Difficulty (medium); Land requirement (medium); Versatility (high)
In Eco, the engineering profession begins with basic engineering. The next skills are all related to the industrial and modern era of the game. In practice, this divides the engineering profession in two distinct branches.
The first branch deals with roads and wood projects. Basic engineering has a cute niche in the world since you provide unique tools and you link players with roads. Eco is a sandbox and a collaborative game, but free flow of resources necessary for collaboration and creation cannot really happen until a good basic engineer joins the server. You also have a vital role in research.
The second branch of the profession uses metal to make the machines, produce oil derivatives and fiddle with electronics (including lasers). These are all late game skills that are both fun and long to reach. They will make you build factories, electricity distribution, powerful machines, vehicle and the very most advanced crafting tables. But aiming for the end game without thinking about the process and your community can cost your world.
Given the fact that basic engineering is a single skill and the others are all late-skills, the ideal settling location largely depends on the other skills taken. Aiming for some sort of town in close proximity to many biomes, including desert and mountains is never a bad idea. Also, I have seen and role-play the nomad road builder persona without having more than a 2x2 workshop, so land size is not a problem for this profession. You might refer the the mason overview and the carpenter overview to know more about the type of approach you want to make if you pick basic engineering.
If you find the second branch interesting, you will need a 4x3 space for the first factory (but your house may still be on top of it). In general, mechanic, industrial and electronic crafting tables require a different factory. Oil drilling doesn't directly require a factory. In all cases, you will need a lot of iron and getting close to a smelter or choosing smelting yourself is likely to bring you near the desert biome.
Early engineers are likely to pick mining or logging first. The main reason is the full potential of basic engineers unlocks when a carpenter makes a wainwright table. Carpenters' first best choice remains logging, so your crafting table might not be available if you begin early. This is why you can pick a skill that will help you work on your home and infrastructure to get the best of these XP when you begin your real career. Road building with a freelancer twist makes relaxing gaming session and picking both mining and logging will be handy to clear lands rapidly and complete other contracts.
Otherwise, you will often see on servers engineers with either a wood profile (logging/carpentry) or stone profile (mining/masonry). Both are valid paths honestly, although I personally enjoyed the wood path while setting an automatic road shop to allow everyone on the server to make their own roads and buy from miners and masons. If roads are your thing, maybe you could first work on setting up the government and then make a mechanism to get properly paid to make "real" roads for the community.
Late engineering skills require metal. Naturally, most players aiming for the late engineer path will think about picking mining and smelting before transitioning into mechanics. It will be tempting, especially if playing Eco is your only real-life activity at the moment, to play countless hours and push forward to advanced smelting, industry and electronics. At medium settings, this would give you a "royal flush" of skills where you can do almost everything alone in the late game and secure your place as laser maker. This setup is frequent. Since you need to keep the iron you produce, such approach is more successful by applying greedy trades or teaming with a friend who makes food and takes other skills along the road to unlock research and speed things up. This is typical of dreaded close teams and rushers.
I used "royal flush" on purpose because it's an unbeatable hand in poker games and the late engineer skill path does the same in Eco. As soon as one teams makes an assembly line, many players disappear. Since I began playing Eco, I have seen few players presenting their congratulations for this achievement before leaving the server, as if it was some kind of contest. Playing as a smelter, I also experienced a feeling of loss when other players reached this stage and I wasn't able to sell my iron to them. I knew that a blast furnace would only accelerate things on their side and consolidate their independent approach. On rare, very very very rare occasion did the players in this position facilitated access to their skills and infrastructure. So normally other players have to do things in parallel, while the team accelerate toward electronics and finish the game. When a player has a royal flush, it's a winning hand : this player can do almost everything alone and the rest of the community are mere providers of fuel for his growing industry (food, ore, oil).
Eco is a game that we play in our leisure time, not a real life and death scenario. I believe many players of Eco seek a fair chance to craft things on their own and contribute in a meaningful way to the world, which would explain why royal flush means the end of collaboration. The "winners" of industrial races often end up alone and ridicule : there in't much a world to save anymore, unless you care for virtual elks.
Of course I drew a dark picture here, sorry. Since this is Eco, there are many alternatives to avoid this faith. You will see in this article community projects that saved worlds and led to prosperous communities. But since we are talking about skills here, I would say the easiest way to promote collaboration and maintain a healthy server is to avoid the royal flush pattern, distribute engineering skills among many players and share access to machines in a collaborative way.
You will find here few ideas about your role at each era. Of course, Eco is a simulation and a sandbox game, so I encourage you to experiment other paths.
I will focus here on the first branch, which is the basic engineering skill. The second branch’s role is often tied to the smelting profession and limited to the late game. Each of the late engineering skills lead to different roles and different items to provide to other engineering skills. They have somewhat limited role towards other professions, except for making trucks, advanced tables and tools. In fact, each late engineering skill could have it's own short guide since they are complementary jobs in a way carpenters, chefs, farmers and other professions are between themselves.
