What's new

Two things at the shop worth giving money to

There is a Causes shelf at the shop now, and it is the only counter in the game that hands you nothing back. Eighty a month, to either of two outfits.

LandSAR are the volunteers who come and get people off the hill. Give them a month and, if they ever do come for you, the callout costs your name half what it would have. You will still feel just as stupid about it.

Trail Running NZ put the volunteer crew on the tracks: the ones who cut the benches and replace the markers. A month to them puts the trail crew singlet on the shelf, in a green nobody else can buy, and it stays there for good once you have given it.

A month is a month, and it is up when it is up: nothing renews itself, you cannot pay twice in one, and the shelf tells you the day it runs out. Each one is worth a point to your name. It will not carry you up a board on its own, because a month of not going out anywhere costs you more of your name than a month of giving pays back.

Both have a badge on them, and neither will ever be worth a second on a hill.

The hills are a skill now, and you can be winched off one

The routes have always been the biggest days in the game. From today they also ask something of you that a fast pair of legs cannot supply: backcountry, which is what the hills teach you by being in them.

Every route says what it earns. Jumbo–Holdsworth is worth 3 the first time you get round it, then 2, then 1. The Southern Crossing starts at 5 and the S–K at 10, both stepping down a point a trip. A day you turn round on still teaches you something. Your running total is on the FKT board, on each route's own page, and under your runner on the hub.

And a route you are not ready for ends with a helicopter. Go onto the Tararua tops with nothing behind you and the day can end at a hut or a trig with LandSAR winching you out: no time posted, nothing paid, and a knock to your Confidence and your Reputation that everybody hears about. Nobody dies out here. They get found, and they get a ride they would rather not talk about.

Nothing stops you going. The board will not refuse you, and it will not tell you which route is beyond you either. It carries one line saying that one of them is, and that is all. Turning round at the hut is still the careful call and still pays for itself. Walking onto the main range on your first morning is a decision, and now it is one with a cost.

Start on Jumbo. It asks nothing, and it is where the hills start teaching.

New runners start at the bottom

Bradley signed up and was put straight into the Tops, the region's top group, three days later. That was never meant to happen, and it turned out not to be the ladder's fault.

The field was seeded too slow. Twenty-eight of the thirty-two local runners were weaker than somebody on their first morning, and the slowest of them could never have caught one however long they trained. There was also a gap in the middle of the region with nobody in it at all: you outgrew the runners below you around week six and then had nobody to chase until about week thirteen.

Every local runner has been stood up against a real career. The five standards now run from somebody at your own day-one level all the way to somebody at the top of the sport, with no hole in between, and the quickest of them is a runner a maxed-out career can still beat, but only just. A new runner now starts in the Valley, whichever class they pick, with the whole ladder above them.

⚠️ The local ground is held at faster times than it was. That is the same change seen from the other side, and it is deliberate. A local runner may only hold one piece of ground now, though, where they used to hold two, so the board is spread across a lot more people than it was and a good deal more of it is within reach of a runner a month or two in.

And your group now reads the whole runner, not just your training. Your division used to be decided by your seven qualities alone, so a season of racing counted for nothing towards it while a fortnight off the training counted for a great deal. Reputation counts too now. That is what ground, marks and race results pay you, and it quietly fades if you stop going out. Fitness is still most of it: racing hard for a season is worth a few places, not a division.

The cabinet holds what you won

The cabinet was mostly a list of things you had not done. Seven badges, each with its name, the time it wants, where it is won and a paragraph about it, and on a runner holding two of them five of those rows were about days that had not happened.

It holds what you have won now, newest first, with a count of how many are still out there. Nothing has gone: what each route has on offer, what it wants, and your best on that ground are all on the route's own board and its record page, which is where you are standing when you can actually do something about it. An empty shelf points you there rather than reciting the seven.

Each badge on the shelf now says which route earned it, and the rows read as rows: the mark sits to the left of the name, and everything under it hangs where you are already reading.

Reputation buys you a name

Reputation only ever did one thing: move you up the region board. Now it buys the thing everybody out there already has and you did not.

At 25 Reputation a nickname field opens on your account. Pick one, and from then on it sits between your first and last name everywhere your name appears: the region board, a race results sheet, the feed, even the notification that lands on your phone in the morning. Everybody reads it, so it goes past a check before it goes up, and you can change it once a fortnight.

Drop back under 25 and it comes off. It is not gone, though. It stays yours and it goes straight back on when you are back over the line, and your account tells you when you are close to the edge.

The locals are on exactly the same terms, which is the part that changed for them. Every runner out there has had a nickname baked in since the day they were made, and from now on they only wear it while they have the results to back it up. On a fresh region that is about five of the thirty-two. The rest have to go and earn it, same as you.

The book stays open after you sign it

Leaving a note in a hut book or a ground log worked, and looked like it had not. The book shut the moment you pressed the button, taking the note you had just written down with it, so the only thing the game had to show you it had taken your words was hidden behind a summary line.

The book now stays open on the note you just left, marked just now, with the line underneath saying it is waiting on a read before it goes up on the board.

