Every town and village now counts as a city visit
A pilot flew to the middle of Bremerhaven this morning and the city timer never started. Bremerhaven has 138,000 people, a harbour you can see from orbit and a name on every map. We still didn't know it was a city.
The reason was our list. City visits counted the places we had on file: about 1,250 large cities, the capitals and regional centres of every country, and a list of bigger towns we added earlier today. That is a few thousand places for a planet with millions of them. Fly over a market town in Bavaria, a fishing village in Norway or a hamlet in the Andes and the game said nothing.
What changed
City visits now ask the map itself. When you fly somewhere our own list doesn't cover, the server looks at the map tile under you and reads the places marked on it: cities, towns, villages and hamlets. If you are close enough to one of them, the three-minute timer starts, the same as for Paris or Kyiv.
How close is close enough depends on the size of the place, measured from its centre:
- City: 4 km
- Town: 2.5 km
- Village: 1.5 km
- Hamlet: 1 km
Suburbs and single farms don't count on their own. A pass over the fields between two villages doesn't count either, which is on purpose: a visit should mean you were over the place.
Everything else about visits works as before. Three minutes inside a place gives you one day there, once per UTC day. More days raise the tier from I to V, and the highest tier makes you mayor. A tiny village has a mayor seat too, and it's probably free.
Where the data comes from
The places come from OpenStreetMap, served as vector tiles by OpenFreeMap. The first time anyone flies over a tile, the server downloads it once, keeps the towns and villages from it in our database and reuses them after that. So the list grows only where people actually fly, and a tile is refreshed once a year.
A place that has the same name as a city we already know nearby is skipped, so Bremerhaven doesn't turn into two Bremerhavens. There is one known rough edge: villages that share a name inside one country (Germany has several called Neustadt) share one visit record for now.
Over a tile nobody has visited yet, the first check can take a few seconds while the tile loads. After that it answers instantly for everyone. Small places don't have their own landing page, so your visits there show up on your profile and on your cities page.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the ODbL.