I went in expecting it to have "cringeworthy levels of hippy idealism", but no, it is actually a reasonably sane game. It is the first game since Wurm Online that I have felt like part of a community thanks to the game mechanics themselves, and not just incidentally. A lone person will need inordinate amounts of time to go far into the tech tree, so instead people specialize, and soon after I was running a delivery company that moved orders of resources between players, with people greeting eachother when passing by at the trade district.
But thanks to how it works, it doesn't need 10s of coordinated people, you can certainly just join some existing server with a friend and have an equally good time.
I'll have to give it another go then. Do you have any recommended settings for this?
I also "cheat" at the start by using vanilla commands to research and level up in all the disciplines -- makes the game more about finding and efficiently utilizing resources without also having to scavenge random stuff to "research". Since there's such a breadth of everything, it reduces the grind ("specializations" are annoying if you're forced to be a jack of all trades) without making it too easy.
It still feels like a real accomplishment to build a large building -- both architecturally and via thinking about how each block traces back to the resources pulled out of the ground -- without requiring huge amounts of time in the game. I'm fairly proud of this one [1], and more so of the industry and infra that supported it.
Plus, Eco is just gorgeous, especially when in single-player with low ecological impact there are so many animals hanging around all the time (peep the alligator in that shot).