Passenger to Keeper
Common 1, likely 2, lucky 5, rare 10. Ranks run Passenger → Navigator → Field Officer → Naturalist → Archivist → Keeper of the Matrix — the last of which means every species in the archive, seen with your own eyes.
01 / THE NATURE MATRIX
A 354-species wildlife calendar, wired into everything.
The biggest addition is a whole new layer. The Nature Matrix is a free UK wildlife calendar of 354 species and seasonal spectacles — every one carrying the months it is genuinely in season, an honest rarity band, a field note and the expedition files that hunt it.
It covers far more than birds: mammals, marine life, thirteen rockpool entries, butterflies and moths, dragonflies, reptiles, amphibians, fungi, wildflowers, fossils, harvest, leaf colour and dark-sky events. And it now carries a full angling thread of forty-eight entries — wild brown trout, sea trout, grayling, Arctic charr, pike, perch, barbel, mackerel, bass, the mayfly hatch — with the licence and close-season rules stated plainly rather than left for you to discover the expensive way.
Filter it by month, rarity, group, expedition or region, or search it outright. Every journey file shows its six headline species and now expands to show all of them, and the homepage carries an in season right now strip that recomputes itself every month with no maintenance at all.
02 / THE FIELD LOG
Tap a species. Collect the archive.
This is the part nobody planned and everybody now uses. Every species card is a tap target. See something, tap it, and the card lights: rarity colour on the border and pictogram, a date-stamped ✓ LOGGED seal, and a rare card that was sitting there as a grey silhouette ignites gold.
Bronze at four, gold at six
Each expedition carries six species. Four logged earns bronze; all six turns the patch gold. The patch wall shows all twenty-two at once.
A6 cards for the glovebox
Bigger icons and type for a small crew, and every expedition page prints a real A6 spotting card — six species, tick boxes, no signal required.
Export and import
Your log lives in this browser only. Export it to a file to move phones or keep it safe, and importing merges rather than overwrites — nothing is ever lost.
03 / THE COLLECTION LAYER
A numbered book that fills with colour.
The field log grew a proper collecting loop. None of it adds pressure and none of it is a game you can lose — there are no streaks, no daily targets and no leaderboards. It rewards being out there, not chasing.
Every species has an index number
The archive is numbered end to end, alphabetically, from #001 Abbotsbury cygnets to #354 Wood white butterfly. The number shows on every card, in the A–Z index, on the printed A6 cards and in search — so typing 324 finds the turtle doves. A numbered book with gaps in it asks to be filled.
The book starts grey
Every pictogram now sits muted until you log that species, then takes its rarity colour. Names, months and field notes stay visible throughout — you cannot hunt what you cannot name — but the Matrix visibly fills with colour as you go. Rare cards keep their darker silhouette and their UNSPOTTED tag until the day you earn them.
The archive answers back
The first time a species enters your log, the card says so: NEW ENTRY · #324 REGISTERED. It fires only for genuinely new sightings — not for un-logging, not for upgrading a heard bird — so it stays a first-time moment rather than background noise.
Rank changes announce themselves
Crossing a rank threshold used to happen invisibly. Now the site tells you: ▲ PROMOTED · NAVIGATOR, with the line that goes with it. Only ever upward — dropping back below a threshold happens quietly, because being told off by a website is nobody’s idea of a good evening.
Heard but not seen counts for half
Real field craft: a nightingale singing in the dark is a genuine record even if you never see the bird. Every bird card carries a ♪ HEARD button worth half points, rounded up. Tap the main seal afterwards and it upgrades to a full sighting. Heard entries count toward your file patches — but never toward a mastery medal, because those mean with your own eyes.
The site knows where you are
The homepage greets a returning traveller with their own line — species logged out of 354, current rank, points to the next one, patches earned. The Nature Matrix carries a progress meter that follows your filters, so choosing rockpool tells you 4 of 13 logged. Neither appears at all until you have logged something.
All of it lives in your browser, exactly as before. No account, no sync, no server that knows what you saw. Clear your browser data and it is gone — which is why export exists.
04 / MEDALS + THE CARD
Twelve sets, twelve months, and something to keep.
Two new collections rewarding different habits — one for depth in a subject, one simply for going out all year round — and a way to take the whole archive with you.
Complete a subject, earn its title
Log every entry in a group and the medal lights gold: THE COMPLEAT ANGLER (all 48 fish), ROCKPOOL MASTER (13), CLIFF WATCHER (32 seabirds), BOTANIST (31), FALCONER (29 raptors), DAWN CHORUS (23), LEPIDOPTERIST (19), STALKER (12 deer), HAUL-OUT KEEPER (12), HERPETOLOGIST (10), NIGHT WATCH (8 dark-sky) and ESTUARY HAND (6 waders). Locked medals show their progress, so you always know how close you are.
