With our biggest update ever - ‘Eco 10’ - out the door, it’s time to set our eyes on the next big milestone: Eco V1, exiting Early Access!
Early Access has been an amazing way to develop this experimental new genre of a living government/economy/ecosystem mashed together and run by real people, we’ve got so much great feedback from the community, as well as funding to let us build out the extent of our vision. Now, with the bulk of features added (minus a couple big ones coming this year), we plan to spend the year building and then exit Early Access at the end of the year/beginning of next year.
To achieve this, we have a ton of work to do over the course of the year, and we have set a roadmap based heavily on player feedback. Our goal with V1 is to produce a highly polished, performant, accessible, and long-lasting gameplay experience. This means that we are putting the focus on improving and polishing existing systems rather than introducing new ones. We’ve based this decision on player surveys and stats from reviews, and the results were a clear mandate: make what we have more polished, and smooth it all out.
From that we’ve compiled a roadmap of what we hope to achieve, which can be divided into several main categories:
Bugs and Performance
Top focus is fixing anything and everything that annoys the player and delivering a highly performant build at v1. We’re focusing on user feedback from reviews and surveys and user-study sessions to set our priorities here.
Professions
More Professions. We intend to flesh out 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. We will scale this with collaboration settings so that small servers can still cover everything needed.
Infinite star spend. Right now, there comes a point when you’ve spent all the stars you can, and thus the need for high-tier food and homes dries up. By V1, we will have added many more ways to spend stars, such that there will always be a need for stars no matter how developed your society is, and thus there will always be demand for these core professions. Part of this will be the ability to spend stars on talents (the upgrade choices you get as you level up), with branching paths that you have to choose creating further niches driving more collaboration, as well as spending stars on objects to upgrade them.
Maintenance. Everything will wear down and, if not maintained, break over time. 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.
More upgrades. One of the best ways to prevent that feeling of grind is to have continuous upgrades in your ability to do things. That means you will only be digging with a shovel/swinging a pickaxe for a short time before you get upgraded tools and vehicles that make this action obsolete and allow collecting much more resources with much less effort. 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. One example we intend to produce is explosives for mining, allowing much greater bulk collection of ore.
Ecosystem Impact
For V1, we want to make interacting with the ecosystem much deeper and more impactful:
Garbage. All crafting will create garbage, which must be dealt with by putting into trash containers, which can then be picked up by a trash service run by your settlement, funded perhaps from tax dollars. If garbage is left out, or left in a trash can too long, it will begin to pollute the environment. This creates a mechanic that will both impact ecosystem and economy (trash collection and funding for it).
Oil Spills. Connected to the maintenance task above, we will add the possibility of pipes to burst when not maintained, and for vehicle transport of oil or other pollutants to spill when driving on unmaintained roads or with an unmaintained vehicle. This creates a scalable difficulty for major disasters, as oil spills which will have a disastrous impact on the environment and require a lot of work to clean up. We’ll also make tainted water affect any housing systems that rely on it.
Challenges Beyond the Meteor. We plan to add more end-game disasters and challenges beyond the meteor, challenges that will arise and face society over time. We’ll be deciding on what to target and designing it out with citizen input over the year.
Accessibility and Learning Curve
This is about making the game easy to jump into, flattening the learning curve so you can interact in rich and interesting ways without having to understand a lot of complex mechanics. It's also about making the game have deeper ‘emotions’: representing the beauty of the natural and man-made worlds, taking care of animals, and general coziness that makes it very comfortable to spend time in. Additions include:
Animal Husbandry. This will be our marquee launch feature, which will include raising animals for meat, milk, eggs, and wool, as well as pets, which will give a home bonus. All animals in general will get an upgrade as well, making their pathfinding and behaviors highly polished.
New User Experience polish. Making the initial flow for new users through the tutorial and connecting to a community seamless and fun. We’re doing user studies on new players to see the sticking points and address them.
Outdoor Housing Decoration. Adding a new scoring category for outdoor land, so that you can decorate your space beautifully and get rewarded for it, making for quaint and pretty villages.
