Fair play: catches are made by you
Skydex has a written rule about automated play now, on its own page: Fair play. The short version is the first line of it: catches are made by you.
The rule
Scripts, macros, bots, browser extensions or programs that aim, shoot, fly or move for you are not allowed. Leaving the game open is fine. Letting something else play it is not.
What stays allowed is most of how people already play. You can leave a window open over a harbour while you do something else, fly for hours, use a gamepad, an FPV radio or a VR headset, remap your keys, or use an accessibility tool that changes how your own input reaches the game. The page has a short FAQ for the edge cases, and if a tool you use is not on it, write to [email protected] before you use it.
Still there?
After 15 minutes without a real mouse move, key, touch or stick input, the flight pauses, the same pause you get on Esc. The picture stops, flight time and city and airport visits stop counting, and other pilots see you as paused. Press resume when you are back. A VR session always counts as being there. The spotting sights check the same thing: without real input in the last 15 minutes they ask "Still there?" and take no shots. Pressing the shutter key is itself input, so a person at the keyboard never meets a refused shot.
How we look, and what happens
We look at how catches happen over time: breaks, rhythm, how many come in a day, whether the shutter took its usual photo. None of that removes anything by itself. When the numbers look wrong, a person on our side looks at the account and decides.
An account that breaks the rule can lose the catches made that way, its place in the season and the rewards that came with them. The rule applies from today, 29 October 2026. Catches made before it was published are not judged by it, and the October season will pay out as it stands.
The leaderboard now links to the rule under the standings. Two smaller changes from this week sit next to it: the pause between catches and new Tridents for aircraft types.
If you want to tell us about an account, please write to [email protected] with the player name and what you saw, rather than calling anyone out in the chat.