The watch button works

Pressing watch on somebody in the region did nothing at all. Not slowly, not sometimes: the press never left your phone, so nobody was ever added and there was nothing to see. Fixed, and the two people in the world can follow each other again.

Five screens, and a lot fewer words

Bradley, a day into playing it: everything was the same volume and competing for your attention. He was right, and it turned out to be two problems wearing one coat. Nothing on a screen was louder or quieter than anything else, and there was simply too much of it.

Every screen has three levels now. One headline that says what to do next, in a bigger size, above one filled button, and at most one of each per screen. Under that, the live state worth reading: your condition, your load, how you're going today, the race window, the kit you're short of. Under that, everything you look up rather than act on, folded into drawers that stay shut until you open them and that say what's in them on the front. A warning wears a ▲ as well as a colour, so you can find it by scanning rather than by reading.

The nav is five words: today, out, region, shop, account. It used to be nine plus the FAQ, which on a phone meant three or four of them lived behind a menu on every screen. out is the one question that used to be three doors, ground, routes and races, and the three boards carry a strip along the top so you can move between them.

Today and your runner are one screen. They were the two longest screens in the game and most of the second was the first one said again, the same level bar and the same division and the same purse drawn twice. The runner sheet is six drawers under the hub now: Your runner, Standing, Kit, Forecast, Work and the purse, History. The hub came out shorter than it was before it absorbed a whole screen. /game/runner still works and lands on the drawer.

The three boards lead with the decision. A name, what's standing on it, what it's worth, and then only the rows that bite today: today's conditions, the fuel, the kit, the retreat warning. Everything else, who found it, who the Regular is, the landmarks, the badges, the record, is behind a More about drawer. The compulsory kit list only shows when you're short of something, which is when it's the row that matters. Measured: the ground board went from about thirteen phone screens to under two.

The region opens with the people. It used to be a ladder thirty-three rows long on which the only way to tell a person from a simulated runner was that one of them carried a level. Now /game/region is the people first, one row each with a watch button on it, then what everybody you watch has been up to, then the four divisions with yours open and the rest folded. A person is marked wherever runners are listed.

And watching somebody finally tells you something. When a rival takes a piece of ground, sets a mark on a route or posts a race result, it lands in your feed, with both the person and the hill as links. It's still one way, they're still never told, and none of it ever buzzes your phone.

Living costs come off the wage. Money was piling up with nothing left to buy, because the shop is finite and the wage was unconditional. Rent, power and a supermarket shop now come off every morning before anything reaches the purse, so what you bank is the difference, and the jobs board prints all three figures for every job on it. Two lives pay nothing, because barely working and studying both mean living at home. There's no bankruptcy and no debt: a thin month is a squeeze.

The shop is a shelf at a time, and it opens on whatever you're short of. What you need, shoes, poles and shell, light, pack and water, fuel, physio, and a shelf for a look. The jobs board folds by band, with the life you're living open.

Two new things on the counter. A recovery session, which takes the tail off a heavy week and stops dead at the red zone, so it buys back the part that was always coming back and never a red zone you ran into. And a race singlet, in the same three colourways as the shoes, which does nothing at all: no seconds saved, none lost, and nothing will ever ask for one. It's the thing you buy because you want to look like that.

That second one is a rule loosened on purpose. The purse buys what money buys a runner in life, kit, entries, treatment, recovery, a look, and never what only training buys: fitness, a result, a start line somebody else earned, a name on the region board, or a mend for an injury you ran into with your eyes open. A strain and a real injury are still refused at any price, and an earned hat is still not for sale.

Your first week has a thread through it. Creation deals you a runner and folds the dresser underneath, four numbered steps instead of sixteen rows of arrows. The orientation page is six cards, a third of what it was, and one of them is about the other people, which it never mentioned. And for seven days the hub carries five things worth doing once, each linking to where it's done: finish a session, look at who else is here, get kitted for a mountain route, enter the free Wednesday race, sign a ground log. It pays nothing, it isn't a tutorial you have to clear, and then it takes itself away for good.

The FAQ is grouped the way the game is, today then out then region then shop then account, with a one-line answer at the top of every section and the jump list finally naming all nineteen of them. It's about a third shorter, because anything a screen now says for itself doesn't need three paragraphs here as well.

One for us rather than for you: an admin can hand the admin flag to somebody else from the screen for it, instead of somebody typing a command on the server.

The teaser sits still on a phone

Two things the game did on a phone that it should not have. Scrolling the teaser made the footer at the bottom of the page slide up and down under your thumb, because it was pinned to the height of the screen and the height of the screen changes as the address bar comes and goes. It is not pinned to anything now. It sits under the page and stays there.

And the strip at the very top, the one with the clock and the battery in it, was showing whatever prose or artwork you had just scrolled past. That one was the scanlines: the faint lines drawn over everything to make it look like a CRT were pinned to the screen, and pinning something that size is what made the browser paint the page up behind the clock. They are drawn over the page instead now, which looks the same and does not do that. Fixed on the front of the site too.