Off-grid placement. Some items will be able to be placed on surfaces off-grid, i.e. setting objects on tables and shelves, to decorate your space in greater detail. It will also allow hosting dinner parties with placed food, which can have a cultural reward.
Canny-voted items. We’ve integrated a system called Canny that allows citizens to propose and vote on what they believe are the important issues for them here. We’ll be tracking this and fixing top-voted items continuously, especially ones that are low effort + high impact. Feel free to hop in and make suggestions and vote on existing ones.
Expanded culture system. With Eco 10 we introduced the culture system, which allows you to earn points for creative works. We plan to expand into other systems and deepen its impact on the game, as it serves for a great evergreen goal.
It’s worth noting that once we do exit Early Access, things will not slow down, in fact they will likely speed up, as we have lots more plans we want to do after that. (Trains for example will be a big one post v1, which was neck and neck with Animal Husbandry as the marquee feature, but we decided it’s better to stay focused on just one of the two and so will make Trains in an early update post v1).
So stay tuned, tons more to come and it’s going to be an exciting year!
Hotfix 10.1.4 released!
Hey Citizens, we have just released Hotfix 10.1.4 to address the following issues:
Civics:
Fixed: In specific circumstances annexation didn't work due not consuming the necessary resources.
Fixed: When a bank account on a bank was destroyed due to the linked settlement dissolving, its owner received double the amount of currency they had on the bank account to their personal account.
Fixed: Joining a settlement by placing a homestead with the respective option enabled was not possible when foreign property ownership was disallowed in the immigration policy.
Improved: When a deed has more claimed plots than claim papers supporting them, there is now a timer counting down before unsupported plots will be removed.
Improved: The error notification when an annexation fails due to not consuming the necessary resources was made more helpful.
General:
Fixed: The main menu wasn't displayed when the last joined server / local world was invalid.
Fixed: For users of the french and spanish language (and potentially others) spawn points on the map weren't displayed by default.
Fixed: A potential issue that could lead to a black circle overlaying the UI.
Fixed: The dev flood tool didn't work correctly when trying to add or remove a layer on the top of a body of water.
Fixed: When breaking aqueducts or pipes the game could create water source blocks that were unremovable.
Improved: The dev flood tool can now remove all connected water, this action is potentially dangerous and requires confirmation in a popup.
Improved: Multiple small improvements to aqueducts, making it easier to build and use them. (More changes coming in the future)
Interaction:
Fixed: Vehicles on a barge wouldn't get locked when the driver is still in the vehicle.
Fixed: Vehicles on a barge could get locked in a flying position.
Fixed: Vehicles could stay locked on a barge even after the ramp was opened.
Fixed: Multiple issues with collisions at the ramp of barges.
Fixed: Claiming via the map didn't work correctly for unfounded settlements.
Fixed: Claim papers and stakes could be taken from a town foundation without authorization when swapping them while already having any type of claim papers or stakes in the inventory.
Fixed: An issue with the hammer that allowed to rapidly click without limitations at a storage.
Server:
Fixed: An issue that could cause a server crash and subsequent inability to start the server related to crafting fees.
Fixed: An issue that could cause server crash and subsequent removal of all currently running work orders.
Fixed: Several issues that could potentially lead to server crashes.
Fixed: The /unclaim command didn't work when the linked deed had residents.
Fixed: Civics.eco.template was not reflecting the prolongued civic invalidity timer of 60 minutes from Update 10.1. (Make sure to adjust the config of your server if you have a Civics.eco and want to make use of this change)
Hotfix 10.1.3 released!
