I was set to write a short guide...hopefully. Until Hubois said a “picture is worth a thousand words”.

Seriously, the following infographic is intended for players of Eco by Strange Loop games who work with ease with the basic technological tree (made of skills and crafting tables) and are ready for the next level.

If your Eco games are about trading, getting the biggest XP multiplier and crafting the right items to get ahead, then you are missing a lot. In fact, the previous actions cannot even be described as collaboration, but merely independent play with occasional interactions or even competition.

I hope this info graphic gives you a positive view of this next level where avatar skills become community roles and independent projects becomes collective endeavours.

The whole picture is in this guide, but you may find the original version to download and edit in the resource section here[sites.google.com].

The adventure of your town begins before the first day of the server, ideally during a session 0 week or event where you can meet future players and form groups with similar expectations.

The collaborative approach of the info graphic here is most useful for groups labelled as teams (closed groups of friends), communists (sharing stockpiles and living together) or socialists (retain personal claims but share several production infrastructures).

For individual or capitalists-oriented groups (also labelled as economy or trade-oriented), you may want to remove entire sections of the picture and leave them to private endeavours and the “free will” of the market.

Individual players who live outside towns can still use the info graphic to remember key aspects of their progression (ex.: plan your access to water).


Every white block contains information about key actions to perform, projects or items. So if you are a town’s leader or official, each block is a mission to complete together, but under your leadership.


The top-most horizontal layer in grey is mostly about different versions of the town hall (T1 to T5) and marks time. Use this layer as a reference: blocks aligned vertically belong to the same time period.

A town should finish all the blocks from a given time period before moving to the right. In fact, early races for T3 items (ex.: lumber rush) typically come with massive desertion. This said, some infrastructure projects like roads and energy grids, can last longer.

Towns who retain their citizens and play smart will funnel their resources towards community goals (ex.: the laboratory) and quickly work on better modules. This is why the BU3 and AU3 milestones are present.


The remaining blocks have been split into horizontal layers, each one about an aspect of your micro-society: finance, research, urban planning, culture and special projects.

This organization strongly leans towards the idea of roles to distribute amongst citizens of the town. This is why the Standing Role section was added: if you take the role of research, you have a general job description and the blue layer tells you everything you need to do plan for.

I am a player of Eco since 2018 and evolved in a variety on contexts: competitive, collaborative, communist (weird label), heavily modded, etc. I now only settle on vanilla worlds with medium settings and heavy emphasis on collaboration. I am a professional in the field of collaborative learning and a bit less novice everyday in quality management and writing in English.