Patch notes
Everything that has shipped, newest first. Each entry names the commit behind it, so nothing here is a claim you have to take on trust.
121 releases · 427 changes · last updated September 26, 2026
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1 new
Every data page says when it was checked
A figure with a visible date is easier to trust, whether the reader is a person or an assistant quoting the page.
New /states County, budget, state and comparison pages now carry one line under their headline figures: which release of the Census survey the figures come from, and the month the page was last built and checked.
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States colour in five bands
Fifty solid shapes on one red-to-green ramp ran together in the middle, and a ramp that only changes hue is hard to read with red-green colour blindness.
Improved /explore In the States view, each state is coloured by which fifth of the states it falls in on the chosen metric, from the bottom fifth to the top fifth. The bands also step from dark to light, so the order reads without the hues. The legend shows the five bands with the real values each one covers. The Counties view keeps its continuous ramp.
The map opens on states
Three thousand county outlines at once read as clutter. The map now opens with the fifty states coloured by the metric you choose, and a click on any state zooms in and opens its counties.
New /explore The map has two levels. It opens on states, each coloured by the state's own published Census figure. Click a state to zoom to it and see its counties, or flip between States and Counties with the switch at the top left of the map. The home button returns to the country view.
New /explore With a state open, the panel beside the map shows that state's median rent, household income, home value, property tax bill, population, commute and unemployment, its rank among the states on the chosen metric, and a door to its page. Click a county and the panel switches to that county.
Improved /explore States colour by the seven metrics the Census publishes a state row for. Pick any other metric and the map shows counties, with a note saying why. No state figure is ever averaged from its counties.
New A Browse by state list on the home page and under the map, so every state page is one click away and every county page two.
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The quiz answers with states first
Finishing the fitting quiz used to print three county names at the top of the result. It now shows your states to consider, nearest first, and asks you to open one. The counties that fit you there wait on that state's page.
Improved /find The quiz's result screen now lists up to five states: your own, the two next door, then two from anywhere, each with its fit, one line on why it is there and its three photographs. The three county names that used to lead the screen are gone from it.
New /find Each state on the result carries a Learn about button that saves your character and opens that state's page, where your three closest counties there are ranked on the answers you just gave.
Improved /find The create-an-account note on the quiz result and on Find your fit now says what the account is for: it saves your quiz answers and your character, and opens the Keep, the Journey and your dashboard.
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6 new3 improved1 fixed
Property tax reads as a percent first
A percent compares fairly between a cheap county and a costly one, so every property tax reading now leads with its rate and gives dollars as an example.
Improved /states On county pages, what owners pay now leads with the rate, such as 0.75% of home value a year, then gives the median bill as an example. California's buyer card leads with about 1.15% of the purchase price, then an example on the county's median home value. State pages open their property tax paragraph the same way.
New /states Georgia, Wyoming, Nevada and Hawaii follow rules that fit none of the usual cases, so their county and state pages now say so in plain words, each with its source. Oregon, Arizona and New York state pages now note that a buyer inherits the seller's capped value.
New /states A short note under the property tax cards explains why most counties show no exact buyer's percent: a buyer's rate is the sum of local rates, and no free, citable national table of them exists. If readers ask for it, we will look at adding them state by state.
County pages answer first, state pages show you around
People reach these pages from a search for one figure, such as a county's property tax rate or its median income. County pages now open with those answers, and state pages lead with the counties to open next and a few places worth the trip.
New /states Every county page opens with a quick answer: median household income, property tax rate, median rent and median home value, each under its full name, then one plain sentence that says the same.
New /states A property tax section on every county page with two readings side by side: what current owners pay, and what a buyer would pay. California counties show a buyer's yearly bill on the median home value. Where a sale ends the seller's cap, the page says a buyer pays more than the owners' rate and names the rule: Florida, Michigan, Texas, South Carolina, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, Maryland and the District of Columbia. In Oregon, Arizona and New York a buyer inherits the seller's capped value, so the owners' rate is given as a fair guide. Everywhere else it is the closest published guide.
New /states Side by side doors on county pages. If you have named a home county, the page offers this county beside yours. The largest counties also link to their ready-made comparisons.
Fixed /states The note that a buyer should expect a higher property tax bill than current owners named three states. A check of all fifty states and the District of Columbia found ten places where a sale ends the seller's cap, so state pages for Texas, South Carolina, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, Maryland and the District of Columbia now carry the note too, each with its source.
Improved /states The list of every county on a state page now sorts. Press rent, household income, home value, property tax or population to order the whole state by it, and press again to flip the order.
New /states Each state page gains a short guide: when the state joined the Union, two sentences of its history, and three places worth the trip, each linked to the agency that looks after it.
Improved /states On state pages, the counties to open next now sit near the top, above the detailed health, hazard and tax sections.
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Every state has a real page
The ladder on Find your fit invites you to see all of a state, and until today that door opened onto a bare table. Now each state has a page of its own: what the place looks like, what it costs, and the counties inside it that suit you best.
Improved /states State and county pages have plainer addresses: /states/california/sacramento-county, where it used to read /counties/ca/sacramento-county. Every old address still works and sends you to the new one, so no bookmark or shared link breaks.
New /states Each state page opens with three photographs, one of its nature, one downtown and one courthouse. Each says which place it shows and credits its photographer.
New /states Six readings for the state as a whole: median rent, household income, home value, property tax bill, commute and unemployment. Each is the figure the Census publishes for the state itself, never an average of its counties, and each names its table.
New /states A plain paragraph on property tax: what the median owner in the state pays each year, which counties sit lowest and highest, and a note for California, Florida and Michigan, where a buyer should expect more than current owners pay. The county table gains a property tax column.
New /states If you have named a home county, the page sets the state beside your own state, median beside median. It compares places only and never reads your income or your budget.
New /states Your three closest matches in the state, from the weights you set on Find your fit, each with Set as target, which hands off to the Journey. With no weights set, the three most populous counties stand in and the page says so. Made-up answers work too.
New /states Health and natural hazards for the state as a whole. Health: life expectancy, people without health insurance, poor or fair health and injury deaths, from County Health Rankings' own state rows. Hazards: the expected yearly loss, the building loss rate per $1,000 and the costliest hazard by name, from FEMA's state table. FEMA publishes no risk score for states, so none is shown, and air quality keeps its dash because the EPA publishes none by state.
Improved /find On the ladder of states, photo credits moved from under each small picture to one line under the strip. Every photographer and licence is still named in full. On a phone the credits had grown taller than the photographs they credited. Tap a photo to see the original.
New /states Side by side doors: the state's largest county beside its runner-up, beside the largest county of each state next door, and beside your home county if you have named one.
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A ladder of states, nearest first
Two readers asked Find your fit for somewhere cheaper and were handed counties a thousand miles away. The numbers were right. The answer was too specific and too far, both at once. So the result is a ladder now. Your own state comes first, the states next door come second, and the rest of the country comes third. You decide how far you want to dream, and the counties are one tap inside whichever state you open.
New /find The result is three rungs of states: Close to home, Next door, and Where your money goes furthest. Five states show first, one from your own state, two from next door and two from anywhere. Each rung opens to show more.
New /find Every state card carries its fit score, a plain line on why it is there, and photographs of real places inside it where we hold any. Each photograph credits its photographer and links to its licence.
New /find Every card compares like with like: a place beside a place. Another state shows its median rent and home value beside your own state’s, and how prices run between the two. Your own state shows your closest county match beside the county you live in. None of it reads your income or your budget, so your own rent deal never colors the comparison. Every figure is a published median that names its source, and a figure nobody publishes shows a dash.
New /find A new question at the top of the page and at the start of the quiz: where do you call home? Your answer sets where the ladder measures from, your own county is left out of its own rung, and nothing is filtered away. Made-up answers are welcome, as they are everywhere on this site.
New /find Not for me removes a state from the ladder and pulls the next one up. One Undo line appears in case you change your mind, and everything comes back on a reload.
New /find Open a state card to see your best-fitting counties there, with the same Set as target button as before, or follow See all of that state to its full county table.
Improved /find Show counties instead switches the result back to the flat list of counties grouped by state, for anyone who came here knowing what they want.
The counties come first now
Find your fit used to open with a thirteen-screen questionnaire and a note where the county list should have been. Two testers and a fresh read of the page said the same thing: the ranking was being held back until you had earned it. So the ranking arrives with the page, grouped under the states the counties sit in. The quiz is there when you want to sharpen the list.
Improved /find The county ranking is on screen the moment the page loads, built from the weights everybody starts with. The fitting quiz no longer opens by itself.
New /find Counties are gathered under their state, three at most from any one state, so the list always shows you more than one part of the country. Each state heading carries that state's published median rent, straight from the Census, and a dash where nothing is published.
New /find The quiz now has a Close button that brings the county list straight back. Your answers keep and you can pick them up again from the same screen.
Improved /find The six weights are called by their plain names everywhere on this page, the quiz result included: Cost of Living, Jobs & Income, Health & Healthcare, Commute & Daily Life, Environment & Disaster Risk, Schools & Education. The character names for them still live on your sheet and in the Keep.
Improved /find A note beside the filters says what has always been true: made-up answers are welcome, here and everywhere on the site. It works out an answer for whatever you put in.
The map comes first
Improved Forums moved from the top bar to the links at the foot of every page. The forum is young and quiet, and the top bar is for the parts of the site a new visitor needs first. It returns to the top when the room fills.
Improved /explore Explore now opens on the map. The how-to card used to sit above it, which pushed the map off a laptop screen, so a page named after the map began with a heading, a button and instructions. The card now waits under the map, next to the compare box it describes.
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1 improved2 fixed
Three fixes from a phone
The owner walked the site on a phone and sent back what he saw. The map's how-to card had squeezed its text to a few words a line, one page still counted the measures at a number two years stale, and the site's spelling had been drifting between two countries.
Fixed /explore The "How to read this map" card no longer squeezes its three steps into a narrow column on phones. The compass, the title and the Got-it button share the top line, and the steps run the full width beneath them.
Fixed The Story page and the home page's verify card said 35 measures; the county profile has carried 45 for some time. Every count on the site now reads from the one list the measures live in, so the number cannot drift again.
Improved The site now spells the American way throughout: color, license, center, modeled, program, enrollment and their kin. Screen-reader labels and the older patch notes were brought along.
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3 improved5 fixed
Numbers that could not vouch for themselves
The weekly data audit found readings the Census publishes with a margin of error wider than the reading itself, and a few figures on the site that were estimates under measured labels. Both are gone. The county data also moved to the newest Census and County Health Rankings releases.
Improved County data now comes from the 2024 American Community Survey and County Health Rankings 2025, the newest releases of both. Most figures moved a little. Life expectancy reads about half a year lower nationwide in the new release and food insecurity about three points higher; that is the source, not the site.
Fixed /explore Twenty-three counties reported an unemployment rate of exactly zero on margins as wide as 73 points, and ranked as the best job markets in the country. A zero the Census cannot vouch for now shows a dash and does not score. Same for the thirteen counties showing zero college enrollment, whose margin cap also tightened from 30 to 20 points.
Fixed /explore Household income, home value and rent are withheld where the Census margin of error exceeds 40% of the figure, so a handful of very small counties no longer top the affordability rankings on numbers that could be off by half.
Improved /explore Life expectancy no longer feeds the fit score. Where County Health Rankings publishes no usable figure, the modeled estimate still shows for context, and the note under the map says so. The health category now scores on poor health and the uninsured rate.