Three species in a month earns it
The medal case carries twelve month stamps, awarded retroactively from dates already in your log. Three species in a calendar month lights that month; all twelve earns ★ THE FULL YEAR. This is the one that makes February worth something — the whole point of a wildlife calendar is that there is no dead season, only a season you have not been out in.
Keeper of the Matrix
Above Archivist sits one final title at the true ceiling of the archive: every one of the 354 species, seen rather than heard. It comes with a printable certificate. We do not expect anybody to reach it quickly, and that is rather the point.
The Traveller’s Card
One tap renders your archive as an image to keep or post: your van’s name from the shared profile, your rank and points, species seen, heard-only, files completed, sets mastered, months stamped, and your rarest entry starred in gold. Completed stats turn gold. Reach Keeper and the whole border does.
The Spotter Licence
A printable A5 licence for a young traveller: their name, the van’s name, the five ranks as tick-boxes to pencil in as they earn them, and space for their first species, its number, and the best thing they saw. The footer reads: tick a rank when you reach it — the animals decide, not you.
What we did not build
No streaks, no daily login rewards, no bonus-point events, no leaderboards, no accounts. Points stay a clean, legible economy that cannot be inflated. The collection rewards presence — being somewhere, at the right time of year, paying attention — and never punishes absence.
05 / ENGINE UPGRADES
The planner now shows its working.
The Trip Engine has grown up considerably.
Why not the others. Under the ranked deck, every file that didn’t make the top three now gets one honest sentence explaining why: "edged out mainly on the 3.5 h approach", "its 5 days would rattle loose in your 21", "puts the van on ferries against your no-boats brief". Nineteen lines of the Engine arguing with itself, in public.
Side-by-side comparison. Pick any two recommendations and get a proper table: tier, days, file miles, approach hours from your start, fuel at your mpg, sailings, single-track, best season, nature lead, vehicle length fit and what to book first.
Demand ratings. All twenty-two files now carry a five-pip rating computed from single-track miles, sailings, tide-criticality, distance, length and family-friendliness — from GENTLE through COMMITTING to EXPEDITION. It shows on every journey page and on the deck cards.
A month scrubber. Drag across the year and the whole species index re-lights in real time, counting what is in season: "NOV — 17 of 27 in season". The best way to understand the British year in one gesture.
A five-year date horizon, with honest warnings rather than a hard block: nothing under eighteen months, then a note that ferry timetables open around twelve months ahead and club sites twelve to eighteen, then a plainer one past five years.
Two arithmetic corrections went in too. Daylight now uses the standard refraction correction, so sunrise and sunset match published tables to the minute instead of being seven minutes out. And a battery-chemistry setting was added — lithium owners were being told four off-grid nights when the honest answer was six.
Out-of-window species fold away. The species board used to list everything at once, in season or not, which on a phone meant a great deal of scrolling past things you cannot see this trip. Those now sit behind a single button — Show 8 species outside your window — one tap from view when you are planning a return, and out of the way when you are not.
06 / TIDES + CLIMATE
Two things you can know months ahead.
A forecast is useless when you are planning in February for August. Two things, though, are genuinely knowable that far out.
Tide windows. Tidal range follows the moon, so it can be computed years ahead with no data feed at all: biggest a day or two after new and full moon, smallest at the quarters. The Engine now draws a bar per day of your trip — gold for springs, grey for neaps — and names the dates: the biggest range is the lowest low water of the trip, so the most shore uncovered for rockpools, ledges, causeways and sandbars, and the fastest flood behind you. Files whose set-pieces depend on it are flagged tide-critical. It is honest about its limit: range only, never times, with a link to the official tables.
Climate windows. Not a forecast — character. Twelve regional profiles giving the typical daytime range for your month, whether it sits in the wetter or drier half of that region’s year, computed daylight for the middle day, and what the month is known for on that ground: "peak midge season inland and on the west coast", "sea fret can sit on the coast while inland is clear", "hill roads close first here". The Met Office and MWIS remain the captains for the week itself.
07 / THE VESSEL REGISTRY
Set it once. Everything follows.
The calculators always shared a vehicle profile. The Trip Engine, embarrassingly, kept its own — so you had to enter your van twice and neither knew about the other. That is fixed: there is now one profile, and it updates live across open tabs.
