Blockipelago

How it works

One hex, one block

The globe is made of 1,004,892 tiles: hexagons, plus twelve pentagons where the pattern needs them. Every tile is one Bitcoin block. Block 0, the genesis block, sits at the south pole, and the block numbers spiral out from there, hex after hex, past block 1,000,000 near the north pole. A hex is about 435 metres across, and the globe is about 716 km round. How it's put together is under Hexes and pentagons.

The block shapes its island

• Every coastline is different. The block's hash seeds the shape of its land, so no two islands are alike.
• Busy blocks are hilly and green. The more transactions a block holds, the hillier and lusher its island.
• Big fees raise mountains. Blocks that paid high fees push up peaks.
• Some blocks always rise from the sea. Famous blocks, round numbers, numbers that read the same backwards and blocks that paid huge fees always get land. Keep an eye out for them.

Big lands on the pentagons, and the snowy south

Eleven of the twelve pentagons have been mined so far, and each holds a big land with its own character: volcano, karst, mangrove, atoll, jungle, savanna, black sand, lakes, dunes, granite and highland. The twelfth, the fjord, rises at the north pole when block 1,004,891 is mined. Far to the south lies the snowy south, with its own cold-weather animals.

It grows with Bitcoin

Hexes for blocks that haven't been mined yet are open sea. When a new block is mined, its hex rises into the world while you play. Only the ground around you is loaded, so a whole planet fits in an inscription.

The same for everyone. The blocks decide where every island, animal, boat and bottle is. A friend standing on the same block sees the same world you do.

Guide

Base camp

Everyone starts at base camp, a hilltop clearing with a fire ring and log seats under string lights, torches, and a big screen. Wherever you end up, the Back to base camp button in your journal brings you home. The journal is also where you choose who you play: Mike, the classic sailor, or Gucci, with her curly bright-blue hair and tattoo sleeves.

• Light a fire. Cut firewood with your knife. A fire takes four bundles, then strike a match.
• Grill your catch on the camp barbecue, and grab a beer from the crate.
• Watch an inscription. Type any inscription ID into the big screen and it plays there.
• Pitch your own camps. Put up a tent on any dry ground, up to four at a time. Each comes with a camp chair, a crate of beer and a kettle barbecue, and your crew sees them too.
• Hang a hammock with your rope, and set down your torch or lamp to light a spot.

There's also an old trapdoor in the grass. It stays locked.

How it works

Day, night and weather

There's one sun for the whole planet, and it runs on real time. It goes round the globe once every 24 hours, so half the planet is always in daylight and the other half in night. Sail far enough and you can sail out of the night into morning.

• Base camp keeps UK time. In late October the sun rises at about 06:50, is highest at 12:00 and sets at about 17:10 GMT.
• The seasons are real. The sun drifts north and south through the year. Base camp gets about 15¼ hours of daylight in late June and 8¾ hours in late December.
• Nights get properly dark. Stars come out, a soft cool light comes from the far side of the sky, and fires, lamps and lighthouses come into their own.
• The weather follows the fees. Storms are likelier where the blocks around you paid high fees. Mist rolls in now and then, and the wind shifts and drives your sails.

How the sun goes round the globe is under How the sun lights the globe.

Guide

Sailing and getting about

You start with a sailing canoe. Sails need wind, and no boat can sail straight into it, but the better the boat, the closer to the wind it points. Rare boats lie moored off big islands. Take one and she's yours. She stays wherever you leave her.

• Galleons. Big three-masted ships lie moored out at sea around the world. Climb aboard, walk her decks and take the wheel.
• Buggies. They're parked inland on the big islands and big lands, ready to drive, with headlights for the night.
• On foot and in the water. Go ashore, tie up your boat with your rope, or jump in and swim.
• Your colours. Pick from nine sail colours, and fly any inscription as your flag: give the game its number or ID.

How it works

Fishing

Cast your rod and wait. A nibble isn't a bite, so strike only when the fish really takes it. Then comes the fight: give it too much tension and the line parts, too little and it throws the hook, and some fish dive for the reef to cut you off.

• Each block has its own fishing. A block's water has up to three fishing spots. Busier blocks hold more of them, and bigger fish.
• In the shallows: silver bonefish, blue parrotfish, yellowtail snapper, spotted grouper, needlefish and bluefin trevally.
• Out in the deep: skipjack tuna, mahi-mahi, wahoo, great barracuda and giant trevally.
• And beyond those, two rare fish and one legend wait in special blocks.
• Keep your catch in the fish box, or cook it on a barbecue.

