Housing

There are 2 primary purposes for player homes in Eco:

1. Most crafting stations must be placed in an enclosed room to function.
2. Adding furniture to a home will provide players with a passive Skill Point boost.

Early in the game, each room can serve both these functions, as lower-tier crafting stations can share space with furniture. Some crafting stations, however, such as the Anvil and Assembly Line, will disable the skill point gains from furniture, requiring specific rooms if the furniture bonuses are to be preserved.

Furniture and Skill Points

Old UI. In the Skill Points HUD, the housing graph on the right displays the value balance of the 4 room types. This player is receiving 80 XP per day from their housing bonus.

Housing is one of the 3 ways which players can gain passive Skill Points, the other two being food XP (by eating various foods) and idle XP (which is granted without needing to do anything). To start gaining housing XP, at least 1 room must be constructed within a single claimed land which is authorized under the player. (To be specific, only the interior need to be within claim, the walls can be outside of claim.) Then, housing furniture must be placed in the room, and there must be no industrial table in the same room. Some of the furniture, such as Wooden Straw Bed or Butchery Table, provides furnishing value, representing how much XP per day a player would receive, if first placed in a room under optimal condition. Also, check if a furniture has a valid status after placing it: interact (E) with it, and ensure the top left green indicator is lit. Most furniture must be placed on solid ground, most fuel consuming items must be fueled (at least with a wood pulp), items requiring electrical or mechanical power must be powered, volume of the room must be large enough, and kitchen equipment must be placed in a sufficient tiered room.

After getting the XP from very first furniture placed in very first room, below are what player can do to further increase the housing XP: 1. Construct a different room and placing down a different type of furniture. There are 4 types of rooms: Bedroom, Kitchen, Living Room and Bathroom. 2. Placing down different type of furniture within the same room. Eg, a bedroom can contain Bed, Nightstand, Dresser. 3. Placing down sub-furniture in the same room, which are Seating, Decoration and Lighting, capped to certain percentage of main furniture points. Bedroom can additionally take in a small amount of Living Room furniture. 4. Placing down multiple instances of same type of furniture. For example, placing down a Wooden Fabric Bed followed by a Wooden Straw Bed in a same room. 5. Construct a second room of a type, eg, a second bedroom, second living room, etc. 6. Using a higher tier of building blocks to construct rooms, with Tier 1, such as Hewn Log being lowest and Tier 4 such as Framed Glass being Highest. 7. Constructing bigger room such that more furniture can be squeezed into the same room. 8. Min-maxing by choosing a correct combination of certain type of furniture. For example, in a Living room, place 5 Upholstered Couch followed by a dozen of Padded Chair.

Below are why housing points are not granted in a room, or lowered from the optimal points: 1. The room is not complete. Either missing corner or having opening larger than 1x2 empty tiles. There must be no opening to sky. Also, there is a minimum number of blocks must be placed proportional to the room volume. As such, rooms with a lot of wall openings will grant lower points compared to room with modest amount of opening. Fully enclosed room will not grant additional points compared to rooms with modest amount of opening. 2. Industry table is present in the same room. Such as Carpentry Table. Store and Kitchen Equipment are exception and they can be placed in a room. 3. Stockpiles contained in the room, which lowers the room value proportional to the number of blocks stored. Also, accidentally placing down building material (not via hammer, but stacked on the ground as pieces) can lower the room value. 4. Missing corner caused by diagonal building. Either some other block close to the external wall opening, building sloped roof diagonally, or pipes penetrating a 1x2 opening, etc. 5. Fueled furniture are not fueled. Check if all fireplaces, torches and braziers, and cooking equipment are fueled. 6. Holes below furniture. Furniture must be placed on solid ground. 7. The room is too cramped such that the furniture total required volume exceeds the room volume. Frequently happens for Kitchen room. 8. The room with higher tiered blocks are mixed with lower tiered blocks, such as Brick room containing Hewn Logs. 9. Too many openings on walls, even if the openings are not greater than 1x2. 10. Furniture requiring mechanical power, electrical power or water pipe input are not satisfied.

At the most basic level, you can assume that adding furniture to rooms on land you own will increase your SP bonus from housing, but the math can get complicated.

Diminishing Returns

When determining how many SP/day a given piece of furniture will give you, there are three different kinds of diminishing returns you must consider:

Category Diminishing Returns

The first is *category* diminishing returns. Each piece of furniture belongs to a category, and each item past the first in a given category yields less value than the previous. For instance, both Stuffed Jaguars and Carved Pumpkins are in the "decorative" category, so putting both in a room will count for less.

