The Weekly Explorer's Mark — week of 23 August 2026

Last Sunday there were 142,482 plots in Praetoria and no way to say anything on any of them.

In the seven days since, eighty-two messages were left on the ground.

This post is where the next seven days of them live.

The first week, counted

• 82 Marks, from 8 accounts, on 72 different plots
• spread across 48 of the 143 regions
• mentioning 58 separate landowners

Honesty about that number: two of us left most of it, and one of those two is me — walking the continent to find out where it breaks. The other six went out on their own, and that is the part I did not build.

Fifty-eight owners got a notification from a stranger standing on ground they bought. That is the number I actually care about.

What changed in the world this week

Everything below is live right now at praetoria.live — walk in and it is there.

A landowner's Collector binders. Open a plot panel and, if the owner has them, their stylised card binders now show, linked out to their Splinterlands collector page. It reads the public collector API directly in your browser and stores nothing, and if that service is slow the section simply does not appear.

Named owner search bar There is a search bar in the side panel now. Type a Hive account and every plot they own lights up across the grid. You can click any username you see on screen to pop it into search as well. It only ever reveals what your fog already has; unsurveyed land does not light up, so it is a way of reading the owners on what you have walked, not an X-ray.

A missing road. 074 Mors Deep and 143 Dryae Tor border each other and the map would not let you cross. It will now — and more generally, the server, not the browser, decides whether an edge is walkable, so partially-surveyed regions stop refusing legitimate crossings.

Small UI improvement: region crossing Region crossings were not labeled well. Every region now signs its exits in the black border: an arrow, the destination region's name and number ("Champlain #63"), and a soft glow on the crossable edge. It distinguishes a region you can walk to from one that exists on the official map but was never sold, from open sea. On a phone they collapse to bare arrows so they clear the touch pads.

Being build in development

PvE

Quests, from the land itself. The first one works end to end. A plot's highest-level summoner sends you to find another staked creature of its own race somewhere else on the continent — and because the world is made of real staked cards, that search is a real search. There is a journal to track it.

The land fights back. Preliminary working on the PvE system of battling staked cards on land.

PvP

I will speak on this aspect more, but there are ideas in the works for player vs player interactions ingame.

What an Explorer's Mark is

For anyone arriving this week. Walk to a plot. Write a few lines. Sign it with Keychain.

That message becomes a reply to this post — a real Hive comment, from your own account, in your own name. It records which plot you left it on, and it mentions whoever owns that land, so the owner hears about it wherever they already read Hive. Then the next person who walks to that plot reads what you wrote.

What to write

Anything. Suggestions from someone who has now walked a lot of it:

• A note for the landowner. Somebody paid real money for that ground.
• What you were doing there. Looking for a Castle? Lost?
• Something in character. #roleplaypraetoria exists for exactly this and is
  entirely optional — nothing in the game requires it.
• A landmark. "Third Keep from the eastern edge, the one with nine workers."
• Now that search exists: pick an owner, light up their land, and go leave a
  Mark on the strangest plot they own.

Where to start

praetoria.live. Browse to the map, sign in with Keychain, and if you own land it will already be marked as yours. It works on a phone, through the Keychain app.

Never seen the project? Start with the introduction — what it is, what is built, and where it is going. Last week's Marks are here, and they stay readable forever.

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Praetoria is a @splinterlands world. This project is independent, built by @amphlux — a dedicated player, but not affiliated with core Splinterlands. All art asset credit goes to the Splinterlands art team.

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