The fish you can catch also swim where you can see them, each cruising its own patch of the shallows.

Guide

Camera, journal and maps

Your backpack holds a camera, a journal, a chart, a GPS, a compass and the rest of your kit: knife, matches, torch, hand lamp, rope, fishing rod, tackle box, fish box, lunchbox, radio and drink bottle.

• Photos fill the journal. Snap the wildlife and places you find. The camera counts an animal out to 30 metres plus 6 metres for every metre of its size. Birds count out to about 120 metres. Something out there lets your camera reach much further.
• The journal keeps your world. It ticks off places in history, discoveries (wrecks, caves, sea arches and stone circles), wildlife, fish, beachcombing, boats, cave finds, treasure, photos, logbooks and maps, messages in bottles and Bitmon.
• The chart and the GPS globe show where you've been. Soft glows mark hot spots. Something worth finding lies inside each glow, never right in the middle, and the glow fades once you've been there. Green glows show where wildlife lives.

Secrets, without spoilers

Finds, bottles and secrets

Beachcombing

Walk the tide line and pick up what the sea leaves. There are 25 kinds of beach find, some far rarer than others.

Messages in bottles

Each bottle carries the message a miner wrote into that block, with the pool that mined it. The oldest bottle of all holds the newspaper headline Satoshi put in the genesis block.

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”Block 0, 3 January 2009

What we won't tell you

• Wrecks, caves, arches and stone circles are out there. Ship's logbooks, harbour ledgers, damp letters and torn maps turn up, and some point to an X and a block number. Find the X and dig.
• Fifteen rare finds are waiting, from a brass spyglass and a storm lantern to a black pearl and a meteorite. A couple of them change what you can do.
• Eleven of Bitcoin's big moments stand on the very blocks where they happened, from the Genesis Stone and the Pizza Picnic to four Halving Lights. Finding them is up to you.

Guide

Wildlife on land

Each big land has its own animals, and the islands round about share them. All of them can be photographed for the journal and show on the maps.

How it works

How the animals live

The woodland animals live in five food chains, each running from a plant to a hunter:

• wild flowers → rabbits → red foxes
• birch bark → red deer → grey wolves
• shrubs → wild goats → brown bears
• fallen berries → pheasants → lynx
• fallen hazelnuts → red squirrels → pine martens

White-tailed eagles and carrion crows clean up after the hunters and nest in bare old trees.

Their ways

• One hunter, one prey. Once an animal is being chased, no other hunter goes after it.
• Hunters keep apart. Two hunters that meet turn and go their own ways.
• One suitor at a time. An animal only courts a mate nobody else is already after.
• They rest. They're on the move for a few minutes, then rest for 5 to 10 minutes, unless a hunter comes, a mate comes near, or it's time to drink.
• Prey only run from their own hunter. A deer walks calmly away from a fox.
• Room to roam. Each kind starts with four animals and never grows past eight on a stretch that's all land. Coasts and small islands get fewer. New animals start out of sight and wander in, and a kind that dies out gets a new pair walking in.
• They drink. The island woodland animals, and the hoofed and padded animals of the big lands, walk down to rivers, pools and lakes to drink now and then, then wander back.

Guide

Life in the sea and sky

Two rare treats. Flying fish skim off ahead of your boat, and dolphins come to ride your bow. Each happens at most once every five hours, out in deep open water, so enjoy it when it does.

Guide

Bitmon

Bitmon are shy little creatures made of Bitcoin bitmaps. Each one's body is its own block drawn the Bitmap way, as squares in shades from purple through pink to orange and yellow, so no two look alike. There are 3,630 of them, each living on its own island at its own block.

Walk up to one and it runs, hides, covers its eyes and peeks out at you. Wait at a distance and it comes back out. Photograph them for the Bitmon page of your journal.