Fixed The health index for Puerto Rico was a composite of income and education under a County Health Rankings label. It now shows a dash where County Health Rankings has no data, as injury deaths already did.
Fixed The K-12 and higher-education indexes no longer print a score built from a single input. K-12 rests on graduation rate and child poverty, both required; higher education needs at least two of its three inputs. Where that is not met the index shows a dash.
Fixed The modeled life-expectancy estimate carried a small fixed offset per county so that neighbors would not read identical. Removed: the estimate is now exactly the state baseline adjusted by county income, employment and education, and nothing else.
Improved Connecticut's nine planning regions keep every health measure after the County Health Rankings 2025 change, which published some measures on the new regions and the rest on the old counties.
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Two counties, one address
Any two counties can now be compared at a plain web address, with the same winner logic the map's Compare panel uses, so a comparison you share is a page anyone can open.
New /compare A county-versus-county page at /compare/<state>/<county>/vs/<state>/<county>: Dollar for dollar and Head-to-head, every published reading for both counties side by side, the better figure marked on each row. It reads the same rule the map's Compare panel reads, so the two cannot disagree.
Improved /explore The Compare panel's share link now copies that page's address when exactly two counties are pinned. With one, three or four pinned it still copies the map link with the pins in it.
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A monthly budget for every county
Each county page now has a budget page beside it: what a median household there pays, and what each budget line should cost on the county's median income, every figure from a published source or rule.
New /counties A monthly budget page for every county, at the county's address plus /budget: median income per month, rent, the utility brackets, childcare and property tax as the sources publish them, then the nine budget goals priced against that income with their publishers named. Doors into the Treasury and the Sustainable budget odyssey.
Improved /counties The county page links to its budget page under the headline readings, and the sitemap lists every budget page.
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3 new1 improved1 fixed
Every county has its own page
All 3,222 counties now have a page of their own at a plain address, and the About page became one screen with the full story moved to its own page.
New /counties Every county has its own page, at an address like /counties/ca/sacramento-county: every published reading the map holds, grouped as the map groups them, with its sources and doors to the map and the fit quiz. A page per state lists its counties, and /counties lists the states.
New /explore The map's county card links to that county's own page, and the home page's sources section links to the index.
Improved /about The About page is one screen: two sentences, six tiles, one door. Each tile opens the matching part of the full story.
New /story The run so far: the whole story that used to sit on the About page, moved word for word to its own page, the Diamond promotion screenshot and its match-history receipt included.
Fixed The sitemap now lists the Journey, the Keep, the dashboard, the glossary, the story, and every county page, so search engines can find them without a link from elsewhere.
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7 new6 improved6 fixed
Phone-width fixes across the site
A pass over every page at phone widths: four places where text or a control ran past the screen now wrap or say where the rest is, and every fixed-pixel label grew to the readable floor.
Improved Small print grew to the site's smallest readable size everywhere: eyebrows, chips, badges, chart axis labels, the seal letters and a hundred other labels that were set in fixed pixels now scale with your text settings and never drop below the floor.
Fixed The header's Sign in link no longer breaks onto two lines on a phone.
Fixed /guild The Treasury's scan-receipts door wraps its label instead of clipping mid-word.
Fixed /journey A sustainable budget's goal rows wrap on small phones: the recommended label and the plan, real and distance figures each keep to one line but break between them.
Improved /guild The Provisions and Treasury month charts say on phones that the later months sit to the right, since a phone hides its scrollbar.
Improved /journey On phones the constellation keeps its names on the stars, drawn larger, and repeats every name in a list right under it at full size: the odyssey in the seat, its journeys with their stars, and the other odysseys as buttons. The small caption lines inside the drawing are hidden at that width. Tablets and desktops keep the drawing as it was.
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The forums stay plain text
A stated rule for the hearth talk: no links for now, and no formatting is interpreted.
New /forums The forums now say, above the composer and in the small print, that posts are plain text: links are not permitted for now, and formatting marks show exactly as typed. A post or reply carrying a link is declined with a sentence, and your draft stays put.
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The Jobs Board reads The Career
The Keep's Jobs Board now shows what the Career odyssey has recorded and aims its doors by the role you named there.
New /guild Your Career on the Jobs Board: the role, the pay floor, the record by stage and the offer, each a door to the Journey stage that edits it. Nothing can be changed from the Keep.
Improved /guild The notice board's doors are handed the role you named on the Career odyssey and the county you said you are hunting in, ahead of the class term and the move target.
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The Career: landing the job
A sixth odyssey on the constellation, for the first big job out of school or after a first certificate. Four journeys: name the work you're after, set your pay floor, track what you sent, read the offer. Wages are BLS state medians and say so; nothing here is a clock.
New /journey Name the work you're after: the role as postings write it and the county you are hunting in. The stage reads the BLS state median for your line of work and the county's workforce share, with doors to the venues.
New /journey Set your pay floor: the monthly take-home a job must clear, read beside your reported expenses, the landlord three-times-rent rule for the county, and the state median at the site's stated take-home convention.
New /journey Track what you sent: a plain record of applications, one at a time, pasted as a batch, or logged as a tally when names do not matter. Counts per stage only; no rate, no clock, and closed is never a failure.
New /journey Read the offer: an offer against your floor, the state median, the county's household income, and rent burden, with a door to report it as your income on Your Numbers.
Improved /dashboard The Dashboard's odyssey strip carries The Career's stars and spoils, two rows of three.
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The dials wear the pixel matrix, and Your Numbers joins the cluster
The instrument cluster's two main dials and the temperature sub-dial now draw their arcs as a field of cells, the same material the XP bar wears, and a Your Numbers screen sits under the mains showing what that journey has recorded.
Improved /dashboard The runway, cruising speed and temperature dials draw their arcs as lit cells instead of a smooth band. Lit cells brighten toward the needle, the field shimmers gently, and it holds still if your device asks for reduced motion.
New /dashboard The readout strip above the dials now carries Your Numbers too: savings joins income and expenses, and planned commute and health coverage stand beside range and sales, each marked reported or not, with one door to the Journey stage that edits them. Nothing can be changed on the Dashboard itself.
Fixed /dashboard On phones, the temperature line under the thermometer no longer runs off both edges of the cluster; it wraps inside the card.
Fixed /find On phones, the forged-character card no longer squeezes its words to one per line beside the Retrain button; the button drops beneath the text.
Fixed /dashboard The runway dial's spoken description no longer mentions a dashed "there" marker that left the face on 1 September; it now points to the RANGE THERE readout.
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The first home goes live, four journeys
The last dashed ring on the constellation lights up. Rent first to learn the county, choose where to own, pick how you'll pay, and test what owning would cost each month. Every default names who published it, and your own figure always wins.
New /journey Rent for now: name the county and the rent you expect, and the stage prices your move-in as deposit plus first month, with the county's median rent beside the box and a door to its rental listings.
New /journey Choose where to own: one county, starting from where your move is headed or where you live now, read three ways: the median home, years of local income, years of your own reported income. Doors to homes for sale near the median and to retraining on Find your fit.
New /journey Pick how you'll pay: cash, conventional, FHA, VA, USDA, rent-to-own or seller financing, each with its published down payment and a box to type your own. The result prices the down payment in your county and shows how far your reported savings reach.
New /journey Test the monthly: principal and interest at a rate you type (Freddie Mac's 30-year average as the dated default), property tax at your county's rate, insurance from your quote, read against your housing goal and HUD's 30% line. What it cannot price it names as excluded rather than counting as zero.
Improved /dashboard The Dashboard's odyssey strip now reads The first home's stars and spoils: the monthly figure, the down payment, or the county chosen, whichever is furthest along.
Fixed /journey The constellation spaces an odyssey's journeys to fit however many it has. Before, a fourth star had nowhere to draw.
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Property tax, as the county's owners actually pay it
Two new cost readings on every county, from the Census: the median owner's yearly property tax bill and that bill as a share of home value. They are labelled as what current owners pay, because a buyer usually pays more.
New /explore The Cost of Living tiles now show the median yearly property tax bill and the owners' tax rate for the selected county, after the price and rent pairs. Sacramento County reads $3,768 a year, 0.76% of home value.
New /guild The Housing Board's hearth's measure prints what your target county's current owners pay in property tax beside its median home and rent.
Improved Where the Census caps the figure at $10,000 or more (Westchester, Nassau, Marin and thirteen others) or publishes a margin of error wider than a fifth of the estimate, the tile stays blank rather than printing a floor as a fact. About nine counties in ten carry the figure.
Improved The tile's description says plainly that a new buyer usually pays more than this, and much more in California, Florida and Michigan, where the assessed value resets to the purchase price at sale. Under California's Prop 13 a Sacramento buyer pays about 1.15% of the price, not the 0.76% the county's long-held owners average.
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11 new6 improved4 fixed
The Fitting Quiz joins the Odyssey stage
The first journey wired into the Journey page. Find Your Fit collects your answers; the stage under the constellation displays what they produced and points back when something needs changing.
New /journey Click the Fitting Quiz star and the stage shows your best fits: the top three counties with their fit rings, your six stats, and three doors: price one in the Runway, see all your fits on Find Your Fit, or retrain there. Without a character yet, the stage offers one door to forge one.
Improved /find Retrain on Find Your Fit now has a direct door from the Journey page: it lands with the questionnaire already open and your answers filled in.
Fixed Retraining your character now starts from the six stats you already hold. Before, the dials came up at their defaults, so walking Next through a retrain to change one answer quietly reset the other five.
Improved /journey The Keep and Find Your Fit can open a journey's stage directly, so a link can land on the Fitting Quiz rather than the top of the page.
New /journey Every budget goal can now be stated your way: a percent of income or flat dollars a month. The % and $ switch beside each goal's box picks the unit, the row measures and reads in that unit, and it moves to the matching group. A recommendation only stands in its own unit, so a switched row waits for your figure rather than inventing one.
New /dashboard The Dashboard now reads the whole game. An odyssey strip under the instrument cluster shows every odyssey with its stars lit and its spoils in one figure: readiness in your target county, your next credential rung, your cash left each month. Each tile opens that odyssey's stage on the Journey page.
New /dashboard A trip meter joins the odometer: scouting deeds ticked in your target county's diary, out of sixteen. It reads "no target" until you have one and 00 of 16 until you tick a deed, and it moves both ways because a tick can be undone.
New /journey College or trade school is a live odyssey. Its first journey, Report your schooling, takes the degrees and diplomas you hold in your own words, a level and a name per row, such as BS Finance and MBA. Saving raises your character's highest education level and pays no XP, the same rule as declaring it in the forge.
New /journey Its second star is the tie into The Credential: your schooling's rest state has a door that seats The Credential on the stage, and another that opens the certification ladder in the Keep's Training hall. The Dashboard's tile for this odyssey now names your degrees.
Improved /dashboard The runway dial's "there" marker left the face, word and tick both: it sat on the needle tip whenever here and there read the same, and the cruising speed dial never wore one. The RANGE THERE readout above the dials and the runway card below still carry the figure.
New /dashboard A temperature readout joins the strip above the dials: your real spending as a share of income, drawn as the budget goals' own bar, with 📝 at your plan and 🎯 at the goal the cash-leftover rule sets. The words beneath say met or by how much it is over. It reads from your Treasury's latest full month and says "no Treasury month yet" until you have one.
Improved /dashboard The instrument cluster's numbers wear a new monospace face, JetBrains Mono, on the readout strip, the odometer and the trip meter.
New /dashboard A temperature sub-gauge dial sits under the gear strip: the same reading as the strip's thermometer on a dial face, 0 to 100 percent of income, with 📝 plan and 🎯 goal on the rim. Both forms are on the page for now; the one that fits less well will be cut.
