Hello Eco Citizens, Update 10.2 is now available! The main changes in this update are a new Blacksmith profession, tons of improvements for the Exhaustion system, legal 'Injunctions', settlement polish, civics polish, lots of audio polish, and a multitude of bug fixes and balance changes.

Blacksmith Profession

Eco 10.2 introduces the first of the new specialties we have planned from our Roadmap to 1.0. The Blacksmith is intended to fulfil the manufacturing side of metalworking and takes over a lot of recipes that were so far handled by smelters. The update comes with five new workstations (Blacksmith Table, Power Hammer, Fletching Table, Grindstone and Pottery Table), two new decorative objects (Lighthouse Lamp and Town Bell) and four new items:

• Clay Mold - Used as a new ingredient by Smelting. (Crafted by Gathering)
• Ceramic Mold - Used as a new ingredient by Advanced Smelting. (Crafted by Pottery)
• Ink - Used as a new intermediary resource by Paper Milling.
• Printing Supplies - Used as a new consumable for creating copies and printing textures in the Printing Press.

Most of the recipes of the Blacksmith require multiple different tables to be in the same room, similar to how the Mechanics and Industry specialties work. Some recipes from Smelting, Advanced Smelting and Pottery now also use this mechanic. A list of related balance changes can be found under "Balance" in the release notes below.

Improvements to Exhaustion

The Exhaustion feature allows you to define how much time players can spend doing work in the game, allowing server hosts to create worlds that prevent people who have much more time to commit from running away with progress and leaving less frequent players in the dust. When exhausted, you can still play in the game (socializing, planning, setting up contracts, etc.), but you can't do certain calorie consuming tasks. Based on community feedback (special thanks to Mighty Moose and Le Village communities) we have iterated on the exhaustion feature and given it some major improvements:

• Administrators will now be able to fine control the exhaustion time per each weekday, hence being able to for example set different playtime limits for weekdays and weekends that will be shown in the server information card when selecting a server.
• They can now also set a one-time starter bonus granted on the first login of a player or configure retroactive exhaustion gain which will give players joining later in the cycle the amount of hours they would have had if they had joined on the first day - only limited by the configured maximum bank capacity for saving hours. "Rollover" can now be turned on or off, allowing servers to use this feature for sole maximum playtime limiting per day or giving players the ability to carry over unused hours up to the maximum bank capacity, for example for saving time during the week for the weekend.
• The time when exhaustion is refreshed can now be decoupled from the in-game time and instead be set to a constant real time that is not affected by server downtimes. The Update also comes with a long awaited filter to only display servers that have exhaustion turned on and a new server card only for servers that have exhaustion turned on.
• Administrators can decide for each separate vehicle if it should be affected by exhaustion limits or not and players no longer need to log out when being away for a bit to save their time - they can now just sit on any of the furniture in Eco to stop the timer.
• Last but not least we also fixed some issues with the system, made tooltips more clear and easy to understand and added an Ecopedia page that shows a detailed explanation of the system and a rundown on the configuration on the server the player currently plays on.

Injunctions

In this update the Large Court object additionally to holding laws offers a new feature: Injunctions. They allow higher-level settlements (countries and federations) to influence the laws of their member settlements. If the constitution of such a higher-level settlement allows, authorized office holders can issue an injunction against laws in member settlements. An injunction can block certain triggers, certain legal actions, and specific targeted laws in other settlements. Ignored elements are no longer executed, meaning an ignored law is treated as it wouldn't exist and ignored triggers and legal actions will be skipped - but all other parts of a law will still continue to function. This allows countries to have more power in determining the legal actions of the member towns, so when towns are forming the constitution for a country they need to think long and hard about how to grant the power to issue injunctions, or if they want to disable it entirely!

