Quick answer: Eco is not a game you configure once and forget. Two settings decide what your server actually is. The meteor sets whether there is a deadline at all. Collaboration sets how much your players are forced to depend on each other. Get these two right and the rest is detail. Get them wrong and either the server ends before anyone has built anything, or nobody ever has a reason to talk to each other.
The meteor: your server's deadline
Eco's meteor is the whole premise. A rock is coming, your civilisation has to develop the technology and the laws to stop it, and if you do not manage it in time the world ends. That is the game.
Which means turning it off is a real design decision, not a difficulty tweak. A server without a meteor is a sandbox: relaxed, open ended, good for a group that wants to build. A server with one is a campaign with a clock, and the clock is what makes players actually negotiate about resources instead of everyone quietly doing their own thing.
The relevant settings live in two places:
Difficulty.eco.template carries HasMeteor, which controls whether a meteor spawns at all.
Disasters.eco carries CreateMeteor and MeteorImpactDays, the latter being how long your civilisation has.
You can also reach server configuration in game with the /serverui admin command rather than editing files, which is usually the faster route for a setting you want to try and adjust.
Practical advice on timing: groups consistently underestimate how long Eco takes. A first world with people who have not played before needs far more days than a group that knows the tech tree. If you are unsure, set it longer than feels right. Extending a deadline mid game is easy, and a server that ends while everyone is still enjoying it is the fastest way to lose a group.
Collaboration: whether players need each other
This is the setting that quietly decides your server's social shape, and most admins never touch it.
Eco ships collaboration presets: no collaboration, low, medium and high. Higher levels make the game harder in a specific way, by making it more expensive for one person to do everything.
The mechanic underneath is CostPerAdditionalSpecialty, which sets how many extra stars each additional specialty costs a player who already has some. It defaults to 1 for every preset except no collaboration and low collaboration.
Read plainly: on higher collaboration, a player who tries to be a farmer and a smith and a carpenter pays steeply for the third and fourth skill. Which means they will not. Which means they need someone else who is a smith. That is the entire point, and it is why a high collaboration server produces the economy and politics the game is famous for, while a no collaboration server tends to produce five people building five separate self sufficient bases and never speaking.
How to choose: match it to your group size and how social they actually are. A group of four friends on high collaboration can end up blocked because nobody took the one specialty they needed. A public server of thirty on no collaboration has no reason to form a society. Small and private tends toward lower, larger and public tends toward higher.
The combination is what matters
These two settings interact, and the four corners produce genuinely different servers:
| Meteor | Collaboration | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| On | High | The intended experience. Deadline plus interdependence, real politics |
| On | Low | A race where everyone works alone. Fast, shallow |
| Off | High | A society sim with no urgency. Works well for long running communities |
| Off | Low | A relaxed building sandbox. Fine, but barely Eco |
Most groups who tell us the game "did not click" were on the bottom row without realising the top row existed.
What this means for your server size
Eco's memory use follows world state rather than player count. That is the thing to internalise when picking a plan.
A fresh world with a small group barely uses anything. The same world after a group has cleared forests, dug mines, built settlements and passed a body of law is tracking vastly more, because the simulation remembers all of it. Pollution in soil, plant populations, animal populations, every block anyone changed.
So the honest sizing question is not "how many of us are there" but "how long do we intend to play this world". Our Eco hosting runs 4 to 12GB tiers from EUR 4 a month for exactly that reason: start at 4GB for a fresh world, and move up as the world accumulates rather than paying for headroom on day one.
One thing worth knowing about Eco specifically
The server keeps simulating whether or not anyone is connected. Plants grow, pollution spreads, and the meteor keeps approaching while everyone is asleep.
That is not a quirk, it is the design. But it does mean a hosted server is the only sensible way to run Eco. A world that only exists while one player has the game open is not the game the developers built.
FAQ
Where do I change the meteor settings?
HasMeteor sits in Difficulty.eco.template, and CreateMeteor with MeteorImpactDays sit in Disasters.eco. You can also use the /serverui admin command in game.
Can I change the meteor deadline after the world has started? Yes. It is a server setting rather than something fixed at world generation, so you can extend it if your group needs longer.
What does collaboration actually change?
How much extra specialties cost a player who already has some, through CostPerAdditionalSpecialty. Higher collaboration makes being a generalist expensive, which pushes players to depend on each other.
Which collaboration level should a small group use? Lower. On high collaboration a group of four can get blocked because nobody has the specialty they need at the moment they need it.
Does the world keep running when nobody is online? Yes, and that is the point of hosting it properly. The simulation and the meteor timer do not pause.
How much RAM does an Eco server need? Start at 4GB for a fresh world with a small group. Memory tracks how much of the world has been altered, so long running worlds are more comfortable at 8GB or more.
Related reading: Eco hosting plans, 4 to 12GB across the Netherlands, North America, Singapore and India.