Improved /dashboard The readout strip above the dials reads in two rows: income over expenses, range there over sold, with the thermometer standing beside them at the same height.
Improved /dashboard Every line on the instrument cluster is bigger: the strip's labels, figures and words, the captions under each dial, and the tick labels on the dial faces. Nothing on the glass sits below the site's small text size any more, so the readings hold up for weaker eyesight.
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Honest evidence, a truer college measure, and county diaries
Three data-integrity repairs from the weekly audit, plus the index the county diaries were missing. Nothing here changes what you have recorded: it changes how plainly the site tells you what it knows.
Fixed /explore The College Enrollment Rate now reads the real share of 18 to 24 year olds enrolled in college or graduate school. The old field measured adults over 25 with some college and no degree, which ranked the most-educated counties near the bottom. College towns such as Chapel Hill, Ithaca and Ann Arbor now sit where they belong.
Fixed /explore Counties whose college enrollment estimate is mostly noise, where the Census margin of error is wider than 30 points, no longer show a reading at all rather than a false 0% or 100%.
New /find Each county card on Find Your Fit now says how much evidence its score rests on, for example "Scored on 7 of 13 measures", and the page explains that a measure with no data is left out of the average, never counted as zero. A card with no note was measured on everything your sliders put in play.
Fixed /find Find Your Fit no longer scrolls sideways on a 1024 or 1280 pixel window: the priorities rail and the result cards now share the width instead of fighting for it.
New /guild The Keep's Diary lists every county diary you have started, with its count and progress bar, and opens each one to the same tickable deeds the Journey page shows. Your target county wears the word Target beside its name.
New /guild The Knight's certification ladder arrived: guard card, POST peace officer certification, armed security license, and the CPP at the top. The Steward of the Land gained its Foundation rung, the FFT2 wildland firefighter red card, and both classes now explain where their exams actually come from.
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The Journey reports, the Keep displays
One rule got wired through the site today: the Journey page is where your adventure's figures are reported, and the Keep is where they live on display. Two odysseys now carry their own reporting on the stage.
New /journey A sustainable budget is a live odyssey. Its three journeys read your own reported facts: your income, the cost lines you have written down, and the cash the two leave over each month.
New /journey The budget stage hosts the ledger itself: report what comes in and what goes out without leaving the Journey. The Keep's Treasury shows the same figures and now walks you here to change them.
Improved /journey The Credential's stage now carries the whole Ascension ladder, so exam parts are recorded where the adventure lives. Training in the Keep shows the same ladder.
Improved The ledger's totals now say "Reported income" and "Reported expenses" in plain words, and saved-figure notes across the Treasury say "saved with your character", which has been the truth since accounts arrived.
New /journey Save your ledger now answers the click: the button confirms "Ledger saved" with a check for a moment, and screen readers hear the same sentence.
New /journey A saved ledger folds to a preview: your three readings, an expense bar where every answered line is a slice of the reported total, and an Edit ledger button that reopens the full form.
Improved Budget lines now carry their symbols — the house, the loaf, the car and the rest — on the ledger's form, its preview ladder, and the Treasury's answered-line badges, the same marks the runway comparison already wears.
Improved /journey The ledger's expense bar took the loot-filter colors: your largest cost wears 1st place red with the star, then orange and blue, and the rest stay dim. Every color keeps its word and figure beside it.
Improved /journey The Runway Quiz stopped re-asking what your ledger already answers: those screens now read your figures out, with one button to adjust them in place. Redoing the quiz also no longer unlights your recorded budget while you walk it.
Fixed /journey The quiz reads out only figures you actually reported: an unreported income or money-on-hand is asked as a question again, and the read-out's edit control became a proper button with a pencil.
Fixed A reset that synced against an older copy of your character could print a reported $0 you never typed for savings, income, or the budget. A reported flag now travels with the figure it describes, and a first report can no longer reopen savings XP already paid.
Improved /journey The Runway Quiz walks the shape of the move in three acts now: where you stand (money on hand and the county you live in), income and expenses on one panel (income entered there, costs read from your ledger with a door to change them), and the county you want to move to.
Fixed The county search box no longer jumps the page when it opens, and the county you picked now lives in the box itself instead of only in the caption beneath it.
Improved /journey Your Numbers no longer carries a second target-county picker: your heading is set in one place, the Runway Quiz's closing act.
Improved /journey The move odyssey's journeys are drawn in the path most lives take: the Fitting Quiz finds your best fits, the Runway prices the pick, Your Numbers backs them both. Any journey still starts whenever you are ready.
Improved The character forge stopped asking for your cash on hand and monthly income: those are reported on the Journey now, so the forge is one screen shorter and its wage-estimate note retired with the question.
Improved The forge's income-and-housing question became a slider: three stops from low housing costs to higher income, each naming itself in words as you slide. The exceptions answer keeps its own button beneath.
Improved Four forge dials became true sliders: health, calm ground, commute, and schools each take any weight from 0 to 100, the reading prints beneath the bar as you move it, and the compiled weights beside the forge follow live.
New /journey Odysseys have results pages. The Sustainable budget shows its three journeys' spoils on one card — the leftover, the ranked expense bar, and an Edit door per journey — and clicking The Odyssey's own star summarizes your readiness, core requirements, and stretch count against your heading.
Improved /journey The quest cards run the page's full width now, matching the county card above them: the narrow side rail they used to share the row with had emptied out as its cards moved to better homes.
New /journey The Sustainable budget odyssey gained its first budget goal: housing at or under a third of income, the landlord 3x-rent convention, measured live from your own ledger. Set your own percent instead and the goal measures against that.
Improved /journey The county card and its quests now show only while the move odyssey is seated: they measure the move, and other odysseys keep their own results.
New /journey Budget goals arrived on the Sustainable budget odyssey: nine of them, one per cost line plus the cash leftover, each with a recommended threshold that names its publisher — HUD, USDA, HHS, DOE and the rest — or marked yours to set where no honest rule exists. Type your own percent or dollar figure on any row and the goal measures against yours.
New /journey Every budget goal reads three ways: plan (your reported ledger), real (your Treasury record's latest full month, named on the card), and the goal. The met check judges your real spending whenever a full month anchors it, and a partial month never settles a check.
New /journey The goals draw as bars: the emerald bar is always your real spending, 📝 marks where your plan lands, 🎯 marks the goal, and the words say met or by how much it is off.
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The Journey becomes an Odyssey
The Journey page was rebuilt around one idea: an odyssey is made of journeys. A constellation now maps your odysseys and the journeys that feed them, and one stage panel beneath it is where every journey is walked.
New /journey The Odyssey constellation: your odysseys drawn as stars, with the journeys that feed the focused one and dashed ties showing how every odyssey feeds the others. Click any odyssey to seat it and the page follows.
New /journey The Imaginary Runway, the first journey of the move: your figures, then your dream county, then your own budget priced there line by line. The runway screen is the journey's summit.
New /journey The Credential, a second live odyssey whose steps are computed from your own class: it names your next certification where a national exam is transcribed, and says plainly when your line of work licenses through the state instead.
Improved /journey One stage panel under the constellation now hosts each journey — the Runway Quiz starts there, your numbers are edited there, and finished journeys show their results there. Journeys need an account; signed out, the stars lead to creating one.
Improved /journey The page slimmed to match: the XP bar, the four life chapters, the blueprint and chronicle ledgers and the skills panel all left for their true homes (the character panel and the Keep). Nothing about your XP, seals or certifications changed — only where they are shown.
New /glossary The glossary teaches Your Odyssey: the oldest journey story in the West, made of many smaller journeys, toward home. An odyssey has no deadline.
Improved /account The full character reset moved off the Journey page into account settings, beside Delete Account and behind your password. It says exactly what it erases — your character on this device and your account's saved copy — before it will do anything.
The Megaron becomes the Keep
Improved The hall that holds your records is now the Keep: the safest tower of the castle, and the place where you keep things. Plain English won over the Greek — same hall, same panels, same address, and the glossary records the whole naming history.
The landing page gets an ending
New / The home page now closes with a proper goodbye instead of stopping at the sources table: what this site is optimized for (your life, not your time on it), a promise that your character and the data will be here when you come back, and a share button that opens your device's share sheet or copies the link, for sending the Atlas to someone deciding where to live.
New / The closing panel wears a new emblem: the New Wave, a blue Aegean wave arriving at a small red flame standing safe on its hearth stone. The tide changes; the fire stays lit.
New / One sentence beside the Hestia seal now says the mythology is flavor, never homework, with the glossary as its door — every screen works in plain English.
Improved /about The story page now ends by handing readers to the glossary, so the mythology's translations are one step from the story that uses them.
The privacy page says the quiet part out loud
A plain privacy answer now sits right under the county search, and the privacy policy gains the section most sites never write.
New / A line under the county search answers "is my data private?": other players can never see it, and it is never sold or shared, linking to the privacy policy.
New /privacy The privacy policy gains "The part most sites never say": a plain statement that the people who run any online service can technically access its database, our rule that we look only when you ask us for help, the receipts behind it, and a promise that any future lock-even-us-out encryption will be announced before it happens.
Improved /privacy The account section of the privacy policy now states the help-only rule exactly instead of an absolute the operator of any website cannot honestly make.
The front page gets a new hearth
The landing page was rebuilt around its map, and the map itself now tells the truth twice over: the lights sit where America's people actually are, and the moving flames retrace the country's largest real moving patterns.
Improved / The home page is recomposed as a banner: the mainland map stretches the full card under the title, the two intro paragraphs read left to right beneath it, and the feature emblems flank the map three per side with bigger art.
New / The map's lights now mirror real population density — each light is one of the most populous US counties at its true position, sized by its Census ACS population count.
New / The traveling flames now follow America's largest real state-to-state moving flows from the Census migration tables — California to Texas, New York to Florida, and five more — each flying its flow's true direction.
Improved / The coastline is drawn as a crisp line instead of a soft band, a bright glint now travels the whole coast on a slow loop, and the lights no longer overlap each other or clip the border.
New / The intro now says what the Atlas is in its builder's own words: an RPG where achievements are real and tied to goals in your life.
New / One plain answer to "what's the catch?" sits under the county search: everything here is free, with no ads, linking to the page that explains why.
Improved / The whole opening card — title, map, paragraphs, emblems and search — now fits one screen on a typical monitor, so the search bar no longer hides below the fold.
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Eighteen sparse counties get real galleries
New /explore Eighteen counties whose photo strips were empty or nearly empty now open with hand-verified photographs — from Washington County, Maine (the easternmost lighthouse in the US) to Loving County, Texas (the least-populated county in America), Yakutat's Hubbard Glacier, the Nebraska Sandhills, and a Lake Chicot cypress swamp in Louisiana. A survey found these counties' freely licensed photos were being passed over on filename technicalities; each gallery now leads with photographs verified by eye, with full credits.
College Enrollment Rate was reading the wrong Census figure
Fixed /explore College Enrollment Rate was pulling a Census field for adults 25 and over with some college but no degree, not the share of 18-24 year-olds actually enrolled. That graded it backwards, scoring college towns like Ithaca, NY low and scoring counties with the fewest college graduates high. It now reads the correct Census figure, and a handful of counties with too few young adults to measure reliably show "—" instead of a noisy number.
Improved /explore The Higher Ed index was re-graded on top of the corrected enrollment figure, since it had been curved to match the old, wrong numbers.
