While you entertain the best way to upgrade your house bonus in Eco, the easiest and fastest solution is actually sharing a house with another player...
There are days like that... I log into a world where I ask the admin to share a house and I get this answer: "this is stupid, no". The next game after that, I ask the same. Now another player jumps in the conversation and says house sharing doesn't work because you get a penalty on XP for both players.
If there is one thing I really learn about Eco by strange Loop Games since 2018 is that it contains several cooperative mechanisms. Sharing has always been a good choice...
But I agree with the player who said there is a penalty for sharing a house, because there is one. However, the penalty and bonuses for residency in Eco are not that simple. This penalty is in fact a way to reduce the immense potential brought by sharing.
I proposed a minimalist house design for Eco in a previous post about how to get XP. It is a 240 blocks design that yields 4 tiny rooms of 2x3. This is best suited for a player, such as a carpenter or basic engineer, who really needs this extra boost of XP to get to lvl 5 or lvl 6 as quickly as possible.
This design contains the following furniture and yield a balanced total of 26 XP house points :
Building this house with an upgrade module 2 and collaborative neighbors is likely to cost you about the same price as 1000 wood logs, with 540 wood logs for the building blocks and 460 wood logs for the furniture. I included the price of calories.
Sadly, a common belief on servers is that furniture should cost double or worse, that you should sell furniture according to demand. If this is true in your world, your house could cost between 1500 and 2000 wood logs. You may see now how powerful this furniture leverage is because you spend all the time to get materials while the crafter gets as much as a whole free house for pushing few buttons.
Welcome new players ! We are beginner friendly.
So the story at the beginning was true: there is a penalty when you share a house and this penalty is 33% for a second resident. For instance, if I make this 26 XP house and allow my friend to take residence, we will both end up with 17.5 XP.
Is this stupid ? No at all. From a community perspective, sharing turned my 26 XP house into a home generating a total of 2x17.5 = 35 XP.
From an efficiency perspective, the initial 26 XP cost me 1000 wood logs, which is 38.5 wood logs per XP gained. Sharing my home means I can work with my friend and ask her to bring 500 wood logs to the project. Now it only costs me 500 / 17.5 = 28.5 wood logs per XP. Sharing this way also means I can get a house in half the time.
And it gets better...
Now what would happen if we made two houses next to each other and then used a single claim for them ? What we end up with is a residence with two living rooms, two bathrooms, etc.
Having one resident in a big house imposes a penalty of 50% on the value of the second set of rooms. Overall, it's like having a 25% penalty on the XP value of the entire house. In this case, the theoretical 2x26 = 52 XP homes only yields 39.4 XP for it's rich user.
From a community perspective, this is a wasteful situation. I have two homes that could generate 52 XP for the community, but my selfish setup only generates 39.4 XP. From an efficient perspective, the cost of each XP is now 50.8 wood logs per XP (2000/39.4). You could argue here that putting two houses on top of each other instead of building them separately allows saving on material. This is true. In this example, I could save about 155 wood logs, lowering the cost at 46.8 wood logs per XP instead.
Now what if my friend takes residence on this land ? In a way, the game considers that each player normally has a single home with one room of each type. This is why the second set of rooms previously had a 50% penalty. Now that we are two residents, this penalty is lifted.
From a community perspective, this theoretical 52 XP home now yields a total of 70 XP divided into 2 players. It's cost is about 28.6 wood logs per XP for each player or 26.4 wood logs per XP if we build a two floors home.
I regularly see big players making 3 sets of each room in an attempt to get even more XP. But this third set of rooms has a 75% penalty, for an overall penalty of 42% on the total house value. Again, three houses could generate 78 XP, but keeping it for a single player only yield 46 XP. We are also looking at a cost of 65.33 wood logs per XP.
Simply sharing this house with another player yields about 87 XP for the community and reduces the cost to 34.4 wood logs per XP for each player.
In the two last examples, we can see that one player who spends all the time to get three sets of each room would get about the same XP bonus as two players who each brings half the material. On the plus side, making multi-level houses is also a way to save land claims.