Guide

Things to see

• Lighthouses. The red-and-white towers on the shore stand on the blocks where Bitcoin's difficulty changes, every 2,016 blocks. Others stand offshore on their own rocks. At night each one sweeps a single beam round that dips to meet the water.
• At sea. Houses on stilts with their walkways, rafts, fish farm pens, channel buoys lit at night, lines of lobster floats, stone breakwaters, old sea forts, floating markets, yachts and fishing boats at anchor, a yacht sailing by, crates and barrels adrift, and oil rigs out in the open ocean.
• Inland. Windmills, rivers with bridges, and on flat ground on the bigger islands and the temperate big lands: old stone churches whose stained glass glows at night, part-ruined castles, rows of painted houses and old log cabins.

The twenty new islands

Twenty new islands each have a camp of their own: a stilt cabin with a porch, sea shacks with washing on the line, a fire ring with log seats under string lights, a big screen for inscriptions, a pier with a rowing boat, one of the rare boats to take, a hammock between palms, tents, a barbecue, a beach bar with stools to sit on, a lookout tower, a signpost with the island's block, and a small football pitch with a ball to kick into the goals. Cut a stick from a bush and toast a marshmallow at the fire. At night the camps light up and fireflies come out.

How it works

Playing together

Sail with friends as a crew, from a crew page or straight from the game itself. The game finds the other players through Nostr relays, then links your browsers directly, with the host passing messages on. If the relays can't be reached, swap invite codes instead. Your crew sees your camps, and you can chat or talk as you go.

The backpack has toys for the evenings too: a kite, a harmonica, an ocarina and a Chinese lantern.

How it's built

Hexes and pentagons

You can't cover a ball with hexagons alone. Blockipelago's globe starts as a 20-sided shape made of triangles, like a 20-sided die. The edges of every triangle are split into 317 steps, the points of that fine grid are pushed out onto a sphere, and each point becomes one tile. Most points have six triangles round them, so their tiles are hexagons. At the shape's 12 corners only five triangles meet, so those 12 tiles are pentagons, and they're the only ones.

• Why 317? Splitting the edges n times gives 10 × n × n + 2 tiles. 317 gives 1,004,892, the fewest that leave room for block 1,000,000. 316 would give only 998,562.
• Nearly even. The points are spread along a gentle curve rather than in equal steps, so the tiles come out closer in size. Neighbouring tiles' centres are 384 to 498 m apart, 435 m on average.

The spiral of blocks

The genesis block sits on one of the pentagons, because the south pole is a corner of the 20-sided shape. From there the blocks go round ring by ring, each ring a run of blocks in order: 952 rings from pole to pole.

• The southern cap. Each ring holds five more tiles than the one before: 5, 10, 15 and so on. Ring 317, with 1,585 tiles, holds the next five pentagons, 317 blocks apart: blocks 250,747, 251,064, 251,381, 251,698 and 252,015, mined in August 2013.
• The middle band. From ring 317 to ring 634 every ring holds 1,585 tiles. Ring 634 holds five more pentagons, blocks 753,192 to 754,460, mined in September 2022.
• The northern cap. The rings shrink by five each, down to ring 951: one pentagon at the north pole, block 1,004,891. Block 1,000,000 is in ring 907, about 15 km from the pole.

Eleven of the pentagons have been mined so far, and each is the heart of a big land some 20 to 30 km across. The twelfth is still open sea. When block 1,004,891 is mined, around the middle of 2027, the last big land, the fjord, rises at the north pole.

How it's built

How curved it is

The globe's size comes from its hexes. Each one is 250 m along each edge and about 435 m across, big enough for a proper island, and just over a million of them cover a globe 113,950 m from its centre to the sea, 716 km round. Earth is 56 times bigger, so this world curves 56 times as tightly, and you can see it.

• The sea falls away fast. Over 1 km it drops 4.4 m below a level line (on Earth, 8 cm). Over 5 km it drops 110 m.
• Islands sink behind the curve. From a boat, an island with 20 m hills drops out of sight about 2.8 km away.
• Mountains peek over it. The volcano's rim would clear the horizon from 16 km away, but the game draws the world out to about 13 km, so that's where it first appears.

The curve is real, not a trick of the camera. Every hex has its own small map, flat at its centre, with east, north and up. Each hex's ground, trees and water are built on the true sphere, then everything is drawn in the map of the hex you're standing on, so far islands really do sit lower. Even the water knows: it works out how deep the seabed lies under the curved sea to paint sunlight rippling across the shallows.

How it's built

How the sun lights the globe

There's one sun, and it lights half the globe at a time. The game works out where it is from a clock: the time of Bitcoin's newest block, which it asks for when it starts and with each new block, counted on in real time. Update 4 sets that clock back 7 hours 10 minutes, so that base camp's day matches the UK's.

