How to Install Eco and Join a Server

There is a meteor coming, the server has set how long you have, and stopping it needs an industrial civilisation that does not exist yet. Building one produces pollution. Pollution kills the forest, the forest was feeding the animals, the animals were feeding you, and now half the server is hungry and somebody wants to pass a law about it.

That is Eco. Not a survival game with a green theme bolted on — a game where the ecology is simulated properly, your industry damages it measurably, and the other players are the only mechanism for stopping anybody from ruining it.

Which makes the choice of server the entire experience. Listings collect on the hub, and the practical advice below is mostly about picking well, because in this game the server is not a venue. It is the world, the government and the other twenty people you now depend on.

What the game actually simulates

The claim that Eco models an ecosystem is usually taken as marketing. It is not.

Plant species have populations that grow and decline. Animals eat those plants and each other, in numbers the server tracks. Hunt a species too hard and it stops existing — not respawning at a reduced rate, not becoming rare, but gone from the world for good.

Soil has nutrients that crops draw down. Mining produces tailings that poison ground and water if nobody deals with them. Burning things puts carbon into an atmosphere that warms, and a warm atmosphere raises sea level, and a raised sea level floods whatever somebody built on the coast in week one.

None of this is a lecture delivered by a pop-up. It is a set of numbers running in the background that you can read, argue about and legislate over.

The result is the most genuinely difficult multiplayer negotiation in any game: you need the industry, the industry is doing damage, and the damage lands on people who did not build the factory.

You cannot do everything, deliberately

Eco hands out skill points and does not hand out enough of them.

You specialise. One player becomes a farmer, another a smith, another a carpenter, and the specialisation is deep enough that you cannot quietly cover your own gaps at the weekend. If nobody on the server took masonry, nobody on the server has stone construction, and that is a problem the server has to solve socially rather than individually.

Skill points come from how well you live — the quality of your housing and the variety in your diet — which means improving yourself requires other people's professions. The farmer needs the carpenter to build a decent kitchen. The carpenter needs the farmer to eat something other than raw meat.

This is the mechanism that forces a community into existence. A single player on an Eco server is not playing Eco. They are doing chores.

The government is real

Most games with a "politics" feature mean roleplay. Eco means executable law.

Players draft laws in a rule editor, and passed laws are enforced by the server itself. A law banning tree felling inside a district stops you felling trees inside that district — the axe does not work. A tax on iron ore is deducted when iron ore changes hands. A ban on a particular pollutant is a ban, not a request.

Elections decide who can propose what. Districts divide the map into areas with different rules. Constitutions set out how laws get passed in the first place, and servers argue about their constitution the way you would expect people to.

It is possible to watch a server pass a law, discover it had an unintended consequence, and spend an evening amending it. That is not a failure state. That is the game working.

The economy is also real

Currencies are player-created. Somebody mints one, people decide whether to accept it, and its value comes from whether anybody wants what its issuer sells.

Shops are physical buildings with stock and prices you set. Contracts let people commission work. Prices move because supply moves, and a server where the only smith goes on holiday for a week has an iron price problem.

None of this is authored by the developers beyond the tools. It emerges, and it emerges differently on every server.

Choosing a server: the part that matters most

Here is the advice that changes your experience more than anything else in this guide.

Find out where the server is in its cycle. Most Eco servers run to a meteor countdown, and a world twenty-five days into a thirty-day cycle is not somewhere a new player can contribute. The professions are taken, the infrastructure is built, the laws are settled, and you will spend your entire time gathering sticks for people who are launching rockets.

Join near the start of a cycle. A server that is on day two is a server where you can be the person who takes masonry, and being needed is the whole point.

Some servers disable the meteor entirely and run indefinitely. Those are a different game — slower, more like a persistent town — and they are a reasonable place to learn without the clock.

This is the same dynamic that governs wipes elsewhere, and our piece on the best Rust wipe schedule for solo players makes the general argument well: in a game with cycles, when you arrive matters more than how good you are.

