A meteor threatens the planet, and players must develop a civilization while managing the effects of resource extraction, hunting, and pollution on a simulated ecosystem. Changes to plants, animals, and habitats can ripple through the world. Players gather resources, farm, hunt, construct homes and towns, and build infrastructure such as roads and transport. Crafting stations, recipes, and research unlock new technologies, while skills let players specialize in fields such as farming, engineering, or trade. Progress depends on organizing resources and work across a community. Players can trade goods and services, create stores and contracts, and use information from ecosystem graphs and maps to propose laws. Elections, taxes, and programmable rules let communities shape how development and environmental protection are balanced.
Build a society under a looming meteor, specializing in crafts and managing trade, laws, and ecological consequences.
A meteor threatens the planet, and players must develop a civilization while managing the effects of resource extraction, hunting, and pollution on a simulated ecosystem. Changes to plants, animals, and habitats can ripple through the world.
Players gather resources, farm, hunt, construct homes and towns, and build infrastructure such as roads and transport. Crafting stations, recipes, and research unlock new technologies, while skills let players specialize in fields such as farming, engineering, or trade.
Progress depends on organizing resources and work across a community. Players can trade goods and services, create stores and contracts, and use information from ecosystem graphs and maps to propose laws. Elections, taxes, and programmable rules let communities shape how development and environmental protection are balanced.
Players who enjoy Eco often praise its unusual blend of cooperative town-building, specialization, trade, and ecological systems, where a community’s choices can shape both its economy and environment. Reviews also value the social experiences and emergent politics that develop among players. Others find the game demanding in time and learning, and say its systems work best with an active, coordinated group.
Full Game Details
From the Devs
Enter the world of Eco, 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?
Construct buildings and towns, tend to your farm, hunt wildlife, build infrastructure and transportation, craft clothing, build power plants, and research new technologies. Specialize in a craft and trade your goods to other players. Develop your civilization and sculpt your planet.
As your civilization grows, you’ll need to analyze data from the simulation; evaluating the impact you have on your world. Use this data as evidence in proposed laws, restricting harmful activities without disrupting the advancement of technology. Balance your individual needs with the needs of community, all while maintaining the state of the ecosystem. The future of your world is in your hands.
Every organism in Eco exists as part of a detailed simulation; a disruption in one species can have cascading effects across the planet. Chop down all the trees, and habitats for creatures will be destroyed. Pollute the rivers with mining waste, and your farms will become poisoned and die. The ecosystem supplies the resources you and your community will need to stop the meteor. Manage your pollution, mining waste, hunting, and resource collection to balance your effect on this system.
Eco is built on a rich ecological simulation. All the data generated from the interaction of plants, animals, climate, and players can be searched and analyzed using in-game graphs and heat-maps. Use the collected information as scientific evidence support to proposed laws. The ability to successfully debate using scientific evidence is your greatest weapon against the destruction of your world.
Establish and maintain your own set of laws and government, which are enforced automatically by the game. Draft a proposal to limit clear-cutting in a protected forest, incentivize green energy solutions over fossil fuels by providing tax subsidies and penalties. Participate in elections for world leadership, allowing you to set tax rates and allocate community money. Use a programmable law system to make dynamic and flexible rules for the community, passing them by vote. Construct a wide variety of governments; from tightly-regulated dictator-states, to tax-and-spend subsidy programs, or even lawless communities relying on trust.
Your skills increase based on your food and shelter. By consuming a highly nutritious variety of food and building an elaborate home you will rapidly increase your skill points. Skill points can be spent on skills like farming, hunting, trade, engineering, research, and more. Contribute to the greater good while increasing your own personal success.
In the player-run economy, you achieve the most when you specialize and trade both goods and services. Create stores to buy and sell goods you need asynchronously with other players. Setup contracts within the game’s quest-like labor market, soliciting other players to perform specialized work for you in exchange for payment. Build complex crafting machines and charge a fee for players to use them. A thriving economy in Eco can be both a powerful tool for progress, or a dangerous threat to the environment.
To grease the wheels of commerce, you can create your own currencies, backed by fiat or by resources. Manage the value of your currency relative to others by setting exchange rates at asynchronous currency exchanges. Sell items at stores and collect credit from other players. Eco is designed for rich asynchronous play, allowing many players of many disciplines to contribute to one another’s goals at separate or simultaneous times.
All of the world’s resources originate from its environment, which is affected by your actions. While a meteor looms over head — set to strike the planet in thirty days — a more subtle threat grows from player-interaction with the environment. Without careful attention, ecological destruction can destroy civilization before the meteor even strikes. To ultimately succeed, you and your community will need to use the tools of government and economy to find a balance between progress and protection.
Included Features
Online Multiplayer - Collaborate online with a community of players.
Local Singleplayer - Build your own world, with the option to invite friends.
Dedicated Server Included - Host your own Eco worlds.
Over 30 different craft tables, with hundreds of recipes.
Hundreds of items, skills, craft tables, and building blocks.
A simulated ecosystem with dozens of unique species.
With limited carrying capacity, players must create vehicles and networks of roads to transport materials.
Create your own backed or fiat currencies, using them as a means of exchange in the economy.
Build stores where you can sell your excess items for a profit.
Eat varied and nutritious food and build ever larger homes to increase your skills.
Create contracts for jobs that you would like players with different skill-specialties to accomplish for you. Take on contracts from other players that need the skills you possess.
Design laws using programmable template system to protect your world or increase your profits, enforced by the game if ratified by the population.
Run for election and make decisions that affect the globe.
View and compile rich data from the simulation and use it to argue for group decisions.
Claim land as your own property, and share access rights.
Give and remove reputation from other players.
Find a balance between progress and protection, between individual needs and those of the group, succeeding or failing together.
Eco is our forever project. We plan to keep growing, expanding, and improving it with the support of the community. Follow our plans and progress through the Eco Tree, which displays in-depth details on current and future features. The Eco Tree can be found on Eco's official website.
Awards & Kudos
Back of the Box
Platforms
Windows
Achievements
87
Age ratings
ClassInd (Brazil) L
IGRS (Indonesia) 3 — Interaksi Daring
Steam (Germany) 12
Players
From 1 (maximum not specified)
Play modes
Online co-op
Co-op campaign
LAN play
Persistent world
Other modes
Single-player
Private server co-op
Dedicated server hosting
Asynchronous multiplayer
Large community servers
Small-group co-op
Collaboration settings from no collaboration to high collaboration
Sandbox/chill mode without meteor
Timed meteor scenario
Player-run economy and trading
Government, laws, voting, and elections
Roleplay/community servers
Multiplayer
Eco supports single-player and online multiplayer. Official features list Online Co-op and LAN Co-op, and the description states local singleplayer can optionally invite friends. The game is built around cooperative, asynchronous server-based play with specialization, trading, laws, elections, and player-run economies. Dedicated servers are supported.
Multiplayer & mods
The game is described by players as moddable, with mods used to change gameplay and server setups. Reviews mention adding mods for later playthroughs and a modding scene outside Steam Workshop. No provided text states specific multiplayer-only mod behavior.
Controller required
No
DRM / EULA
Requires agreement to a 3rd-party EULA Eco EULA Eco EULA