The cooperative fabric that makes Eco is woven on the principle that players will need to exchange items to win the game. In this context, human societies found it useful to use intermediate tokens or money...because the blacksmith doesn't always want to be paid in chicken and taro roots.
In Eco, players will see two main types of money: personal credits and minted currency. Both come with advantages and limits. This article is meant to present you many more types of money that stem from this starting point.
First of all, note that every type of money works. However, they all come with disadvantages that may not suit your game style or match the planning effort you are willing to make.
When the game starts, there is already an unlimited amount of "money" available in Eco. This is because each player has its own currency (ex.: player 1 credits, player 2 credits) which they can produce in unlimited amount. You can imagine these credits as small colored rocks, wood pieces or shells bearing the crest of a player.
This money is great for early exchanges and I strongly recommend it for maps where you want to welcome new players. The main reason is it gives a high control and agility over the exchanges you want to make, while you learn about the peculiar economic flow of Eco. It also protects against a lot of competitive or aggressive trade behaviors from novice players.
However, what new players sometimes miss, is the fact that each store has their own currency and you do not have coins from the other players at first. Therefore, when Bob sells something, the other players can't buy it because they do not have Bob's credits yet. So Bob first needs to buy items or at least create contracts where his credits will be given as payment. Only then they can buy items. In the same approach, no one will accept to bring items to your store or accept your contracts unless you sell something of value at your store. You can see here that some form of balance is needed at your store as you need to buy a bit from everyone while you make your items available.
Keeping a flow (in and out) at your store can be hard, even for experienced players. You may take time to read about how you can set your store to reach this equilibrium and consider bartering shops to deal with special or high volume items (ex.: upgrade modules).
There are many players of Eco who seek minted money as soon as possible, under the pretense that "it is better this way" or "barter was the primitive way of doing business millennia ago". The first thing you can answer to these claims is that Eco communities (except official servers) very rarely rise over 50 active players and they almost never stay this big for more than a few days. Basically, the scale of the communities is Eco is actually smaller than primitive clans who managed to survive long before official currencies appeared. As a side note, you will experience a lot of games with 10-20 active players. These players will likely be scattered across the map and will operate in clusters of even smaller populations. You don't need money to win: you need to collaborate.
Also, the basic economy mechanic in Eco is that every player can get resources from the environment. These resources are then taken to players with crafting skills to be transformed. The transformed items are finally consumed and disappear (ex.: food, coal as fuel) or are fixed on the map (ex.: crafting tables and buildings). After a while, you need a fresh input of basic resources to keep this flow active. Therefore, crafting skills can be seen as nodes or intermediary steps in this flow and stores need to buy and sell accordingly. This is why personal credits work for even the most complex communities in Eco : it is best suited to mediate the exchange at the store of each specialist and ensure that nodes operates in a flow manner (in and out).
Even if personal credits work, I found it easier, still, to add to these games a central barter store (that doesn't use any currency) to exchange only basic resources and thus promotes early exchanges.
This is basically how Lord's money is created: all you need is for players to change the credits at their store to operate with the same player's credits. These credits will be much as if you minted an unlimited amount of money and put in a single chest (the Lord's personal funds). Lord's credits need not to be enforced at all cost: like minted money, you just find 2 or 3 trusted allies to start the movement. The chosen player can simply open a store that accepts material for a common project (ex.: first town hall) and citizens around will be able to get money while supporting a community effort. He can also hand out a bit of money to everyone. The fact that people trust these credits and you can buy more things with them will be enough to increase its appeal to other players.
A great advantage of this type of money is the player acting as "Lord" can immediately starts making contracts to build roads and community buildings as a way to distribute money and lead an early community effort. You can even create laws and taxes few hours later to balance the early diffusion and return of money into the Lord's account.
It seems obvious, but even if the Lord's money works in a very similar way as minted fiat money, the fact that it is a personal currency deters most players. Also, Lord's money is not a fully backed currency in the sense that each coin can be worth anything. Your Lord needs to know how to set prices (ex.: using government stores) and carefully manage an economy. I encourage Lords to cooperate with at least two other players: one who will receive a large initial sum of money to prepare contracts and another who will receive taxes and note the daily amount before returning the money to the player making contracts.
If you cheat money from the start or wait until the advanced era or tier 2 era is reached, you'll be able to make a tier 2 room with a mint. This "crafting table" lets you set up a currency based on specific items. For instance, you can feed the mint paper items or iron to create coins. The type of item and the amount of currency created per unit of item split minted currency in two categories : fiat money and backed money.
A good example of fiat money is when you set the mint so that each wood pulp item becomes 10,000 coins in a world where you want wood logs to be worth 1 coin each. Basically, you don't need many items to make a treasure and you end up with more money that your community really needs to operate. This is a lot similar to the Lord's money: a single account with unlimited money.
If a single wood pulp produces a treasure, an obvious advantage is it is cheap to set up. Making a mint and a tier 2 room cost a lot of time and energy already! In fact, this is a popular way to set up money from the start: you just give yourself a few bricks, a mint and then burn worthless items in it. Just don't forget to prevent anyone else from making money afterward (ex.: law).
