One thing you can try if you're starting out is to delete the startup citizenship law first.

As of 0.8.0.5 the server's fully functional afaict on Arch Linux with

$ pacman -Q mono referenceassemblies-pcl aspnet-runtime
mono 5.18.0.240-1
referenceassemblies-pcl 4.6-2
aspnet-runtime 2.2.1+102-1

installed and current. I'm not certain the assemblies and aspnet are necessary, but I see from the logs I installed them while getting 0.7.8.9 working.

Anyway, with those, I fetch and unzip the linux client into somewhere/Eco and the server into somewhere/Eco/server to match the windows install internals, cd to the server, edit Configs/WorldGenerator.eco for 144×144 world because at 72×72 having all the critical species is a bit of a crapshoot, and fire up the server with a plain mono EcoServer.exe. The gui works, the webserver works, everything works.

Once the gui comes up go to the Difficulty tab and pick No Collaboration for singleplayer farting around to get familiar with the mechanics, then File→Save to lock it in. Connecting to it's "Your Worlds", "Add" (the green"+" high and right) and enter localhost or your hostname, the client can't seem to find LAN games right now.

To take your server public, since the client isn't also trying to be a server you don't have to change the port numbers, forward 2999/3000/3001 to your box (I just do TCP+UDP for all of them) and dig into the rest of the configs as per the wiki.

A note: loading for your very first connection after install is ssssllllooooooowwwwwwwwww (many, many o's and w's elided here), but it does finish. Once you've completed the tuts G in to the government webserver and delete the citizenship law proposal before running for office to elect yourself mayor.

There are some glitches, most notably that after you shut down the server it gets to "Shutdown Finished" and then hangs so hard you have to pkill -9 -f EcoServer it. For the rest it's things like sometimes fields in the server gui don't update until you tab into/out of them and having to type the hostname to connect.

@larz

had a world still on day one so I join and find a nice little island to do my own thing

I really think you got out of the game what you put in to it.

The game's "like Minecraft" way down underneath but that's not really part of it, the benefits from cooperation and specialization and social structure are so dramatic the Minecraft-y parts are subsumed, they're not the interesting bits, they don't factor in to the gameplay as more than diversions while you get to know the neighbors and figure out a plan.

Especially with r8 you retreading the same paths others on the server are already mastering is just pointless waste and pollution. You divvy up the skills and figure out transport. One takes carpentry one takes fishing one takes basic engineering one takes mining one takes hunting one takes etc.

Fire up an SP world or a localhost server (the server works as well on Linux as anywhere now afaict, I just mono EcoServer.exe now with an up-to-date mono and ta-daa) set on "No Cooperation" to experiment with the skills if you haven't got anybody you already know into the game yet and you don't want to go through all the embarrassing noob clumsiness in public.

@AMX You don't. You change it before the world's generated. I don't know the Steam server's install dir, but I'm pretty sure the ritual is, stop the server, find that dir and edit Configs/WorldGenerator.eco in it to set the x and y dimensions to the same multiple-of-four size, delete the Storage directory (or delete or move Storage/Game.*) and restart the server, it'll build a new world at the new size.

@SLG-Dennis Can I just edit all the RequireRoomMaterialTier() specs to be .05 less than they are now? The server says it's compililng all the mods, and it looks like all the items are delivered as mods.

edit: yep, that works, you can drop the tier requirements a bit and route pipe out of the room asap

@sc In my experience the default 72×72, 0.52km², is barely or even not enough to reliably support even one player, populations of one or more near-essential species tend to be down around 10 and on a public server those'll get monopolized or genocided p.d.q. A 144×144 server has populations in the hundreds, that's sustainable.

edit: no wonder this board gets so few posts, the rendering mangles content. Added some syntax marks to work around the dropped phrases.

The white placement ghosts can get distracting, especially in tight quarters, it'd be nice if we could toggle displaying them on and off, seems to me it'd work well even if placement itself still works the same, just toggling the ghost visibility, but I think certainly placement where no ghosts are currently displayed should still work.

Set authorization on your deeds, you probably missed this one in the startup tuts.

@SLG-Dennis I did try running the server, the only instructions I could find here (basically, install mono and the server, then mono EcoServer.exe -nogui) produced a stacktrace and a hung process I had to unleash kill -9 on.

Edit: okay, discord is new to me, going there it says use mono 5.14, downgrading to that (on arch, install the downgrade package from the AUR, then downgrade mono and pick 5.14 off the list) seems to work.

ssia, this seems like a straight oversight to me