Dear Eco Citizens, we're happy to announce that Update 9.7.10, the last part of our 9.7 Performance Update series, is now available. In the coming days after the easter holidays we plan to make an early development version of Update 10 available for public testing on the playtest branch. Please note that the official playtest on official server White Tiger will start independently from that a bit later and that this branch may be updated very frequently, up to several times a day. The branch will not guarantee migration yet, neither from prior versions nor between playtest versions. All further information about the playtest will be available on our official discord: https://discord.gg/eco. We're sorry for the slight delay. Good luck on your egg hunts and please find the changelog below:

Optimization - Client

• Improved: Optimized plant rendering, making plants faster to appear and more lightweight for the engine.
• Improved: Heavily optimized the minimap, also addressing several issues with and caused by it.
• Improved: Several optimizations for chunk, network and view updates - removing duplicate and unnecessary updates, reducing and optimizing sent data.
• Fixed: An issue that caused micro-freezes on harvesting plants.

Optimization - Server

• Improved: The amount of notifications sent was vastly decreased by accumulating notifications where possible, removing unnecessary notifications and displaying notifications only to affected players where they are not relevant for anyone else.
• Improved: Mod file uploads have been limited to one at the same time per user to prevent overwhelming the network. Additionally a configurable limit for how many players can be served with mod downloads at the same time has been added.
• Improved: Property updates are now sent via broadcasting to all relevant clients in the same network packet instead of having a separate one for every relevant client.
• Improved: Small optimizations for the login queue.

Icons

Avatar

• Fixed: The land claim stake was displaying as a untextured white object on the avatar.
• Fixed: The avatar would hold an arrow in its hand when the player went to sleep while having a bow selected.
• Fixed: Removing a tool from the hotbar that exists a second time in the hotbar as currently selected tool led to the avatar showing its hands as empty, despite the selected tool still existing.

Civics

• Improved: Civic name length limit was increased.
• Fixed: Revised civics would not correctly remove the addition of "Revision" after passing when the law name was too long.
• Fixed: Old civics that were revised would get multiple "Old" added to their names instead of just a single one and a number.
• Fixed: Some contract clauses would become invalid in repeatable contracts after it was accepted the first time, preventing players from accepting it several times as intended.
• Fixed: Contracts could show up with missing description and all entries invalid on contract boards.
• Fixed: Performing specific actions when creating a contract with nested clauses could lead to a client crash.
• Fixed: Repeatable contracts could disappear until a server restart after it was completed for the first time.
• Fixed: Not repeatable contracts would sometimes still be displayed on the contract board despite they were already accepted.

Economy

• Fixed: Trading with a store which had set a bank account that was deleted in the meanwhile led to a client crash.
• Fixed: When claiming new land for a deed, the bank account of any stores on the deed was reverted to the one of the owner of the deed.
• Fixed: Stores owned by an elected title reverted to barter mode and turned off after changes were made to the owning elected title.
• Fixed: Deeds for sale on a real estate desk were not removed when the deed was deleted.
• Fixed: Deeds listed on a real estate desk were removed when the deed was owned by a title and there were changes to the holders of the title.

UI

• Improved: Trees on the edge of the minimap now disappear smoothly.
• Fixed: After opening the chat while the map is in full screen mode, the map could no longer be closed with the "ESC" button.
• Fixed: Text in store tooltips could overlap for long item names.
• Fixed: Hovering over the amount of people with a specific level of a profession in the skill UI would not show a tooltip.
• Fixed: Several tools were not showing their descriptions.
• Fixed: Players were receiving a hint to switch their residency to a deed with allegedly more housing value than their current residence, despite that not being true.
• Fixed: The soil sampler could show wrong info on growth times when growth rates were changed in the configs.
• Fixed: Food items would sometimes not accurately show the spoilage level until moved.
• Fixed: Property layer on minimap was not activated by default as intended.
• Fixed: Shadow placement preview could show objects with wrong colorization.
• Fixed: The popup that appeared when being kicked from the server due to inactivity showed buttons to report a bug.
• Fixed: Under rare circumstances it was possible that the map on the Web UI was no longer displayed permanently after a server restart.

ModKit

• Added: A way to define food items as not spoiling. (Thanks to nid)
• Added: An option to toggle a vehicle's world object state while driving.
• Improved: Expanded availability of marked up usernames. (Thanks to nid)

Balance

• Changed: Harvest yield of kelp was increased by 1.
• Fixed: Harvesting kelp was not affected by the gathering skill.

Miscellaneous

• Improved: The camera for cart driving was adjusted to remedy a possible motion sickness cause.
• Improved: Carts do no longer collide with animals.
• Fixed: The "Clear Vegetation" tutorial could sometimes not be completed.
• Fixed: Some animal species, like alligators, tended to die out quickly after server setup.
• Fixed: Food items would sometimes not turn into rotten food despite the remaining shelf life being 0%.
• Fixed: Under specific circumstances it was possible to interact with world objects through walls and windows.
• Fixed: Players were unable to leave their vehicle when it fell over and turned upside down.
• Fixed: When using specific mods it was possible that food items picked up did not start with a shelf life of 100%.
• Fixed: Plants would sometimes not show fruits, despite being fully mature.
• Fixed: Some dolphin can be mounted again, also fixing an issue that could lead to players being unable to join an very old migrated worlds.

Server & Configs

• Added: Command /network setpassword to set or remove a server password during runtime.
• Fixed: Normally unobtainable settlement objects in a savegame would crash the server.
• Fixed: Players trading with shop carts caused unnecessary warnings in the server log.
• Fixed: The command /land remove removed all blocks but the specified blocks instead of the other way round as intended.
• Fixed: Players sometimes could get stuck at downloading mods.

• Added: "MaxNumberOfDownloadRequests" config variable, defining the number of players that can be served mods at the same time - defaults to 10.