A radar you can find, and a tower that points sooner
We counted what new pilots actually do in their first ten days, and the answer was uncomfortable. Plenty of people take off. Very few catch anything. Out of every hundred guests who flew, about seven caught a ship or a plane. The radar, which shows the real aircraft over your head right now, had not been used by a single guest.
That last number had an obvious cause once we looked at the map with fresh eyes. The radar was one small icon in a column of ten, between the zoom buttons and the globe. Nothing said what it was for.
The radar button. It now sits at the top of the map, next to search, with a name and a second line: planes over you. Turn it on and, until your first scan, a short note above the scan button explains the idea. The radar uses your location to find the aircraft flying over you, you press Scan the sky, then tap a plane in the list to catch it. The scan button pulses until you have pressed it once.
First flight. The checklist that greets new pilots has a new second step: open the map and scan the sky. Its button opens the map with the radar already on. Any scan counts, an empty sky included, because the point is to learn where the radar lives.
The tower speaks up earlier. Skydex Tower already called out the nearest target, «at your 2 o'clock, 1.8 km», but only after four minutes without a catch. The typical first flight is about two minutes long, so almost nobody heard it. For guests and pilots with fewer than five cards the first call now comes after 45 seconds of flying and repeats every three minutes. We also fixed a bug that made the tower treat every guest as a veteran and skip ordinary ships in busy harbours.
Keep your first catch. Since November 1 guests can catch without an account and the catch waits for them. The sign-in window used to appear only on the second catch, and most guests stopped after one. It now opens right after the first card, titled Keep your first catch. Nothing is lost if you close it: the catch still waits for 30 days.
If you are flying for the first time, open the map, press Radar and see what is over you. Then go and catch it.