The catalogue said there were two aircraft achievements. There are twenty-three.
Open the achievements page today and you get fifty-one achievements sorted into nine headings: Daily, Ships, Real spotter, Aircraft, Races, Cargo drops, Freestyle, Flying spots, Social. Until this morning that page was lying about one of them, and it was lying to the people we most want to keep.
The Aircraft heading listed two achievements. Not twenty-three. Two: Plane Spotter and Airline Collector. Everything else the aircraft track has — Type Rating, Sky Legends, Directly Overhead, Red-Eye, Rotorhead, Top Brass, Stratosphere Club, Short Final, Quad Hunter, the whole set — was filed under 📸 Social, a heading otherwise about publishing photos. Two ship achievements had drifted in there too.
How a page tells a lie without anything breaking
Every achievement declares which family it belongs to, in a lookup table keyed by its id. The table was written when the game was about ships. When the aircraft wave landed — types, airlines, manufacturers, altitude, wake classes, military, helicopters, turboprops — the achievements were added, wired to their counters, given tiers and XP, and awarded correctly. What nobody added was the row in that lookup table.
An id missing from the table does not throw. It falls through a default and gets filed under social, because a catalogue has to render something. So the page rendered, every achievement worked exactly as designed, XP was paid, tiers were awarded, notifications went out — and the only thing that was wrong was the heading each one appeared under. That is the kind of defect that survives for months: nothing is red anywhere, and it only shows up if you read the page as a player rather than as its author.
Read as a player, it said something quite damaging. Somebody who came here to catch aircraft opened the catalogue, found the Aircraft section, and saw two entries. The honest conclusion from that page is "this game is about ships and I am a guest here" — while twenty-one achievements built specifically for them sat three headings further down, under a photo icon.
The fallback stays, because a catalogue must always render. But it no longer does it quietly: an achievement with no declared family now names itself in the server log at boot, so the next wave of content cannot repeat this in silence.
While we were in there: what are you about to finish?
The page has always been a list of everything that exists. It never answered the question you actually have, which is not "what is there" but "what am I close to?"
So there is now a block at the top of the achievements section: Closest to your next tier — five achievements, each with a bar and the real numbers, like Directly Overhead · tier 1 · 9 / 10. Click one and it jumps to its entry in the catalogue below.
Two deliberate details. It ranks by the share of the next tier you have done, not by how many are left: "180 of 200" is a nudge worth acting on, "1 of 500" is noise wearing the same costume. And achievements you have never touched are left out entirely — a list of things at zero is just the catalogue again, and the catalogue is right underneath.
None of this needed new data. Your counters have been travelling to the browser with the rest of your progress for months; they had simply never been joined to the catalogue standing next to them.