Like the Lord's money, the main problem is you need a mechanism to set a reference price, which can be easily done with a government store and public contracts. Many admins choose an even faster route and simply tell every player reference prices. I also advise you to set taxes in order to return money to the treasury later. You can attempt to give away money to every player and then hope for the best without attempting to manage the economy (lock and load approach). But worlds like this often fail a few days later.
The fourth type of money I see a bit less in Eco is when currency is made in a way that each item consumed in the mint is worth the same (or more) than the number of coins gained. The items selected are also harder to get or you have a law that somehow limits how much money can be minted. Since the mint consumes these resources, players who have a choice of using them for money or for sale are unlikely to sell them at a very different price at their store. So if a single iron ore creates a coin, the coin you have in your pocket should be worth about the price of an iron ore item. The whole economy can then align on this reference. Obviously this is when the admin doesn't cheat entire stockpiles of iron and make a ton of money first. In this case, you have something closer to fiat money instead.
A strong aspect of this kind of money is there is a direct link between items and their worth in coins. These coins mean real work and people are not likely to stray much from this reference point. Another good thing is you can allow players to mint their own coins, which is rare and original when I think about the public servers I have seen since 2018. Also, new players arriving in the world have a clear project (let's make some coins).
However, some items used in the mint, in my opinion, quickly introduce inequity and problems. Examples are wood boards or iron bar rush where resources are burned into the mint rather than used for players. Also, gold bars can be made by jealous smelters who keep money like a hostage : they attempt to buy products at a very low price from other players afterward. So you may want to think about a public DIY contraption or some sort of community infrastructure to avoid these problems when you choose crafted items to mint money.
Also, note that the worth of a server lies in the amount of time players put in it, but minting money divert a signifiant portion of this time into minting rather than impressive monuments and cool houses. On top of that, when players just mint money, there is nothing yet to put value in the treasury to fund community projects. The latter is not a problem in small communities that manage to collaborate well, but you may want to quickly think about taxes. You may even put taxes on the minting process through a law. Finally, there will be a time where minting more money will harm your economy and you should have a good mechanism to stop it.
Tokens are not like other types of money. Basically, it is when a currency (usually minted money) is used for a single product or purpose and you don't want to involve the common currency in the process. Tokens generally make it harder for some players to get more of their expected share. You can use them to distribute something of great value through a shop without first handing a lot of money that players can spend elsewhere. Yes, there might be exchanges of money and tokens between players, but players also tend to hang on to rare items as opposed to selling them.
For instance, you can make a shopping mall and decide that each player deserves a small spot there (for free). Instead of handing out lands manually, you can make a law that distributes a token to everyone and then the store sells each plot for a token. Alternatively, you can buy land papers in exchange for tokens so you get your own land papers back after this project and you don't need to cheat land papers.
Similarly, you can create a scenario where one token is given to each player and there are many starting shops which sell starting packages (equipment and clothes for miners, hunters, farmers or lumberjack). However, each starting package costs one token so you cannot have them all. In this scenario, you don't hand out money that new players may spend elsewhere and everyone on the server wears nice uniforms. The token stores can also have other stores next to them to buy the equipment from the community.
There are plenty of other ways to be creative with tokens.
It is possible to set the currency type of your store to "none" or barter. This turns it into a barter store. From now on, players will need to sell the exact value of what they buy.
The main advantage of barter stores is to force players to buy items if they bring resources. This may sound a bit aggressive, but there are many contexts where you want to offer a crafting service without interfering with your normal shop. Early community structures and special contraptions also benefit from this feature.
For instance, I like to make an early community shop where wood logs, stones, crops and carcasses can be sold and bought (no profit). I dedicate some of my time to filling the store with various items (sort of a voluntary tax) and the players can come and exchange basic resources according to their skills. This allows me to propose an early list of prices for basic resources to help new players grasp their relative value. This store can be further used to distribute early scrolls made from a community research hut, which helps grow the stocks of resources available.
Another example is tool repair, which is quite challenging to operate with a normal store. In this case, the advantage of bartering is you can set the prices of items in such a way that players must bring you a broken tool to match the price of repaired tools. See here for more details.
I now make two stores early on: one is for high volumes of some items (ex.: hewn, mortared stones, cloth) set in a barter mode and the other is a regular store. The barter store is linked to a crafting table with a huge crafting order on it. This allows me to make my skills available at all times without the fear of someone dumping thousands of wood logs or stones just to get money while I get stuck with unwanted products. In fact, I sell the wood or stones in the store next to it. Stone management is now very much easier too.
Personal credits (1) are usually made available through stores and contracts and are great for early communities (sometimes great until the end too). Minted, backed money is made available to players through the process of minting. However, fiat money and Lord's credits first lead to a single account with a lot of coins in it. Therefore, you need a way to distribute money to the players. Shortly after, most worlds need some kind of return mechanism so that money goes back in the treasury and can fuel once more community projects and help new players.
In brief, I am no economist, but I see an incredible amount of failed worlds where admins set up money and just hope that somehow an economy will run on its own. Sadly, there are always 2 or 3 players ending up with a ton of credits and eventually stop selling items and just buy resources to fuel their own personal projects until the server fails. Again, no economist, but I would love to see an article describing what I believe is a delicate balance in the "cycle of money", just like there are delicate balanced phenomenons everywhere else in this game.
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