Side Quests
Side Quests
Little pins on the map with a question attached. Go past one, tell us what you saw, take the credits. What you report goes to MapMap, the mapping platform behind this game, and makes the map better for everybody who uses it, including you.
The three questions
| Quest | What you are asked | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Low bridge | Does this bridge carry a height limit sign? What does it say? | Yes, there is a sign, No sign at all, Cannot tell |
| Right of way | Is this path open to the public right now? | Open to walk through, Blocked, Private, Not there any more, Cannot tell |
| Place check | Is this place still trading under this name? | Yes, still trading, Still open, different name, Closed or empty, Nothing like it here, Cannot tell |
Low bridges are the one worth explaining. Lorry drivers hit them because the height on the map is wrong, missing or years out of date, and the only reliable way to know what a plate says is for somebody to stand under it and read it. That somebody is running past anyway.
What is collected
- Your answer, as one of the set options above, plus the height you read off the plate when there is one. There is no free text anywhere in a survey.
- How close you got, in metres, taken from the activity that proves you were there.
- When you filed it.
What leaves this game is an observation about a bridge, a path or a shop. The handoff to MapMap carries no handle, no account and no route: nothing in it can be traced back to a person or used to work out where anybody has been.
You have to actually go there
A survey can only be filed if one of your own recorded activities passed within 60 metres of the pin in the last 7 days. The same matched trace that claims your territory is what proves the visit, which means a survey cannot be answered from an armchair, and tapping a pin from the other side of town does nothing at all.
Photos, if you want to
After you file, the app offers to attach a photo. It is genuinely optional: a survey without one is complete, and pays exactly the same. We will never pay more for a photo, for the same reason we never pay more for a particular answer.
A photo of a height plate settles an argument in a way a typed number cannot, so it is the single most useful thing you can add to a bridge survey. Photos are private: they are seen by the people checking the answer and nobody else, never other players, never your profile, never published. We strip the location data your camera writes into the file before storing it, because we already hold the one location we need.
What you get
- 12 credits, every time, for every answer. A day at the cap is 60 credits.
- The Surveyor’s Chain, a collectable that gains a link at 3, 10, 25, 60 and 120 surveys filed. It counts surveys filed, never surveys that turned out to agree with anybody, and it does nothing at all in the game.
- 5 surveys a day, and one answer per pin per player, ever.
How an answer becomes a fact
One answer settles nothing. A pin is only marked as confirmed when at least 2 different players give the same answer and lead any other answer by 2. So two people agreeing settles it, and two agreeing against one does not: one dissenting voice is enough to hold it back until somebody else has been.
Where answers disagree, the pin is marked contested and a human looks at it. Contested pins are never handed to MapMap as though they were settled, and every answer is kept, including the ones that turned out to be the odd one out. “Cannot tell” never counts as a disagreement with anyone.
Safety, and when to say cannot tell
Answer from where you are standing. Do not climb, do not trespass, and do not step into traffic to read a sign. If the plate is covered, the light is gone or the gate is round the back, “cannot tell” is a real answer, it is useful, and it pays exactly the same as any other. Guessing is the only wrong answer, and it is the one thing this design goes out of its way not to pay for.
Where the pins come from
The first set is drawn from OpenStreetMap: roads with a height restriction recorded years ago, permissive paths that nobody has checked since, and shops whose entry has not been touched since 2009. Every pin carries the map element it came from, so an answer can always be traced back to what it was checking. You are never shown what the map currently claims, for the obvious reason.