I’d tilled a small patch of ground behind it to make a vegetable garden from wild seeds I’d found in the forest, and had a storage stockpile to set aside more raw resources. I built a small, one-room log cabin with an earth floor and a campfire inside, which I was using to roast some tomatoes. On a fresh, new planet in Eco, almost everywhere was forest. I switched ownership of my meagre pile of logs to public, and left for a new world. The meteor felt, in fact, like a MacGuffin to force people to work together. But they didn’t seem concerned about the meteor. There were a couple of other people on the server, discussing what progress they had made in building. And progress can be made, as evidenced by the business and homes other people owned. I’d have to move to the other side of the world to make more progress. But then what? Almost everything else nearby was owned by someone else already. There was very little forest near my camp, so I spent most of my time trekking back and forth carrying logs, and eventually built a small home. What I spent most of my time doing on my first Eco planet The server I was on was, unsurprisingly, not a communist one, but they did have a stockpile from which newcomers were allowed to take a certain amount of food to keep them going. There are systems in the game that encourage collaboration and prevent griefing you can set the ownership of any of your stuff, making it public, private or available to certain individuals. Players were working together and showing each other what they’d built for the effort (a big path between different homes). There was a forge, general stores, and a long stretch of a highway was under construction. This person owned the only living corn on the planet, I think. I got hungry and couldn’t complete the quest to find food, because the only edibles growing nearby were owned by another player who was now running a bakery. The nearest trees to me were a slog away, and I barely managed to build anything. The camps around me had long since been abandoned for larger homes. I didn’t realise then that the plain I was on was once a thick forest carpeted with wild fruits and vegetables the deforestation had been curbed by the introduction of a tax on anyone but new players cutting down trees. The tutorial advised me to set up my camp near other buildings, so I’d be able to take advantage of what the community had built so far. I spawned in on a wide, flat plain with a few tents dotted around. It seemed like a good idea, because they’d have gotten a head start on stopping the meteor about to hit the planet, you see. The first time I played Eco, I chose a world that had been running for a few days, with a few active players. This is like one of those jokes that work on Twitter but makes people really concerned if you write it on Facebook: "Anyone else feel like the planet is doomed and we should stop trying?" Like, your aunt would post a comment underneath asking if you were okay. Check back tomorrow, if we're still all here.
RPS is having an Apocalypse Day! We're celebrating the end of the world and games about it.