The skip button clears the bar at the bottom of the screen while it is at it.

Names lead somewhere

The feed has carried links for a while: a hill goes and you can tap the hill, tap whoever took it. Every other screen in the game named the same things and printed them flat.

The standings were the worst of it. Under a name it lists the ground they hold and it said "Skyline" with nowhere to go, on the one screen whose whole subject is who holds what. A rival's dossier was worse again, because it is the screen a feed link lands you on: ground held, the ground you have both run, every race on their record, and not one of them led anywhere.

They all do now. Where a name has a page behind it, the name is the way to it, and it looks the same wherever it turns up: the standings, a dossier, the career log, the two boards, the hub, the last race. Whoever holds a piece of ground or a route is a tap away on the board you are already reading.

Nothing else moved. A name with no page behind it is still just a name.

You can see how everybody else is going

The ladder could tell you what a runner had been doing over a week and nothing at all about the state they were in today, so somebody deep in the red read exactly like somebody who had just come off a rest day.

Every row now carries the load they are carrying, with the red zone marked on it the way it is marked on your own, and how their body is reading today: Flying down to Wrecked. If something has gone wrong, the row says so before it says anything else.

What they have been doing is still there, under lately, because a quiet week and a wrecked morning are two different facts and one of them clears overnight.

You still cannot read their attributes. That is the same line as ever: you can see the shape somebody is in, not what they are made of.

Closing an account, and what it does not do

The FAQ has said for a while that aiming something at a real person takes the account with it. Now there is a way to do it, and the same pass wrote down what it actually means, because closing an account and deleting one are not the same thing and the page said neither out loud.

Closing takes away the way in. You cannot log in, and the next time you try you are shown the reason somebody wrote, rather than being left to work out whether you have forgotten your password. Nothing goes: the runner, the record and everything you wrote are all still there, and it can be undone.

Deleting is the one that erases the lot, and that stays yours to do on your own account page rather than ours.

What you write, and where the line is

The FAQ now says what happens to the things you write. Ground logs, hut books, the name you put on a teaser run, a piece of ground you send in: every one of them is read before it reaches anybody's board, and none of it had a public sentence anywhere saying what the standard was.

It is five short answers and it sits where you would look for it. What a log is for, what reads one before it goes up, where the line is, and what happens if you cross it. The short version: be as rude as you like about a hill, and none of it at another runner.

The section about your account and how to leave now has a jump link at the top of the page too. It arrived without one, which made the one thing somebody might want to check before signing up the one thing they had to already know was there.

The link looks like the game now

Paste a link to the game somewhere and you get a proper card: the terminal, the line about what this is, and the address underneath. It used to unfurl as a small square of the app icon, which told somebody almost nothing, on the one link you would send if you wanted to show them.

The doors are open

The game is open to anybody who wants a runner, so the bits of it that still said otherwise have gone.

The teaser used to end by offering to tell you when the real game opened. It was true when it was written and it is not now, so it points at the way in instead: play the ten minutes, then take on a runner of your own if you fancy it. There is still a list, and it is a list rather than a queue.

test has gone from the top of the screen. It was a workbench for the two of us building this, it played every race and every route straight through, and it would happily have shown you the ending of a race you had not run yet.

There is a contact form now, at the foot of every page. The FAQ has been promising that somebody would go and have a look since the site went up, and there was nowhere to say anything: no address, no form, nothing. Tell us what happened, what you expected, and roughly when, and we will.

The FAQ also answers what we hold about you and how you leave, which it never did. Retiring a runner keeps their record and deleting one does not; deleting the account takes the lot, straight away, and we cannot put it back.

The way in is guarded now. Get your password wrong five times and the login sits you down for five minutes, and the reset mail will only go to the same address a few times an hour. Neither is something you will meet by fumbling, and both exist so that nobody else can meet them on your behalf.

None of this changes a thing about your runner.

A record says what has been run, not what is meant to be

The three record pages, one for a piece of ground, one for a route and one for a race, each printed a par: the time the hill is supposed to take. Under your own best they added how far off the standing time you were. Both are gone.

A record is what people have actually posted on that line. Whose name is on it and their time is one row up, so if you want the gap you can do the sum, and what the ground is capable of is something you find out by going up it. The weekly email says the same about new ground: the distance and the climb, and nothing about what it ought to take.

What survives is the gap to a person. When somebody beats you on a hill, or you run a new best on ground somebody else holds, the feed still says by how much, because that is a rival and not a bar.

Put it on your Home Screen

The game installs. It gets its own tile, drawn as your runner, and it opens without a browser around it. On an iPhone that is also the only way it can reach you at all: Safari will not let a website notify you until the thing is on your Home Screen, so until you have done it a session finishing or a piece of ground going waits in the feed until you next look.

Nothing ever said so, except one grey line in Account that only appeared to browsers that already could not do it.

Your first morning says it now, /game keeps one quiet line about it until you have got round to it, and Account carries it properly. On Android and on the desktop there is a button that does it in one tap. Once you are installed the same block turns into the switch that was the point of it: turn the pings on.

