Patch notes

2026-10-29 — Deferred pings now claim empty squares

A deferred MeshMapper ping into a square nobody on MeshWars has scored yet now counts. It is worth the same as a ping heard by one repeater (0.1 points), plus the usual +0.5 first-visit bonus. That means it can claim an empty square, and it can attack an enemy square that has no score on record. Before this, a deferred ping into such a square earned nothing. Squares that already have a score on record behave exactly as before.

There is a patch notes page now. This list lives at /patch-notes and is linked from the footer of every page. The "What changed recently" section of the docs points here.

2026-10-28 — Hide the score panel, follow keeps your zoom, Ko-fi

The score panel can be put away. A tab on its left edge slides it off the right side of the map and back, the same way the layers box already works.

Follow no longer changes your zoom. Turning on follow centers the map on you and keeps going at whatever zoom you already had, instead of jumping in to a fixed level.

Support MeshWars on Ko-fi. There is a Ko-fi icon in the top bar and a link in the footer and on the About page.

2026-10-19 — The rules now match the live game

Play is worldwide. There is no play-area box any more. Your squares are wherever MeshMapper (MeshCore) or FreqMapper (Meshtastic) reports your radio.

Meshtastic scores from FreqMapper only. A FreqMapper report is worth a flat 0.5 points. The old MeshView-only checks, the position-precision rule and the Meshtastic speed limit are gone: FreqMapper's reports are taken as FreqMapper sends them. MeshCore is unchanged at 0.1 points per repeater you heard, up to 1.0 per ping.

Places Worth Going score only where MeshMapper or FreqMapper reports you. A place counts when a MeshMapper (MeshCore) or FreqMapper (Meshtastic) report puts your radio there. The two boards no longer share one scoring table, and the Rules page now shows them side by side.

2026-10-12 — Regions

The map has a Region picker. Choose a region, or a joined group of regions, from a filterable list. The board, scores and top captures follow your choice, and the choice is kept in the page address so you can share it. Joined groups are drawn with one outline around the outer edge, and joined regions are listed biggest first.

Ask to join neighboring regions. A link under the picker lets a signed-in player send a request to group two or more regions together, with an optional note. You can send three requests a day. The operator approves or declines them.

2026-10-03 — Deferred pings score

A deferred MeshMapper ping now scores instead of being ignored. It is worth what the most recent scored ping in that square earned. It counts toward your per-square cooldown and the limit on how many new squares you can claim, and it credits Places Worth Going like any other ping.

2026-09-27 — Communities

"Where it's played" on the About page now lists communities. Each community is a hand-written entry with its own name, area and link, in place of the old fixed list. Behind it, a community can now have its check-in nets and connections attached to it.

2026-09-18 — Adding your community

The docs explain how a mesh group gets added to MeshWars. The new "Adding your community" section covers what to send for MeshCore (a CoreScope or Beacon address, your net's channel, day, time and timezone) and for Meshtastic (a Meshview or MQTT source, the channel key if it is encrypted, and your check-in hashtag), and how to ask. Painting works anywhere MeshMapper or FreqMapper reports you; adding a community is about its net check-ins. Points are paid once per player per day, so two nets on the same day pay once.

2026-09-12 — Check-in streaks are per net

Each net you attend keeps its own streak, instead of one streak per board. A check-in still pays once per player per day, so two nets on the same day pay once.

2026-09-09 — Map controls

The map got a few new controls. A Light/Dark switch for the basemap, a slider for how see-through the claimed squares are, grid lines when you zoom in close, and a My Location dot in your team's color. Follow re-centers the map on you as you move. The Privacy page now says what happens to your device location on the map (see Privacy).

2026-09-07 — Places Worth Going cover the world, and reach further

Places now exist worldwide, not just in the western United States. A landmark scores its square and the eight around it, so reaching the gate or the fence line counts. A park with a mapped boundary scores every square the boundary touches, plus one ring outside it. A summit scores the squares near the peak that are within 200 meters of its height, so you have to actually be up on top. Only the most valuable place a ping reaches scores. Peak Tagger ties now go to whoever reached the taller summit.