Hey Citizens, we have just released Hotfix 10.1.3 to address the following issues:
General:
Fixed: The crane was causing a client crash when used to pick items up from a storage and could afterwards no longer be removed from the world due to that causing another crash
Fixed: Elevators didn't function reliably with vehicles, them sometimes getting stuck or falling through them
Fixed: The Twitch plugin sometimes claimed it is disabled on the server, despite it was enabled
Fixed: After using /ownit on a vehicle, players authorized on it could no longer be reliably removed
Fixed: An issue that could lead to a server crash when the water of a pipe was flowing into a different chunk
Fixed: A rare issue that could lead to a server crash and corrupt the savegame, preventing the start of the server
Fixed: Memory required only during server connection wasn't freed after the connection finished
Civics:
Fixed: Setting wages on demographics and titles did not correctly setup the recurring transfers for the wage, preventing them from being paid out
Fixed: When many property changes occured, the annexation table was unable to reliably show a selection of annexable settlements and too many notifications were triggered
Fixed: An issue that could lead to the reputation given by a law to be extremely higher than the set value
Fixed: Adding a constitutional amendment under specific circumstances could lead to a client disconnect
Improved: Buy orders for Homestead support papers and settlement papers can now specify their origin to be "Any settlement", making acquiring of homestead support papers easier
UI:
Improved: Hovering over items in the work order bar at a work table will show the tooltip for that specific item again, instead of the general tooltip of the work order bar
Improved: The game will now show separate informational error dialogues when connection to steam backend servers or our own was not possible when it was started
Hotfix 10.1.2 released!
Hey Citizens, we have just released Hotfix 10.1.2 to address the following issues:
General:
Fixed: An issue related to claim papers that could lead to a crashloop on servers
Fixed: An issue related to constitutions that could lead to a crashloop on servers
Fixed: An issue that made it possible to unlink claim stakes and papers from their settlements, allowing to use them anywhere
Civics:
Fixed: Appointed titles wouldn't always correctly consider the holders of member titles as occupants
Improved: Annexation notifications due to culture were still triggering too often, they will now only trigger when a culture value higher than the so far highest achieved value was reached
Interaction:
Fixed: Vehicles driven onto barges couldn't be driven off them anymore
Fixed: Right clicking to deposit resources into a storage one is only authorized on didn't work
UI:
Fixed: Eating animations for some foods showed pink particles
Fixed: Hovering over contracts in the economy viewer did not display the expected tooltip
Fixed: Hovering over items in a "Put items into container" clause of a contract did not display the expected tooltip
Hotfix 10.1.1 released!
Hey Citizens, we have just released Hotfix 10.1.1 to address the following issues:
Fixed: An issue that prevented some players to join some servers
Fixed: Even miniscule changes in culture triggered notifications for annexations, leading to spam
Fixed: The /unstuck command didn't work correctly when used while being on a boat on the ocean
Fixed: Vehicles that were parked on a deed were put into void storage when its owner was removed from residency of that deed
Update 10.1 released! New Homestead Support Papers!
Dear Eco Citizens, Update 10.1 is now available! We've been taking a lot of feedback from citizens on the settlement system that was newly introduced in 10.0 and applied it. It's a big system with unique mechanics that only truly play out when you have groups interacting together in their own worlds, and after 10.0 we've learned a lot from our citizens and made the following upgrades:
Homestead Support Papers
This update contains a new type of claim papers, called "Homestead Support Papers", which just like normal settlement papers will spawn in the settlement foundation based on the amount of citizens it has. The special thing about these is that they cannot be used within the influence of a settlement, but only to expand homesteads located outside.
Homestead Support Papers have no use for settlements - the intention is for these papers to be given away, allowing players that prefer to not be part of a town or that are farming outside of a settlement to increase the size of their homestead to a degree only limited by how many of these papers they can acquire. The value for the settlement is the income or reputation they can generate through this mechanic. Homestead support papers work anywhere they can be used, no matter from which settlement they were received. We hope that this new mechanic addresses space problems some of our citizens experienced while preserving the importance of settlements, but we also made other changes that should help with that.
Changes to Annexation
While monitoring the usage of this feature we have noticed that it is still used too often in a way we have not intended, especially to gain new claim papers by gaining new citizens for one's own settlement. In this Update we have changed the default requirements for annexations to cost additional materials depending on the tier of the settlement annexed. The cost will now also depend on the amount of citizens the target has, e.g. the more citizens a town has, the more the annexation will cost.
The most impactful change we made is that annexations now require claim papers to be paid to the target, both for homesteads as well as for lower level settlements, which is supposed to make annexations with the goal to increase the amount of claim papers no longer viable as they are now one of the costs.