You can calculate for yourself the diminishing returns as follows: First, take all the items in a given category and put them in a list, ordered with the highest valued items on top with the lowest at the bottom. The top item contributes its full value. Each item underneath it takes the penalty listed under "Repeats yield X% less value each" once for *each* item above it. Sum the items in the list to get the value for the category. Sum the categories in the room to get the total value for the room.

Example 1: A room has two stuffed jaguars, a carved pumpkin, and a small rug in it. We create a list of all the "Decoration" objects in the room, and order them by their value: The two stuffed jaguars are at the top of the list with a value of three, and the carved pumpkin is at the bottom with a value of 1. The first stuffed jaguar contributes its full 3. The second stuffed jaguar says "Repeats yield 90% less," so its value of 3 is reduced to 0.3. The Carved Pumpkin says "Repeats yield 60% less," and there are two items above it in the list. Its value of 1 is reduced by 60% for the first jaguar (leaving it at .4) and by 60% *again* for the second jaguar (leaving it at .16) The Small Rug, despite being decorative, actually belongs to its own category of "rugs", so it is alone in its own list and contributes its full .5 value. The total value for the room is 3.96.

Example 2: We put a third stuffed jaguar into the room. Now there are three stuffed jaguars in the list, followed by the carved pumpkin. As before, the first stuffed jaguar contributes its full 3 and the second stuffed jaguar yields 0.3. The third jaguard is reduced by another 90%, for .03. The Carved Pumpkin now has its value of 1 is reduced by 60% *three times*, bringing it to 0.064. The Small Rug, being in its own category, is unaffected. The end result is that adding the third jaguar has *lowered* the room's value from 3.96 to 3.89, showing that more furniture is not always better if it "conflicts" with other furniture with low diminishing returns.

To avoid category diminishing returns, try to fill your home with a variety of different furniture categories that have a low % penalty on yields when repeated.

Note that there is a *hard asymptotic cap* on furniture yields. For instance, if you have spam a piece of furniture with a 50% reduction, then no matter how many repeats of that furniture you have, you will never achieve more than 2x that furniture's base value by spamming that piece of furniture.

Material Diminishing Returns

The second type of diminishing returns is *material* diminishing returns. The room's value, as calculated above, may be reduced depending on the tier of the room. As mentioned above under building materials, each room has a tier based on what materials were used to construct it. Each room can only support 5 value worth of furniture per tier of the room. (For instance, a tier 3 room can support 15 value worth of furniture.) Rooms made of mixed materials can yield decimal tiers, such as a brick/mortared sandstone room being tier 1.39 and supporting 6.95 worth of furniture.

Any value *past* what the room can support is affected by diminishing returns, on *top* of the category diminishing returns listed above. This is a reduction on the value of the room. The first 100% of the soft cap counts as 100%, the second 100% of the soft cap counts as 50%, the third 100% of the soft cap counts as 25%, etc. Thus, like the Category Diminishing Returns, there is an asymptotic hard cap to the value of any room: No matter how much furniture you have in a room, you cannot get more than twice the value of the room's soft cap.

Room Diminishing Returns

Room diminishing returns works like category diminishing returns, except that it applies to rooms instead of pieces of furniture.

There are four "categories" of rooms: Kitchens, Bathrooms, Bedrooms, and General Rooms. To determine what kind of room a given room is, the game looks for any furniture that is in a given category. For instance, a Latrine has a "Room Category" of "Bathroom," so including it in a room will turn that room into a bathroom. The exception is furniture in the "General" category; this can be added to any room without changing the room type, and a room is considered a "general" room if it entirely lacks bedroom, bathroom, or kitchen specific furniture. If furniture conflicts (such as a Latrine and a Wooden Straw Bed in the same room) then the room's type will be determined by which category has the highest total base value. All furniture from the other room category (such as bathroom furniture in a bedroom) will be disabled and their yields will be 0.

There is one special room category for furniture: "Industrial" Any industrial furniture in a room will automatically make that room industrial, regardless of what other furniture is in the room. All industrial rooms contribute 0 room score, regardless of their contents. Thus, putting a bloomery in your bedroom will nullify its SP yields entirely.

The first room in each of the four useful categories provides its full value to a player's housing SP bonus. Each room past the first in any given category is subject to a 50% penalized value. Thus, if you have two bathrooms, one at value 8 and one at value 6, your total score for bathrooms will be 11. (8 + 50% of 6).

A players total SP due to housing is equal to the sum of the four categories of rooms.

