Overview
How to maximize your experience gain from housing / furniture in Eco 9.2
Introduction – Why should I care?
I am a relatively new player to Eco, having started with 9.0, and one of the most important ideas that I feel was not well explained is how experience advancement works. I now understand that you get character levels, which unlock the ability to have new specializations, simply by the passage of time. Every day of real time since you joined the server, you gain a set amount of experience (xp) based on the server settings. However, this amount is multiplied by the sum of two values: your nutrition score and your housing score. Nutrition is fairly well explained by another guide on Steam, but I have not found any sort of guide to how housing works. That inspired me to write this guide.
Definitions – What are you talking about?
First, a few definitions. In this guide, I’ll be talking about rooms, tiers, and furniture. There are a few things you need to know about each of these.
First, what is a room? While this may seem obvious, it is important to understand how Eco sees something as a room, or not a room. A room is an area enclosed entirely by blocks with a 1×2 doorway. This includes a complete ceiling as well as a floor. If you have any point that is open to the sky, the game does not consider it to be a room. One thing I read repeatedly in the forums is that people are trying to have two rooms stacked on top of each other, with a stairway between them. However, the game sees them as a single room, as there is no horizontal doorway separating them. You are allowed to have blocks missing from your walls, doorways that are 1 wide and 2 high (1×2), and you are allowed window-holes that are 1×1 or 2×1 (up to 2 blocks wide), however, these holes will lower the tier of your building. Also note that the blocks that are above and below your walls, in line with your floors and ceilings, are also part of your room. It is really common to assume that since you can’t see it, that it’s not part of the room. I see many people complaining that their rooms are tier 0.88, for example. This is either due to missing blocks for windows, additional doorways, or blocks above or below the walls that have not been replaced. The game recognizes five types of rooms: General, Bathroom, Bedroom, Kitchen, and Industrial. A room with furniture in it that has no specific room associated with it is considered a general room. A room with ANY industrial furniture is considered industrial. Bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens are rooms which have furniture of the appropriate type and none of any other type except general. I’ll get into this in more detail below.
Second, what does tier mean? Simply put, each room has a tier based on the type of blocks that it is made from. When considering the room, the game ignores the two blocks with the lowest tier (presumably to not penalize you for having a single doorway with no door). All other blocks are checked, and their tier is averaged. For example, if you have a room made of the following:
· Floor: 25 hewn logs (tier 1), 5 Slate blocks (tier 0)
· Ceiling: 25 brick roof tiles (tier 2), 5 Slate blocks (tier 0)
· Feature Wall: 15 Slate blocks (build against a hillside, with unbroken blocks) (tier 0)
· Main Walls: 41 mortared stone (tier 1), 10 air (left empty for doorway and windows) (tier 0)
This is a total of 126 blocks. When adding up the tier value of the blocks involved, the total tier value is 116. The game would then take 116/(126-2) to get a tier value of the room of 0.94. Please note that this is NOT the housing value, but will be involved in the housing bonus calculation later. For now, the important concept to understand is that the tier sets a functional maximum to how much housing bonus the room provides. A golden toilet in a mud hut just doesn’t have the same impact as it might in a marble palace.
Finally, a bit of talk about furniture. Ultimately, proper furniture is what makes your house a home. Conceptually, the better your house is furnished, the more comfortable you will be, and the faster you will gain experience. Furniture is anything you can place in your house that has a skill value. Some food-related workstations are considered furniture, and so show up in the economy viewer when you filter for housing. A few other items are considered furniture that don’t show up under housing, but have the “industrial” category when you examine them. These still affect the housing bonus, and so for this guide are considered furniture.
Overview of housing value calculation – Get to it already!
Your housing bonus is the sum of the housing value of the values of every room in your claimed area. Each room is considered individually, and then added at the end. Here’s the procedure.
1. If there is furniture in a claimed area, consider all such furniture in a single room as a group. For each piece, if it is the only item of its type, it provides its full skill value to the calculation. If there are more than one item of a given type, the one with the highest skill value counted, then the next highest piece of the same type has its value reduced by its repeat value (as a percentage), and then the next piece is considered, and so on. For example, imagine a room with a stuffed bison, two limestone otter statues, a limestone wolf statue, a small rug, and a large rug. There are two types of items here, decorations and rugs, which are considered separately. The large rug has the highest value in its category, and so gets its full 2 points. The small rug has a skill value of 0.5, and a repeat value of 50%, so it only gets 50% of its value, or 0.25. The animals are all decorations, and so the stuffed bison, which has the highest skill value at 3, gets it full 3 points. Next, the limestone wolf has a base value of 1.5, with a repeat value of 0.5, and so is reduced by 50% to get 0.75 points. The next is one of the otter statues, with a base of 1.2 and a repeat value of 0.4. This statue is the third decoration in the room, so it reduces its value by 40% for each other decoration already counted. This gives it a final value of 1.2 * (100% – 40%) * (100% – 40%), or 0.43. The final otter statue is the fourth decoration and so has a value of 1.2 * (100% – 40%) * (100% – 40%) * (100% – 40%), which comes to 0.24. Adding all of these up, we get 2 + 0.25 + 3 + 0.75 + 0.43 + 0.24, totaling 6.67 housing value from furniture in this room. Since there is no room-specific furniture in this room, it is considered a general room. Also note that furniture that consumes fuel or requires energy (Steel Electric Ceiling Lights, Ashlar Stone Fireplaces, Mills, etc) must be provided with fuel or energy in order to provide their bonus. Crafting stations such as Bakery ovens must be fueled, but unlike the others will not consume fuel passively. Crafting stations with space requirements (such as Butchery Tables, which require 25m of room space) must also have sufficient room or they will be considered disabled and will not provide any skill value.
