Questions, answered.

Every waypoint has a 15 metre geofence around its coordinates. You have to be physically inside that circle for the app to let you verify it: no drive-by scans, no remote completions. On a GPS-only waypoint, being inside the circle and tapping Verify is all it takes. Phones that report a faked location are turned away.

No. Every waypoint is verified by GPS, and that alone is enough. Markers are an optional extra you choose waypoint by waypoint, and they do two jobs. They add a search to the game: players follow your clue to the hidden object, and a marker can hold a treasure of its own. And they stop GPS cheats: GPS shows where a phone says it is, which a determined cheat can fake, while a marker has to be scanned on the spot.

Use GPS only for a relaxed walk or a hunt spread across a city, and add markers where you want a search, a competitive hunt, or a prize worth cheating for. You can mix both in the same hunt.

Tap Marker clues on the verification card: the creator's description and photos show where the marker is hidden. The QR scanner has a torch for dim spots, and a Bluetooth beacon is picked up on its own once you tap Verify, so keep Bluetooth on. If you think the marker is missing or damaged, message the creator.

If your session duration runs out, or the creator ends an open-ended hunt and you miss the extraction-buffer window, your session closes without a successful exit. Every treasure you were carrying is returned to the hunt for other players to collect. Same thing if you abandon early or the creator hits "Abort hunt": your virtual backpack empties back into the world.

Yes. Once you successfully complete an extraction waypoint, you can rejoin the same hunt. Joining starts a brand-new session: all per-waypoint reward flags reset, so you can collect a new treasure from each waypoint on the next pass. If the hunt is at capacity, you'll be slotted into the same FIFO queue as a new joiner.

A creator can optionally set a maximum number of concurrent participants. When that cap is reached, new joiners are placed in a FIFO (first-in, first-out) queue. As active players extract, abandon, or time out, slots open up and the next person in line is admitted automatically. You can leave the queue at any time, and you'll be removed automatically if the hunt closes.

Your virtual backpack has 10 slots. Each treasure occupies one slot. You can also drop a treasure back into the world at any time to free a slot. It returns to its original waypoint or progress marker and becomes available again to other players.

A waypoint and its progress markers can hold many treasures, but per session you can only collect one from the same waypoint, across the waypoint itself and all its markers combined. The rest stay in play for other players. Rejoin the hunt later, start a new session, and the limit resets.

They were three fixed map types a creator had to choose between. There's now one map, and the shape is set waypoint by waypoint instead:

• Links: join two waypoints so one leads to the other, one-way, one-way in reverse, or both ways.
• Hidden: keep a waypoint off the map until a player verifies a waypoint that leads to it.
• Start from here: mark the waypoints players are allowed to begin at.

All three old styles are still authorable and, for the first time, so are mixtures of them in a single hunt. See The map for diagrams.

Yes, that's the point. A treasure is a real prize the creator promises: physical, virtual or electronic. Claiming one in-game puts it in your virtual backpack; extract successfully and the creator ships the real reward to you. Items (keys, tools) are different: they're gameplay-only and never shipped.

An optional gameplay layer creators can add to any hunt:

• Challenges: quiz questions or secret codes that gate waypoints, treasures or quests, with retry cooldowns.
• Quests: storylines with ordered objectives and rewards at the end, discovered as you play.
• Items: keys and tools in their own inventory; some challenges need the right item to open.
• Clues: hints that reveal themselves and collect into your clue log automatically.

Hunts without any of this remain fully playable location adventures. The feed shows a badge when a hunt includes extra gameplay.

Playing is free. Publishing is free too, up to a point. Building and testing your own hunts is unlimited on every tier, and the free tier keeps five of them live at once. A subscription raises the ceiling rather than unlocking the door:

• Free: play anything, build and test without limits, and keep 5 hunts live at a time. Each live hunt can hold 15 waypoints, 7 challenges and 4 quests, take up to 10 players, cover a 1 km radius and run for up to 30 days. A live hunt nobody plays for 60 days is paused (see below). As a player: 2 hunts on the go, 2 queues waited in.
• Explore: a paid subscription that raises every one of those numbers: 20 hunts live, 50 waypoints, 40 challenges, 30 quests, 100 players, a 3000 km radius, and hunts that can run open-ended instead of ending inside 30 days. Your hunts also never pause for going quiet. As a player: 4 hunts at once, 10 queues, priority when a queue admits the next person, and sessions that survive 15 days of inactivity instead of 7.

Explore is a real paid subscription, billed through Google Play or the App Store. The beta does not make it free. Current prices, in your own currency, are shown in the app.

Every limit, side by side, is on the Plans page.

It gets paused. A live hunt that sees no player activity for 60 days, with nobody inside it at the time, is paused: hidden from search and the feed, and closed to new joiners. Anyone queuing for it is told, and keeps their place. The queue picks up again if the hunt comes back. The clock starts when the hunt opens to players, and any play resets it: one person setting off is enough. You also get a notification 30 days before, so no hunt pauses without warning.

Nothing is deleted and nothing ends. Sessions already under way run to their natural finish, and prizes already won are still owed and still shipped. A paused hunt does still occupy one of your five live slots, so there are two ways out: subscribe to Explore and every paused hunt of yours comes straight back, or retire the hunt and free the slot for the next one.

While you're subscribed to Explore, none of your hunts pause at all, which is the whole of it if you run something seasonal, annual, or somewhere people only visit when the weather is good.

The rule looks at the subscription you have when it checks, not the one you had when you published. So if an Explore subscription ends, every hunt comes under the rule, including the ones published while subscribed. Those hunts get the same 30 days' notice as any other: nothing pauses without telling you first, and resubscribing brings all of them straight back.

Separately, you can pause a hunt yourself at any time, on any plan, and bring it back whenever you like. A hunt you paused is hidden and closed to new players exactly like one paused for going quiet, and it still holds one of your live slots; pausing it yourself does not reset the 60-day clock. Only a hunt paused for going quiet needs Explore, or a retirement, to come back.

A hunt that doesn't appear in the public feed: only players the creator invites can join. Perfect for private events, team-building days and birthday hunts, and available to every creator.

Yes. Treasure Hunt Explore is in beta testing and the beta is open to everyone. On Android it is in early access on Google Play; on iOS it ships through TestFlight, Apple's free beta app. Both are free to install from the Download page.

Being a beta means you get new builds early and rough edges are still being filed down. If you hit one, tell us through Report a Problem in the app.