Improving your Housing Score

To summarize the above: to gain a higher room value, you must increase the quality of your rooms. You can do this by:

1. Adding more furniture or replacing the furniture you already have with higher value versions so your base SP yield increases.
2. Adding a range of different furniture types to a room so you lose as little as possible due to Category Diminishing Returns.
3. Balancing your room types so you lose as little as possible to Room Diminishing Returns.
4. Use higher tier building materials so you lose as little as possible due to Material Diminishing Returns.
5. Ensuring that any industrial furniture items, such as a Blast Furnace or Bloomery, is stored in its own room.

Hypothetical Maximums

In theory, a tier 4 room can support 20 value of furniture, and asymptotically approaches an adjusted value of 40. A player can have four such rooms, for a total value of 160, and as a player build duplicates of these rooms, they will asymptotically approach a total of 320 SP/day.

In practice, however, the nature of the asymptotic hard cap makes 320 unachievable. Players can never actually get there; they can only get arbitrarily close. Players must choose at what point the diminishing returns are strong enough that it is no longer worth improving their housing. For instance, two copies of a four room complex that has an adjusted value of 30/room can give a player 180 SP/day, which is a highly respectable amount and should be sufficient even for late game.

Furniture Value

Information coming soon ...

Ownership

Deeds can support multiple residents and allows duplication of each room without incurring duplicate room penalty. IE: A deed with 2 residents can have 8 rooms (2x kitchen, 2x living room, 2x bedroom, 2x bathroom) without incurring a room penalty.

Adding residents incurs a new penalty that reduces total housing bonus (table coming soon ...). Though the penalty is far less than the additional rooms and rewards more residents. IE: 3 residents incurs a 50% reduction of housing bonus but allows 3x the rooms without penalty; theoretically a tier 1 soft-capped house with 12 rooms would provide a bonus of 30 while a tier 1 soft-capped house of 4 rooms would provide a bonus of 20 as a sole resident.

Maximizing housing points

As of current version, Update 9.7.6, it is possible to reach 30 points (which is diminished from 40 points actually) for each type of 4 rooms (Bedroom, Living room, Toilet and Kitchen) by combining different furniture of each sub-class to minimize diminishing and maximize points.

House size

Example of minimum house size to reach 30 points of each rooms:

• Bedroom: internal size 12 x 8 x 4
• Living: internal size 11 x 8 x 4
• Toilet: internal size 15 x 8 x 4
• Kitchen: internal size 11 x 8 x 4

By tiling these 4 rooms in a square, the minimum overall size is: House foundation: 29 x 19 = 551 tiles Additional tiles per floor: 551 (roof) + 540 (wall) = 1091 tiles per floor (eg, Level 1: 1642, Level 2: 2733, Level 3: 3824 tiles, etc)

Bedroom furniture

• Futon bed: 1
• Fabric bed: 3
• Nightstand: 7
• Lumber dresser: 6
• Couch: 1
• Animal mount: 1 (interchangeable with shelf or fireplace as long as the 'Living' component is maximized)

Living room furniture

• Shelf: 5
• Adorned fireplace (fueled): 2
• Upholstered couch: 3
• Padded chair: 4
• Animal mount: 3 (avoid wolf mount)

Toilet furniture

Toilet is the easiest to score high point due to low diminishing.

• Water closet: 2
• Bathtub: 1
• Large toilet mat: 5 (not to be confused with general rug)
• Towel rack: 2
• Industrial Sink: 1 (need inlet and outlet pipes, and need to turn on)
• Small sink: 8
• Washing machine: 1
• Washboard: 4

Kitchen furniture

• Metal stove: 1 (need exhaust pipe and fueled)
• Modern Stove (fueled), Kitchen, Bakery Oven (fueled), Mill (need nearby windmill): 1 each
• Butchery: 4
• Salt basket: 4
• Fridge: 4 (fridge is 10% worse compared to industrial fridge so you no need to keep foods in it)

Note: Industrial fridge provide no housing points, but it is 10% better than fridge. Put outside of rooms to save space.

Common furniture

Put the items below in EACH rooms.

• Large rug: 2. Toilet need 3 more large rugs, Living room only need 1 more.
• Steel ceiling lamp: 3. Toilet 1 more.
• Limestone statue: Bison, wolf, owl and otter - 1 each. Toilet need 4 more small statue. Also swap limestone bison for stuffed bison.
• Seating: 2 adorned table + 2 bench. Toilet need 6 more adorned chair
• Large fountain: 1. Toilet need 1 more.

Summary

With the above setup you can get 120 points per 'floor', or up to 225 points if you build 4 floors. It is no longer possible to reach over 264 points (no matter how many copies of rooms or furniture) as of current update.