2026-09-05 — Sign in to MeshWars

You can sign in now, instead of only holding on to an API key. From the account page, connect GitHub, Google, Discord, a magic-link email, or a password — any one of them gets you in, and you can connect more than one to the same account, so losing access to one doesn't lock you out as long as another still works. Signing in links to exactly one player. If you never want an account, the original flow — join with an invite code, get an API key, paste it in when you need to check anything — still works exactly as it always has.

Signing in turns the account page into your whole player dashboard. Your radios (add or remove any time), a full setup-check and diagnostics without pasting a key, your stats, your check-in history, your honors, your team, and a Security section covering your sign-in methods, your password, your contact email, your API key, and every device you're currently signed in on, with sign-out available for one device or all of them at once.

Joining from inside the account page skips the invite code. The invite-code join page is still there for anyone new. If you're already signed in, you join from the account page instead — straight into name, team, and radio type, no code needed, since being signed in already clears a higher bar than the code does.

If you join as Meshtastic while signed in, you no longer get an API key. Nothing on the Meshtastic side — FreqMapper, check-ins — has ever used one, so a signed-in Meshtastic join now mints nothing to lose or misplace. The original anonymous join is unchanged and still issues one, since it's the only way an anonymous player can ever come back and claim their own player later. Either way, you can generate a key later from Security if you want one for something else.

2026-09-05 — Confirm your node directly

A new way to prove a radio is yours, instead of waiting for it to line up on its own. Net check-ins are normally matched automatically — by your registered node ID on Meshtastic, or by your registered contact's name on MeshCore — but that breaks the moment a radio's name or identity drifts from what MeshWars has on file. "Confirm my node," on the account page, proves a specific radio is yours directly instead of waiting on that.

MeshCore proves it with an advert. Type the name your radio is currently posting under, press Confirm my node, then trigger an advert from that same radio — a long-press of the side button, or "Send Advert"/"Flood Advert," on most devices. MeshWars watches the mesh for five minutes and shows you every node it heard advertising under that name; pick yours, and its public key is bound to your account, so a later name change on the radio won't break it again.

Meshtastic proves it with a one-time code. No name to type — select Meshtastic and press Confirm my node, and you're handed a short code like mw-3h7fpk4. Send that exact text as a message on any channel on your mesh (it's fine buried in a longer sentence); MeshWars watches for it for five minutes and shows you which node it came from. Confirm it's yours, and that node ID is bound to your account.

Either way, a radio already bound to someone else's account can't be claimed this way.

2026-09-05 — Two-factor authentication, and deleting your own account

Two-factor authentication is optional, and lives in Security on the account page. It adds an authenticator-app code on top of your password or magic-link email — the two sign-in doors MeshWars issues itself. GitHub, Discord and Google already have their own two-factor options on their side, so this only ever guards the two doors it can actually protect. You get ten recovery codes the one time you enable it — save them, since a lost authenticator with no recovery code left behind is a lost door.

You can delete your own account, player, and data. "Delete my account," at the bottom of Security, permanently destroys every way you sign in — password, two-factor, and any connected provider — along with your session, your API key, and any radios linked to your player. It's confirmed by typing your own display name (plus a two-factor code if you have one enabled), and it can't be undone. What it doesn't touch is the shared game record: the squares your team holds stay with the team, and your past check-ins, honors and captures stay in the record — they just no longer say your name. A new Privacy page, linked from every page's footer, spells out exactly what survives and what doesn't.

2026-09-05 — Looking up a player by name now requires signing in

Finding where a specific player is on the map now requires a session. The score panel's player-search box, and the API behind it, used to answer "where is this person right now" for anyone — unauthenticated, with no login of any kind required. It now asks you to sign in first; a logged-out search says so plainly instead of just failing. Nothing else about the map changed — squares, teams and territory are exactly as public as they've always been. What required signing in was specifically the link between a name and a location.

Signed-in sessions now remember which browser and OS you used, never your IP address. The account page's Sessions list already showed this; what changed is what's actually stored behind it — a label like "Chrome on Windows" rather than a raw device fingerprint, and no IP address at all, not even a hashed one. Existing sessions were rewritten to match, not just new ones going forward.