• It goes round 15° an hour. The sun circles the globe's axis, the line from the genesis block at the south pole to block 1,004,891 at the north pole, once every 24 hours. It rises in the east and sets in the west.
• It leans with the seasons. Through the year it swings up to 23.44° north and south of the middle of the globe, just as Earth's does: furthest north around 21 June, furthest south around 21 December.
• Every spot has its own sun height. The game takes the angle between straight up where you are and the direction of the sun. That one angle decides the light: day, golden hour, twilight or night.

Base camp through the year

Base camp is on block 840,027: the game picks the first flat, dry hex after block 840,000, the 2024 halving. It lies 43.6° north of the middle of the globe.

Times are GMT. Add an hour for British Summer Time.

• At the poles the sun stays at the same height all day and just circles the sky. At the genesis block it circles 23° up in late December and 23° below the horizon in late June, so the snowy south has the midnight sun in its summer and polar night in its winter.
• You can outrun the night. Round the middle of the globe the edge of night moves at about 30 km/h, and at base camp about 22 km/h. A boat easily goes faster than that, so you can sail east into the morning, or west and keep the sunset with you.

How the light is made

• Sunlight changes colour with the sun's height: white by day, golden when the sun is low and deepest at sunrise and sunset, then fading to night as the sun goes from 4° above the horizon to 3½° below.
• Shadows fall for 60 m around you, drawn on a 2,048 × 2,048 shadow map and softened at the edges. Thick storm cloud switches them off.
• The sky has the sun's disc and glow, clouds lit on their sunny side, and at night thousands of twinkling stars, some warm and some cool.
• At night the soft cool light comes from the side of the sky opposite the sun, and up to eight fires, lamps and lights at a time light up what's round them.
• Fog and haze thicken with distance and glow warm when you look towards the sun.

How it's built

The engine

Blockipelago doesn't use a ready-made game engine. Its own engine is written into the main inscription, and the whole game is code: there are no picture files, sound files or 3D model files in it. Everything you see and hear is made as you play, from Bitcoin's block data.

Drawing

• WebGL2. The game draws with the 3D graphics built into modern browsers, using seven shader programs written for it: one for the world, one for many copies of the same thing at once (trees and plants), one for grass, one for the sky, one for falling snow, and two for shadows.
• 17 materials, painted as they're drawn. Ground, wood, bark, stone, plaster, roofing, cloth, paper, snow, water, metal, leaves, skin, hair, glass, glowing lights and plain colour. The shaders add grass, earth and bare rock on steep slopes, wood grain and plank seams, cracks in stone, a weave in cloth, light shining through leaves from behind and glints on snow. In the snowy south, snow settles on anything facing up.
• Water shows the sky at low angles and the sun's glitter, glows turquoise over sand and deepens to blue, with foam at the shore and waves rolling in, and turns grey-green in a storm.
• Wind sways leaves, palms and grass, and blows the falling snow.

Building the world round you

• Only the hexes near you are built. Your hex and the two rings round it get a ground point about every 8 m, 5,400 triangles a hex. The next two rings get one every 21 m, and rings 5 to 8 every 42 m: 217 hexes in all. A simple far view then reaches 30 rings out, about 13 km, for 2,791 hexes in sight.
• A little at a time. The game builds in slices of about 7 thousandths of a second each frame, so it keeps running smoothly while new islands appear.
• Kind to slow computers. If the game drops below 30 frames a second and stays there, it turns its own quality down: first a smaller shadow map, less grass and fewer pixels, then no shadows at all.

Characters, animals and sound

• Built from shapes in code. Mike and Gucci, the animals, the boats and the buildings are made from simple shapes by code. The characters and animals move on jointed skeletons with walk cycles.
• Sound made live. The wind, the waves, the hull through the water, flapping sails, birds and the buggy's engine are made as you play by the browser's own sound engine.
• Your game is kept in your browser: what you've found, caught and photographed, your journal, your camps and boats, and the miner messages already read.

How the updates join in

When the game starts it looks up its own children on Bitcoin and loads each one that is a script. Each child hands itself to the game and gets the same tools the game uses, to add animals, buildings, rules and fixes. That's how five inscriptions play as one game.