Do you wonder what happens if 3 citizens share this 3 level house ? The penalty for sharing in this case is 50% for every resident, which seems huge. However, 3 residents allow this last 3rd set of rooms to come at no penalty. Therefore, each player gets 39 XP, turning this 78 XP home into a 117 XP home for the community at a cost of less than 25.6 wood logs per XP.
Remember, 39 XP is the same as a single player who makes two sets of each room alone. With 3 players, we get the same at the cost of a single home each. This becomes less of a stupid choice...
There are a lot of views about what Eco is. Some see it as an interesting economic war game. I like to see it as a learning experience for collaboration. As such, working together is always the best choice. However, it comes at the risk of trusting each other. Considering their high cost, sharing houses is a top-level challenge for trust.
In a world full of strangers, my advice would be to first begin with a low risk approach such as joint buildings for your workshop. You may also endeavor small community projects to further boost trust, such as an early town hall with a capitol to launch the constitution (6 land claims, building with inside space of 4x4 and x3 high with 132 blocks, capitol) or a nice community library (2 land claims, building with inside space of 5x3 ad x5 high with 170 blocks, a store, 2 research tables, 2 stockpiles on the roof).
Once I find the least paranoid player to share a home, I usually just go for a 2x2 land with the previous design and multiple floors. Each player provides 2 land papers only and the owner can share access as well as residency using the land claim tool (with "E" key) or accessing land settings from the map. We then work on a single house once BU2 are available, adding one or two floors later.
For the entrepreneurs among you, rent is a powerful tool to manage hotel-like buildings. I suggest you build on a land separated from your storage. The reason is residents have access to every container on the land. Having residents pickup coal from the braziers is actually a problem that will need a solution in future versions of the game.
You can invite residents by accessing your land settings: residency section. You'll be able to invite specific players or based on demography. To avoid spamming, I suggest you approach a few neighbors individually. But before this, you must set the rent. Again there are multiple approaches, going from an extreme of "make them pay as much as they can afford" to "make it free". You can set a rent for joining and another one per hour (offline and online).
I usually dislike offline fees since people have a real life out of this and I don't want them to worry about joining the game just to pay the rent. I link this to a bad feeling about the game, which can demotivate players quickly. I may get less "money" out of this, but keeping a player in the game is most often worth it.
From an objective standpoint, each additional resident will lower the XP for everyone, so you have to add more rooms if you want to keep them high. Your customer will want to know about two things: the rent and the XP gained. Those are likely the two variables you will need to discuss. On your side, you have a secret variable as well : number of days before you get back your investment.
For instance, I know the first floor cost me 1000 wood logs and the others 845 (I am saving on floor space). Therefore, I want every player to bring me about 900 wood logs. I estimate each of my residents is likely to play 4 hours per day and they are likely to want a tier 2 home around day 5 in this world (total of 20 hours each). If I refer to the table in the following section, I can hope to get 2 customers (plus myself = 3) and promise them an XP bonus of up to 39 XP. Over the next 5 days, however, they will have to pay a rent of about 45 wood logs per online hour (900 /20). I can also put an initial join fee and reduce this rent. For instance, 100 wood logs to join, then 40 wood logs per online hour).
Note two things in the previous example. First, I am not making "money" out of this, but I am getting more XP bonus (probably more early too) for the personal cost of a single house. As a carpenter or mason, this project will allow me to use my skill and receive more experience points. If I am a cook or an engineer, I bet the carpenter will sell me his stuff for a more reasonable price. Secondly, this project is an ecological leverage that allows us to use materials that would yield 78 XP to a total of 117 XP. Each felled tree brings more for the community ! This is where Eco is about finding non-zero sum game bonuses rather than seeking individual profit.
Sadly, even with this reasonable cost, I rarely find more than 1 player interested in renting. Except for the trust requirement, this is probably because Eco is also a sandbox game and players have fun making their own house too.
First, the previous players were right: sharing residency brings a penalty on the XP value of a home. But this is only from an individual perspective and without taking into consideration the cost per XP gained. As we see in table 1, this conclusion is likely reached by players who have not yet experienced collaboration on a regular basis (novice players) and with a lot of time to play. When you have the luxury to put in 8 hours per day in this game, you don't mind spending 65 wood logs per XP to reach an advantageous 45.9 XP house bonus. Sharing in this case only lowers your potential.
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