Hand-picked photos lead the gallery
New /explore County photo strips can now open with photographs verified by a person, not just by text filters. Sacramento County is the first: the Cosumnes River Preserve, the State Capitol, the downtown riverwalk and Old Town Elk Grove now lead its gallery. Some of the best freely licensed photos never name their county in the filename, so the automated filters had to pass them over — hand-picking fixes that, county by county.
Fixed /explore Photo credits no longer go missing when a license name or photographer's name is short. "CC BY-SA 3.0" and similar attributions were being dropped by a length check meant for captions, so some photos showed no credit line at all.
A courtroom photo loses a seat in the gallery
Fixed Alameda County's photo strip no longer shows the back of a courtroom spectator's head. The photo's title named the courthouse and passed every text filter while the picture showed a person's scalp, so the photo pipeline now carries a rejection list for images the filters cannot judge from words alone.
Connecticut's health data returns
Fixed Connecticut's nine regions now show real health, safety and education measures instead of "—" across the board. The Census renamed Connecticut's geography in 2022 while the County Health Rankings still publish the old eight counties, so the two datasets stopped matching and the whole state went silent. The measures are now bridged from the old counties as population-weighted estimates, town by town, covering all 3.6 million residents.
Improved The Higher Ed index now grades on a curve drawn from the country itself. The old scale left a perfectly average county reading 19 out of 100, which looked near the bottom while sitting in the middle. The same data now spans the scale honestly, so a middle county reads like a middle county.
Improved /explore Two comparison panels wear better names. The cost table is now "Dollar for dollar" and the ranked bars are now "Live ranking", joining "Head-to-head" as plain names that say what each panel does.
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Doors out of every county, and the Training ladder gets drawn
New /explore Every county you study now offers four doors out: Zillow's rental search, homes for sale filtered around that county's own median, and job searches on Indeed and LinkedIn. Each opens the site's own search in a new tab, already aimed at your selected county, and the job doors carry your class's line of work once you have forged a character. The section wears a new Hearth Door emblem.
Improved /guild The Training panel's recommended credential sequence is now an actual wooden ladder: Foundation at the base, the capstone at the top, your character perched on the rung in front of you. Credentials you hold turn warm gold and catch a slow sweep of light.
Improved /guild The CPA card on Training now speaks to your own move. It reads your home county and target county and says what a state-issued license means for that journey, instead of showing preset information.
Fixed /guild Training no longer shows development leftovers: a study-tools block and pointers to files nobody browsing the site could open are gone.
Improved The School Segregation measure has left the compare table, the county panel and the metric count. A 0 to 1 research index was unreadable without its methodology, so it informed nobody; the K-12 index it feeds is still built from it behind the scenes.
Improved /journey Stretch goals are resting while we rework them into goals worth stretching for. The panel stays, core requirements are untouched and every goal you already cleared keeps its banked XP.
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The About page wears the house emblems
Improved /about The cards on the About page now carry the same emoji emblems their pages wear: the drachma and the loaf on the money panels, the herald's scroll on the Jobs Board, the house on the Housing Board, the merchant's balance on the Market, the crossed xiphoi on the Journey, the ladder on Training, and the guildhall on the Guild. Drawn large, so you can spot a surface by its symbol before you read its name.
Improved /about Two sections that told the same story, the dashboard's readings and the tour of what is built, are now one: each surface gets a single card with how it is used, and a footer line naming the dashboard reading it feeds.
Improved /about The section on the game framing has a clearer name: "Why life can be framed as a game".
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The adventure, in one sentence
New /about The About page carries the site's slogan now: your life, seen as the adventure it is. A new section unpacks it, with the quote from James Bridle's New Dark Age that inspired it and a few words on what re-enchanting a life of tasks and budgets means here.
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The front door says what the house holds
Improved / The home page now names what is inside, in one breath: pick a county and see what life there really costs, then line up the budget, the job, and the home to get you there. Four small marks point at the county rankings, the budget and runway tools, the county job search tool, and the rental and home listings, each wearing the same symbol you will find on its page.
Improved / The hearth-lit map took center stage: the title runs in one underlined line across the top on a wide screen, the map grew, and the county search sits beneath it with the live-data badge at its side. A new line tells the rest of the story: sale listings drafted for eBay and Facebook Marketplace, spending drawn month by month, and the certificates that level up your career.
Improved Cold Iron, the steel-blue palette, is the default look again. If you picked a theme yourself, your pick stays exactly as it was; only first-time visitors see the change.
Improved /journey Daily check-ins no longer pay XP. Your streak still counts, and every point you already earned stays banked; character level now measures the move itself, not attendance.
Improved /journey The Here-vs-There budget lines each wear a small symbol now: the house on Housing, a bolt, flame and water drop on Utilities, the shared loaf on Food & household, the car on Transport, and a cash stack on Insurance, Debt payments and Everything else.
Fixed /dashboard The dashboard's gauge cluster says INCOME and EXPENSES where it used to say IN and OUT, its dial legends spell out income and monthly expenses, the caption under the right dial reads simply CRUISING SPEED, and the money left each month is called Leftovers everywhere, glossary included.
Improved /journey The example character moved: she now lives in San Diego County, CA and is targeting Dodge County, MN, so the Here-vs-There comparison shows every line genuinely re-priced instead of a same-state wall of unchanged figures. Her example ledger moved with her, down to the grocery store.
New /guild The example character's ledger now runs from January 2020 to the current month, six and a half years, so you can see what the charts look like after real long-term use. Her dollar amounts are still invented example data, but their movement over those years is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own published price record, category by category: rent up about a third since early 2020, electricity up nearly half, car insurance up about half, and phone service the one line that fell. Pick a year above each chart for month-by-month detail, or All years to see the whole climb at a glance: one point per year, each point that year's average month, with the months behind it named on hover.
Improved /guild The Counting House's receipts record now previews each category as a single line: its symbol, its rank among your categories, a small line tracing every month's total, the first and latest monthly readings, and the count and sum of its lines. Open a category for its months, open a month for its lines — the wall of month rows is gone.
Improved /upgrade The free-and-why page now states the promise in full: the whole site can be used entirely free, with no adverts, today and for as long as it is online, with the simple economics that keep that true explained right below it. One promise was trimmed honestly: the page no longer rules out a donation button someday, though none exists and none is planned soon. Free and ad-free stand exactly as before.
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The Guild Hall takes its older name: the Megaron
Improved /guild The Guild Hall is now the Megaron, the great hall of the Mycenaean palaces built around a hearth that never went out. Same hall, same panels, same address; the glossary teaches the word and its history.
Improved /forums Forum posts now show for signed-in players; the boards and counts stay visible to everyone, with an invitation to sign in and read along.
New /about Chapter I of the About page now shows the receipt: the 2015 League of Legends Diamond V promotion screen, at its original resolution, under the paragraph about the climb it ended.
Improved /upgrade The free-and-why page now states the economics outright: the automated tools are tuned to break even, nothing optimizes for maximum profit, and there are no investors or debt behind the site. A long-term project, said in as many words.
Improved /upgrade The free-and-why page no longer quotes a per-scan price for the AI tools, and it stopped counting them: it now explains the process instead, since more document-reading tools keep arriving. A file you choose goes to an outside AI service, that service charges us for every read, and every such tool keeps a free path, so the whole site can be used entirely free.
Comparisons travel, the forge gets its winged boot, sign-up says why
New /explore A county comparison is now a link you can send. Pin counties and the address bar carries them; a Copy share link button sits beside the panel, and whoever opens the link sees the same counties pinned, scrolled to the comparison.
New /find The forge's big-life-goal question now wears the Talaria, the winged boot of the old myths, drawn in the site's own emoji style. The plain feather that held its place is retired.
Improved /explore The comparison bars' explanations no longer pop up on hover, where they clipped against the panel edge. Click a group of bars and a Data sourcing and reasoning block under the bars lays out the measured values, the ranking method, and the named source, with room to breathe.
Improved /explore The Cost breakdown table now leads the comparison: it sits first, above Head-to-head and the Living profile bars, so the quick dollars-first read comes before the fuller tables.
Improved /explore The Cost breakdown drops its Rent burden column: the rent dollar figure already carries that story, and the burden percentage still lives in the county profile and the Head-to-head table.
Improved /explore The Cost breakdown's column titles are bigger and easier to read, and each symbol now sits large beside its word. The utility columns gain their own symbols, drawn in the site's emoji style: Electricity carries the Keraunos, Zeus's thunderbolt; Gas carries Hestia's own hearth flame; Water & Sewer carries a drop of the Aegean; the two arithmetic columns carry a matched terracotta pair, a plump multiplier on the home Price ratio and a division mark on Childcare cost, each the operation in its own reading; and Rent carries a banded stack of dollar-green notes.
Fixed /explore The Cost breakdown table is fully aligned: every column is one shape with the centered title above its symbol, the County heading sits on the same line as the other titles, each reading centers under its column's symbol, and a county's state abbreviation now follows its name at the same spacing whether the name wraps or not. The County and Household income columns bracket the costs with matching vertical rules, and the Head-to-head table below draws the same vertical lines between the metric labels and each county.
Improved The create-account page now says what comes with an account: the AI scans switch on, your character and ledger become yours across devices, and your data stays private to you.
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AI scans join your account, and the posting board rests
Improved Auto Draft Listing, the receipt scan and the PDF statement import now ask for an account before they run, so every scan is counted to its own player and nobody else's. Manual listings, typed expenses and CSV imports are unchanged and never need one.
Improved /guild The Jobs Board's Posted work list is resting while its data source is upgraded to a government one. The four venue doors, the search they carry and the wage context all still work exactly as before.
Improved /find County cards no longer print a postings-nearby count while the posting source is being upgraded; it returns with the new source.
The county profile leads with what movers check first
Improved /explore A county's profile now opens with the essentials people research first: cost of living, jobs and income, and commute and daily life. The other four groups — health, environment, schools and community size — sit one press away behind a button that says exactly how many measures it holds and which groups they are. Nothing was removed; the full list is unchanged once opened.
Improved /explore Commute & Daily Life now sits above Health & Healthcare in the profile order.
Improved / The home page's five-metric source preview now shows Mean Commute Time in place of Injury Deaths. The injury measure is unchanged and still listed with its source in the full table — a mortality statistic just isn't the right greeting on the front page.
Improved / The screenshot showcase on the home page now sits in a hearth-amber frame with a soft glow, with a small flame beside its heading. It used to wear the same dark panel as everything around it and disappeared into the page; the product demo now reads as the one thing the hearth is lighting.
Fixed / The home-page screenshots no longer show mismatched dark bands around them. The five captures have five different shapes inside one frame, and the space around each now matches the screenshots' own canvas exactly, so each slide reads as one seamless surface.
Fixed / The home-page screenshots render sharper: some slides were being stretched up to 28% past their captured size, which blurred them next to the page's crisp text. A screenshot now never draws larger than the pixels it was captured with.
Improved / The fullscreen view of the home-page screenshots is retired for now. The slides themselves now show each capture at its full resolution, so the fullscreen button could only re-show the same pixels, blurrier.
Improved Guild Hall now sits before Journey in the top navigation, so the row reads in the order you actually use the site: explore, find your fit, meet your character in the hall, then work the journey.
Improved The one-line explanations under page titles are now at most two sentences: what the page shows, then what to do. Explore, Journey, Dashboard and Forums each carried a third sentence whose fact already lives on the page itself.
New You can now look inside every page without an account. Signed out, the Guild Hall, Journey and Dashboard show a sample character built from published medians instead of a sign-in wall, under a banner that says exactly that. Nothing you press in the example saves, and nothing from it can ever end up in a real account; sign in and the pages switch to your own record.