For homesteads specifically, a town that wishes to annex it also needs to replace all homestead support papers assigned to that homestead with its own town claim papers. (Additional to the general amount they have to provide already) The homestead support papers will be exchanged with those seamlessly on annexation and be given back to the settlements they originated from. This ensures that homesteads have a way to make their annexation much harder as long as their owners are actively playing and that none of the additional claimed property gets lost when the citizenship changes. The annexation of homesteads whose owners are abandoned is completely free, ensuring that settlements aren't blocked from implementing their plans and projects by abandoned property.
It is now also easily possible to disable annexations on your server completely if you would rather not use this feature.
Changes to Border Control
We have moved the "Border Control" feature from the Embassy Desk to the settlement foundation, making it available earlier. By also making borders open by default and requiring citizens to restrict them if they so desire, they learn the process and are thus able to un-restrict them to accommodate outsiders they wish to allow claiming into their influence (perhaps for a price). This will also make it easier for homesteaders to claim into town influence, with their permission, in order to have enough plots in range to become a citizen. This is also a great way to deal with issues resulting from border disputes between two adjacent towns due to expanding culture.
Release Notes
Avatars
Fixed: When connecting to a server after having left it with the avatar sleeping, the UI would show the inside of the avatars face and prevent interactions until reconnecting to the server
Fixed: When entering water while eating, the avatar would lose its hand animations and prevent any interactions until reconnecting to the server
Fixed: Avatars that had invalid items could lead to the player only seeing a black screen after connection to a server
Fixed: The avatar's backpack didn't hide when sitting on a chair or mounting a vehicle
Balance
Changed: Decreased maximum givable reputation by laws of towns from 20 to 10 and for countries from 30 to 20
Changed: Culture calculation now uses the lower of the artist's / the picture's reputation instead of the sum of both - this can notably reduce existing culture where it was mostly gained by artist instead of picture reputation and hence lead to influence sizes appearing smaller after updating (If this causes trouble on your server, you can increase the "SettlementInfluenceMultiplier" inside Settlements.eco to make up for this change)
Changed: Increased shelf life of all cooking oils to match the one of Flaxseed Oil
Changed: Reduced labour cost of seed crafting from 25 to 20
Changed: Adjusted lumber recipe to require less Flaxseed Oil, it now yields 2 lumber pieces with only the other ingredient costs increased to match
Fixed: Geology Modern Papers were having a static ingredient cost for glass, it is now dynamic
Civics
Added: A setting in the immigration policy that allows determining if child settlements can annex each other
Added: New civic conditions "Is Government Account" and "Matches Settlement"
Added: New game value "Settlement of Bank Account", allowing to check if the bank account used in a transaction is hosted by any settlements specified
Fixed: The influence of settlements could be projected at a completely different place than where they actually were when their foundation deed was located around the 0 coordinate wrap border
Fixed: There was a discrepancy in regard to where homesteads can be placed between the client and the server at the borders of unfounded settlements
Fixed: It was possible to accept citizens into an unfounded settlement and then move it, keeping the already accepted citizens now no longer within its influence. When a homestead would no longer be covered by the influence when moving a settlement it will now inform the acting player that the homesteads affected by this will lose their citizenship, which they need to confirm.
