Tutorial

Building your own walk

There's no mission in your city yet? Draw one. The planner is open to anyone, needs no account, and works out the astronomy for you — you choose a round object and a direction, and it tells you where all eight planets land.

It takes about ten minutes at a desk, and a good afternoon if you go and walk it — which you should, and which is what separates a route that works from a set of pins on a map.

Step 1 · “Where does your Sun live?”

Everything in the walk is measured from one object, so this is the decision that shapes the rest. You're looking for something round and public: a fountain, a globe, a dome, a sphere sculpture, a planetarium.

Three ways to place it:

• Search for a place or address.
• Use my location, if you're standing at it.
• Tap the map. Pick "place it on the map" and the map goes full-screen — tap the exact spot, then Done.

Be precise. This pin is where a walker will stand to start, and everything else radiates from it — a Sun dropped fifty metres off drags all eight planets fifty metres with it.

Step 2 · “How big is your Sun?”

Slide to match the real size of the object. There's a human figure on the gauge for reference, at about 5 ft 9 in.

This is the single most consequential number in the walk, and the one place accuracy really matters. It sets the scale for everything — planet sizes and the distances between stops both come straight out of it. Guess low and your walk shrinks into a few blocks; guess high and Neptune ends up in the next county.

A useful band is roughly 16 inches to 30 feet across. Small enough and the whole solar system fits in a park, which is charming but skips the part where the distance surprises you. Large enough and the outer planets leave the city.

Measure it if you can — pace out the base, or compare it against something with a known size in a photo. If you're within ten percent you're fine; the promise this product makes is that the scale is real, so it's worth a few minutes.

Step 3 · “Aim your walk”

Now you have eight orbit rings around your Sun. Aiming spins all eight planets around those rings at once, so you can point the whole walk down streets that actually exist.

Drag the handle on the map, or use the slider. The readout shows the heading in degrees and as a compass direction.

What you're looking for:

• Walkable ground the whole way out — pavement, a park, a promenade.
• Not straight into water, a motorway, or a rail yard.
• A direction with good things along it. The planets don't have to be at landmarks, but a walk that passes interesting places is a better day out.
• An outer end you can actually get to. Check where Neptune's ring crosses — is there a bus, a train, a bike path?

Step 4 · Place your stops

Now the detail work: one planet at a time, from Mercury outward. For each one the map shows a band — the area that planet may be placed in. Drag its pin anywhere inside.

The bands aren't the same size, and that's on purpose. Each planet gets a share of the gap to its neighbours, so Mercury has a tight little zone and Neptune has room to manoeuvre. It means no two planets can ever end up in the wrong order or on top of each other, however far you drag.

Three things help you place each one well:

• The accuracy badge. How close your pin is to where the astronomy says it should be. Watch it as you drag.
• The ghost pin and tether. A faint marker at the mathematically ideal point, with a line to where you've actually put it. That line is your compromise, drawn.
• Nearby suggestions. Real places around the pin, so you can snap a stop to something worth standing at instead of an anonymous stretch of kerb.

Trade accuracy for a better place, within reason. Given a choice between a perfect spot on an empty verge and one a hundred feet away outside a good café, take the café. The walk is a day out, not a survey. The badge is there so you can see exactly what the trade costs.

Give each stop a landmark name, and a hint if the exact spot is hard to find. Those are what a walker reads standing on the pavement looking around — "the third bench from the fountain" is worth more than a coordinate.

You don't have to place all eight. A walk with a Sun and one planet is already saveable and walkable. But a partial walk is a partial walk — the outer planets are the ones people remember.

Step 5 · “Name it & make it real”

Last step. Fill in the details:

• Walk name — what it'll be called everywhere.
• City.
• Preferred slug — the bit that would go in the URL. It fills itself in from the name; you can override it.
• About this walk — a short blurb. What makes this route special, roughly how long it takes, anything a walker should know before they set off.

Above the buttons there's a summary: your Sun, the scale ratio, how many planets you placed, and the total walking distance with a time estimate. It's the first time you see the walk as a walker would — check the distance is one a human would agree to.

Then: three things you can do with it

These aren't exclusive. Do all three if you like.

Keep it — “Save to my device”

Saves the walk to this phone as a real, playable mission. From then on it behaves exactly like a published one: scan your Sun card out in the city and GO finds your walk, credits your stops, and shows your planets at true scale. Nothing is published, nobody else sees it, and you can come back and edit it.

This is also the step people miss. Leaving the builder without saving keeps a draft — something you can carry on editing — but a draft isn't a walk you can go outside and do. Save it properly before you set off.

Send it — “Copy share link”

Packs the whole walk into a link. Text it, mail it, put it in a group chat. Whoever opens it gets a preview and can save it to their own phone and walk it, no account needed.

It's a lightweight copy — the route, the stops and the scale travel in the link; photos and long write-ups stay with the full version. Very large walks can make a link too long for some apps to handle; if that happens, share the JSON download as a file instead.

Publish it — “Submit for review”

Think it belongs on the site for everyone? Submit it with a contact address. Every official walk gets a personal review — we'll talk it through with you and help fill in anything missing, and we'll ask for a photo of each stop before it goes live.

Your contact details stay private. Only the credit name you choose is ever published. Full detail, including what we look for and what we can't take yet: submitting a walk.

And, for planning the day

• Walk this route in Google Maps — opens the whole thing as a route.
• KML for Google Earth — the waypoints as a file.
• Export raw JSON — the complete walk, to back up or hand-edit.

Worth knowing

It saves as you go

The builder keeps your work in progress automatically, so closing the tab by accident doesn't cost you the afternoon. It's stored in this browser on this device, though — see where progress lives — so a walk you care about should be exported or shared to somewhere permanent.

Walk it before you submit it

Save it to your device, go out with your card, and do the whole thing. You'll find the stop that's actually behind a locked gate, the leg that's a horrible road walk, and the place that turns out to be the best moment of the day. That's the difference between a route and a walk.

Editing later

Saved walks are yours to change — reopen the draft in the builder, adjust, and save again. A published walk is edited by talking to us; drop us a line if something on the ground changes.