2026-09-05 — Colorado Mesh joins the roster

Colorado Mesh is now a configured MeshCore community, alongside Mountain West Mesh — another net you can check in with. See Where It's Played on the About page for the current list.

2026-09-02 — Switch teams, once a month

Picked the wrong team, or just want to play somewhere else? You can now switch teams yourself, once per calendar month, from the setup-check panel at the bottom of the Join page — paste your API key, then use the new team control right below your name and team.

Your points and streak come with you. Your ground doesn't. Every check-in point, exploration point, and streak you've built stays attached to you, not your old team, so none of it is lost by switching. The squares you currently hold are the one thing that stays behind — they remain with the team that held them, exactly as if someone else on that team had painted them. The confirmation screen spells out both halves of that before you commit, along with the date you'll be able to switch again.

2026-08-27 — The Layers box gets out of the way

You can put the Layers panel away. The layer switcher in the bottom left corner of the map now has a tab on its right-hand edge. Press it and the panel slides off the left side of the screen, leaving just the tab behind; press the tab again and it slides back. Worth the most on a phone, where the panel was covering a real share of the map and could not be dismissed at all.

Your choice is remembered on that device, so a collapsed panel stays collapsed the next time you open the map rather than making you put it away again on every visit.

2026-08-27 — Places no longer stack

One square, one place, one credit. A square that carries more than one place — a landmark standing inside a large park is the usual case — used to pay out for every live place on it from a single ping, most valuable first. That was never intended: one trip to one square is one errand, and it should pay once. Only the most valuable place on a square scores now. The lesser one is dropped rather than paid alongside it, and it is not a fallback either: if you already collected the valuable place this week, the square pays nothing rather than handing you the cheaper one. If the valuable place is worth more than what is left of your weekly hundred, it still pays — just for the remainder, capping you at the hundred instead of turning you away. Two places of exactly equal value on one square always resolve to the same winner, for every player and every week.

The weekly cap caps, it doesn't refuse. This applies whether or not a square has a runner-up sitting on it: reach a place worth more than what's left of your hundred for the week and it no longer turns you away empty-handed — it pays out the rest of the budget and leaves you at the ceiling. A player at 50 points who then reaches a 100-point peak is credited the remaining 50, not zero. That place has used its one credit for the week either way.

Nothing already earned changes. Past credits, past scores and frozen months stay exactly as they are — this is forward behaviour only.

Explorer, said properly. Explorer is not a monthly honor and never was resettable: it is the name of an activity and of a rankings tab (alongside Wardrivers and NetOps under Top Operators), a season-long points figure that counts toward your total score. The rules said so in passing; they say so plainly now. The monthly honors built on places count visits, not points — Tourist, Park Hopper and Peak Tagger.

2026-08-25 — Places Worth Going, a new map, and self-hosted terrain

Scoring changed. Reaching a summit, a park, or a landmark now earns points on top of the usual square-claiming game — "Places Worth Going." Points are effort-based, not category-based: anything inside a town's limits (a city park, a summit you can drive to) is worth 5, wherever it sits outside one a landmark is worth 10, a park 25, and a summit 100. A weekly rotation cycles landmarks and small parks through so there's always something new nearby (raised from a 5-place, 3-mile quota to 15 places, 1-mile spacing, measured against real town coverage rather than guessed). Trailheads and lookouts were dropped from the landmark list — a trailhead is where a walk starts, not a destination, and a lookout on a peak is the summit you already scored.

Explorer and Frontier mean something different now. Explorer used to track squares nobody had ever claimed, which mostly duplicated Frontier. Explorer now counts points earned from places; Frontier keeps tracking ground taken out past the towns. Months already frozen keep the numbers they were frozen with.

The map changed. The MapLibre map, previously a side-by-side preview at /map2, is now the front page. The old Leaflet map is still there for comparison at /map-legacy, marked so it doesn't compete with the real page in search. Terrain, roads, and public-land overlays are now served from the game's own archives instead of fetched live from another project's tileset — that other project rebuilds its archives often enough that the map was breaking (blank regions, stale byte ranges) most times it did. Contour lines were tried and dropped: they cost most of a map pan's frame budget to draw lines over terrain the hillshade already shows.

Older history

Everything before this file existed is in the commit log.