A shared world with a deadline
Eco drops your group into a fully simulated ecosystem where plants and animals grow, spread, and die on their own. A meteor is set to strike the planet in thirty days, so the clock is always running. Your job is to build a civilization capable of researching and stopping it, but every tree you fell, every river you pollute, and every animal you hunt feeds back into the same world you depend on. Chop down too much forest and habitats collapse; dump mining waste in a river and your downstream farms die. The challenge is reaching the technology you need before the ecosystem you are stripping collapses around you.
How your group plays together
Eco is built for online co-op, and it rewards splitting up. One person can specialize in farming to keep everyone fed, another in hunting, another in engineering or research, and another in trade. Skills grow based on your food and shelter, so eating varied, nutritious meals and building larger homes pushes your skill points up faster. With limited carrying capacity, you will need vehicles and road networks to move materials between sites.
The economy runs on players. You can open stores to sell surplus goods, set up contracts in the labor market to hire other players for specialized work, and build crafting machines that charge a fee to use. Currencies can be created and backed by resources or fiat, with exchange rates set at asynchronous currency exchanges. Because play is asynchronous, members of your group can contribute at different times and still push the same shared goals forward.
Government, laws, and data
As your civilization grows, you get tools to govern it. The simulation produces searchable data through in-game graphs and heat-maps, showing the impact of plants, animals, climate, and player activity. Use that data as evidence when drafting laws, then pass them by vote. Laws are enforced automatically by the game, so a rule limiting clear-cutting in a protected forest or a tax subsidy favoring green energy over fossil fuels actually changes behavior. You can run for world leadership, set tax rates, and allocate community money. The programmable law system supports everything from tightly regulated states to subsidy programs to communities that rely on trust with no formal rules.
Before you start
Eco is in Early Access, so expect the systems to still be settling. The game includes online multiplayer, local singleplayer with the option to invite friends, and a dedicated server for hosting your own worlds. There are over 30 craft tables with hundreds of recipes, hundreds of items, skills, and building blocks, and a simulated ecosystem with dozens of unique species. The meteor gives you thirty days, but the quieter threat is your own footprint: ecological destruction can end your civilization before the meteor ever arrives. Success means balancing progress against protection, using both government and economy to get there.