Build 26378388

Orienteers! Update 6.4 is here.

The steep, low shores of lakes and rivers now have earth banks, walls you cannot climb out of the water where they stand high. About half the maps carry a wide power line on tall wooden portals, through a strip of forest that has grown back. Where a road leaves a river valley high up, it crosses on a tall bridge, a steel arch where the valley takes one. Tracks and gravel roads get new bridges and cross wider water, the wide road and asphalt roads get ditches, and roads and paths come closer to the shore. Faint paths now cut across country where the walk round is long, a fäbod takes the place of the cabins, and every hard landing takes your breath.

New since October? Update 6.2 brought live races for up to 128 runners with text and voice chat, a guided Tutorial that teaches you to set the map, and 20 Steam achievements. Update 6.3 let you choose your runner in your country's colours, put flags on the challenge boards and started a Nations League.

Tall bridges and steel arches

• Tall bridges, up to 20 m over the water, where the wide road or an asphalt road has to leave a river valley high up. Before, the road crossed low and then climbed far more steeply than any road should.
• Where the valley takes one, the tall bridge is a steel deck arch: two rust-brown ribs springing from the valley's sides, 43 to 64 m across on the maps we checked, with the deck on braced columns.
• Steel girders of rust-brown weathering steel now carry half of the car roads' concrete bridges where they fit, following the road round a bend.
• Grass grows under tall bridges, where it left a bald strip before.

Earth banks along the shores

• Where the land rises steeply out of a lake or river, the shore now has an earth bank of sand and clay, with grass along its brink, stones at its foot, and short beaches between one bank and the next.
• Over 1.2 m high, a bank is a wall you cannot climb out of the water, drawn on the map as 201 Impassable cliff: swim along to a lower stretch or a beach. Lower bank can be walked up, and is drawn as 104 Earth bank.

Wide power lines

• About half the maps now carry a regional power line on 22 m wooden portals, as on Sweden's 130 kV lines, drawn as 511 Major power line. The rest keep the local line on its poles.
• Through forest it runs in a cleared strip about 40 m wide that has grown back with young trees, pines and bushes, in stretches from portal to portal: 407 where you can still run, the denser 409 where you walk, and rough open land where the ground is rocky. On the map the stripes run across the line.

Roads and bridges

• New bridges on tracks and gravel roads: a narrow steel truss, a timber bridge on piles that follows a bend in the road, or a stone arch, with concrete only where none of them fits. On a track's stone or concrete bridge the deck now shows bare, without wheel ruts.
• Gravel roads and tracks now bridge wider water, up to 90 m, so some that ended at a shore now cross, and a track can now cross a river that ran a long way with no road over it.
• Ditches beside the wide road and asphalt roads: a shallow trough, 0.5 m deep, just past the road's edge.
• Paths now come down to the shore, to 1 m above the water, and roads to 3 m, where both kept 5 m above it, so fewer paths need a footbridge.
• Some bridges now slope up onto a higher bank, retaining walls hold some deep road cuts that were left as bare banks, and fewer roads and paths stop dead at the water or turn back on themselves near a bridge.

Faint paths, docks and huts

• Faint paths across country now join roads or paths that run close together but are far apart by road. A faint path over the water can now run on as a dead end on the far bank, sometimes down to a floating dock you can walk out on, and faint paths cross wider water, up to about 39 m.
• A fäbod, a small Nordic log hut, takes the place of the wooden cabins, on ground levelled only close round it, so the hillside round it stays. Knolls, depressions and pits no longer tilt or sink a building, and the wigwams, improved by Dmitry from our community, stand in camps of two to four.

Running, the map and Rob

• Hard landings take breath on every map: a drop of 3 m or more takes 5 % of your stamina bar, and 5 % more for each metre further, up to a quarter. Before, only maps with Fall Penalty on did this. Running down a slope, however steep, is still free.
• A hard landing now grunts in your runner's own voice and lands with the sound of the ground underfoot, and a jump off a bridge into the lake splashes. Only water deep enough to swim breaks a fall: the shallows hurt like dry land.
• Focus Leg keeps to your pivot: with your Map Rotation Pivot set off the middle, say beside the compass, G (LB + RB on a controller) now puts the leg there instead of in the middle of the screen.
• The mouse's side buttons, Mouse 4 and Mouse 5, can now be bound to any action in Settings ▸ Controls. Handy if your keyboard drops G while you hold Shift and W to sprint.
• Rob runs Score-O: his run is in the replay on Score-O courses too, taking the controls in the order he finds quickest.
• In Score-O, the map stays where you hold it: with Auto-Focus Next Leg on, it no longer zooms and moves by itself at the start and after each control. Press Focus Leg when you want it fitted to the controls still to find.
• A replay keeps its map when another copy of the game on your computer draws one while you run, and a replay that lost its map can draw it again with Rebuild Map.
• In a live race, runners far away move smoothly instead of stepping forward a metre at a time.

Graphics

• Distant ground no longer turns to sand: the terrain around you now shows its own ground at every distance. Before, past 250 m on Very Low, about 440 m on Low and up to 1000 m on Very High and Ultra, it took the sandy colour of the lake bed.
• Less video memory: the game now frees terrain and a sky that nothing draws any more, and keeps the far terrain's ground at a smaller size. On a PC set up as a 4 GB GTX 1650 on Low, one map took 2.59 GB of video memory while walking instead of 3.76 GB.
• Three more skies now take 96 MB of video memory instead of 384 MB, on every card, and the surface detail of tree stumps and pine roots takes a quarter of the memory it did.
• Clear days have a little more haze far off, and the land out to the horizon now has the greens and patches of the terrain in front of it, so the edge between them is softer. The mossy rocks of the easy-running forest stay in view to 200 m on Very Low and 400 m on Ultra.

Please note: new maps

The map generator moved on again, so a seed's map and course can differ from 6.3.0's, mostly beside the wide road and asphalt roads, where ditches now run, along the power line, on shores with earth banks, at bridges, and where faint paths, fäbod huts and wigwams now stand. Map IDs from 6.3.0 still load, but build the new map for their seeds. Your maps in Recent Maps are kept, marked with their version, but New Attempt on one starts a new card. The current challenges start fresh, with a new attempt for everyone, and times run in 6.3.0 no longer show on the boards or count in the Nations League.

Live races need everyone on Update 6.4: a friend's race on 6.3.0 shows in the list as "Different game version" and cannot be joined.

Thank You

Thank you for running with us! Tell us what you find along the shores and under the new bridges in the discussions, or on Discord.

See you on the start line, and on the leaderboards!

Andreas, Markus, Jens, Sten