Every Icon Redrawn, and Caravans You Can Actually See

Every icon on the map was 80 pixels across. They are 300 now, and the six maps under them went from 1000 pixels to 1536.

This is not a redesign. It is the same art at a size that survives being looked at closely. On a phone the map zooms to 8x, and at that point an 80-pixel icon was asking your browser to invent five pixels for every one it actually had. Blur was the honest outcome.

Fifty-three building icons were redrawn. The spawn markers got more than a resize: the bird is still the bird, but it reads as a spirit now instead of a flat green silhouette.

Caravans have an icon

A caravan used to be a name on the map and nothing else. If you had the Stonesword Key marker turned on you also got a circle around it, which was the only way to see one at a glance.

Now it has its own mark, and it is not behind a filter. It draws under everything else on the map, so it will not sit on top of a boss or a chest sharing the same corner.

The app icon

If you installed the site to your home screen, the icon you got was a 512-pixel image upscaled from an 80-pixel one and then squeezed into 256 colours. It had been that way since the icon existed. It is redrawn from the new art at full colour. Installed already? It replaces itself within a day.

An icon is the same size on every screen now

The map builder had been sizing icons by guessing what kind of device you were on, and the guess pulled in three directions at once.

On a portrait tablet the icons came out a fifth smaller than on a desktop showing a map of the same physical size. Nothing about the map had changed; only the guess had. On a phone a separate minimum-pixel rule fired and made them about half again as large as the formula intended.

All three rules are gone. An icon is a fixed percentage of the map, and it is the same percentage everywhere. What you see on a desktop is what comes out on a phone.

The Crystal Finder had the opposite problem. Its crystals did not grow when you zoomed. Not slowly, not partially: not at all. Every other icon on a result map does, so at full zoom on a phone a building icon was nearly six times the size of a crystal sitting beside it. They scale together now.

The phone layout

The header said N.S.F. It says Seed Finder, on the left, with the site's mark beside it, and it moves aside when the home button needs the room.

The map cards on the front page were different sizes depending on how long the map's name is in your language. Topo da Montanha wraps to two lines in Portuguese, and that card grew in both directions, taking its map picture with it. All six are the same size now in every language, and a one-line name sits centred in the space a two-line one needs.

On a map page, the Config button and the Markers button were placed by two unrelated systems that disagreed about where the top of the map is. They could end up 145 pixels apart. On a phone both slid under the header, one behind it and one over it. They read the same measurement now, taken from the header's real height, so they line up and neither reaches the header.

The timer

The sweep behind the expedition timer was divided into thirds. A day has four stages, so it is quarters now.

The explanation no longer ambushes you the first time you press start. There is a question mark beside the timer that opens it when you want it, and it is translated into all ten languages.

It also says the right thing. It used to talk about the circle closing. The game calls that the Night's Tide, and the modal calls it that too, in each language's own words: 夜の雨, maré da Noite, Nachtregen, 밤의 비. Those names come out of the game's text, not from me.

The links at the bottom

The Explore block at the foot of most pages was eighteen boxes, each carrying a sentence explaining where it went. Eighteen sentences nobody reads.

It is four columns of plain links now, sorted into Reference, Using the Tool, Project and Legal. Same eighteen pages, one screen, no boxes.