The city map
The map is not decoration around a quest list. It is the quest list, and it is your progress bar.
Districts, quarters, streets
A season's city is a grid. The current season, Genesis, ships one district — civic_core — laid out as a 10 × 10 grid of 100 quarters, addressed by row and column and labelled with street names: Nexus Boulevard, Neon Alley, Cipher Street, Quantum Avenue and the rest.
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| City | The whole playable surface of a season |
| District | A themed region of the city. Genesis has one; later seasons add more |
| Quarter | One block of the grid — the unit a quest is anchored to, and the unit you claim |
| Street | The label a quarter carries, so people can talk about places |
Every quarter has a stable code (civic_core:r4c7) that does not change for the life of the season. That is what lets your claim, your Daily Check point and a quest all point at the same place.
Quests live on quarters
A quest is not floating in a menu — it stands on a specific quarter. In Genesis, 33 of the 100 quarters carry a quest, one quest each.
Each quest also holds a small cluster of quarters — two or three in most cases, the quarter it stands on among them. Finishing the quest claims that cluster: the seal lifts and the quarters open on your map for the rest of the season. This is the sense in which the city is the progress bar — your completed work is a shape on a map rather than a number in a list.
Sealed quarters
A season can ship sealed quarters: parts of the city that are drawn but closed, and open only once the work that unseals them is done. The seal lives on the quarter, not on the quest.
Genesis uses them. The four quarters in the centre are open to everyone from the start; the other 96 begin sealed, and every one of them is held by some quest, so the whole city can be opened. The clusters are laid out as a spiral from the centre in the order of the waves: walk the season in that order and your city grows as one patch; jump ahead and you open an island further out, which fills in as you catch up.
A SEAL NEVER LOCKS A QUEST
A quest standing on a sealed quarter can be started and finished like any other. The seal is what the quest lifts, not what stands in its way — nothing in Genesis requires you to finish one quest before starting another, and nothing about the map is behind a paywall or a whitelist.
Seals are personal: the quarters you open are open on your map. Another player sees their own city, opened by their own quests.
Everybody is on the same map
The city is shared and live:
- Every signed-in player has a marker on the map, positioned where they are working.
- Your marker's colour is derived from your wallet address, so it is stable and yours.
- Players who arrived through a referral link carry a small star on their marker — a shape, not a colour, so it reads at any zoom and in either theme.
- Tapping a marker opens that player's public profile card.
Presence is a view of who is around, not a ranking. The ranking is the leaderboard.
What the map does not do
- It does not hide quests behind other quests as a paywall.
- It does not sell quarters.
- It does not change under you mid-season: the layout, the palette and the quarter codes of a published season are frozen when the season is published.
Related
- Seasons and waves — how the map fills up over a season
- Quests and tasks — what sits on those quarters
- Daily Check — the one thing on the map that moves every day