Release Notes

Audio

• Added: Engine sounds for fishing trawler and transport boat.
• Added: Support for sound combinations during block placement, allowing to adjust sounds based on the surface an action is executed on.
• Added: Harvest sounds for all pickup actions with animation.
• Improved: Replaced fishing trawler horn sound.
• Improved: Sounds at game entrance are now smoother.
• Improved: Performance of the sound system.
• Fixed: Sounds related to character movement were sometimes delayed.
• Fixed: Sounds for placing and destroying blocks weren't playing.
• Fixed: Sounds for picking up rubble weren't playing.
• Fixed: Some sounds didn't play in the correct variant for the selected sex of the character.
• Fixed: Sounds for elevators could get stuck, replaying endlessly.
• Fixed: Sound of the torch could get stuck after switching to another item in the hotbar.
• Fixed: Tools could suddenly stop playing their sounds.
• Fixed: Multiple issues with sounds playing double or in a weird way for block interactions.

Avatar & Camera

• Improved: Leaving the avatar display camera mode will bring the camera back to the exact position and rotation it had before entering that mode.
• Improved: Portrait camera for user pictures was readjusted, it will no longer cut off the display of the head.
• Improved: Rotation of the avatar during avatar creation is now faster.
• Improved: When mounting a vehicle, some camera angles could lead to clipping of the avatar - the camera angle was limited to prevent that.
• Improved: Entering the avatar display camera mode didn't always work correctly, sometimes keeping the current camera view with partly invisible tools.

Balance

Recipes

• Added: Fur Pelt can now be turned into Leather Hide and Tallow.
• Added: Raw Fish can now be turned into Fish Oil and Fish Stock, serving as variants of the already existing recipes for Oil and Meat Stock.
• Added: Hewn Logs can now be turned into Charcoal.
• Changed: Pots and Wet Bricks are now crafted on the new Pottery Table.
• Changed: Barrels are now crafted on the Rolling Mill using Advanced Smelting.
• Changed: Bows are now crafted on the new Fletching Table using Hunting. (Wooden bow remains on the Tool Bench)
• Changed: Arrows now have two recipes, one on the Tool Bench and another one on the Fletching Table.
• Changed: Pottery Upgrade Module recipe was moved to the Pottery Table.
• Changed: Paper Milling Upgrade Module recipe was moved to Small Paper Machine.
• Changed: Dendrology Research Paper ingredient was moved to Basic Upgrade 1.
• Changed: Gathering Research Paper ingredient was moved to Basic Upgrade 2.
• Changed: Replaced Cellulose Fiber ingredient for Recurve Bow with Linen Yarn.
• Changed: Increased craft time of Basic Engineering Upgrade.
• Changed: Electric Machinist Table recipe now requires Mechanics labor.
• Changed: Steel bars now use iron concentrate instead of iron bars and require more ingredients, but also yield more product.
• Changed: Rebar, Rivet and Steel Pipes now require the new Power Hammer present in the room to be crafted.

Other Changes

• Changed: Bloomery and Blast Furnace now require to be placed inside a room to function.
• Changed: Bloomery now uses Basic instead of Advanced Upgrades.
• Changed: Food Variety bonus maximum cap was lowered to 1.55.
• Changed: Total calories required to be eaten of a single type of food to be included in variety bonus increased to 2000.
• Changed: Bows now require hunting specialty for repairing.
• Fixed: Variants of the Cotton Bunting on the Automatic Loom were only costing labour, but no ingredients.
• Fixed: The ingredient cost of boards for the handplow was unintendedly high.