Fixed: Editing deeds via the map didn't take into account the setting for if a settlement allows foreign property ownership, enabling non-citizen players that already owned a property in a settlement to continue to expand their deed even when foreign property ownership was disabled since acquiring that property
Fixed: Foundations with the default "Everyone" permission did not always correctly prevent players from taking claim papers out of it, which is supposed to only be possible by the Mayor with that permission set
Fixed: It was possible to edit or remove the citizenship demographic of a settlement, leading to the settlement becoming invalid
Fixed: Removing a citizen from a settlement while it was offline caused a server crash
Fixed: Trying to remove a citizenship application on a settlement that was assigned as child of another settlement via admin tools lead to a client disconnect, all applications will now be removed when a settlement is assigned to be a child settlement this way
Fixed: Multiple civic related server crashes that appeared in unforseen edge cases
Fixed: Trying to place a capitol on a server that has settlements enabled or placing a foundation on a server that has settlements disabled caused a server crash, placing will now correctly provide an error in the UI
Fixed: With settlements disabled, civic objects wouldn't allow their usage until forceenabled as they were considering themselves to not be within jurisdiction of a settlement
Fixed: With settlements disabled, civics weren't considered valid and removed themselves after the invalidity timer ran out
Fixed: With settlements disabled, claiming would sometimes show an error saying the action would not be valid due to not being within a settlements influence
Fixed: With settlements disabled, when unclaiming the last plot of a deed the server would crash
Fixed: With settlements disabled, it was not possible to sell claim papers
Fixed: With settlements disabled, it was not possible to use the treasury
Improved: Constitutions can no longer become invalid, preventing players from being stuck with an invalid constitution they cannot edit despite valid options to do so would be available
Improved: Settlements can no longer become invalid due to missing or invalid civics, only by failing their base requirements
Improved: Settlements will now automatically try to repair invalid entries by resetting them - this can also be done manually by using the new admin command /resettle
Improved: Invalidity warnings for civic objects are now sent multiple times during the duration of the invalidity timer to make it more likely that players notice them, additionally the default invalidity timer has been increased from 20 to 60 minutes.
Improved: Invalidity warnings are now only sent to the creator of the civic object and any players that have authorization on the deed the object is located on and could hence actually solve the problem
Interaction
Fixed: Interacting with a felled log using a soil sampler caused a client disconnect
Fixed: Interacting while in third person didn't always reliably work due to the interaction origin being tied to the camera, instead of the player
Fixed: The skid steer was accepting items it is not intended for that when placed by the skidsteer would create a unremovable white square
Fixed: Grass that had grown on tilled soil couldn't be removed by tilling it again
Fixed: Claim stakes defaulted to a vehicle deed if that was the last remaining deed
Fixed: Stone roads did not have a default form selected when using the hammer
Fixed: Plants highlighted already harvested fruits when hovering them
Fixed: Objects displayed and set to be available for purchase in the world couldn't be bought due to an authorization issue
Fixed: When trying to mount a vehicle multiple times quickly or during lag the player could end up driving a vehicle in the passenger seat
Fixed: When placing blocks in a multiform with the hammer the error message "Not attached to ground" could wrongly appear when the actual problem was the building range being invalid
Fixed: Mounting a vehicle in first person view would always rotate the camera to face north
Fixed: Transferring ownership of a deed to a different player, title or demographic caused a client disconnect
Fixed: The ramp of the barge could be opened despite not being authorized to do so
Improved: Paintings can now be added to and removed from frames via simple shift + right click
UI
Added: The game will now show a information message when connection to the authentication servers isn't possible, informing the player about our status page and the support mail
Added: Notifications for sales made with the "For Sale" feature
Fixed: Contract acceptance confirmations didn't show the requirements to fulfill the contract
Fixed: Crafting orders could show a "Halted" hint in their tooltip despite that wasn't the case due to not taking into account upgrades reducing the required amount of ingredients for a recipe
Fixed: Holding food in ones hands while in third person view and interacting with something could lead to the food additionally appearing on the screen as it would in first person
Fixed: Draft settlements were showing in the government UI, clogging up the view
Fixed: The "x" button to remove applicants for citizenship didn't do anything
Fixed: Hovering over a link in the notification menu could show the tooltip for something the player didn't hover
Fixed: The settlement picture area wasn't correctly showing in the foundation UI
Fixed: The password entry dialogue when trying to join a server was not displaying the mouse cursor
Fixed: Tooltip parts added by mods weren't reliably displayed due to a loading order issue
Fixed: Settlement influence wasn't shown on the map until turning the setting off and on again