It has nothing to say once you are running from the tile with notifications on, and the line on /game has a "not now" that sticks.

The feed is somewhere to go now

"Tessa "Two Days" Faulding went up Skyline in 56:50. You're second there now." Two things worth looking at in one sentence, and neither of them went anywhere.

Names in the feed are links now. A hill goes to its record, so you can see the ten quickest on it and every time it has changed hands. A runner goes to their dossier, so you can see who has just turned up and taken something off you. It works everywhere a name is printed: ground and FKT routes, the runner who beat you into the finish, whoever else was out on the same line today, and every one of them on /game and in the full career log alike.

A race name is a link too, and races have a record page of their own now: the course record, the ten quickest on it, and every running of it with your own result on the day. It is at /game/races/<race>, linked from the calendar, from the medal drawer and from the feed. A race that has left the calendar keeps its page, so a medal from one still leads somewhere.

And it fixes the feed you already have. Every line written before today has had its links put back, so the whole career log is a door and not just the part of it from here on.

• The two Blade fixes nobody could have reported. The division line on the hub was printing a fragment of its own source at you, and the Reputation a piece of ground paid never appeared in the block that says what you won. Both render now.

The training board stopped telling you what time it is

A session goes on the board when your runner wakes up, and it is run whenever you press go. Three of them were named as though somebody already knew which hour that would be, and the heat drill was the worst of it: a report landing at nine in the morning saying you had been out in the midday sun.

The hour was never the card's to know, so it no longer claims one.

• Heat drill, Oriental Parade. Same session, same heat, no time of day attached to it.
• Night navigation, the Skyline ridge and Double threshold, twice in a day. What they are called says plenty; they have stopped insisting on the clock as well.

Sessions you have already run keep the name they were run under, because that is what they were called at the time.

Nobody wakes up while they are still out there

The S–K runs from one dawn to the next, and the morning it crossed used to arrive as though you had been asleep for it: a wake-up ping telling you what a good day it was for a run, and a fresh training session put on the board under a runner who was somewhere on the Dress Circle.

The day still turns over, because it is a new day. What no longer happens is the waking up.

• No alarm while you are out. A line lands on the feed saying the date changed somewhere behind you, and that is all. It does not reach your phone.
• Nothing new on the board. The day's session waits until you are home, and it is the same one that was next.
• And no night's rest. Running through the night is not sleeping it, so the route no longer quietly recovers you part-way through itself. It all comes back the following morning, in a bed, off what the day actually cost.

A long day out now knows what time it is

Two things on the mountain routes, and the Tararua S–K in particular.

• The story tells you the actual hour. A beat that mentions the time of day now reads the clock you are running on rather than one somebody imagined. The S–K used to say you were a third of the way in and it was still morning, which was true for nobody: at the route's own par a third of the way in is half past twelve, and if you are still building toward a sub-twenty-four it is a good deal later than that. It says what it actually is now.
• And a beat waits until you get there. Answering the call at Arete used to print everything through to Nichols Hut, thirteen kilometres and several hours up the ridge, all at once. The ground between two calls now arrives as you cover it, so the water at Dracophyllum and the hut at Nichols are two separate arrivals in your day instead of one paragraph read hours early.

Nothing about the route, the time you post or what it costs you has changed.

Arriving late, and why it is a good time to

Six changes landed together this week, and they are one change. If you are new, they are the reason the region is worth joining now rather than six months ago. If you have been here since the start, they are the reason there is still something to go and get.

• You are ranked among people at your own level, not against the fastest runner in Wellington. Four divisions, sorted on ability. A first runner lands in the Valley, alongside the rest of the region's beginners and a good half of the local field, and the group directly above is somewhere to get to.
• The ground comes free four times a year. At every change of season every tenancy in the region opens at once. Nobody holds anything. The hill that has had the same name on it since you arrived is a hill you can go and take in the first week of summer, and so can everyone else.
• Turning up is now worth something on its own. Every piece of ground has a Regular, and it is nothing to do with speed. So is a personal best, which is the number that moves fastest when you are new.
• The fast runners cannot stand still. Fitness drifts when it is not trained and drifts hardest at the top, so the times on the board belong to people who are still going out. A gap that used to be permanent is now a gap somebody has to keep defending.
• And there are more people out there. The field is thirty-two runners rather than fourteen, with a sharp end that trains its way up to national level over months. More of them are coming for your ground.
• Going away is a thing you can plan for. Book a holiday and your runner takes one rather than falling apart: half the drift, the load and the stress cleared, and nothing lapsing while you are gone. They spend it on a beach.

None of it pays a currency and none of it is for sale. It is a region that moves, which is the only honest answer to arriving after everybody else.

Going on holiday

You can go away now. Book a holiday on your account screen: pick the day it starts and how long, and your runner goes with you instead of quietly falling apart while you are up a hill with no signal.

