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Update 13 released! Logging Machines, Progression Rework, Store Tags and more!

Eco · Community Announcements · April 08, 2026

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Hello Eco Citizens,

we're happy to announce the release of Update 13! Let's dive right in and take a look on what changed:

Revised Progression

The largest changes have been made to the progression system, which has been completely revised to lay the groundwork for stars to become a "currency" that can be spent on a variety of benefits, ensuring that there is always a reason for good food and housing. Hence, starting with this update, players earn significantly more stars over the course of a game than before, but also need to spend more stars.

Specialties now no longer all cost a single star, instead their star cost is based on their individual tier. For example Logging costs 1 star, Farming 2 stars, Baking 3 stars, Oil Drilling 4 stars and Composites costs 5 stars - additionally, by default (except on No and Low Collaboration) for every specialty you have already learned your next specialty will cost an additional star on top of its base cost. Similarly, talents are no longer free - choosing one does cost a star as well and many of the new talents can even be chosen multiple times to improve their benefits at further star costs.

This new progression system introduces a larger array of options for players to create their builds and specialize, which will further increase with upcoming Updates adding more ways to spend stars. We understand that this makes for a significant change in gameplay and hence will closely monitor the effects outside of playtests and make adjustments in hotfixes and maintenance updates as necessary.

New Talents

To accompany the revised progression, we have replaced nearly all talents in the game with new talents that have a diverse array of different, typically more specialized effects. Check out some of them:

Talents have been designed with expandability in mind: Not only do we plan to add more talents over time - modders can now also easily adjust existing talents, remove them or add their own ones at any level. That even includes the ability to create talents that do not cost stars, but grant some in exchange for negative effects.

Wood Cutting Attachment & Scorpion

Loggers can finally rejoice with this Update: Next to them having gotten all their talents implemented, we have added two new advanced means for them to process trees more quickly.

First, we have added the wood cutting attachment for the steam tractor: Just like the more advanced Scorpion it allows to grab a tree and fell it. It however can not store logs internally, so it instead cuts the trunk into logs of a size that can be either picked up manually or with the scoop attachment:

The second addition is the Scorpion that has the ability to store logs internally and hence fully automates the process - also saving time, as it does not need to cut logs into pieces that can be directly picked up from the ground:

Store Tags

Based on one of the top suggestions on our feedback tracker, we have added the ability to list tags as buy and sell offers in stores:

This feature is fully integrated with the economy viewer and tooltips, for example the economy viewer will show stores buying tags that contain the item the player is filtering for and item tooltips will list stores that buy the item through a tag.

Quality of Life Improvements

Another thing we did for this Update was putting some focus on Quality of Life improvements the community wished for. The probably most notable of them being the ability to remove blocks with the hammer tools:

The farmers among you will probably like the new overlay when applying fertilizer, which will also display the change in nutrients as a little floating text whenever fertilizer is used:

We also made quite some more minor improvements, for example these:

We don't plan to stop there, but want to add some Quality of Life improvements to every future Update.

Release Notes

Balance Changes:

General:

Food:

Housing:

Items:

Talent Restrictions:

The following recipes require a talent to be crafted:

World Objects:

Server & Configs:

Balance.template.eco

Disasters.template.eco

Difficulty.template.eco

Rooms.template.eco

Outlook

Our next Update will focus around garbage, recycling and pollution and is also planned to contain some significant changes to modules. Work on it has already begun and our team will fully shift focus to it after the expected release maintenance. It's still too early to go into details and we will get those to you via our usual channels and developer streams once they are available - but, given we have shown a new vehicle in the Update 12 release notes, why not do that again? Here you go:

Of course we also haven't forgotten about Animal Husbandry - it will still be part of the 1.0 Update with which Eco leaves the Early access, currently planned to happen by the end of this year. Until then we however still have some smaller Updates in store, stay tuned!

Thanks for reading and your continued support, we hope you will enjoy this new update! - Strange Loop Games

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