How it's built

Endpoints and other parts

The game reads Bitcoin through ord's recursive endpoints: addresses an inscription can ask the site showing it, such as ordinals.com. These are all it needs to build the world.

The journal shows whether each of the four block endpoints is working, and how many reads it has made. If they can't be reached, for example when the game is opened away from an ordinals site, it makes up demo blocks from the block numbers and says so.

Also used

• The browser's own tools: WebGL2 for drawing, Web Audio for sound, and its storage for your save.
• For playing as a crew: four public Nostr relays (relay.damus.io, nos.lol, relay.primal.net and nostr-pub.wellorder.net) help crew members find each other, and Google's public STUN servers help their browsers link up. Positions, chat and voice then travel straight between your browsers, with the host's browser passing them on.
• Google's Draco decoder, from two inscriptions already on Bitcoin, fetched only when a crew member's 3D model has been squeezed with it.

Stats

By the numbers

Eight hours at sea

We sailed 150 km of deep water and 150 km of shallows in the game and counted every animal that came close enough to show, then worked it out for eight hours of sailing at a steady 30 m/s (about 860 km). The numbers include update 4. Each pass counts, and numbers in brackets are the animals in the groups.

Log

Every update

Blockipelago is a main inscription with children that add to it. Each child loads into the game by itself, and they all work together.

1. 0

   The main game

   Inscribed 25 October 2026 · 360 KB

   • The globe of 1,004,892 tiles built from Bitcoin's blocks, growing with every new one
   • Base camp, the big screen, fires, tents and barbecues
   • Sailing with five boats, canoes, buggies and swimming
   • Fishing for 14 fish, the camera, the journal, the chart and the GPS
   • Beachcombing, messages in bottles, wrecks, caves, treasure maps and places in history
   • Day and night on real time, weather from block fees, lighthouses, oil rigs, windmills, rivers and bridges
   • 14 kinds of wildlife on the islands and in the sea

   0a4dc65ad4e1955d3e3560c04a00b7ba486e236a659b4918ca704d1b0e103627i0Copy ID
2. 1

   Child 1: Bitmon, galleons and wildlife

   253 KB

   • 3,630 Bitmon on their own blocks
   • Galleons to board and sail
   • Hot spots glowing on the chart and the GPS
   • The woodland animals of the big lands, with their five food chains and scavengers
   • Cold animals in the snowy south, and desert and winter animals
   • Shoals of small fish in the shallows
   • Toys: a kite, a harmonica, an ocarina and a Chinese lantern
   • Playing together as a crew, straight from the game

   1f853138dd37471291cad4736c0df18b254db45da573a9a8713b59778b0d1054i0Copy ID
3. 2

   Child 2: the living world

   258 KB

   • The woodland animals on ordinary islands too, coming down to drink
   • Lions and zebras, macaques, pumas and falcons, donkeys and condors, llamas, butterflies, snakes, crocodiles and capybaras
   • Sharks, rays, morays, octopus, orcas, whale sharks, sea lions, flying fish and bow-riding dolphins
   • The catchable fish swimming in the shallows, and more whales in the deep
   • Water birds on the sea and on ponds and lakes
   • Things at sea: stilt houses, rafts, fish farms, buoys, forts, markets, yachts and offshore lighthouses
   • Churches, castles, painted houses and log cabins inland
   • Camps on the twenty new islands
   • Rare boats and buggies around the world
   • Birds counted in photos from much further away, wildlife on the maps, and fixes for phones

   5019bad788eaeec87ca8a00517002c8bbb4de638a50ba401f5c447fc826bdaf1i0Copy ID
4. 3

   Child 3: the base camp fix

   Inscribed 26 October 2026 · 2 KB

   One of child 2's rare boats near base camp was given a type the game has no boat for, and the game stopped the moment it tried to draw it. This puts every rare boat right, and keeps the game running if a frame ever fails.

5. 4

   Update 4: calmer and wilder

   Ready to inscribe · 15 KB

   • The woodland animals' ways: one hunter per prey, hunters keep apart, one suitor at a time, rests of 5 to 10 minutes, and a quarter as many
   • Flying fish and bow-riding dolphins at most once every five hours
   • An eighth as many humpbacks, and a quarter as many orcas and whale sharks
   • Lighthouses with one sweeping beam, a tenth as many offshore ones, and solid stone bases under them
   • The trapdoor at base camp locked
   • Base camp on UK time