Eco Report # 3 New Vehicle List

Eco Beta 8, the Vehicle Update.

Vehicles are one of the biggest aspects of Eco still left to fully flesh out, as we currently only have a few.  Their main role is to scale up the amount of resources you take from the ecosystem while also scaling up the impact players have. Think worlds covered in farms, giant strip mining pits with huge piles of tailings.  This update will include a big pack of new vehicles, and expect more to come throughout Early Access.

Here’s a look at a tentative list of what we’re thinking. PLEASE NOTE that we will probably not make all of these for the next update: some will likely be cut, or changed, so don’t get too attached yet.  We’ll keep you posted on development in the weekly Eco Reports.

Bulldozer

This vehicle you’ll get considerably earlier than the excavator, and will be especially useful for flattening large areas, for farms cities or what have you.  You’ll also be able to scoop up dirt and put it in stockpiles easily with it. It won’t cut through stone, though, so you’ll need other vehicles for that.

Universal Steam Engine

Early prototype which will be the heart of all the steam powered machinery.

Plow

Here’s the first mechanical plow, which will let you farm at a much wider scale early on in the game. We’re also hoping to make manual powered plows, (and someday in the far future we want to add animal domestication and have animal drawn plows).

Tractor

The steam-powered tractor will have a variety of attachments on the back, to allow for plowing, sowing, harvesting, fertilizing etc.  Will let you tech up your farms quite quickly with this.

Combine

For large scale harvesting of late-game farms, you can’t beat the combine. Top tier food will require massive amounts of ingredients, and you’ll need a few of these to fully supply a growing server for the last tech push to destroying the meteor.

Elevator

We’ll have two varieties of elevators, one for straight drops (as you would find in a mine shaft) and another for overhangs (to hang off the side of a cliff).  This will be able to fit some of the smaller vehicles.

Truck

A higher capacity vehicle which will be able to carry the large quantities of resources these other vehicles will be producing.

Tractor / Plough

The tractor, equipped with the plough will allow players to make large fields to better scale up production. This will lead to a more efficient means of mass production.

Grinder

A very powerful mining tool, the grinder will chew through mountains, supplying late-game ore supplies as well as carving out tunnels for transport.

We’ll be shipping some of these out in 1 month, on April 6th, to staging (and main Steam release a couple weeks later).

Roadmap

We’ve got a new roadmap!  This one lists a big list of features we want to do, and you can vote on what you’re most interested in.  Check it out here:

https://ecoauth.strangeloopgames.com/roadmap

We’ll also keep it updated with what’s coming in the next release.  Keep in mind that community votes won’t determine what we work on, but we will definitely take it into account.

We’ve also got some new stuff coming in a couple weeks, including Localization which will have a first pass ready!  So a big thanks to the members of the community helping us translate, if you’d like to help us translate into another language join #translation-team in our Discord.