• Four weeks of the year, three at a time, seven days at least. Booked ahead, tomorrow at the earliest, and free to call off right up until the morning it begins. Call it off before it starts and there is no record of it at all.
• The first morning clears the load and the stress. Three weeks off the job really is three weeks off the job.
• The fitness still slides, at half pace. A holiday is a kinder fortnight, not a paused one. Real runners take an off-season and come back rested and a little slower, and so does yours.
• A session you never started costs you no Confidence, and the autopilot stands down. A holiday is a holiday.
• You can watch them take it. The hub draws your runner reclined on a towel with a drink for the whole of it, somewhere warmer than Wellington.
• It does not hold your division. The season turns whether you are there or not, and you can be relegated while you are away. The booking screen says so before you book: it names the day the season turns, tells you whether that falls inside the holiday you are about to take, and shows where the table currently has you.
• It costs nothing, and it does not stop the purse draining if you never look in. Those are two different things: one is a decision you made, the other is nobody being there to make any.

The season is the actual season

The competitive year is the real one. Summer, autumn, winter and spring, on the real New Zealand calendar: 1 December, 1 March, 1 June and 1 September. There is no second calendar to learn, and every screen that shows a division now says how many days are left.

• When the season turns, two things happen at once. The divisions settle, off the ability ranking you have been watching all season. And every piece of ground in the region stands open: whatever you were holding, you are not holding now, and neither is anybody else. One line in the feed tells you both.
• The first week of a season is the best week of the year to turn up. The board is empty, and the local field comes for it within days.
• Nothing you actually did is lost. Your times stay on that ground's new all-time board for good, your personal best is still your personal best, and every FKT mark, badge and Reputation point is untouched. What ends is the tenancy, which was only ever a statement about who is standing there now.
• The FKT marks do not reset, and never will. Ground is minutes from town that anybody can take off you overnight. A route is hours in the Tararuas.
• The races come round at different rates now. The Wednesday handicap is every week and costs nothing. XTRAIL West Wind is the first Sunday of every month. WUU2K is once a season, entries open eight weeks out, so a training block has somewhere to point. When a race is out of season the calendar says when its entries open next.
• The ground record shows both boards: this season, and all time.

The region is cut into four

Everybody in Wellington, you and the whole local field, is now ranked on ability and sorted into four divisions: Tops, Ridge, Bush and Valley. You are not asked to opt in and you cannot pick one.

• It goes on fitness, and nothing else. Every quality except Reputation, the same figure your level is counted in. Not your standing on the board, which is what you have been doing lately rather than what the body can do. Both readings are on the standings screen now, side by side.
• The groups are a fixed size, so there is always somebody directly above you to get past and somebody below trying to get past you. You go up by becoming faster than the runner holding the last place above you. You go down when somebody becomes faster than you.
• It settles when the season turns, and never in between. The board shows you where you would land if the season ended today, all season long, so a drop is something you watch coming rather than something you find out about.
• A fortnight's warning if you are in the bottom two of your group. Once, and a fortnight is enough training to answer it.
• Your runner sheet prices both directions: how many fitness points to the promotion, and how many you are clear of the drop by.
• A division pays nothing. No currency, no unlock, nothing for sale. It is a mirror held up to the region, and that is all it is.

A bigger region, with a sharp end to it

The Wellington field has doubled, from fourteen runners to thirty-two, and it no longer stops where it used to.

• There are people out there you cannot beat yet. A handful of the new arrivals are national level, and one or two are quicker than that. They are not there on day one: they train into it over months, the same way you do.
• The rest of the field is exactly where it was. There are still runners you are already quicker than, and there always will be. Nothing at the slow end of the region moved.
• The standings say what body somebody has. A rival's card reads club runner, sharp end of the club, regional, national level or elite, and none of those is a level. It is what they are, not how long they have been here.
• More runners means more of them coming for your ground. Ground that had gone quiet should start changing hands again.

Standing still costs something now

Fitness has always drifted when you stop training. It used to slow down the longer you were gone, so the second half of a month away was nearly free. It does not slow down any more, and there is one free day rather than two.

• The further you pushed a quality, the faster it comes back down. A beginner sheds what they always shed. A season of climbing does not.
• Standing orders are not a way to leave. After four days without you opening the game the plan stops setting out, and fitness starts drifting on a second, gentler clock that answers to you rather than to the runner. Running on autopilot is still better than doing nothing. It is not the same as being here.
• The runner sheet says the day the next point comes off, and which qualities go first, so it is never something you find out afterwards.
• The rest of the region is on the same rules. Runners who used to hold their fitness through anything now lose it like everybody else.

Nothing falls below the runner you started as. Three months of nothing takes you all the way back to that block and no further, so there is always a career there to build again.

Regulars, and a best of your own

Two things for anybody who is not the fastest runner in the region, which on ground held for months is nearly everybody.

• Every piece of ground has a Regular. Whoever has been up it most often in the last ninety days. Not quickest. Turning up. It takes three outings before the title exists, and after that it is whoever goes there most, which is rarely the same person as the one holding the time. It is on the board, on each piece of ground's own page, and it pays nothing at all, which is what keeps it about going running.
• A personal best is news now. A day that beat your own time on a line somebody else holds used to be one grey feed line about how far off you were. It gets the block a take gets: what you ran, what you took off your own time, and how far the hill still is. It pays nothing either. It is your number and nobody can take it.