Fixed: Map settings weren't saving the selection for settlement influence between play sessions
Improved: The notifications for removed claim papers will now explain why they were removed
Improved: Reworked the game entry flow, making the entry to the game menu more smooth
Objects / World:
Fixed: Grass was spreading onto tilled soil
Fixed: The fishing trawler was catching fish even if it wasn't moving
Fixed: The ramp of the barge wasn't correctly synced between all players
Fixed: The settlement crafting table had wrong occupancy values, it now fits its size
Fixed: The plastic buoy had wrong occupancy, it now fits its size
Miscellaneous
Fixed: The game was crashing when trying to join a server on old CPUs that do not support SSE 4.2 / AVX 2, we have implemented a workaround for that
Fixed: An issue with the chat that could lead to a severe decrease of performance
Fixed: Twitch integration causing connection issues that slowed the game down when enabled
Fixed: Branch occlusion in third person wasn't working correctly
Fixed: Shadows were not moving smoothly with the sunlight
Fixed: Additional causes for rubble teleporting
Improved: Multiple changes to animal pathfinding to make it more smooth
Improved: Added a new volume slider for weather sounds
Improved: Only unclaiming (instead of also claiming) is now restricted by default when a property has residents on it - the option that can be set by the landlord to enable property changes and warn potential residents about this before agreeing to a rental has been adjusted respectively to reflect that
Server & Configs
Added: A setting that automatically scales influence sizes of settlements with the world size, enabled by default
Changed: Changing the property owner of a deed via admin commands will no longer turn off objects on that deed like a regular transfer would
Fixed: Server restarts were resetting the available item count in work orders to 0 until the linked storages were updated, despite items were available to continue crafting
Fixed: Changing the anonymous voting setting for the basic default election caused an error in the server ui
Fixed: The server changed the "AFKOccupancyBeforeAFKKick" config value back to 0 when restarting the server, overwriting the configured value in the config file
Balance.template.eco
Added: "CraftingQueueQuantity" config variable, defining the number of work orders a crafting table can hold at the same time - defaults to 5.
Difficulty.template.eco
Added: "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsDisabled" config variable, defining the number of claim stakes (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are disabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
Added: "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsDisabled" config variable, defining the number of claim papers (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are disabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
Added: "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsEnabled" config variable, defining the number of claim stakes (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are enabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
Added: "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumedAndSettlementsEnabled" config variable, defining the number of claim papers (usable anywhere) granted when reading a skill scroll when settlements are enabled - defaults vary depending on the collaboration setting.
Added: "ScaleInfluenceBasedOnWorldSize" config variable, determining if settlement influence scales automatically with world size - defaults to true.
Added: "MayAnnexSameLevel" config variable, determining if settlements can annex other settlements of the same level - defaults to false.
Added: "MayAnnexSubSettlements" config variable, determining if settlements can annex other settlements of lower level - defaults to true.
Added: "HomesteadSupportClaimsPerCitizen" config variable, determining how many homestead support papers are spawned per citizen - defaults to 5, 5, 5.
Added: "HomesteadSupportClaimsPerAbandonedCitizen" config variable, determining how many homestead support papers are spawned per abandoned citizen - defaults to 3, 3, 3.
Renamed: "ClaimStakesPerCitizenPastFirst" to "ClaimStakesPerCitizen".
Renamed: "LandClaimsPerCitizenPastFirst" to "SettlementClaimsPerCitizen".
Renamed: "LandClaimsPerAbandonedCitizen" to "SettlementClaimsPerAbandonedCitizen".
Note: If your server hasn't updated to this version yet, you can temporarily switch back to the prior version via the "10.0.4" Steam branch when right clicking Eco in your library -> Properties -> Betas. Make sure to set this back to "none" once the server updated, you will otherwise no longer receive any updates automatically.
Hotfix 10.0.4 released!
Hey Citizens, we have just released Hotfix 10.0.4 to address the following issues:
General:
Fixed: Under specific circumstances it was possible to place blocks outside of the allowed height limits, breaking the savegame and leading to a black screen with HUD for all players on the server
Fixed: Using the "Approve all" function for pictures deleted all pictures that were supposed to be approved
Fixed: Approving a picture that was already approved deleted the picture
Civics:
Fixed: It was possible to override the permission to transfer properties outside of law jurisdiction
Fixed: Laws that use "Citizen Timer" were able to affect players outside of law jurisdiction
Server:
Fixed: A memory leak related to room calculations
Fixed: An issue that could cause the server to lock up, halting crafting timers and breaking interaction
We are currently working on a bigger patch addressing lots of issues that aren't as critical, scheduled for release within the coming days.
