How to Disable the Meteor on Your Eco Server

When you normally start a game of Eco, you are told a meteor will hit your planet in 30 days and destroy it.

The goal of the game is, normally, to increase your level of technology until you have the means to stop the meteor impact, but without destroying your environment in the process. If you're not careful, you can "save" the world, but what's left is full of toxic waste and garbage, the trees and plants are all gone, and there's nothing left to eat anymore.

You Can Turn Off the Meteor!

It is possible to disable the entire Meteor impact part of the gameplay, though.

Disabling the meteor can allow new players to focus more on learning the game, especially how the skills, talents, and research tree works. The gameplay in Eco starts simple, and gets surprisingly deep after a while.

Disabling the meteor can also allow players to focus more on city building, community development, and economic aspects of the game. A lot of the late stage gameplay revolves around collaboration between different players, who have different unique crafting skills, and how they interconnect and depend on each other. Plus, it's fun to build a really impressive house in the game (and it takes a lot of hard work).

Ways to Disable the Meteor

The meteor can be disabled in two different ways:

• Editing one of the game's config files before a world is generated

• Using an admin command to destroy the meteor in an existing world.

If you use the admin command to destroy the meteor, we still highly recommend editing the meteor setting in the config files as well, just so the game doesn't respawn it (oops, here's your meteor back!).

This guide describes both methods.

Method 1: The Disasters.eco Config File

The creation of a meteor, and how many days till impact is a default setting in the game. Normally it's set to "true" (yes, it's making a meteor), and 30 days till impact. These settings can be changed by creating a config file called Disasters.eco.

You will not normally find a file called Disasters.eco on server after a fresh install of the game Eco. You will instead see a file in the config folder called Disasters.eco.template. For the config file to be used by the game, you will need to remove the .template portion of the file name, so that the file is only named Disasters.eco.

Inside this config file, you can set the Meteor creation to "False" if you want, so it doesn't even create it all, or change the number of days until impact. The settings in this config file are used when generating a new world (if you have already created a world with a meteor, there are ways to fix that at the end of this article).

Where to Find the Config Files

The config file Disasters.eco.template is normally found in the "Configs" folder, which is one of the folders in the main directory.

We highly recommend making a copy of Disasters.eco.template

While you can simply change the name of the existing template file, we recommend making a copy first. The syntax used inside the config file needs to be very specific, and it's very easy to mess up. A single missing bracket, parenthesis, or comma can prevent the file from being read correctly. It's a good habit to keep the original file as is, and edit a copy of it.

You can copy theDisasters.eco.template config file by the following steps:

• In the file manager window, you can click on the box to the left of it's file name.

• Then click on the "Copy" button that will appear at the top of the file manager window.

• A small pop-up window will appear, and there will by a field called "Select Destination" with a white box under it. Click on the white box, and a list of locations to copy the file to will appear. In this case, the only choice will be "/(main folder)".

• Click on the blue "Copy" button to copy the file.

• In the file manager, go back to the main folder for your server files, find the Disasters.eco.template file. You can select it again, and use the "Rename" button to change it's file name and remove the .template at the end.

• Select the file again by clicking on the box to the left of it's name, and then click on the "Move" button above the file manager window. In the "Select destination" box, choose the "Configs" folder.

Alternately, you could also download the file from the server to your home computer, rename and edit the contents and then upload it to the server.

Editing the Config File

When you edit the config file, you should see the following:

To disable the meteor, just make the following changes:

• Find the line with CreateMeteor

• Change true to false at the end of this line

• Please do not remove the comma at the end. It's required!

• Save the changes to the config file

If you just want to change the number of days until meteor impact, you can do that by:

• Editing the line MeteorImpactDays

• Replace 30.0 with another number

• It does not need a comma after the number

Restart the Server

As a last step, either start your server to create a new world, or restart the server if it was already running.

Method 2: Using an Admin Command

If you already made a world with a Meteor, altering the config file might not remove it. You may need to use an admin command to destroy it. We still recommend editing the Disasters.eco file as described in the first section above, so that the game knows to disable it permanently.

The admin command to destroy the meteor is:

/meteor destroy

You will need to be set as an admin in the game's config files before you can use this command. Simply enter the command into the in-game chat.

We have a guide about how to set admins that can help if you're unsure how to do it: How to Become Admin in Your Eco Server

Adding a Meteor

There's a similar set of admin commands for adding a meteor too. Why would you want to do this?

Maybe you've finally reached the point where you have the technology to destroy the Meteor and you want to see the cool lightshow. Maybe you just want to see it all blow up.

We highly recommend making a backup before using any of these commands! This admin command respawns a new meteor.

/meteor spawn

There are also two other related commands that you might find useful:

• /meteorfall begins the meteor impact sequence. The sky is falling!

• /meteorimpact instantly causes the meteor impact with no preamble. BAM! done!