The map controls got tidied up
The map had grown one button at a time, and it showed. Zoom was a pair of typographic plus and minus signs, the radar was an emoji, the favourite button was another emoji, and switching between satellite and street map was a word squeezed into a square button. The flight HUD around the map moved to a single icon set months ago; the map never followed.
Today it did. Every button on the right edge of the map now uses the same icon family as the rest of the HUD: zoom in and out, recenter, fly to where you are, the radar, save a place, your places list, your fleet, and the base-map switch. The base-map button shows the map you will switch to, so a satellite dish means "go to satellite" and a folded map means "go back to streets". Hover any of them on a computer and it tells you what it does.
Layers moved into a panel
The biggest change is the layer row. It used to be a strip of chips along the bottom of the map: ships, live sky, players, spots, your places, your fleet. On a phone most of it sat off the edge of the screen, so checking what was switched on meant scrolling sideways across the map you were trying to look at.
Now there is a Layers button in the right-hand column. A small number on it says how many layers are on. Tap it and a panel opens with one row per layer and a switch on each. The two ship filters, "My fleet" and "Our receivers", sit indented under Ships, because that is what they are: ways of narrowing the ship layer, not layers of their own. Press Escape, tap the cross, or open the radar and the panel gets out of the way.
The ship-type filter (cargo, tanker, passenger and so on) is still a row of coloured chips at the bottom. You flip those often and the colours match the dots on the map, so they stay in reach.
Same controls on both maps
The map you open in the game and the standalone map at /map used to carry separate copies of these controls, and they had quietly drifted apart. They now share one set of components. Each map still chooses which buttons it shows, but a fix to one now lands on both. The live network maps got the new zoom icons too.
The map at /map also caught up with the in-game one. It now has the ship-type filter, a city search, a button that centres the map on where you are, and, when you are signed in, your saved places and a shortcut to your fleet. Until today those lived only inside the game.
Links that show one thing
Some links exist for one reason. "Ships we hear" on the AIS page is there to show the water our volunteers' antennas cover, and it used to open on a map full of players, aircraft and spots on top of it. Now it opens on those ships and nothing else, with a bar at the top saying so and a Show everything button next to it. A station owner's link to their own receiver works the same way, and a link from a sky alert opens on the live aircraft alone.
If something on the map now looks wrong or is harder to find than before, tell us in Discord. This was a tidy-up, and the point was fewer surprises, not more.