Tutorial

Building your own walk

If there is no mission in your city yet, you can absolutely make one! The planner is open to anyone to use for free!

Step 1 · “Where does your Sun live?”

Everything in the walk is measured from the sun object. 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 place your pin at the sun's location.

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 sets the scale for everything, distances between stops come straight out of it.

A useful band is roughly 16 inches to 30 feet across. Too much smaller and the planets are too small to visualize well. The upper range is mostly dictated by your tolerance for walking.

As a reference point a 43 ft sun would put neptune a full marathon 26.2 miles (42 km) away from the starting point.

Step 3 · “Aim your walk”

Once you've set the location and scale, you'll see eight orbit rings around your Sun. Aiming with the slide on the bottom spins all eight planets around those rings at once, so you can point the whole walk generally in one direction.

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.

Trade accuracy for a better place to stop. Given a choice between a perfect spot on an empty field and one a hundred feet away outside a good café, take the café. The walk is a day out, not a survey.

Give each stop a landmark name, and a hint if the exact spot is hard to find. A picture is worth a thousand words, when I'm planning a mission I usually place a marker near something interesting and then live correct when I'm actually near the spot.

Step 5 · “Name it & make it real”

Last step. Fill in the details:

• Walk name What it'll be called.
• City. Where is it?
• Preferred slug the bit that goes at the end of the URL.
• 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.

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.

Send it to someone else - “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 (your) version.

Publish it - “Submit for review”

Think it belongs on the site for everyone? Submit it to us for review. 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. (Construction, walking path changes etc...)