Ever since the meteoric rise of survival and block-building simulator Minecraft, dozens if not hundreds of similar games have been released trying to recreate that success. So far, most of them have been little more than cheap knock-offs, but a newly announced indie title called Eco seeks to take the Minecraft formula and put its own ecological twist on it.

“It is the role of players to thrive in [Eco’s] environment by using resources from the world to eat, build, discover, learn and invent,” the game’s Steam Greenlight page says. “However, every resource they take affects the environment it is taken from, and without careful planning and understanding of the ecosystem, lands can become deforested and polluted, habitats destroyed, and species left extinct.”

While the worst thing that can happen to a player in Minecraft is losing a few hard-won items, the worst thing that can happen in Eco is the world being destroyed—forever. The game world faces an impending disaster, and if players are unable or unwilling to overcome the challenges facing them, they could see their world destroyed in a server-wide permadeath.

“This ecosystem is your only lifeline in a race against time, your source of resources that will either prevent humanity’s destruction, or become the source of its destruction when the group squanders its resources,” developer Strange Loop Games told Eurogamer. “Thus you’re facing two existential crises simultaneously: an external threat that you must avert, and the threat of causing your own destruction. A rock and a hard place.”

The game will let players form their own communities with laws and power structures, and while everyone will have the same overall goal – to not die – not everyone will have the same needs or motivations.

“Despite everyone occupying the same world and having the same interest in its survival, individual incentives will make for vastly different positions,” the developer said. “Is your character a lumberjack specialising in cutting down trees for their livelihood? You’re likely going to have a different idea as to how many trees should be allowed cut down than others. We’re all in this together, and yet the only enemy is ourselves, the individual’s needs vs the group’s.”

The developers received a grant of nearly $900,000 from the U.S. government’s Institute of Education Sciences as a program to “enhance middle school students’ knowledge of ecology and environmental literacy.”

Image credit: Strange Loop Games (c)