This page

Everything below was already true. Until now the only way to find out was to notice that something had moved.

It is linked from the footer of every page, including from inside the game, and it reaches back to the first thing anybody could play.

Reputation fades, and a long day out finally pays

Your name now moves in both directions.

• Reputation decays. It used to only ever go up, which meant the region was slowly ranking whoever had been playing longest. Stop racing and it drifts back down, fastest when it is highest, and never below the eight you started with. Your badges are untouched. Reputation is what people think of you now. A badge is what you did.
• Ground and marks pay every time, not once. The pay-once rule existed only because the number could never come down. Now it can, so taking a piece of ground pays again after a fortnight, and a mark after three weeks.
• A mountain day is worth what it costs. Finishing an FKT route pays on its own, whether or not the mark changes hands. The S–K pays most, the Southern Crossing next, Jumbo–Holdsworth least. Turning round still pays something on the two big ones, because turning round is the careful choice and always was.
• A finisher badge for each of the three routes, on the shelf beside the clock badges.
• Every route has a record page. Whose name is on the mark and since when, the ten quickest, and every time it has changed hands.

The day ends where the day ends

• Turning back gets you off the hill. Retreat at Dundas Ridge and you are home that afternoon, not the following night. The clock now runs to where you stopped, plus the walk out.
• You get your result. Finishing a route used to bounce you back to the board, which threw the ending away. The run now lands on the day it was: your time, the mark, the splits, what it built.
• The ending waits for the road end. Jumbo–Holdsworth asks its last question at 17 km of 24, and the story was narrating the descent while you still had an hour of it in front of you.
• The Jumbo–Holdsworth directions are named the way the maps name them. Valley first is anticlockwise. We had it the other way round.
• Nothing types into a window you are not looking at. Whether the tab is in the background or the window is simply sitting behind something else, the story waits. Come back and the beat you missed types in from the start.

Taking ground says what it won

Taking a piece of ground off somebody used to be a line in the feed and nothing else.

• It pays Reputation, and says so.
• A block on the board with your time, the margin over what it beat, and where it moved you in the region. It goes quiet on its own after a day.
• Every piece of ground has a record page: who holds it and since when, the ten quickest on it, every time it has changed hands, the line on the map, and its elevation profile.

The screen keeps up with the world

Leave the app open overnight and the world moved on without telling the page. The session resolved, the day rolled over, the wake ping landed, and the board in front of you still said Wednesday.

It refreshes itself now when something happens to your runner. It does not interrupt anything you are reading, and it does not touch a form you are typing into.

A world with other people in it

The largest single batch so far, aimed at a world that feels inhabited rather than a loop that asks for more of your day. Nothing here added a notification.

• Ground logs and hut books. Every piece of ground carries a log, every route a hut book, both read before you commit rather than after. Finish an outing and you can sign it. The field signs the ground log too, in their own words, and nobody signs the hut book, because the mountains are yours alone.
• Rivals. Tag anyone, a person or one of the field, and the standings narrow to the handful you actually care about. It is one-way. Nobody is told you are watching them, which is also what makes it work the same over a bot.
• Somebody else was out here today. A quiet line naming whoever ran the same line earlier.
• Absence stops paying. Ignore the game for a fortnight and your runner came back richer than the one who showed up, because wages banked and nothing spent them. They now get on with their life while you are gone, and it costs.
• The physio. A massage takes the stress down, a session clears a niggle. A strain or a real injury is refused at any price. Those heal on time and nothing else, which is the whole point of earning them.
• The Wednesday handicap can be lost. The field ran to form every week, so sixty places collapsed to about five and the handicap was decided entirely by which ending you reached. Everyone on the start line now has good days and bad ones.
• The wake line says what the morning is about. Heavy legs, stress, or too long off. It knew, and it never said.

The places, drawn

Every race and every route now shows you where you are.

Fifty-six new pictures, one per place on each course, drawn as terminal half blocks in the same phosphor the rest of the game is in. Khandallah Park in the dark at six, the Skyline in the wind, the turbine, the Tip Track, the velodrome. They arrive with the prose, a row at a time, so a place turns up as you reach it.

The wind farm, the kit, and the purse

• West Wind replaces Turbine 16. Turbine was invented. West Wind is a real race on Meridian's wind farm at Makara, 17 km and 761 m, and every landmark in it is read off the organiser's own pages. Turbine stays readable for anyone who ran it.
• The kit is yours to buy. You start with trail shoes and two gels, not a full cupboard. The mountain routes and the two long WUU2K distances each carry a compulsory list, read off the real ones. No gear, no race, checked at the start line rather than at entry, so you can enter a week out and buy the jacket in the meantime. You are warned four times before it costs you anything.
• The money is a purse, and it is marked ¤. Every figure in the economy is calibrated against real Wellington wages on purpose, and a $380 beside a Buy button read like a microtransaction on a game that will never sell you one. Same numbers, different sign.
• The teaser is a teaser, not a demo. A demo is a cut-down version of the product. This is a different product: one fixed Western States scenario with thirteen endings.

