Your streak was invisible — now it flies with you
There has been a daily loop in Skydex since the third of August. Every signed-in player gets three missions a day — one spotter task, one pilot task, one wildcard — drawn fresh at the UTC rollover. Closing them pays Feathers. Keeping the day alive advances a streak, which pays a little more, and pays a bonus on day seven and every thirtieth day after that.
All of that worked. Almost none of it was visible.
A loop you had to leave the game to see
The only surface for any of it was a card called "Today" in the career section of your own public profile. So the way to find out whether your streak was still alive, or how many days you were on, or what today's three missions even were, was to leave the simulator, open another tab, and read your own page.
Inside the world you got exactly one signal: a toast when a mission closed. A toast is good at saying what just happened. It is no good at all at saying how many days you have strung together, or that today still needs one more catch before midnight takes the run away.
That is a strange way to build a daily habit — the mechanic existed, the payouts were real, and the game never mentioned it.
Taking off is what closes the day
Until today the day was secured by whichever mission happened to tip over first — which could be twenty minutes into a session, or never, and which needed the missions explained before the streak made any sense.
Now the rule is one sentence: fly the real world today and today is yours. The banner lands seconds after you take off, while you are still getting your bearings, instead of ambushing you mid-manoeuvre. A brand new account gets it on the very first flight — day one, started.
Closing a mission still counts. It cannot happen without playing either, and somebody whose day goes into the voxel worlds or the flying-spots hub should not lose a run over which verb they used.
This is not a login reward and it is not becoming one. Opening the site pays nothing, and it never will: the streak is for flying. That is also what makes the achievement worth having — "a hundred days running" means a hundred days in the air, not a hundred page loads.
The lobby tells you where you stand
The storefront card, right under the take-off button, now reports your streak in one line: how long the run is, and whether today is already secured. That second half is the part that matters. Without it a returning player cannot tell "my streak is safe" from "my streak dies at midnight", and a counter that cannot tell those apart is decoration.
If you have no run going, it says so plainly — take off today and one starts.
And if you are not signed in, the line says what signing in buys you: a streak lives on your account, not in your browser, so it follows you from the desktop you fly on in the evening to the phone you check on the train. Tap the line and you are signed in — which matters most on a phone, where the sign-in button otherwise hides inside the menu drawer.
The chip
The flight HUD now carries a streak chip, and it answers both halves of the question at once. 🔥 7 ✓ · 1/3 means seven days running with today already secured, and one of today's three missions closed. The check belongs to the streak, not to the mission counter — after take-off your day is safe whether or not you have touched a mission yet. When you have no streak, the chip is still there, reading 🎯 0/3: hiding the loop from the person who has not discovered it is exactly backwards.
Tapping it unfolds today's three missions with live progress, in the same words and the same order as the profile card. Both surfaces read the same endpoint, because two places in one game are not allowed to tell you different things about your own streak.
On phones and tablets the chip is a row in the flight-tools menu in the top bar, where the rest of the HUD chips moved a couple of weeks ago. The mission list opens inside that menu rather than as its own sheet, so tapping the world behind it does not close the thing you just opened.
The reroll button — swap one mission for another, 150 Feathers, once a day — deliberately stays on the profile. It is a purchase, and purchases belong where you can see your wallet, not next to the shutter button.
Something to keep
Until today a thirty-day streak left nothing behind. Fifty Feathers, and not one line anywhere to show for it. Nothing to lose, nothing to point at.
There is now an achievement, Dawn Patrol, with tiers at 3, 7, 30 and 100 days in the air. It reads your longest run ever, so a missed day resets what you are carrying but never takes back what you reached. The upper two tiers pay Tridents, which is right — thirty days running is harder than most collection tiers, and a hundred is a third of a year.
Milestones now also land in the notification bell, saying what the bonus paid. Only milestones: the ordinary daily bonus happens every single day you show up, and the chip already shows it.
What we did not build
An alert that your streak is about to expire. It is the obvious next feature and it would be theatre: the bell is only visible to someone who already opened the site, which means they already came back. A real reminder needs a channel that reaches you when you are not here, and we do not have one yet. When we do, it will arrive with a switch to turn it off.
And no login rewards, as above. The streak pays for flying, not for showing up — that rule has been in the design since the beginning and it has not moved, it has only become easier to say out loud.