Civics

• Added: New game value "Direct Citizen", allowing to check if a player is a direct citizen of a settlement.
• Added: New option "Allow any unaffiliated homestead deed to expand within our influence" for the border control feature that now also is the default setting to prevent hostile takeover of settlements by surprise.
• Improved: The game value "Property Owned" can now also count only plots that are in or out a given settlement.
• Improved: Players can now join a settlement without removing their homestead support papers as long as they add a sufficient amount of settlement papers before joining.
• Improved: Players are no longer prompted to remove their homestead support papers or add settlement papers when trying to join a settlement if the inserted homestead support papers aren't actually needed to keep up the currently claimed area.
• Improved: When leaving a settlement that has a parent settlement, players can now choose to remain citizen of the parent settlement instead of losing all citizenship.
• Improved: Made the descriptions of immigration settings and law actions easier to understand and more clear.
• Changed: The influence radius of a settlement is now fixed once it is founded and cannot be moved, foundations themselves can only be moved within a limited, configurable circle around the original position.
• Changed: Cultural deeds must now be located within an existing influence circle plus tolerance of a configurable percentage belonging to a different cultural deed. If a chain of cultural deeds loses continuous connection towards the settlement's foundation at any point, all cultural deeds no longer connected in this way will be disabled after a timer runs out.
• Changed: Notifications about property crisis no longer display the required amount of claim stakes and papers that need to be inserted into the foundation to avoid confusion due to the notifications not being able to update themselves - the correct and current information is now always available in the tooltip that appears when hovering the foundation deed.
• Fixed: A client disconnect when viewing government bank accounts in a treasury on a server that has settlements disabled.
• Fixed: Treasury bank accounts weren't being destroyed when the settlement was, becoming visible for mayors of any settlement.
• Fixed: It was possible to edit the constitution without needing amendments.
• Fixed: Child settlements didn't always correctly influence deeds created with claim stakes of parent settlements.
• Fixed: Ignoring authorization for vehicles wasn't possible.
• Fixed: Creating contracts with multiple nested clauses would disconnect the client from the server.
• Fixed: Distribution stations weren't functional when the settlement system is disabled.
• Fixed: Resources gained on annexation weren't correctly distributed to all eligible citizens of the annexed settlement.
• Fixed: Repeatable contracts could be accepted and finished multiple times despite only fulfilling them a single time. (For example, a contract requiring to place X blocks would consider the same placed blocks fulfilling all accepted copies instead of requiring placement of new blocks for every contract copy)

Exhaustion

• Fixed: The tooltip for the exhaustion bar didn't display correctly.
• Fixed: The icon for the exhaustion tutorial was missing.
• Fixed: Picking up rubble was possible even when exhausted.

Interaction

• Fixed: Cancel action triggering another action when using multi-block placement mode.
• Fixed: Targeting edges of blocks wouldn't work when using multi-block placement mode.
• Fixed: A potential cause for showing the harvest animation while only hovering a plant.
• Fixed: Holding e when opening the Trash Pile UI would cause it to open and directly play the animation to close it.
• Fixed: Trying to use the handplow while seeds are selected in the hotbar would sometimes lead to the seeds being eaten.
• Fixed: Fertilizing would remove the fertilizer from the first stack found in the hotbar, not the currently selected one.
• Fixed: Objects placable in water would display wrong occupancy highlight when doing so.
• Fixed: Clicking outside of the soil sampler tool ui would close the ui and immediately retrigger the soil sampler and hence open the ui again.
• Fixed: Diagonal building for the forms "HalfSlopeA", "HalfSlopeB", "SlopeSide", "RoofSide" and "BasicSlopeSide".
• Fixed: It was possible to pick up garbage in deeds without authorization.
• Fixed: When trying to fell a tree its stump was highlighted as valid target for the tool despite it wasn't.
• Fixed: Trying to remove claim papers from a homestead via shift-click would disconnect the client from the server.