Hotfix 10.0.3 released!
Hey Citizens, we have just released Hotfix 10.0.3 to address the following issues:
Fixed: Shooting down the meteor could lead to an achievement related server crash
Fixed: Pictures in a invalid state (having no creator assigned) could crash the server and corrupt the save game, this fix will scan pictures on server start for this state and assign them a creator to fix save games retroactively
Fixed: Some other server crashes that could be caused by pictures
Fixed: Achievements were not properly storing progress and some were hence unobtainable
Fixed: The levelup animation didn't display its graphics correctly
Hotfix 10.0.2 released!
Hey Citizens, we have just released Hotfix 10.0.2 to adress the following issues:
General:
Fixed: Multiple usability problems with tools, especially the bows and the fishing rod
Improved: Canoes should feel more responsive to your interactions when steering them
Improved: Adjusted temperature and moisture ranges for "Flax" plant to have better habitability
Removed: The network multiplier for reputation was removed, it was causing confusion to players and is no longer necessary with the new settlements system
Civics:
Fixed: Towns founded by citizens that lost their prior town due to the civics invalidity timer showed a property crisis mentioning deeds that were part of their prior town and do no longer exist
Fixed: Custom stats that due to the name of the settlement or its founder had special characters in their full internal name were causing database issues that could lead to a multitude of strange effects
Fixed: The law trigger "First Login" wasn't hidden on worlds with settlements turned on, as is intended
Improved: Performance on scanning properties when changing laws, this notably improves civic performance
Technical:
Fixed: It wasn't possible to create a new world with randomized world generation through the game client
Fixed: It was possible to generate invalid worlds with a height over 160, leading to players seeing a black screen with HUD when joining them after a while. The world generator will no longer generate worlds with a height going over this limit.
Fixed: Some players could get stuck at around 80% of loading when reconnecting to a server
Improved: Multiple improvements to face tracking, including better webcam detection
Singleplayer:
For singleplayers (and dedicated servers with settlements turned off) we have added back the ability to gain claim papers (and now also claim stakes) when they read a skill scroll, as it worked in Update 9. These claim papers and stakes work anywhere and are not bound to a settlement. This is enabled by default when a singleplayer world is created with the "No Collaboration" setting and on dedicated servers that have settlements turned off.
For this to work on singleplayer worlds that were created in Update 10, the configuration needs to be adjusted - the easiest way to do this for singleplayers is to create a new world in the client with the default "No Collaboration" setting, adjusting advanced settings as desired, then load their currently played world again - configs apply to all worlds currently and are not saved per world.
The new configuration options are found in Difficulty.eco file: - "GiveStakesAndClaimsEvenWhenSettlementsAreEnabled" (Default: false, other than for "No Collaboration" where it is true - Determines if unrestricted claims and stakes are also granted on worlds with settlements enabled, which is the case for all singleplayer worlds newly created in Update 10 and not the case for all singleplayer worlds migrated from Update 9.) - "ClaimStakesGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumed (Default: 1 - Determines how many unrestricted Claim Stakes are granted when reading a skill scroll.) - "ClaimPapersGrantedUponSkillscrollConsumed" (Default: 1 - Determines how many unrestricted Claim Papers are granted when reading a skill scroll.)
The last two settings also control the gain for dedicated servers with settlements disabled.
Hotfix 10.0.1 released!
Hey Citizens, we have just deployed Hotfix 10.0.1 to address the following issues:
Civics:
Fixed: Bank accounts created since the last server restart would display a "Dual Permission" error and be unusable
Fixed: Homesteads were able to be placed outside of a settlement when joining that settlement before placing it down
Crashes:
Fixed: Changing the owner of a vehicle was causing a crash
Fixed: Opening the "Influence" page in the Ecopedia was caushing a crash
Fixed: Immigration policies could become invalid and cause a crash when a player tried to leave a settlement (or was made to)
General:
Improved: The claim tool will now auto-select the deed with the closest plot among those owned everytime it is selected. Once a manual selection is made, this behaviour stops for the rest of the play session