New /dashboard The dashboard's fuel dial now carries a dashed "there" marker: the months of cover your savings would buy at your target county's own costs, right beside the needle showing your cover where you live now. It fades in once the ignition sweep settles, and it only appears when a target county is chosen.
Improved / The home page now says what the site is in one plain sentence, no game words: work out where in America you could afford to live, and track your real progress getting there. A quiet line under the search also offers the example character to signed-out visitors, so looking around no longer requires finding it by accident.
New A Glossary page. Every game word on the site, from Character to Guild Hall to XP, mapped to the real thing it names in plain English. Linked in the footer of every page, right after About.
Population reads at a glance, top counties lie flat
Improved Population figures now abbreviate to three figures: 1.58M instead of 1,584,047, and 45.2K instead of 45,187. Counties under 10,000 people keep their exact count, where the precise number is the interesting fact. The tile's description spells out the convention.
Improved /explore The Top counties list moved from the sidebar to a horizontal strip at the bottom of the page, so the sidebar no longer towers over the map and leaves a blank column beside it. County names get more room, and picking one now jumps you back up to the map with that county selected.
Income says whose income it is
Improved The income tile on a county's profile is now labeled Household income instead of just Income. The figure was always the Census's median household income, meaning every earner under one roof combined, and the old label invited comparing it against one person's salary. The Find results row says household income now too.
Comparing counties got clearer
The compare section was rebuilt around a simple idea from studying the best cost-of-living tools: every number should say where it stands and how it was computed.
Improved /explore The Living profile is now ranked bars instead of the spider web. Each pinned county gets a bar per measure, sized by its rank against every US county that reports the measure, so longer always means better living. A measure a county does not report says "not measured" instead of drawing a misleading empty bar.
New /explore Hover or focus any bar in the Living profile and it explains itself: the measured value, how the rank is computed, which direction counts as better, and the source of the number.
New /explore A Cost breakdown table now sits under the head-to-head: home value, rent, the two affordability ratios, childcare, the three utility bills and median income, side by side for every pinned county, with a trophy on the best value in each column. There is no total column on purpose: these measures mix dollars, ratios and brackets, and a sum of them would be an invented number.
New /explore The county panel now opens with a quick answer: the value of whatever the map is colored by, the county's rank within its own state, and whether it sits above or below the state median, in one sentence before any tiles.
Improved /explore Hazard risk names its biggest threat right on the panel ("Largest hazard: Tornado"), income shows what it means per month, and rent is marked /mo so nobody mistakes it for a yearly figure.
New / The home page now shows the product itself: real screenshots of the ranked counties list, the money charts and the import flow, advancing on their own, with any frame clickable to view it full size. The data in them is invented test data, and the caption says so.
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Utility bills read as one clean number
Improved /explore The electricity, gas, and water & sewer tiles on a county's profile now show one approximate figure, like ~$125, instead of a dollar range that could break across two lines. The ~ is honest: the Census reports these as brackets, and the figure shown is the middle of the bracket the county's median billed household falls in. Each tile's description still spells out the bracket and the spread.
The county card stops clipping its score
Fixed /explore On the map's county panel, a long county name could push the "Beats N% of counties" score off the edge of the card, cutting it mid-word — and the Start journey and Compare buttons could poke past the edge the same way. Both now drop to their own line instead of clipping.
The hearth-lit hero
Improved / The home page now opens with the country itself: the mainland scattered with hearth-lights at real county positions, and small flames traveling between them, coast to coast. Pick a county in the search and its light flares into a gold star, exactly where that county really is.
The Hearth Mark: a star on your target county
New /journey Your journey page now carries a small map of the mainland US with a gold star sitting exactly where your target county is — the real place, positioned from the Census's own map data, not a decoration. Change your target and the star moves with it.
The landing page says less and shows more
Improved / The home page now leads with symbols instead of paragraphs: bigger emblems on the four step cards (Journey's new crossed swords among them), the Hestia seal standing large beside a single line, and shorter introductions everywhere. Nothing was deleted, the words just moved to where a curious reader goes looking.
New /about The About page now carries the full story of the name, the colony flame carried between hearths, along with a plain account of where every number comes from.
The About page tours what is built
New /about The About page has a new section: what is built so far, and how I actually use it. It walks the surfaces that exist today, from the Treasury and Provisions panels I open first each day to the Jobs and Housing boards I scout weekly, in the order of my own week rather than a feature list's.
The header fits the window again
Fixed Desktop windows between about 1280 and 1540 pixels wide were getting a horizontal scrollbar on every page — the six-tab nav row switched on at a width where it no longer fit after the site's text grew. The full tab row now appears only once it genuinely fits on one line; narrower windows get the same Menu dropdown phones use, and no window width scrolls sideways.
The Provisions loaf finds its one place
Improved /guild The Provisions panel's bread emblem now lives in the panel title alone, drawn larger there, and the reading beneath it is plain text. The same reading also says "reported expenses" and "reported income" everywhere it used to say "Out" and "In".
The nav lights up where you are
Improved The top navigation now marks your place with color: the tab for the page you are on shows its full-color emblem, and every other tab rests as quiet line art. Explore's chart, Find Your Fit's mosaic and the Guild Hall's gate all follow the rule.
New Journey, Dashboard and Forums each have their own hand-drawn emblem now: a pair of Greek swords at rest, a counting board mid-count, and the columned porch where the agora came to talk. The last generic icons have left the navigation.
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The rail's emblems get their color back
Fixed /guild On phones and narrow windows the Guild Hall's tab emblems were rendering as hollow gold outlines instead of their full-color selves — the Treasury coin, the Provisions loaf and their eight siblings. They now paint correctly at every screen size.
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The Guild Hall rail rides with you
Improved /guild On phone and tablet widths the Guild Hall's tab rail now pins beneath the site header as you scroll, Excel frozen-row style, with your current panel lit and its name printed under the row. No more forgetting which panel you are reading halfway down a long ledger. Desktop already kept the rail in view and is unchanged.
Improved /guild Every panel header now opens with its emblem beside the title. Provisions wears its loaf, and the Character sheet wears your own class portrait once your character is forged.
Fixed /guild Switching panels now starts you at the top of the new panel instead of wherever you had scrolled on the last one.
The Runway Sneaker
New The runway has its own emblem now: a sneaker in the loot filter's warm colors, wearing one hearth-gold wing at the heel. It marks the whole thread — the Runway Quiz that collects your figures, the runway card that compares them, and the dashboard line that cites them — so the same symbol walks you from where the numbers go in to where they come out.
Find your fit opens to everyone
New /find Find your fit no longer asks you to sign in first. Take the quiz, see every county ranked against your answers, and decide afterwards: a Create an account to save button appears once your character is forged, and signing up carries everything you entered into your new account.
Improved The sign-in panels on the pages that still need an account now mention that finding your fit works without one.
The dashboard says what lights it
Improved /dashboard The instrument cluster now states where its numbers come from, in both states. Before the Runway Quiz it says the gauges light once the quiz is complete; after it, it names the feed itself: the dials read your quiz answers, the odometer counts career XP, and SOLD counts your market stall. A link to the quiz rides along either way.
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The notice board, tuned
New /guild Glassdoor joined the notice board as a fourth door, for its salary transparency and company reviews. Its search opens with your line of work filled in; Glassdoor accepts no location by link, so the card says plainly to add your county on their page.
Improved /guild The notice board's doors moved above the posting list. The writ, then the doors you came to press, then the postings that inform them.
Fixed /find The county cards' posting counts now load for the whole top 25. Asking for all of them at once tripped the job source's rate limit, so only the first handful showed; the requests are paced now.
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Job counts on the county cards, and the top 25
The evening's second batch, born from actually using the site: the owner targeted his number 1 county and only learned at the Jobs Board that it held zero postings for his trade. Now the cards say so up front.
New /find Every recommended county card now shows how many postings for your line of work sit nearby, marked with the Jobs Board's scroll and drawn from the same weekly Adzuna reading the board itself uses. A zero prints as a zero, which is exactly the fact worth knowing before you set a target.
New /find A See the top 25 button under the county list expands your ranking from five cards to twenty-five, and the heading counts how many states the list spans. Back to the top 5 folds it again.
Fixed /find The county list now returns the moment your strongest match appears, ranked by the answers you just gave. Seeing county number four no longer requires leaving for the Guild Hall and walking back.
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The questionnaire, retold
A full pass through character forging, question by question, with the owner's own voice in the copy. The questionnaire asks less, says more, and wears the symbols of the pages your answers feed.
Improved /find Every life stage now reads as a rung of one ladder, in plain words. Ignition covers a start-up worth fighting for, Training Arc sends you off to the big leagues, and Stage IV knows what you fought for has bills now.
New /find The questionnaire opens with a new question in place of the old backstory screen. Name the big life goal that led you here, from a fresh start to starting a business, and each choice names the real data the atlas can put behind it. Your own words work too.
Improved /find Questions are now the headlines. The old section labels above them are gone, question text is bigger, answers are quieter, and the act you are in glows gold above the progress dots instead of a step count.
Improved /find The certifications screen opens with one yes-or-no question instead of the full credential ladder. Answer no and move on; answer yes and the ladder unfolds, led by your line of work.
Improved /find The two school questions became one. Elementary and high school always fed a single education preference, and the questionnaire now says so honestly by asking once.
Improved /find The money questions speak plainly. The trade screen asks which mix of income and housing costs fits where you are right now, and its four answers describe real county patterns, including the owner's personal favorite, the exceptions where housing stays cheap while income runs high.
Improved /find The health and disaster questions ask what you actually weigh. Health asks how much you care that the people around you live long and feel healthy; disaster risk asks about the ground under you and answers in loss-tolerance terms.
Improved /find The rent question is simpler and more flexible at once. Two presets split at $1,500, a custom field takes your exact cap, and the title says plainly that it filters rent while home buying gets its own treatment soon.
New /find Questions that set sliders now wear the emblem of the slider they set, drawn in the site's emoji style. A glossy heart for health, a tornado for disaster risk, the gold drachma for your finances, the university dome for schools, a plain warm house for community size, and a dark-blue muscle car for the commute. The same symbols mark the sliders on Find Your Fit, so what you answered is what you recognize.
Improved /guild The Housing Board now wears the plain house too, on its tab and its header, so the home question, the Community size filter, and the board where homes are found all share one roof.
New /find Three new classes joined the roster. Steward of the Land now walks the conservation path from volunteer to fire chief with a new ranger figure, the Homesteader carries the farm with the straw hat and overalls, and the Knight guards the security path from guard to federal agent with a fresh helm and shield. Steward and Knight show no income estimate yet; their wage series arrive with the next data refresh, and a blank beats a borrowed number.
Improved /find Every class card now shows a three-step career ladder, entry to endgame, like Bookkeeper, auditor, firm partner. The Artisan Engineer answers to Digital Engineer now.
Improved /find County matches step aside while the questionnaire is open, replaced by one line saying they return when you finish. No more spoiled reveals, and no answering to steer toward a county you already fancied.
Improved Desktop text is larger across the whole site. The size the owner ran at 125% zoom is now simply how the site renders, so 100% zoom reads right.
Fixed /guild The Guild Hall's side rail scrolls on its own when it grows taller than your window. Reaching the Housing Board tab no longer requires riding the page to the bottom.
Fixed /find The Back button no longer appears on the questionnaire's first screen, and a retrain now says up front that your current answers are already filled in.