You can edit it in three places, and they are all the same thing: the full editor on the Tools page, the compact panel in the Engine, and a new Edit Your Landship section at the foot of the vessel page. Put your own van in and payload margin, off-grid endurance, fuel estimates, budget and vehicle-length checks all recompute for it — including whether you clear the 6.5 m limit on the road into Wasdale.
A registry console, not a form. Editing your van is no longer a row of boxes. The Landship page now carries a live side-elevation schematic that redraws as you type — body, pop-top, wheels, solar array — with dimension callouts, a payload envelope gauge showing your allowance against MTPLM with mass in running order computed, and four instrument tiles for battery, solar, economy and footprint. The registry plate reads FACTORY BASELINE until you change something, then CUSTOM REGISTRATION.
08 / FINDING THINGS
Search, related files and a feed.
In the menu, on every page
Open the menu on any page and there is now a search box indexing every page, every day-card on every expedition and all 354 species — with plural handling, so "wallaby" finds the Manx wallabies.
No more dead ends
Every journey file now ends with three files that pair with it, chosen by tier, shared ground, overlapping species and appetite for boats — each with its reason stated.
A proper feed
Transmissions are now available at feed.xml with autodiscovery on every page, for anyone who still keeps a reader. Some of us do.
Grouped, not endless
Twenty-two expeditions made the archive menu unusable, so the seventeen standard files now collapse into a dropdown while the megas, Great Tour and Grand Quest stay at the top level.
09 / OFFLINE + FASTER
The whole archive, in a field, with no bars.
The service worker used to cache two pages, which made "install it as an app" a slightly hollow promise. It now pre-caches the entire site — every page, both scripts, the stylesheet, the icon sprite and the search index. Install it at home and the whole archive genuinely opens in a Wasdale field with no signal.
It also got considerably lighter. The species index went from 279 KB to 101 KB by rendering from data rather than shipping 354 cards of markup, and the icon sprite — 21 KB of identical SVG that was being duplicated across twenty-six pages — now downloads once and is cached. That is over half a megabyte saved, which matters more on a hillside than in an office.
10 / DATES, DRIFT AND CORRECTIONS
Facts decay. Now the site admits it.
Campsite seasons change, ferry ports move, prices drift. A planning site that never says when it last checked is quietly asking to be trusted forever. These are the additions that stop that happening.
Verified stamps
All twenty-two expedition files carry a status band: FACTS VERIFIED AUGUST 2026, alongside an honest STATUS: PLANNED · NOT YET DRIVEN. You can see how fresh the research is before you trust a single opening season. Nothing here pretends to be a trip report.
Spotted something out of date?
Pages now carry a corrections link that opens a pre-filled message — what you found, where on the page, when you checked. No account, no comment system to moderate, no form harvesting anything. If the site is wrong, the fastest fix is somebody who was actually there telling us.
Planned becomes driven
When a file is finally driven, its chip flips to ✓ DRIVEN with the date and a dated field-notes section appears: what the plan got right, what it got wrong, how the gates actually were, real driving times against the estimates, which species showed — and a box listing anything a future traveller must no longer trust.
The site now tests itself
Several things here are generated from other things — the search index, the feed, the sitemap, the species cards, the printed spotting cards, the badge data. When one drifts out of step, nothing errors; it just quietly goes wrong. A check now runs before every deploy and refuses to pass if any of them disagree. It has already caught three faults that were invisible from the front of the site.
11 / WHAT HASN’T CHANGED
The things that were never the point.
No accounts. No cookies of our own. No advertising, no sponsored placements, no affiliate links. Nothing you type, save, log or plan is transmitted anywhere — it lives in your browser and you can export or wipe it whenever you like. The new region filter asks you where you are rather than requesting your location, because a dropdown answers the question well enough and needs no permission at all.
Every route still says status: planned — all twenty-two of them, including the founding Scotland file, which had been quietly missing the label until a reader noticed. Nothing here has been driven yet, and the site will say so until it has.
And the field law is unchanged and non-negotiable: distance, patience, engine off. No nests, no leks, no baiting, no crowding. The rare entries are worth ten points precisely because you cannot go and get them.
12 / WHAT’S NEXT
Two obvious ones.
Field notes. Twenty-two plans and no wheel-turns is the honest weakness of this archive. The single most valuable thing that can happen next is driving one of these files and bringing back what was actually true: the campsite as found, the drive as timed, the species that showed and the ones that didn’t.
Europe. The Grand Quest completes the UK-plus-Mann set. The Channel is the natural next border, and the ferry doctrine already generalises — but that is a later season’s work. The UK is quite enough to be going on with.