someone's been clearcutting Bunchgrass.  Law example: a tax on harvesting trees.  The game comes with a suite of graphs and data to let you track a bunch of stuff in the world. What's the current population of Elk like? Without Elk, the source of the tastiest in game food is gone. Players can use the online web portal offered by the server to browse through the data, and propose a law based on quote:“We made a mint, minted the currency and backed it with gold. We made around 650 Hay Pennies. …. While we were doing this, a guy out in the woods, who was not part of our society. He was making his own mint and he ended up minting like 5000 official currency that would work at any store. It was called Pound Sterling. No one’s using it yet, but it’s just sitting out there as a threat. … As we realized this individual was building his own mint, there was a rush to impose a law, that said no more mints could be built. I post that law as I saw him starting, I knew what he was doing, he had built a kiln and learned a certain ability. I bet he’s trying to make a mint we need to pass that law.” Not to mention the fact in the late game you're pumping out pollution from vehicles, oil wells, and refineries. Ok so how do skills work? Do I need to buy a jumbo pack of poopsocks to play this game? Not necessarily: though there is resource harvesting etc involved, skill points are gained offline. This badly cropped image:  shows I'm gaining +22.2 skill points per IRL day from my current food intake, and to get the maximum skill increase from food you need to balance 4 food groups (vitamins, carbs, protein, and fat). As you can see in true goon fashion I'm heavy on the carbs so my skill increase isn't what it could be. But so long as you have food in you, you can be logged off doing whatever and still gain skill points, only logging on to eat and dick around for as much or as little as you like. Skill specialisation is also pretty deep. There are specialisations which are learned from craftable skill books and within those specialisations are skills. Each skill group has 3 major areas - the skill itself, efficiency, and speed. Here's an example skill tree for campfire cooking:  With level 1 campfire cooking I can make some basic recipes that give middling nutrition, but with level 4 the recipes become much better. If I levelled up my efficiency, instead of getting 1 pot of beans from a handful I can stretch it to 2 or more making it more resource efficient (efficiency is the best). And speed is, well, how fast it goes. Ok maybe I want to buy Early Access Survival Game #34923789? It's on steam for the listed price, but if you buy it from their website you can buy a two pack for $55 or a four pack for $100. Currently there are 5 of us who are casually playing, and we have set up a server and started playing right as this post has gone up so you can jump in at the start of a world. We're newish to the game as well so jump in and we'll be poo poo together.  Server DetailsFilter LLJK in the janky server browser. You can try to use direct connect to 109.169.4.34:3041 but developers can't make server browsers these days so you're best to search. Web UI thing: http://109.169.4.34:3041 lovely Discord: https://discord.gg/uFVynAM SalmanBashi fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Mar 31, 2018 |
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Mar 31, 2018 14:12
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 18:37 |
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I polluted the world, raised the sea levels and flooded parts of the land. I denied there was a pollution problem. AMA.
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Mar 31, 2018 14:22
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Iceshade posted:I polluted the world, raised the sea levels and flooded parts of the land. I denied there was a pollution problem. AMA. How did you defeat Captain Planet?
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Mar 31, 2018 14:33
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I'm noticing an odd lack of dolphins in those screenshots
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Mar 31, 2018 14:48
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ColdIronsBound posted:I'm noticing an odd lack of dolphins in those screenshots We decided Dolphin Friendly was for communists, poor Ecco got canned.
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Mar 31, 2018 14:53
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RBA Starblade posted:How did you defeat Captain Planet? Turns out, you can legalise pollution and he can't do a thing. The power of buying out politicians!
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Mar 31, 2018 15:12
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So much more satisfying when you get to witness the horrible things you are doing to the environment!
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Mar 31, 2018 15:50
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There used to be trees here. They now serve as walls and furniture! #LoggingMakesTheWorldGoRound #LungsOfTheEarth 
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Mar 31, 2018 18:31
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First poopsock evening went well! Got 15 people joining, some player run shops, some trade between different groups, and looks like we're on track for getting smelting started tomorrow. The 1% even have some fancy houses with actual latrines in them! Pictured is the proposed Capitalism District, which will hopefully develop into a bunch of player run shops: Some SalmanBashi fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Apr 1, 2018 |
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Apr 1, 2018 02:17
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Sooo... what I'm reading sounds interesting but I'm not quite getting what the minute to minute gameplay loop is. Any recommended youtubing?
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Apr 1, 2018 03:45
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There's a big 'overall' thing going on, but the minute-to-minute gameplay right now is shaping the world. We're finding and gathering raw materials for whatever dumb project we have going on, we're making shops, houses, infrastructure (think of building bridges, roads and access ramps for our carts to haul poo poo). We're chatting (researching, talking and collaborating, trading between each other). It's all very pre-industrial right now. I don't know what will happen when we get combustion engines.
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Apr 1, 2018 10:20
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 18:37 |
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For a moment in time, I was the richest man on the planet.
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Apr 2, 2018 15:24
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