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The chart and the tessera
New /explore Explore has its own emblem: the Surveyor's Chart — a parchment map, deliberately blank, with a golden compass rose in its corner. Blank because your counties are not drawn until you have explored them. It sits at the top of the map page, on the homepage's Step 1 card, and as an inked glyph beside Explore in the site menu.
New /find Find Your Fit has its emblem too: the Fitting Tile — a small stone mosaic with its last corner empty, and one golden tessera tilted mid-air above the gap. The tile is you; the gap is the county shaped like you. It heads the questionnaire page, the homepage's Step 2 card, and the site menu.
Improved The homepage's "Meet your character" card now wears the same gatehouse-and-pennant symbol as the Guild Hall's menu entry, so the card and the door it opens finally match.
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The hall raises its banner
Improved The Guild Hall's entry in the site menu now wears a gatehouse with an emerald pennant flying — the front door to the newly emblazoned hall. Step through and every panel inside has its own symbol waiting.
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The Treasury mints its coin
New /guild The Treasury has its own emblem: a golden coin stack with a drachma struck with Hestia's flame, the way ancient Greek coins carried their city's mark. It heads the Treasury panel and colors the Treasury tab in the Guild Hall rail.
New /guild The Jobs Board has its emblem too: a herald's scroll — papyrus held open between two rolls, bordered with the Greek key pattern — heading the panel and coloring its tab in the rail.
New /guild The Market's emblem is a merchant's balance — the tipped bronze scale every agora vendor traded over — heading the panel and coloring its tab in the rail.
New /guild The Market now states its other half: a reserved "What you're saving toward" section at the panel's foot, naming what the buying side will hold and the rules it will be built under. Nothing is recorded there yet, and it says so plainly. The panel's caption now reads "what you're saving up to buy" to match.
New /guild The Housing Board's emblem is an oikos — the ancient Greek courtyard house: three wings around a small open court, a flagstone floor, and a stone well at its heart. It heads the panel and colors its tab in the rail.
New /guild The Guild panel's emblem is a guildhall — red sandstone, a steep gable with a rose window, and a clock tower under a green copper spire — heading the panel and coloring its tab in the rail.
New /guild The University panel's emblem is a great domed library — gold finial, lantern, silver dome, and a honey-stone colonnade — coloring its tab in the rail. The panel itself is still reserved, and still says so.
New /guild The Training panel's emblem is a wooden ladder, leaning the way a real one stands. The Guild hall shows your rung; the ladder is the climb — the two tabs now say it as a pair.
New /guild The Character tab in the Guild Hall rail now wears your own class's headshot once your character is forged — the one tab that is literally you, and it changes the moment your class does. Before a character is forged it keeps the neutral figure.
New /guild The Diary's emblem is an open manuscript: leather boards, vellum pages, the scribe's red initial and brown ink on the right page — and the left page blank, because the diary records what you have actually done and the rest is not written yet. With it, every tab in the Guild Hall rail now wears its own symbol.
Improved /guild The Provisions tab in the Guild Hall rail now wears the shared loaf in full color, matching the panel it opens. More panel emblems are on the way.
Improved The ledger now says "reported income" and "reported expenses" everywhere it used to say "In" and "Out" — the Treasury, the Provisions panel, and the dashboard's ledger reading all use the same plain words.
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The XP ledger learns to fold
Improved /guild Recent XP on the character sheet now opens with a colored bar showing where your XP came from (quests, savings, county surveys, check-ins) and your three newest awards, with one line naming how many earlier awards are folded and their combined XP. One press opens the whole ledger; nothing is hidden, it just takes up less room.
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Utility bills join the cost panel
New /explore Every county's cost panel now shows three utility readings from the Census: the electricity, gas, and water & sewer cost bracket of the county's middle billed household. Brackets, not averages, on purpose: bills swing with home size, climate and thermostat habits, so the site tells you what residents actually pay and never pretends to quote your bill. Gas counts only homes with gas service, and water & sewer is a yearly figure, marked as such.
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The cluster gets its ignition sweep
New /dashboard The two main gauges now do a startup sweep when the dashboard loads: both needles swing from empty to full together, hold a beat, then settle on your true reading, the same ignition ritual a real car's cluster performs. If your system asks for reduced motion, the needles simply start at rest.
Improved /dashboard The small flame that flickered on each gauge needle's pivot has been set aside for now. The compass flame in the site's header still burns.
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The receipt joins the card
Improved /guild A hand-drawn receipt emoji joins the card: cream paper, a torn hem, dashes for print and an amber total line. It sits beside the Scan a receipt button and on the receipts record; the card emoji likewise now rides beside the Import a statement button.
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The card gets its emoji
Improved /guild The statements record is now titled Card statements, and a hand-drawn credit-card emoji sits beside it: an emerald card with an amber chip, in the same style as the Provisions loaf. Its number line is dashes, never digits.
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One record room
Improved /guild The Counting House now holds the whole record: one cumulative line stating every source together (statements, scanned receipts, typed lines, with the grand total), then the statements record and the receipts-and-typed record beneath it, each with its own fold and year windows. The list that used to sit at the foot of the page moved up with everything else.
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The receipts speak in one line each
Improved /guild What the receipts say now opens as one line per category: your estimate, the actual, and how many receipts and days stand behind it. Open the full view to adjust an estimate; the box and its guidance live there.
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Typed lines learn to fold
Improved /guild The receipts-and-typed-lines record now opens as one bar showing where the money went by category, with a single line stating how many entries it holds and their total. Open it and you get calendar-year windows, categories largest first, and a subtotal per month; a month only shows its individual lines when you tap it. A year of monthly rent and car payments no longer scrolls for ten pages.
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Statements come home to the Counting House
Improved /guild Imported statements now live inside The Counting House, where they are created, instead of at the foot of the page. The record opens on its three most recent, with one line stating how many earlier ones are folded and their combined total; open the whole record and the calendar-year toggle appears. Eighteen months of statements no longer make the page a hike.
Improved /guild The list below the receipts is now exactly what its new name says: receipts and typed lines. Statements keep their own record upstairs.
Fixed /guild The monthly PDF counter could read nonsense like 15 of 5 while the housewarming gift was active, because gifted readings were wrongly counted against a limit they do not touch. Gifted readings are now marked as such, and the counter stays out of sight until the gift is spent.
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A year at a time
New /guild The month charts on Provisions and in the Treasury now carry a calendar-year toggle once your record spans more than one year: each year on its own scale, or all years at once. It appears on its own the day your record earns it.
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Statement review reads on a phone, and re-uploads get caught
Fixed /guild On a phone, the statement review rows were nearly unreadable: the description crushed to a sliver and its label printed across the amount's. Each row now takes two clean lines on a narrow screen, description on the first, amount and category on the second.
New /guild The Counting House now recognises a statement file you already imported, by its exact contents, and asks before reading it again. A twelve-statement sitting can no longer spend a reading on a double-click. One press reads it again anyway if you mean it.
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The gift covers the whole household
Improved /guild The housewarming gift now covers your first full year of PDF statements however many cards or banks it takes, not a fixed count. The chooser still asks how your bank hands you the year, because monthly statements read best, but your answer guides rather than limits. A quiet per-household safeguard stands behind it.
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A housewarming gift
New /guild A housewarming gift for the first 100 households to move in: your first year of PDF statement readings is on the house. The Counting House asks how your bank hands you the year, twelve monthly statements or one year-end summary, and sizes the gift to your answer. It never expires, and it never counts against the monthly limit.
Improved /guild CSV statement imports no longer count against the monthly limit at all. They are read entirely on your device at no cost, so the limit had no business counting them. CSV if your bank offers it; a PDF works too. The counter now says plainly that it counts PDFs.
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The leftover chart gets its scale
Improved /guild The Provisions chart now carries a dollar scale on its left edge with gridlines to match. The scale picks its own unit from your numbers, hundreds through thousands and beyond, and the chart states your In in USD.
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The month in progress, and what a statement covers
New /guild The Provisions chart now shows the current month as a hollow, dashed bar with the word so far: its In is counted in full and its Out is still arriving, so it draws provisionally and never joins a comparison until the month is over.
Improved /guild Each imported statement in the Treasury now says covers before its date range. An August statement that covers Jul 1 to Aug 3 is named the way your card app names it, and now says plainly which days it actually holds. Every row always landed on its own transaction date; only the name needed to stop misleading.
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Provisions: the loaf on the table
New /guild The Guild Hall has a Provisions panel, under the Treasury: how long your stores would carry you (your savings against your monthly Out, spoken as time) and your leftover month by month, priced from the statements you imported. A month that kept money rises in green; a month that spent more than it took in hangs quietly below the line as a fact, never an alarm. Nothing here is a score, and nothing here is advice.
New /guild The panel wears the site's first hand-made emoji: a braided Greek loaf, half sliced, drawn from a real tsoureki. Splitting bread at the hearth is the whole idea of the page.
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No NSFW, simply put
Improved /privacy The privacy page's family-friendly section now says it plainly: there will never be NSFW content on this site. The age talk and the video-game rating comparison are gone.
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Ascendancies, less text, and a lighter touch on your IP
New /guild You can now choose your ascendancy on the Guild panel: your specialisation within your line of work. It aims your Jobs Board search and nothing else. No XP, no scoring.
Improved /guild The Guild, Treasury and Market panels carry far less text. The numbers and states stay printed; the standing explanations now sit on hover, on the exact line each one explains.
Improved /guild The Treasury now reads plainly: In, Out, and the cash Leftover each month.
Improved Photo-scan limits no longer keep your IP address. The server scrambles it into a one-way fingerprint the moment a scan arrives, counts with that for up to an hour, and forgets it; the fingerprint cannot be turned back into your address and changes every day. The privacy page explains the whole mechanism.
Improved /privacy The privacy page now states the content standard outright: Hestia's Atlas is a family-friendly place, nothing gory, violent, sexually explicit, destructive or illegal, closer to a Teen rating than a Mature one, and not directed at children under 13.
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The Housing Board opens its doors
New /guild The Guild Hall has a Housing Board, right below the Jobs Board: your target county's median home price and median rent from the Census, and three doors that open the listing sites' own searches for that county in a new tab — Zillow rentals, and homes for sale on Zillow and Realtor.com filtered to a price band drawn around the county's own median.
Improved /guild On narrow phones the Guild Hall's tab row now wraps to a second short row rather than squeezing nine squares into one line. Every tab keeps its full touch size.
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The board hangs beside the Market
Improved /guild The Jobs Board moved up the Guild Hall's rail to sit directly below the Market: the place you sell and the place you seek work now hang side by side.
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Real postings on the board
New /guild The Jobs Board now shows real postings: up to fifty openings for your line of work near your target county, drawn from Adzuna and refreshed weekly. Each card carries the posting's own title, employer, location, posted pay and date, and links to the posting itself.
New /guild Postings wear loot tiers you can check: a red "rare find" sits in your target county with posted pay at or above your line's median, orange means in your county, blue means nearby. A star marks the board's top drop. No stated pay never counts as passing pay.
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The Jobs Board opens
New /guild The Guild Hall's Jobs Board is open. Your class becomes a real job search aimed at your target county, with three doors — Indeed, LinkedIn and USAJOBS — each showing exactly what it will be asked before you press it, and each opening in a new tab so the hall stays where you left it. Beside them, the posted wage median for your line of work in your target's state, straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Quests fold, badges let go
Improved /journey The stretch-goals card now opens on what is still outstanding, with your cleared goals compressed to one summary line. One press unfolds the full list, completed goals under their own heading. Core requirements never fold.