The hub answers one question

Opening the game gave you every fact and no answer.

• What can I do now? One headline, then the ways to spend the day: the session on the board, a piece of ground, a route, the S–K. The rest folds away.
• One body, one outing. You could start a training session and then walk to the ground board and start something else at the same instant. Two efforts in one day is a decision you get charged for. Two at once was never one.
• Race day stands down the other boards too. The session board has cleared on race morning since July. The ground and route boards had not learned, so you could still put the legs into a hill three hours before a gun you paid ¤380 for.
• The writing got read. A dash we had been reaching for in roughly every other sentence is gone, and the walls of explanation with it.

The board is real hills now

The biggest change to the game's shape since the world opened.

• You can add ground. Export a GPX from your watch, crop it in the browser to the span you mean, name it, send it in. Somebody approves it and it is on the board for everyone. The crop is the privacy mechanism: no file ever reaches us, and the ends of your run stay at your house.
• The eight hills the board launched with are retired. Every number on them was typed by hand before any of this existed, and not one had been checked against real topography. The board said the Tip Track was 2.4 km. A real recording of it says 3.46. The board runs on real uploads now.
• A hill is priced off a real time. Where somebody has actually run it, par is that time and a bit. Where nobody has, it is a model fitted against the ones that do, charging the climb, the descent and the footing.
• Crowns and segments are gone as words. Both were Strava's. You hold ground, somebody takes it off you, and there is no trophy noun. That is the joke rather than a gap.

Read your race back

• A finished race or route can be replayed. It types the whole day out again at reading pace, with a way to skip to the end. It is the only way to see what your race plan did on a morning you slept through. Linked from everywhere the race is mentioned.
• The teaser can be shared. Play it to an ending and you get a card, a permanent link that unfurls when you paste it, a name to put on the run, and a public list of finished runs. The link never shows the transcript. The path you took is the spoiler.
• Shoes are sold in a colour, and the sprite wears the pair you bought.
• Four ways up a piece of ground, chosen before you set off, each leaning on a different part of the runner.
• A rival answers your move. Go early on the zigzag and the field comes with you.
• Everything the game says was read end to end. Every scenario, every screen and every public page, rewritten so the whole thing sounds like one person rather than eleven.

Numbers you could not read

• Ground trains you. A maximal effort on a real hill banked no fitness at all. It now builds whatever that ground is made of, which is also what decides who is fast there. Climb a lot of it and you get better at climbing.
• The day has one slot. Take the session or go and attack something. The one you leave stands down free.
• A second big day costs. Two routes in a day, or a race run hard, and the legs know.
• Load is on the front page, with the red zone marked, which was the one threshold in the game you could not see.
• Levels climb like an RPG's. Level 2 is cheap, level 20 is 281 points, and the top of the ladder has to be held rather than reached. Going up now says what it opened.
• An attempt takes the time it takes. Every piece of ground cost you an hour, whether it was two kilometres or thirteen.

Your runner on your home screen

• The app icon is your runner, side on, in the kit you dressed them in. Add to Home Screen and there they are.
• The look you make is the look you keep. The wardrobe had quietly become a free dresser, which made the runner you built on day one a suggestion. Only earned kit changes now.
• You are out there, and every screen says so. A strip at the top of the app while a race or a route is running, with a blinking cursor when something is waiting on you. The route sends a notification for a standing call.
• More than one race at a time. Entering Saturday's marathon used to refuse the free Wednesday club night. The only thing refused now is two start lines on one morning.
• All three WUU2K courses were corrected against the real race. The half was climbing a track it descends, past two things that are not on it. Every par is now calibrated against published finishing times.

Everyone on the same clock

Races come in two kinds now.

• Local races are the ones you already knew: play them when you like, any time in the twelve hours after the gun.
• An event race has a gun. The field sets off together, the calls unlock as the clock reaches their point on the course, and the whole start line is scored at once, minutes after the finish rather than half a day later. The first one is a free Wednesday handicap over Te Ahumairangi, about thirteen minutes end to end, and the one race on the calendar a beginner can win.
• What one runner does, another runner reads. Go early at a landmark and everyone near you sees it, and the gaps change because you moved.
• A race plan for the mornings you sleep through. Play it safe or push on. Any call you leave standing gets taken by it, at a cost on the clock. There is no wait-for-me, because a field does not wait. A race you sleep through entirely comes home with a real result instead of a missed entry.
• The level-10 one-shot comes out on the hill too, once per route attempt, at a call you have actually reached.

