Update 6.3: Six Runners, Country Kits and a Nations League

Orienteers! Update 6.3 is here.

You can now choose who you run as: six runners, three men and three women, in your country's colours or any other's, and in a live race the others see you as you chose. A flag stands before each runner's name on the challenge boards, and a new Nations League ranks the countries by how close their runners come to the winners. Press Focus Leg twice to see the leg after the one you are running. The Tutorial keeps you by the control and lets you go back to any step, the race lobby says where everyone is, the ground at the ends of road bridges is new, and roads now bend on flat ground.

Choose your runner

The first time the main menu opens after the update, the game asks who you run as: Markus, Kathrine, David, Sten, Martha or Vina. Before, everyone ran as the same man, the one now called Markus.

• Your runner is the body you see when you look down, the hand that holds your map, and your shadow. It changes how you look, never how you run: every runner has the same strides and speeds.
• Your country's kit: your orienteering suit is now in a country's colours, with its flag on a patch on the left shoulder, where everyone wore the same yellow and blue suit before. Nearly a hundred countries have a pattern of their own, and the Nordic countries wear a shirt with the flag's cross and, instead of the patch, a round badge on the chest.
• Left on Automatic, your kit is the country Steam places you in, or else your Windows region, or else Sweden's. Or pick any of 250 countries and territories from the list, each with its flag.
• Choose Later runs you as Markus in the Automatic kit for now, and Settings ▸ Runner on the main menu changes your runner and kit later.
• In a live race, the others see you as your runner, in your kit, when See other runners is on or while they spectate.

Flags and the Nations League

An example: the league starts empty with Update 6.3 and fills in as runners run the challenges.

• A flag now stands before each runner's name on the challenge leaderboards, beside each challenge card's leader and in the replay's list of runs. It is the country of the runner's kit, so on Automatic your flag is the country the game picked for you until you pick one yourself. A player it cannot place, or places in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova or Georgia, runs in Sweden's kit with no flag until they pick a country. A run keeps the flag it was run with, and runs from before Update 6.3 have none.
• The Challenges screen has a Nations League: the countries ranked by how close their runners come to the winners of every challenge live now, from today's to this year's. The winner of a challenge scores 1000 and a runner twice as slow 500; a runner's score is the mean of their runs, and a nation's is the median of its runners'. A nation is ranked once three runners run for it, and the league shows no times, so it gives away no time to beat on a challenge you have not run.

Focus Leg and the Tutorial

• See the leg after: Focus Next Leg is now Focus Leg. Pressed once (G, or LB + RB on a controller), it still turns the map to the leg you are running. Press it twice quickly and the map turns to the leg after, so you can plan it before you get there. A line on screen says which leg the map shows, such as "Next leg: 32 → 33".
• The Tutorial teaches it in a new step, The leg after. It also keeps you by the control on every step it teaches you there: wander more than 8 m off and the card shows the way back, and at 30 m, or after 10 seconds out, it brings you back. A long way off a leg it brings you back to your last control too, and the card now says what is holding a step up, such as the map down or a flag punched out of turn.
• Tutorial Steps in the pause menu has a tab for every step, ticked once you have done it: go back to any step, forward again as far as you have come, or start the tutorial again.

Live races and the replay

• The lobby's start list now says where each player is: Loading map, At the start, Running, Spectating, In replay or Practising, within about a second, where it said only Racing, Not back yet or Watching.
• Back in the lobby, the race's world stays loaded under it, so Spectate the Race follows a runner at once, with no loading page, and Watch the Replay opens with its preview window filming.
• Spectating from behind a runner, the Map key raises your own map as on your run, and Sprint shows the runner's map as they hold it.
• In the replay, runners close together now share one list of names beside them. It starts in results order and keeps that order while they run together, instead of reshuffling as their dots jostle. With more than 12 runners ticked, the ten best now keep their names too, beside yours and the followed runner's.

Bridges, roads and plants

• At the ends of road bridges, the road's bank now turns round the abutment and meets the ground beyond within about twice the bank's height. Before, a broad, smooth cut could reach nearly 30 m round each end and stop in a face up to 10 m high. A road cut deep into the hillside beside a bridge can now have its retaining wall, and a road's bridge is no longer laid across another's.
• Fewer roads run down to a river or lake and stop dead there, at times on both banks: such a road now ends short of the water, meets its road on its own side, or takes another way.
• On flat ground, roads now lean round knolls, and a long straight gets a gentle bend where one fits. Before, a road there could run dead straight for up to 600 m.
• Dwarf pines and hazel bushes now stay in view about twice as far off or more, thinning out with distance instead of vanishing.
• The clumps of flowers on open land are gone, taken out because they cost more to draw than they added. Open land keeps the knapweed and St John's wort in its grass, and wild roses still grow in the forest.

Fixes

• On a graphics card with less than 5 GB of memory, such as a 4 GB GTX 1650, textures now load at half size on every Quality level, as on Very Low. One such laptop ran out of memory and crashed mid-run on 6.2.3; on a PC set up as one, the world on Low took about 4 GB of the card's memory instead of about 7. The paper map and the control descriptions stay full size, and on Very Low they are now full size too. Bigger cards and the Steam Deck still load textures whole from Low up.
• Changing Quality or a grass or tree slider from the pause menu no longer changes how the ground near you is drawn. Before, it took the distant ground's plainer look until it next loaded, and the roots on small paths turned see-through.
• Spectating with your map lowered, T only jumps to the leader and Q and E only step through the runners. Before, T also reset your map and, with Rotate Map While Lowered on, Q and E also turned it.
• A seed pasted into New Game ▸ Custom Game with its minus written as a minus sign or a dash, as some chats write it, now reads as that seed instead of a random one, and Load Map ID reads a Map ID pasted the same way.

Please note: new maps

The map generator moved on again, so a seed's map and course can differ from 6.2.3's, mostly along roads on flat ground, near bridges, where roads met the water, at some dead ends, and on open land, where the flower clumps are gone. Map IDs from 6.2.3 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 6.2.3 no longer show on the boards.

Live races need everyone on Update 6.3: a friend's race on 6.2.3 shows in the list as "Different multiplayer version" and cannot be joined.

Thank You

Thank you for running with us! Tell us who you run as, and how your country does in the Nations League, in the discussions, or on Discord.

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

Andreas, Markus, Jens, Sten