UI

• Added: Ecopedia page for seeds.
• Improved: Moved Beans, Camas Bulb and Rice to the "Produce" section of Ecopedia.
• Improved: The submit button in the distribution station does no longer disappear when the configured number of an item is the same as the currently saved setting, but instead becomes uninteractable.
• Improved: Updated the icons displayed in the work order tutorial.
• Improved: The picture viewer was updated to make the preview frame serve as a slot to drop a picture onto at the same time and is now universally used both on the settlement foundation and printer ui.
• Improved: The notification about needing to finish a draft contract before being able to create a new one is now displayed as a pop up to be easier noticeable.
• Improved: The spawn selection screen will now prioritize suggesting settlements that still need citizens as they are smaller as other ones.
• Improved: The skill ui now highlights the selected skill with a yellow border and the confirmation popup when learning a new skill will now say explicitly which skill was selected and is about to be learned.
• Improved: Profession icons shown in the level up animation now have a higher resolution.
• Improved: The tooltip of rentable deeds will now show a notice if the option "Allow property changes while renting" is enabled for that deed.
• Fixed: Deleted vehicle deeds would still show up as reference in user tooltips.
• Fixed: When using shift+left-click on an item with amount 1, 5 or 10 the respective transfer option in the slider would be shown twice.
• Fixed: Five-digit amounts of an item weren't displayed correctly in the store ui.
• Fixed: The settlements view showed the line "Government of name" when no settlement was selected.
• Fixed: In the annexation list, not every mention of a settlement provided a tooltip when hovering over it.
• Fixed: The bug report ui didn't reset its contents after a bug report was sent.
• Fixed: When reading a skill scrollall skill experience bars would change their color, wrongly indiciating that all experience would have been gained in the current play session.
• Fixed: The store ui didn't show the currency icon, but instead displayed a line of code.
• Fixed: The notifications for a dissolved settlement wouldn't link the dissolved settlement and hence not allow hovering it for a tooltip.
• Fixed: The waterwheel showed internal item codes instead of linked item names where it informed about things obstructing its rotation.
• Fixed: Scrolling in the texture review panel didn't work reliably.
• Fixed: Some generators displayed a wrong power type in the "Consumes:" line on their tooltips.
• Fixed: The icon for claim papers in the annexation ui was not displayed correctly.
• Fixed: Deleted settlements could appear as potential spawn point, leading to a black screen on selection.
• Fixed: Notifications for experience gained could appear on photos.
• Fixed: Icons on the map moved when the map was moved.
• Fixed: When zooming in on the fullscreen map, players far away could appear as big icons at the borders.
• Fixed: An issue where depending on the player's locale the correct decimal separator was not recognized and couldn't be entered into respective fields.
• Fixed: Recurring transfers displayed in player tooltips didn't update on changes until a server restart.

Notifications

• Fixed: Wrong error message when building in multi-block placement mode when not having enough building materials stating "Not attached to the ground" instead of "Need x more blocks".
• Fixed: Authorized players accessing a distribution station would cause a wrong notification in the newsfeed for every access attempt.
• Fixed: Notifications when not being able to interact with something were triggered twice in many cases.
• Fixed: When attempting to add items to a full inventory the notification erroneously displayed "Inventory too heavy" instead of "Inventory is full".

World Objects

• Improved: Lighting furniture now functions again outside of rooms.
• Improved: Green electricity generators no longer automatically turn off when they are not needed, retaining their animations.
• Fixed: Force-enabled computer lab and lasers no longer require electricity to be used.
• Fixed: Electrical pumps didn't have a flow rate of 4 as it is intended.
• Fixed: Stores that were owned by a title did not recheck if the bank account can still be accessed by the title when a title holder lost the title - if the title can no longer access the bank account at any point it will now be reset and if the title has no holders at all anymore the store will be disabled.
• Fixed: The water wheel could rotate in the wrong direction in relation to the water flow.
• Fixed: After transferring ownership of an object, the original owner could still grant authorization for it.
• Fixed: The warning about imminent drowning when getting hungry while swimming was sent to everyone instead of only the affected player.

Miscellaneous

• Added: Method for mods to track text changes of signs. (Thanks to JulianMa)
• Added: A confirmation popup when resetting the tutorial.
• Improved: Increased ecopedia font to 22px size.
• Improved: Animal behaviour when fleeing or wandering and when stuck.
• Improved: The dev tool can now remove blocks through water, to target water blocks CTRL needs to be held.
• Fixed: An issue related to claim papers that could corrupt and prevent a world from loading.
• Fixed: A crash that could occur when exiting to the main menu while a world was loading.
• Fixed: Elevators could get desynced, displaying at a position above their base.
• Fixed: An issue that could lead to a disconnect with error "Failed to handle RPCResponse" when eating food.
• Fixed: Vehicles in elevators could appear as levitating to other players, this fix freezes vehicles like on boats.
• Fixed: Multiple display issues with water, especially at "corners" of water.
• Fixed: Kelp, Clam and Urchin didn't spread correctly.
• Fixed: Boats could "fly" when driving where there were placed blocks above it.
• Fixed: Barges would play their ramp animation before showing the correct ramp state when the chunk the barge is in is reloaded.
• Fixed: Crafting recipes that have variants for their form instead of their material would yield unexpected results when not choosing a specific variant.