Race day owns the day

• The hub leads with the race. It knew nothing about races at all, and on race morning it offered you a training session, which is a good way to spoil a start line you paid for.
• The weather is real. Fetched off the forecast every morning, seven days ahead, so a six o'clock start in July is genuinely a headlamp start and the Skyline in a southerly is genuinely unpleasant. Storms are a fourth kind of weather and they cost.
• The prose knows what day it is. Turbine said eight a.m. Sunday against a nine o'clock gun on whatever day you entered. Races now say the hour they actually start.
• Race day types, the way the teaser always has, with the scene changing as the course does.

Mountains, bad days, and a beginner's week

• FKT routes are played, not timed. Three Tararua mountain days, written off the real routes, each one a run of decisions rather than a stopwatch. The calls unlock as you reach them, so at 32 km of 74 you are at Aokaparangi and the ladder is four hours away.
• Nobody starts holding a mark. FKTs are the human-only tier and the boards start empty. The field cannot answer a call at two in the morning, so a route is not theirs to hold.
• A night policy. Pick what happens to a call that lands at 3 a.m. before you go. Being awake is worth time, and it is a number rather than a feeling.
• Bad days exist. Form of the day is half what you have done to yourself and half the luck of the morning, it is settled once and shown with its reasons, and it decides what a session is worth.
• A beginner has a beginner's week. Nineteen sessions on a four-tier ladder, the second daily session earned rather than given, and par is now a time a developed runner posts rather than a day-one one.
• Badges. Inside the day on the S–K, the hour to Powell Hut, a long lunch on the Southern Crossing, and having been up all three. They cannot be bought and they cannot be taken back, and two of them unlock a hat in a colour that exists nowhere else in the game.
• The shop could never sell anything. It rendered a balance, two notes and nothing for sale, which made a promise about always being warned before your gels run out into a promise you could not act on.
• The phone got a stylesheet. The header was eating a quarter of the screen.

Money, mountains, and five classes

• A public site, so there is somewhere to send people.
• Jobs are a lever. Eighty-three of them across thirteen bands, each one a trade between money, weekday training time, stress and flexibility. Change once a month, free.
• WUU2K is one event at three distances. 21 km at nine, 45 at seven, 65 at six in the dark, all finishing at the velodrome. Entries cost money and are never refunded, which buys a number and a place on the start line and nothing else.
• FKT routes. Free, whenever you like, and hours long. The Tararua S–K is 74 km and 6,800 m, declared the day before, started at your own alarm, with tomorrow's forecast on the board and a free withdrawal right up until it goes off. A bad window is never blocked. It is only ever costed.
• Five classes and an ability ladder. Tussock climber, scree hound, road convert, hut bagger, rogainer. A readout at level 5, a one-shot you press mid-race at level 10, and a world perk at 15.

The world stops rewarding you for leaving

A fortnight of work that turned the daily loop into a life.

• Absence costs. A session you ignore lapses, fitness drifts back toward where your class started, and coming back from a month away is ground to make up rather than a runner to bury.
• The rivals became real runners. A whole field of them, each with a personality, training on their own schedule, peaking, getting injured, and coming for your ground while the app is shut.
• Weather, darkness and the season cost you time, and are on the board before you commit rather than after.
• Money, time and stress. Your job pays a wage, eats your afternoon session if it is a rigid one, and grinds you down if you never rest.
• Gear wears out. Shoes go lugless, poles fatigue, a torch goes flat, gels get eaten. Kit can cost you time and comfort. It can never make you faster.
• Standing orders, so a known absence does not have to cost you the week.
• The standings, so there is somewhere to see who is holding what, and a dossier behind every name.
• A career log, an orientation page on your first morning, and the runner on screen carrying the poles and the head torch you actually own.

The runner you can see

Your runner is drawn on screen, out of Unicode quadrant glyphs on a monospace grid, so the whole thing is still selectable text.

Build, skin, and six parts that each carry a shape and a colour. Around them a scene that comes off the world rather than off a menu: the route scrolling past, the weather, the light, the desk at work, the way they move when they are carrying an injury.

The world runs whether you open it or not

The change that made it a game you live with rather than a page you visit.

• One sim day per real day. Up to two sessions, then sleep, then a ping in the morning that your runner is awake.
• It ticks itself. The world advances with the app shut.
• Notifications. Web push first, email as a backstop, on an installable app. Per-kind mutes, an optional daily digest, and quiet hours from ten at night so the morning ping leads the day.

A world, and a runner in it

The first version anybody could sign up to and live in.

• Make a runner. Rolled stats, a background, a region, a job, and a kit dresser.
• Train. Sessions that resolve on a real clock rather than instantly.
• Ground worth holding. Wellington trails with a time on them, an opt-in attempt, and an injury chain where the exposure is earned even though the severity is not. You are warned first, every time.
• Race day. Enter a local race, and on the day play it through with the same engine the teaser runs on, seeded and gated by the stats you actually built. The two halves of the game meet.

The Western States teaser

The first thing anybody could play. One hundred miles of Western States as a branching scenario with thirteen endings, typed out a character at a time on a green phosphor terminal.

The stats that decide which way it goes are hidden, and no choice in it rolls a die. Everyone in the field is a parody of somebody you might recognise. It takes about ten minutes and it is the whole reason the rest of this exists.