Improved /guild Recorded credential badges now carry a small remove control, so a mis-tick costs one click to undo instead of a hunt through the open ladder. Removing a badge claws back nothing you earned.
New The site now sends standard browser security headers: it can no longer be embedded in another site's frame, and a content-security policy is watching in report-only mode before it starts enforcing.
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Your account, yours to close
New /account You can now delete your account yourself, from the bottom of the settings page. It asks for your password, states exactly what it removes and what it keeps, and takes effect immediately. The email route still works if you would rather ask a person.
Improved /account Download my data now covers everything your account holds when you are signed in: your character, the account's synced copy, your forum posts and replies, and your scan-usage rows, as one JSON file made in your browser. Signed out it keeps writing your local character, exactly as before.
Improved /privacy The privacy page's "Your controls" section now describes both of the above instead of promising them.
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11 new15 improved3 fixed
Statements find their months, and the compass carries the flame
Improved /guild Imported card statements now name themselves by the month they closed in: "June 2026 statement" instead of "Card statement". The record orders them by that month, newest at the top, however you uploaded them, and each header says how many days it covers.
New /guild "How the months compare" is now a real chart: one colored line per spending category, months across the bottom, all on the same dollar scale. A month with nothing imported breaks the line rather than pretending $0, and the current month draws dashed with a hollow point because it isn't over. Hold or tap any point for that month's exact figure.
Improved /guild The Treasury no longer ends on a "Not built yet" card promising a financial-rules reference. It's gone, not postponed.
Improved The landing page's metrics table now leads with the five metrics the map leads with, and one button opens all 41. The page is a full screen shorter.
Improved /find Find your fit shows your top 5 counties instead of 10. Every county is still ranked:, you just see the best of the best.
Improved The compass in the corner was redrawn as an instrument: a graduated dial ring like an old cockpit gauge, a north arrow, and the carried flame riding where the needle points, now glowing in a slow swell, because getting somewhere is a slow burn, not an overnight story.
Carry the Atlas in your pocket
New The site can now be installed as an app. On an Android phone, open the browser menu and choose "Add to Home Screen"; on a computer, Chrome shows an install icon in the address bar. It opens full-screen with the seal as its icon, and it is the same live site — no separate download, always current.
Improved On phones and tablets the six main pages now live in a Menu dropdown beside the compass, so the header takes one slim line instead of two tall rows of tabs. Every page keeps its name and icon inside the menu, and the page you are on is highlighted. Full-size desktop windows keep the tab row exactly as before.
Fixed A desktop window dragged narrow now switches to the same Menu dropdown instead of wrapping the header awkwardly onto two lines.
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Wear your character on the forums
New /forums Posts and replies now carry their author's flair: career level and title, class, schooling, and certification count, snapshotted from your character at the moment you post. Each flair catches a passing light. An unforged character posts bare, and posts from before today stay as they were.
New /forums Moderators wear a Keeper · Dev mark on every post and reply, drawn live from the moderation roster.
New /forums A seller's milestone joins the flair set: 100+, 1k+ and 10k+ real items sold, in rising rank colors. Giveaways stay counted separately, the marketplace's own rule. Nobody wears it yet; the first hundredth sale will.
The hearth gets a keeper
New /forums Moderators can now remove posts and replies that break the hearth's rules, and the small print at the foot of the page says so. Like every other forum rule, the power is enforced by the database, not by the page.
The Treasury learns to read its own months
New The site now has a Privacy page and a Terms page, both written from how the site actually works: figures you type stay in your browser, an account stores only what sync needs, and nothing is collected or sold. Linked from the footer.
New /guild The Treasury now shows trends per category: each budget line's spending month by month, drawn from your imported statements and receipts. The largest three categories are ranked, every up/down reading compares the same two full months, and a month you never imported reads as missing rather than as $0.
Improved /guild The Counting House moved to the top of the Treasury, directly under your ledger, so importing a statement is the first door you reach instead of the last.
Improved Forest — the deep green palette — is now the site's default look. Ember and Cold Iron are still one tap away in the theme picker, and a theme you already chose stays chosen.
Improved The mark beside the site's name is now a compass rose, the emblem from the corner of a map's legend, with its north needle in the flame's amber. It replaces the star globe. Find Your Fit's tab icon became priority sliders at the same time, so the compass shape means exactly one thing in the header.
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Threads answer back
New /forums Every forum post now has a Reply button. Replies sit under their post in conversation order, carry their author's name like any post, and you can delete your own. A deleted post takes its replies with it, and the page says so.
Improved /account Account email now arrives from hearth@hestiasatlas.com, reliably. Sign-up asks you to confirm your email again, because the confirmation can actually reach you now, and password reset works end to end.
Shared links now look like the site
New A link to this site pasted into Discord, iMessage, Reddit or anywhere else now unfurls into a proper card: the seal, the name, and what the site does. It used to render as a bare blue URL.
Improved The map, Find your fit and the forums each carry their own page title and description now, so a shared link to any of them says what that page is instead of repeating the site name.
No plans, no prices: the site says it is free
The Plans page and the Upgrade button are gone. Hestia's Atlas is free, and the site now says so plainly instead of publishing a price list for a checkout that never opened.
Improved /upgrade The Plans page became a plain statement of what this site costs you: nothing. It names the one feature that costs us money per use (the photo scanners), says that we pay it, and promises that any change to that will be announced here first.
Improved The Upgrade button left the top navigation. A site with nothing for sale should not carry a sales button on every page. The page it pointed to is still reachable from the footer, relabelled Why it's free.
A permanent address, and a site you can actually read
Hestia's Atlas has its own domain now, renders a size larger everywhere, and says the same things in fewer words.
New The site has a permanent home at hestiasatlas.com. The old address still works, so every link you have saved keeps resolving.
Improved Everything renders a size larger by default. The navigation bar was the worst of it: legible only if you reached for the browser's zoom, and that is no longer the price of reading it.
Improved The writing across the site is more direct. Sentences that leaned on long dashes are now shorter ones that say the same thing, from the landing copy to the quest captions to the tooltips on the dials.
Fixed /account A new account works the moment you create it. Sign-up previously waited on a confirmation email that could arrive slowly, or not at all.
Fixed / Two words ran together in the name story on the landing page, which read as “Atlasholds the sphere”.
6 new6 improved2 fixed
The dashboard gets an instrument cluster
The dashboard now opens on a car-style gauge binnacle — an initial version, and every instrument keeps the promise its automotive twin makes. More will land here later.
New /dashboard A fuel gauge shows your runway — months you can cover where you live now, on a stated 0–12 month face. If your runway outruns the face, the needle pins and the printed figure keeps telling the truth.
New /dashboard A speedometer shows what your cash leaves each month — the dial runs from zero to your own income, so full is your number, not an invented one.
New /dashboard An odometer rolls your career XP — like a real one it only ever counts up — with your level lit on a 1–6 gear strip beneath it.
New /dashboard Hestia's flame rides each needle's pivot, gently flickering — carried, never extinguished, even sitting still.
New /dashboard The main gauge readouts wear their dial's color and catch a passing light, left dial then right.
Improved /dashboard The speed dial's caption now says what it measures in plain terms: cash minus budgeted expenses.
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The Guild steps ahead of Training
Improved /guild The Guild tab now sits before Training in the Guild Hall: where you stand on your ladder comes before the exam that climbs it.
Measured injury deaths replace the modeled safety score
The old Safety Estimate was inferred from income and education, not measured — the last invented number on the map. It is gone, replaced by measured injury mortality, and six more measured county figures joined it: childcare cost and availability, broadband, food insecurity, and 3rd-grade reading and math scores.
Improved /explore The Safety Estimate — a modeled 0–100 score with verdict words like “Very safe” — has been retired. In its place the county panel shows Injury Deaths: deaths from accidents and violence per 100,000 people, measured by the CDC and averaged over five years. Counties without the measurement show a dash instead of a guess. It is mortality data, not a crime rate, and the panel says so.
New /explore Six new measured county figures: child care cost burden (share of income childcare takes for two children), child care centers per 1,000 children, broadband access, food insecurity, and 3rd-grade reading and math scores. All come from County Health Rankings with their underlying source named on the panel. None of them changes any county's fit score — they are for reading, not ranking.
Improved /explore The head-to-head compare chart's Safety spoke now ranks counties by measured injury deaths instead of the modeled estimate.
Fixed /explore The compare chart's Housing spoke ranked counties by raw home price, which pinned every big metro at the worst end no matter what people there earn. It now uses home price relative to income, the same affordability measure the fit score uses.
Fixed /explore The compare chart plotted a county with no reading for a measure — air quality is only monitored in about a third of counties — as if it had scored worst in the nation. A missing measure now leaves a gap in the shape, and the chart says so.
Improved /explore County photographs on desktop are twice the size — three per row instead of six postage stamps across the map card — and up to nine now show instead of six. The map card also ends at its content instead of stretching an empty box to match the stats column beside it.
The Treasury moves in next to your character
Improved /guild The Treasury tab now sits right after Character in the Guild Hall, instead of at the far end of the row among the panels that aren't built yet. Your ledger lives next to the sheet whose savings it explains.
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The listing drafter speaks eBay
The Market's drafter wrote Facebook Marketplace listings; now it writes eBay listings too, and you can type a draft by hand for either venue. Nothing is posted anywhere — the drafter still only writes text for you to review and paste.
New /guild A Facebook / eBay switch in the listing drafter. An eBay draft comes out in the order eBay's own form asks for it — title, category, condition, item specifics, description, price — with copy buttons for each part and a button that opens eBay's sell flow with your title already filled in.
New /guild A “Type it in” mode in the drafter: write the draft yourself — no photo, no scan spent — and get the same review card and copy buttons either way. The floor price you would quietly accept stays in the for-you box; on eBay it maps to Best Offer's private minimum, which buyers never see.
Your forged character stays forged
Fixed /find Find Your Fit no longer reopens the questionnaire for a player who already finished it. If your character is forged you get your rankings, with a Retrain button when you want to answer again — the quiz only auto-opens when there is no character yet.
Fixed A device that had never seen your character could silently erase your class and questionnaire answers from your account when it synced, while your XP survived. Syncing now never lets a device without a character overwrite one that exists.
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Hestia joins the home page
New / The section explaining the site's name now has a picture beside it: Hestia veiled, carrying the hearth flame in a bowl, standing before the Atlas sphere. On a phone it sits below the story instead of beside it.
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Choose your hearth: three color themes
The site now dresses in one of three dark themes, and you pick which. Ember — a warm hearth-glow — is the new default, so the whole site is warmer today even if you never touch the picker.
New A color-theme picker lives in the top bar (the palette icon, next to Upgrade): Ember, warm hearth-glow; Cold Iron, steel blue-gray; Forest, deep canopy green. Your pick is remembered on this device and applies to every page.
Improved Ember replaces the old blue-gray as the site's default look. The greens, the XP amber, and the 1st/2nd/3rd rank colors are identical in every theme — a theme changes the room, never the meaning of a color.
Improved The top bar's subtitle now reads "Between Hearths" — shortened to make room for the picker without crowding the row.
The way in is easier to see
A pass over the doors into the site: the steps that need an account now say so before you click, the sign-in and sign-up cards carry the button you actually came to press, and one line of copy that had quietly stopped being true has been corrected.
New The "How it works" steps that need an account — Find your fit, Meet your character, Level up — now carry an "Account needed" marker on the home page, so you find that out before you click rather than after.