2. Next the room’s tier comes into play. Each tier of material has a maximum housing value associated with it. This is a soft-cap rather than a hard-cap. This means that the housing value can exceed the maximum, but will be reduced, giving smaller percentages of each point earned after the cap. For example, if the above room with a housing value of 6.67 was in a room made entirely of tier 2 materials, the soft-cap would be 10, and the full value would be applied to the next step. If, however, the room was made of tier 1 materials, it would be soft-capped at 5, and so the 1.67 points over the cap might only provide 75% of their housing value, resulting in an actual value of 6.25.
Tier / Soft Cap / Material:
0 / 2 / Air, Dirt, Clay, Unbroken Stone Blocks
1 / 5 / Hewn Logs, Mortared Stone
1 / 10 / Brick, Glass, Lumber, Iron Pipe, Copper Pipe
3 / 15 / Corrugated Steel, Reinforced Concrete, Steel Pipe
4 / 20 / Ashlar Stone, Composite Lumber, Flat Steel, Framed Glass
3. Next, the type of room is identified. If the room has any industrial furniture, it is defined as an industrial room and its housing value is reduced to zero. Otherwise, if it has furniture from exactly one of the categories of bathroom, bedroom, or kitchen, it is identified as a room of that type. Finally, if it has only furniture from the category “general”, it is identified as a general room. If this is the only room of its type, the room’s full value is added to the player’s housing value. If there is already one or more rooms of its type, the rooms are ordered from highest to lowest housing value, with the highest being designated “1st” and providing its full value, the next highest designated “2nd” and providing 50% of its value, the next designated “3rd” and providing 25% of its value, and so on, halving in value for each additional room.
Implications – So what do I do with this?
So the take-away point here are to build your house early, with as much furniture as you can reasonably manage with little duplication. Make sure that you are increasing the tier of your house materials when you can, and that you have a variety of rooms to avoid duplication that wastes skill value.
Strategies to maximize housing value
This guide is not about aesthetics. I’m not going to win any decorating awards, and everyone has personal tastes anyway. This is about how to use the mechanics in the game to have the highest housing benefit you can for as long as possible.
When deciding on how big to make your house, there are a few factors to consider. If building materials are precious (and when aren’t they?) you want to have as much volume for as little materials used as possible. However, most pieces of furniture require solid ground to function, and so height is of less value than width and length. That being said, rooms must be at least 2 blocks high, and most furniture is 2 blocks high. There are a few pieces, notably large fountains and stuffed elk, that are 3 high, but in general, even a 2 block high room will give you a great deal of housing points for the least materials possible.
Depending on your planned amount of furniture, make certain that you have enough room for all the furniture duplicates that you plan on using. This is especially important with kitchens, which have many crafting stations that require room to work. You can often get a large amount of extra floor space by increasing your room by 1 block in one direction, for a fairly low amount of additional materials. Remember that a square room will give you more space per material used than any other shape.
Putting multiple rooms together into a single house is not necessary, but it does allow you to use the same materials on multiple walls. A tower is particularly efficient, since you are likely to have more shared blocks in a ceiling/floor than in any given wall.
Sometimes it makes more sense to have additional rooms than to have repeats of furniture in one room. Even better is to have repeats of furniture in each of 2-3 identical rooms. Compare the percent lost for having a new room to the loss from the repeat value.
Lighting and seating have particularly low repeat values, meaning that it makes sense to have many of them in a single room. Padded chairs are particularly nice, with each one having 80% of the value of the previous one. I like making little “conversation nooks” with 3-4 of them in out-of-the-way corners.
When building, fill in the window holes and door holes. Most building blocks have a “window” option that still allows you to see out, but without having air blocks reducing your rooms’ tiers.
In my first server, iron was a particularly plentiful and cheap resource. This led me to making a building with walls and a ceiling made entirely of iron pipes. It’s a tier 2 material, and was cheaper than bricks or glass. However, building your floor entirely out of pipes is not recommended.
A few items, such as Steel Table Lamps, Wooden Ceiling Lamps, and Bison Mounts, are not required to be placed on solid ground. Make good use of these by placing them on tables, walls, and ceilings, saving valuable floor space for other furniture. Also, counter-intuitively, rugs take up the entire block they are sitting on, and nothing may be placed in the space they occupy.
While there is no hard cap on housing value, diminishing returns make high values particularly difficult. I was able to obtain 208 housing value with moderate effort from a solid economy in the modern age. For this, I used 2 of each room type with housing values of 35-55 before soft-capping. I believe that 300 housing value is possible, but it would be such an extreme effort that I question whether it would be worth it for anything other than bragging rights.
Finally, here is a link to the google sheet I put together to work out the information in this guide.
[link]
Questions and comments are welcome. Live well!