bots

[BREDOK]

Will there be bots in the game? for those players who want to play alone or with a couple of their friends.
of course, I understand that the whole depth of the game is in multiplayer, but still it would be cool if there was such an opportunity.

[SLG-Dennis]

We unfortunately have no plans for that, but you can vote for it on our feedback tracker: https://eco.canny.io/feature-suggestions/p/single-player-npcs

[BREDOK]

thanks for the reply. I voted and left a comment, and that's what I was wondering, how many votes do I need for this idea to get <<under review>>?

[Afrozzi]

Originally posted by SLG-Dennis:

Eco will not feature NPCs as has already been mentioned as the sole point of it is to be a society simulator - with other, real human players. If you use the search, you can find some more in-depth statements to that.

From another thread. No matter how many votes, it won't happen.

[SLG-Dennis]

We have dropped that position with the rise of AI technology and decided to keep the suggestion on our then new feedback tracker for it open, but for a realistic chance to be implemented it not only needs to get into the top voted items, but in evaluation must also prove to be implementable with much more reasonable effort than it would have taken back then.

Eco is a game inherently made for multiplayer experiences, revolving around interaction with other players and while the addition of NPC's could improve the singleplayer experience, the resources necessary to implement that in a viable way so far would have been extreme and notably higher than for any other major feature so far - for a very limited benefit, as there is only a very small percentage of Eco players that mainly play singleplayer.

[Afrozzi]

If you mean the rise of LLM, it requires a data center to run or you have to pay for access to their API. There is yet any game in world that has taken advantage of this technology, but with DeepSeek at least it only requires several million dollars worth of GPU. I'm not sure if the average server owner can afford this, or maybe there is new plan to implement scripts to allow server owners to pay for access to API calls.

Interesting to hear that long term plans for the game have so drastically changed that NPCs could now be seriously considered. In the past when this topic was brought up, there were pages of responses talking about how NPCs are not a good fit for Eco.

It would be great if the roadmap was posted again, because it seems like there is already such a full load of unimplemented features that there would be no room to shift directions like this.

[SLG-Dennis]

As I noted, NPC's are still not planned and we still do not consider them a good fit for the intended Eco experience - but with potential options coming up making their implementation less of a massive task it is simply no longer excluded. The interest in them has also increased a bit from the absolute rare niche requests in the past. There is no doubt that they could potentially provide an interesting experience for singleplayer and the suggestions have shown that the desired implementation can range anywhere from simple crafting assistants to fully simulated towns - with vastly different implementation cost. It simply doesn't hurt to keep it open to maybe revisit at a later point. But I don't see anything happening in that regard any time soon, so there is no effect on development for the forseeable future.

[Knotty Wood]

I wonder if theres a modder out there that could do this