The world map is alive now — ships and players by default
The Map link in the site navigation opens a full-screen world map on every page. Until today it had its priorities backwards: it drew every community flying spot the moment it loaded, and drew nothing else. No ships, no players — a static pin catalogue wearing the name "world map".
That never matched what the map is actually for. This is a live world: real vessels stream in from AIS the whole time, and real people are flying gulls and drones over Hamburg or placing blocks in Kyiv while you look at the page. The map should show that world first, and the catalogue layers only when you ask for them.
What changed
Ships are on by default. The same live AIS picture the in-game map shows — cargo in orange, tankers in red, passenger ferries in cyan, each with its heading tick while under way — now renders on the public map too. Tap a vessel for its name, type and speed. Private craft (sailing yachts, pleasure boats) stay anonymised exactly as they are in-game: generic label, surrogate identity, nothing that ties a position to an owner.
Players are on by default. Everyone currently engaged in the world — wings pilots at their live position, voxel builders at their block coordinates — appears as a named dot. This is precisely the roster every in-game minimap already shows; the map page just stopped hiding it from you.
Spots became opt-in. The community-spot pins still exist, but they no longer carpet the map on load. Flip the 📌 Spots chip if you want the catalogue; the choice is remembered, and the same stored preference drives the in-game map, so the two surfaces stay in agreement.
Every layer has a chip. A row of toggles — 🚢 Ships, 👥 Players, 📌 Spots — lets you turn each layer off independently. And if you're signed in and track vessels, a ⭐ My fleet filter hides all AIS traffic except your starred ships, turning the world map into a quick where-is-my-fleet check without opening your fleet page.
City names are on the map. Every city the sim knows — the same list you fly to in-game — now labels the map, tiered by zoom: megacities from a world view, the full list as you zoom in. The satellite base has no labels of its own, so without these the map was a beautiful anonymous globe.
What didn't change
The spots hub at spots.skydex.online embeds this same map as its catalogue view. There, spots remain always-on and ships and players stay out of the way — a catalogue page should look like a catalogue. The new defaults apply only to the standalone map you reach from the navigation.
Under the hood the map page runs without the game engine, so it can't listen to the in-game feeds directly. It now polls two small public endpoints that mirror those feeds one-for-one — same data, same anonymisation, refreshed every few seconds. Nothing is exposed on the public map that an in-game player couldn't already see.