Improved The sign-in and create-account cards, and the panel that asks you to sign in, have been repainted: a warmer frame and a single clearly-lit button for the thing that page is for. On the sign-in page that is Sign in; on the panel asking you to join, it is Create an account.
Fixed /account/sign-up The create-account card used to say "everything keeps working without an account". That stopped being true when your character, journey, ledger and dashboard moved behind sign-in, so it now says what is actually open — the map, to everyone — and what an account unlocks.
Fixed /explore County photograph captions no longer print raw archive cataloging. Some captions arrived as "Collection : … Accession Number: … Title :" and were cut mid-record, leaving a dangling label; they now read as a sentence, and a caption that turns out to be nothing but catalog metadata falls back to the picture's own name.
Improved The home page's figures are three tiles instead of four. The fourth counted counties with an income reading, which was the same number as the county count — a second copy of a figure already on screen.
A statement is one card now — and a scrub fix
Two fixes from the first real statement import. Forty lines made the Treasury a very long page, and two merchant descriptions kept digits they should never have kept.
Fixed /guild Phone numbers and long account-style digit runs in imported merchant descriptions are now masked, alongside card numbers. This also cleans up rows you already imported — they are re-checked the next time the page loads, so nothing needs re-importing. Short store numbers stay, because they are how you recognize the shop.
Improved /guild An imported statement is now a single entry in your spending record: its dates, its line count, its total, and one bar showing where the money went by category. "Show all 40 lines" opens every row, editable exactly as before. Forty lines no longer turn the page into a scrollbar.
Improved /guild The import draft groups rows by category, biggest group first, with a count and subtotal on each. Payments, refunds and possible duplicates fold behind one line that names how many there are and what they add up to.
8586243
5 new6 improved
The Counting House opens in the Treasury
The Treasury's record has taken receipts one photo at a time. It now takes a whole card statement at once: upload the PDF or the CSV export, check the rows it reads, and enter them with categories already filled in.
New /guild The Counting House, a new Treasury card: import a credit-card statement as PDF or CSV and its transactions become draft rows — dated, priced and filed into your eight budget categories — that you check and correct before anything is saved. Up to 5 statements a month.
New /guild The draft opens with one bar showing where the statement's money went by category, top three marked 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Payments to the card, refunds and likely duplicates of rows you already recorded are set aside with the reason printed — one tap brings any of them back.
Improved /guild Rows in the spending record now say where they came from — scanned, typed, or from a statement. The statement itself is read and discarded: never stored, and card numbers are never transcribed.
60f3484
Atlas Vita is now Hestia's Atlas
When a Greek city founded a colony, the settlers carried fire from the mother city's hearth — Hestia's flame — and used it to light the first hearth of the new home. That is what this site is for, so it now carries her name. Your data, your character and your progress are untouched: this is the same app wearing a truer name.
Improved The site is renamed Hestia's Atlas, everywhere a name appears: the header, the browser tab, and every page that said Atlas Vita. Older patch notes below keep the old name, because they describe the site as it was on the day they shipped.
New / The home page now tells the story behind the name — the colonists' fire, Atlas holding the sphere, and why progress here glows amber.
Improved The line under the logo reads "The Map Between Hearths" instead of "Living Map".
New /forums The forums now open with the house stance, right above the composer: this is a hearth talk. The wider internet has plenty of places for pile-ons and dunks — this is not one of them.
New /about A new section tells the story behind the name: the goddess every Greek home honored first and knows least today, why an unnamed goal and a forgotten goddess are the same shape, and the Statue of Liberty lines that read like her.
2e8b295
The nav gets lighter, and the journey moves up
Seven tabs was a lot to hand someone on their first visit. Patch Notes has stepped down to a link at the bottom of every page, and the remaining six read left to right in the order you actually use them.
Improved Patch Notes left the top navigation for the footer, next to About and Plans. Nothing was removed — this page is now reachable from the bottom of every page on the site.
Improved Journey now comes before Guild Hall in the navigation: work the plan, then visit the hall where what you earned is kept.
Improved On a narrow phone the tabs are wider and the header is a little shorter, because six tabs share the row where seven used to.
2e8b295
13 new8 improved6 fixed
Patch notes fold up, and Chapter I gains a number that was earned
This page was on its way to becoming one long scroll. It is now grouped by the day work shipped, with only the newest day open — and every folded day still says exactly how much is inside it, so nothing is hidden except the wording.
Improved /patch-notes Updates are grouped by the day they shipped. The newest day is open; older days fold into a single row showing the date and a count of each kind, so you can see what a day contained before deciding to open it.
New /about Chapter I now carries the clearest evidence for the idea this whole site rests on: a League of Legends Diamond climb in 2015, 656 ranked games. Nobody hands you that and you cannot buy it — which is the same standard every number in this app is held to.
The listing drafter now matches Facebook's form, field for field
If you sell something to fund the move, the slowest part is writing the listing. Point the drafter at a photo and it comes back with the five things Facebook actually asks for, in the order Facebook asks for them — so transferring it is going down one list while you go down the other.
Improved /guild The draft now lays out Title, Price, Category, Condition and Description in exactly that order, numbered 1 to 5, because that is the order the real Create-listing form asks for them. Category and Condition used to be the other way round.
New /guild Your floor price, and the reasoning behind the asking price, are now fenced off in a block marked "For you — do not post". They have no copy button, on purpose: the floor is the lowest you would take, and publishing it hands that to the buyer.
New /guild Copy buttons on Price and Category as well as Title and Description. The price copies as a bare number because Facebook's price field rejects a dollar sign.
Improved /guild The photo drafter is now called Auto Draft Listing and sits at the top of your Inventory instead of buried under the manual form. It was genuinely hard to find.
Fixed Condition now reads "Used - Like New" with a plain hyphen, which is how Facebook spells it. We had been using a dash that matched nothing in their dropdown.
What you actually spent, and a door on the pages that hold your money
Two halves of the same idea. The Treasury can now hold what you really spent, line by line, so the budget above it stops being a guess — and every page that holds your own figures now asks you to sign in first, so none of it is ever left sitting in a browser you walked away from.
New /guild A spending record under the Treasury's ledger. Add what you actually spent, line by line, each with a category — and re-file any line into a different category whenever you want.
New /guild Each category shows what your receipts actually say next to what you estimated — with the number of receipts and the days they cover printed beside it, because a fortnight and a full month are different claims. The figure is offered in a box you can edit before you save it: it is your estimate, not ours.
New /guild We stay quiet rather than guess. A category needs at least 14 days and 3 receipts before we will suggest a monthly figure at all — but you can always enter your own, whatever the coverage.
New Find Your Fit, the Guild Hall, Your journey and the Dashboard now require an account. Explore, the forums, the patch notes and the about page stay open to everyone — the difference is whether the page holds anything you told us.
Improved Signing out now clears your data from that browser. It reaches your account first, so signing back in brings everything with you. This reverses the old promise that signing out left your data on the device — that was fine when there were no accounts, and wrong on a shared computer once there were.
Fixed Data left in a browser can no longer end up in someone else's account. Your profile is now marked with whose it is, and a mismatch is discarded rather than merged in when the next person signs in.
The Guild Hall becomes a guild hall — and the dashboard is real
A guild hall has always had four things under one roof: a market, a training floor, a jobs board, and a treasury that keeps your ledger. Now this one does too. The Market left the top of the screen and moved inside, Contracts is called what it actually is, and the Treasury stopped being a promise. The tab the Market vacated went to the dashboard — which, as of today, exists.
New /dashboard The dashboard is live: five readings on one screen — how many months your savings cover here and in the county you are aiming at, what comes in against what goes out, the schooling and certifications behind you, the next part in front of you, and what you have sold. It reads only. Nothing on it can be edited, and nothing on it earns XP.
New /guild The Treasury is your ledger. Report what comes in and what goes out and it keeps the running record, including what that leaves you each month. Saving it earns nothing — reporting a number you already knew is not an achievement.
Improved /guild The Market is now a Guild Hall tab, sitting second between Character and Training instead of at the top of every page. Nothing about your listings changed — same ledger, same milestones, same XP. Old marketplace links still work.
Improved /guild Contracts is now the Jobs Board, which is the real thing it mirrors. Still empty — it is waiting on real job postings, and it will cite whoever posted them.
Fixed /guild The Guild Hall's tab squares shrank slightly on phones so all eight fit on one row. At the old size the eighth would have wrapped to a second line on a 360px screen.
Saying the actual plan out loud: a dashboard for your life
The About page used to argue what this app is not — not a checklist. It now says what it is being built into: one screen holding the readings that decide whether you get where you are going. Nothing on that list is finished, and the page says so in as many words.
Improved /about A new section naming the five readings the dashboard is being built to show — runway here versus there, expenses against income, degrees and certifications earned, your next step in a certification, and what you have actually sold.
New /about A fifth promise: your runway will get shorter when rent rises or income drops, and the app will say so plainly. It will never treat that as a failure — nothing earned is taken away, nothing expires, and there is no streak to break.
An About page, and a header that stops breaking on laptops
Atlas Vita is built by one person, and until now the site never said so. There is an About page telling that story — and building it turned up a header bug that had been shipping on every route.
New /about An About page: how a solo developer making a cross-country move ended up building a relocation app shaped like an RPG, and the four design rules it holds itself to.
New An About link beside the Atlas Vita wordmark, at the top of every page.
Fixed The header used to leave the Sign in button stranded alone on a second row at browser widths between 1024 and 1103 pixels — a common half-screen or small-laptop size. The navigation now collapses onto one line at 1280px, where it measurably fits, instead of at 1024px, where it never did.
Guide buttons move to the top of every page
The button that walks you to the next step used to sit at the bottom of the page, under everything else. It now sits in the page header, and the trail runs the whole way through the site instead of stopping halfway.
Improved /explore The next-step button moved from the bottom of the page into the header, where it is visible without scrolling.
New The Guild Hall and Journey now point you onward too — the trail runs Explore → Find Your Fit → Guild Hall → Journey → Market end to end.
Fixed /explore The metric picker no longer pushes the page sideways on a phone; the name and the picker stack instead of fighting for one line.
Fixed The required County Health Rankings credit now wraps instead of overflowing the page on a narrow screen.
3f611ed · 43a37c3 · c80b030 · 38953c3
1 new2 improved1 fixed
The Guild Hall, and a navigation bar people can actually read
The site navigation was tested on people who had never seen it — including the owner's grandparents, who could not find it or say what any icon meant. Icons alone were not a smaller navigation, they were an unusable one, so every destination now carries its name at every screen size.
Improved Every navigation tab now shows its name at all times. On phones the tabs take a row of their own and are taller, meeting the accessibility target size they previously missed.
New /journey Your Runway and the Life Diary — how long your savings last, and a record of what you have done.
Improved /guild The Guild Hall moved its rail to the right and gained the tab system that holds the character sheet, training and ladders.
Fixed Monospaced figures are scoped to the numbers themselves rather than whole sentences, so prose no longer renders in a typewriter face.
feaa9f2 · 942895b · ace9cfc
2 fixed
A fresh account starts empty, and stays empty
A brand-new visitor was being shown a class, a ladder and XP they had never earned. Nothing is minted now until you actually do something — an empty profile renders as empty.
Fixed No class, no ladder and no XP appear until you have earned them. A fresh visit is genuinely blank rather than pre-filled with placeholder progress.
Fixed /account Account fields are length-capped, and the ascendancy shine no longer drifts diagonally across its badge.
a601d06 · 8cf9571
Hestia's Atlas is in active development and these notes are written by hand as work lands. If something shipped and is missing here, that is a gap in the notes rather than a change that did not happen.