If you picked basic engineering first, your first role will be to provide road tools and mining equipment. If you could not find a wainwright table or picked another skill instead, you can still play an active engineer role by talking to other players and leave construction posts on the map to show where roads will be. Using the objective section "o" and discord to say you are planning roads will help communicate your intentions. You may also rush for laws as well and create protected road districts. The sooner this is done, the less chances someone will settle in the middle of the main road and refuse to move.
Once you have your wainwright table, it is imperative to provide wood carts to everyone so they can start any kind of significant trade. Keep at least one arrastra and rocker box on sale at all times since people may discover a passion for crushing stones when pottery and glassmaking are available.
Once people have houses, it is time to pump out real stone roads. Roads can become a truly bonding community project if you allow other people to participate too. There are no required skills for digging crushed stones near the surface and most masons will be happy to turn sand to mortar and get extra XP from it. Consider the fact that the more people bring you material to craft roads, the more XP you gain toward making basic upgrade modules 4. Getting these modules for your community is a great achievement.
Making stone roads is a fun aspect of your role. Some players even choose to become dedicated road builders on big servers where there is a system in place to pay for roads. You have no bank? Private contracts and personal deals in the chat work too.
During the transition to iron age, your skill will be needed to make engineering research papers. Miners, carpenters and farmers will ask for waterwheels or windmills so keep producing them or at least put them on auto production somewhere.
The tier 2 age is also a moment when players may contact you for powered carts and iron wheels. Please remember wheels...since mechanics need them suddently.
Basic engineering are still busy later in the game when it's time to make asphalt. This serves two purposes. First, better roads means less time lost in the flow or resources and more things done. Second, smelters might expect you to deliver them from slag which they can now crush with advanced mining equipment. Asphalt roads look nice and you can reach high speed on them...so much in fact that you need road railing and stop signs at some locations. Hopefully, you have the skill to make them too. Don't forget to put some iron wheels on sale.
As for the late engineering skills, your story begin in the tier 3 era with mecanics. Late engineering skills require a lot more resources for research and comes with steep building requirement (there was a warning with pottery and glassworking). In fact, getting a fully functional mechanics requires costly research, a lot of iron and a tier 2 room big enough for 5 crafting tables, including the large assembly line. Ideally, each crafting table should be equipped with advanced modules 3 from the start. Industry and electronics have even higher requirements.
If you look closely at resources and room requirements for professions since the settling era, you can see they are somewhat similar. In other words, things were relatively fair between players. But now mechanics and industry needs are clearly off the chart. This is unfair... So many resources are needed just for the factory. On top of that, you have on many servers the trade bullies with their profit margins on bricks, lumber, food and furniture, trying to steal resources from you just because they pushed a button.
On the other hand, this is unfair and hard only if you keep looking at this problem with an individualistic approach. Close teams of 2 or 3 players don't just abandon one of their player to make a factory alone. They contribute by adding parts to the factory, help getting iron, pick up wood logs, bring food, etc. In other words, they share the burden. Note it is easier to share the burden because they know the factory will also be their factory and not just the building of a stranger. Next, all the team members benefit from steel tools and efficient machines easily, so making the tier 3 factory together comes naturally.
I discussed how keeping all the engineering skills for one player tend to drive others away and the fact that late engineering skills require a lot of resources. This led me to believe the most important role of late engineers is not about providing this virtual iron gear or trucks, but to make a way for the industrial endeavor to be a collective adventure where many players will share the burden and the benefits of factories and skills.
Dirt roads are useful to prevent vegetation from growing back. But let’s face it: they provide no real bonus to movement and are just a draft waiting for the real roads. Stone roads increase transport, look great and are a strong symbol of a community’s success and hard work. A road project is a very interesting source of XP for engineers and sometimes a great source of revenue.
You do not need a big space for your shop (and home too) and there are many advantages to downtown area. Since you make roads, you are in a good position to put your roads where you want this central place to be.
You might not be able to work directly toward a townhall, but you can at least provide cheap carts to contributors and add a nice stone road in front of the building.
This one is for the late branch of the engineering profession. You can lower the risks of ending the game alone and get more support from other players by making a Fab Lab. Players who use the public space bring their own resources and make contracts so that players with specific skills add their work. Other engineers can use the space too.
Many players, especially chefs, have an interest to live downtown. Find these people and ask them for help in exchange for building roads near their lands. Each of them can find crushed stone near the surface or mortar to contribute. If you are lucky, the little path of gray on the map will bring more players.
Indicate where the roads will be as soon as possible. This can easily be done with construction posts (one in each 5x5 are where roads will be). If a zoning office is available, use it to draw a road district and have people vote on the layout. You’ll even be able to protect it with laws.
When building roads, ask nearby players to prepare the land so you can put the blocks exactly where they want it. For example, if they want to keep the road at the same level, they should remove one layer of dirt in front of their home/workshop so you can fill the trench with road blocks.
You produce road blocks, but you really don't have to go out there in the sun and place them. Sell them instead or better, make a barter stone accepting crushed stone and mortar so that people make their own roads. I always do that if I take the logging/basic engineer path. Once I woke up and someone used the store to make 300 roads. Free XP baby !
Learn to use the contract board and practice the work party feature. It will allow you to make special quests (ex.: make your own truck) and other projects. This is a game and people like challenges and short objectives.
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