Server & Configs

• Added: A setting that allows to give players a retroactive experience gain when joining the server later.
• Added: Commands "/adddems" and "/removedems" to assign a demographic to or remove a demographic from a player permanently, ignoring the demographics' requirements.
• Improved: The "/help" command now displays the number type and "(optional)" instead of "*" for optional parameters.
• Improved: Ground levelling for the "/bt" and "/bm" commands is now an optional parameter.
• Fixed: The "/road" command now also works again with asphalt roads.
• Fixed: The "/teleport atob" command would teleported players onto the head of the target, which wasn't very healthy.
• Fixed: The spawn selection screen appeared despite the config variable "InitialSpawnSelection" being set to false.

Balance.template.eco

• Added: "RetroactiveExperienceRate" config variable, determining an experience rate that players joining a server after start will be assumed to have had for all the time they were not on the server yet and be granted retroactively - defaults to 0 for disabled.

Features.template.eco

• Added: "ExhaustionTimeEnabled" config variable, determining if the exhaustion feature is active - defaults to false.

Exhaustion.template.eco (New)

• Added: "RefreshLocalHours" config variable, determining the hour of the exhaustion refresh in local time - defaults to 0.
• Added: "RefreshLocalMinutes" config variable, determining the minute of the exhaustion refresh in local time - defaults to 0.
• Added: "MondayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on mondays - defaults to 3.
• Added: "TuesdayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on tuesdays - defaults to 3.
• Added: "WednesdayExhaustionRefreshHours": config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on wednesdays - defaults to 3.
• Added: "ThursdayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on thursdays - defaults to 3.
• Added: "FridayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on fridays - defaults to 6.
• Added: "SaturdayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on saturdays - defaults to 6.
• Added: "SundayExhaustionRefreshHours" config variable, determining the amount of exhaustion hours granted on sundays - defaults to 6.
• Added: "AllowPlaytimeSaving" config variable, determining if unused exhaustion hours can be saved for a later day - defaults to true.
• Added: "MaxSavedHours" config variable, determining how many exhaustion hours can be saved at maximum - defaults to 15.
• Added: "AllowExhaustionPauseOnRest" config variable, determining if resting on any furniture stops the exhaustion timer, defaults to true.
• Added: "BonusHoursOnExhaustionEnabled" config variable, determining an amount of bonus exhaustion hours granted for the first login - defaults to 2.
• Added: "BonusRetroactiveHoursAfterStart" config variable, determining if players joining the server later get the exhaustion hours of days they missed granted retroactively up the maximum amount that can be saved - defaults to true.
• Added: "Vehicles" config variable, determines for every vehicle in the game on if it is affected by exhaustion limits or not.

Settlements.template.eco

• Added: "BaseInfluenceRadiusFoundationMovementAllowedAfterFounding" config variable, determining the range around the original position of a foundation in which the foundation can be moved after founding as a percentage of its base influence (without culture) - defaults to 50.
• Added: "CultureDeedLinkPercentRequirement" config variable, determining the percentage of a cultural deeds' influence that is added as tolerance for valid placement of additional cultural deeds in a chain - defaults to 30.
• Added: "HoursBeforeInvalidatingCultureDeed" config variable, determining the amount of hours ticking down as timer before cultural deeds with invalid placement get disabled - defaults to 2.

Note: Migration from the prior version is supported, but some recipes have been moved to the Blacksmith profession, require new work tables and won't be available for crafting without making adjustments first. If you prefer to finish your server on the prior version, you can do so by selecting "10.1.5" in the Steam beta settings for Eco. This can also be used to roll back your version until your server has updated. As always let us know feedback on our Feedback Tracker or Discord and be invited to read up on our plans for V1 and exiting Early Access in our earlier blog post. Enjoy! - Strange Loop Team