Strange Loop Games has pushed Maintenance Update 13.0.4 to Eco, fixing one of the more painful regressions to land in Update 13: pump jacks that took three full minutes to produce a single batch of oil. The patch also ships a full localization rebuild (XLIFF 1.2, per-language files, a community translation portal), a server crash fix around rent calculation loops, and a clutch of room cache fixes that affect every dedicated server on a restart cadence.
If you run an Eco dedicated server, this one matters. Two of the fixes target server-side crashes and persistence bugs that have probably been showing up in your logs since Update 13 landed.
Release Date
Maintenance Update 13.0.4 went live on May 21, 2026 on the default branch. It is fully save-compatible with 13.0.3 and earlier 13.x worlds. No client wipe, no settlement reset.
Localization Got a Long-Overdue Rebuild
The whole localization system has been rewritten. Eco previously stored every language in a single CSV file, which made it impossible to ship per-language updates without re-shipping the entire bundle. As of 13.0.4:
- All language files are now XLIFF 1.2 instead of CSV.
- The single multi-language file has been split into one file per language.
- Obsolete strings have been pruned, missing strings have been backfilled.
- A new community translation portal is live at localization.play.eco/projects/eco so players can contribute translations again without an internal-only tool.
Updated translations shipped for French, German, Japanese, and Russian in this patch. The in-game language selector now displays a yellow warning if a language is under 80% translated and a red warning if it falls under 60%, so players know what they are signing up for.
There is also a small but useful fix for multi-language servers. Chat commands sometimes broke when the language was not set to English. That is patched in 13.0.4. If you have been running an EU or JP community server and seeing players complain that /help or /work mysteriously stopped responding for them, this is why.
Pump Jacks Are No Longer a Three-Minute Bottleneck
The headline gameplay fix. In Update 13, pump jacks regressed to a hard minimum of three minutes per batch of oil related products. The original pre-regression minimum was 30 seconds. The new minimum in 13.0.4 is 18 seconds, which is actually faster than the pre-bug value.
For server owners running industrial-tier economies, this is the difference between a working oil supply chain and a permanent bottleneck that strangles plastic, gasoline, and rubber production. The pump jack UI also had a cosmetic bug where the displayed crafting time did not match the real one. Both are fixed.
Fishing Trawler Now Works in Low-Density Water
The fishing trawler had been quietly failing to catch fish whenever it was placed over water that was not maxed-out density (most player-built coastal docks). It now works as intended in any fishable water. Coastal settlements that gave up on trawler economy and switched back to manual fishing can put the trawler back into rotation.
Server Crash Fix: Rent Calculation Loops
Buried in the Miscellaneous section but worth its own callout for anyone running a public Eco server: the server would crash when a rent was set up with a calculation loop. A calculation loop here means a rent contract whose price formula references another property whose price formula references the first one, directly or transitively. With certain player-authored civic contracts, this was apparently easy to trigger.
If your server has been logging an unexplained crash whenever a player publishes a new rent contract, this is almost certainly the cause. After 13.0.4, the offending rent is rejected rather than crashing the world.
Room Cache Fixes That Matter After Every Server Restart
Two related room-detection bugs that affected every dedicated server on a restart cadence:
- Rooms could fail to be recognized as valid after a server restart, which would silently break housing buffs and skill bonuses tied to those rooms.
- With
EmptyBlocksCountAsWindows=true, rooms sharing a wall with another room could be wrongly classified as outdoors after a restart, also silently zeroing out housing buffs.
If your server runs nightly restarts and players have been quietly losing the housing buff state from their built rooms, the fix is now live without any manual intervention required. No rebuild, no re-place. Restart once on 13.0.4 and the room cache rebuilds cleanly.
Smaller Fixes Worth Knowing
- Resource cost increases from talents now display in red rather than the previous misleading green.
- Color codes inside UI text no longer bleed into surrounding text when not closed correctly.
- The abandon-specialty confirmation popup is clearer that experience is not refunded if the relevant server setting is configured that way.
- The avatar creation and editing screen, which had silently dropped all asset choices, is now showing assets again.
- Camera calibration in settings finally has its scan-for-cameras button back.
What This Means for Your Server
If you operate an Eco dedicated server, do this after pulling 13.0.4:
- Restart the server once. The room cache fix runs at startup. After the first 13.0.4 restart, housing buffs return to normal across the board.
- Verify your pump jack outputs. If players have been complaining about a stalled oil supply chain since Update 13, check throughput now. You should see roughly 10x the previous rate.
- Check your translation status banner if your community runs in French, German, Japanese, or Russian. Updated strings ship with the patch, restart will pull them in.
- No save migration required. Existing 13.0.x worlds load without rebuild.
- No mod break that we have seen so far. The localization rebuild is opt-in for translators only and does not touch the modding API.
DoomHosting Runs Eco Dedicated Servers on Ryzen 9 Hardware
Eco is unusually CPU-bound for a sandbox. Civics calculations, the room cache, and the simulation tick all want clock speed more than core count. On undersized hosts, a single rent-with-calculation-loop or a backlogged room cache can stall the whole tick.
We run Eco on dedicated Ryzen 9 hardware with NVMe storage so the simulation does not flatline during peak hours, and we provide the standard pile of things you should expect from a dedicated host: full FTP, DDoS protection, instant setup, and 24/7 support.
If you are tired of debugging your VPS or running Eco on a Saturday night that never gets unstuck, host your Eco server with DoomHosting and let us deal with the infrastructure side.
The 13.0.4 patch is small in scope but it removes some of the most expensive regressions Update 13 introduced. Worth pulling on day one.