Check whether it is whitelisted. Eco worlds are permanently damageable, and a griefer with an axe can do harm that no rollback fixes cleanly. Serious servers apply and vet. Our guide to running a whitelist people actually apply to is written for owners, and reading it from the player's side tells you what a good application process looks like.

Check the population against the world size. Eco worlds are sized by the host, and a large world with six people is a very lonely game while a small world with forty is a legislative crisis. Neither is wrong. Know which you are joining.

Read the rules and the pitch. Some servers are collaborative and gentle. Some run adversarial politics deliberately. Some are aimed at teaching, and some at people who have played five cycles already.

Installing and joining

Eco is a paid game on Steam. Install it from your library in the ordinary way.

Multiplayer is reached from the main menu, and the in-game browser is the primary route. It shows the servers the master list knows about, and the useful filters are the ones about world state rather than the ones about ping.

Where a community has given you an address directly — from a Discord, a forum, a friend — there is a route to enter it rather than hunting for the server in a list. Take the port with the address. Anyone hosting more than one world on a machine has moved most of them off whatever the default is, and an address without its port simply fails.

Many communities also publish a web view generated by their own server, showing the world's laws, its economy and its current state. Where one exists, it is the best possible way to decide whether you want to join, because it tells you what stage the world is at before you download anything.

Expect a first connection to take a while. The client is fetching a world, and Eco worlds are not small.

Hosting your own

Eco ships a server you can run yourself, which is why so much of the population lives on small private worlds rather than large public ones.

For a group of friends, that is arguably the ideal way to play it. Six people who know each other, one world, no strangers to legislate against. The specialisation mechanic works beautifully at that scale because everybody's profession genuinely matters to everybody else.

Running it from your own machine works for an evening. For a world that exists while you sleep — which matters more here than in most games, because crops grow and animals breed on the server's clock — you want something that stays on. Our notes on game server hosting costs and how many slots a server needs both apply directly, and Eco's answer to the slot question is smaller than people expect.

The first hour, honestly

You will chop trees and gather plants and it will feel like every other survival game. Push through that.

The point arrives when you have to specialise and discover that your plan requires somebody else. That is usually a few hours in, and it is where Eco stops resembling anything else.

Talk to people early. Find out what professions are taken and what is missing, and take something missing even if it is not what you fancied. On a server with no tailor, being the tailor is more fun than being the fourth hunter.

Read the laws that already exist before you build anything permanent. Building a polluting workshop inside a district that has banned it is a bad first impression, and "I did not read the laws" is not a defence anybody accepts.

And do not clear-cut a forest because it is fast. Somebody is watching the population figures for that species, and they will bring it up at the next election.

Problems you will actually hit

Nobody has the profession you need. The defining Eco problem, and it is a social one rather than a technical one. Ask in chat before you assume it cannot be solved — somebody will often take the skill if they know it is wanted.

A law is stopping you doing something reasonable. Read it properly. Laws in this game are written by players and players write imprecise laws, and the fix is an amendment rather than a complaint.

Your food variety has stalled your progress. Skill points depend on how well you eat, and eating the same thing repeatedly stops paying. This catches nearly everybody around the ten-hour mark and it is solved by trade.

The world is visibly damaged and nobody is doing anything. Then the server has a governance problem, and it is worth raising early rather than at the point where the coastline has moved.

You joined late and have nothing to do. The cycle problem described above. Find a younger world; there is no way to fix this from inside an established one.

If this appeals

Eco sits between several things and is not quite any of them.

If the industry and logistics are what draw you, Satisfactory, Factorio and FOUNDRY all build factories at greater depth with no ecological consequence attached. They are better factory games and they are not about anything.

If it is the shared persistent world, Vintage Story and Minecraft both run communities that build towns and write their own rules, enforced socially rather than by the engine.

If it is the co-operative survival, Valheim is the friendlier evening.

None of them will make you argue about a carbon tax. Eco is the only game that does that, and once a server has had that argument properly, it is very hard to go back to survival games where the trees grow back.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Eco servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.