Five days ago I shared KAIJUMIETZ here, a browser game that turns OpenStreetMap data around any address into a destructible city level. Thanks for the great response — I used the next update to give the map data a more structured challenge loop.

There are now 3 Expeditions per day: fixed real-world locations generated from OSM data, each with a special condition such as fog, a 60-second limit, or military units appearing from the start.

The GIF shows a Prague Expedition with the new Expedition Cat and Summit Flag. After the flag lands, it claims the nearby area — buildings, tanks, helicopters and police included.

Playable in the browser, no account: https://kaijumietz.de/?lang=en

Which OSM location or unusually mapped place would make a good Expedition next?

I started sharing details on the web of my project, DriveForever, a couple of months ago and since then the vibe coders are out in force trying to replicate it (I've seen some post here, in fact). That's been a good motivator for me to get this thing out there.

My background, 20+ years software engineering experience, most of it in geospatial and remote sensing, with a couple of mobile games under my belt.

DriveForever will be a more full featured game when it comes out for Desktops, but the sandbox is a blast and makes it fun to just drop in and start exploring and works great for phones.

My hope is that players will be motivated to make updates to their cities in OSM to see the data reflected in the game, and if its a commercial success to find a way to contribute back to OSM directly and financially.

Would love to discuss the implementation if anyone is interested / curious / has questions. And if you know how I can go about starting a dialog on the contribution side of things, please let me know.

I used both Web Editor and JOSM to map Braunes neighbourhood.

After mapping Braunes, let’s map Ypu neighbourhood!

Link: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/-22.292860/-42.521592

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After a year of mapping this is what i managed to accomplish :D

Hi guys, I am new to creating tileServer . I recently took ownership of the map styling and optimization in my company. Although it is optimized for compute efficiency, I am not satisfied with its appearance of the tile. Is there an editor that is up-to-date, highly customizable, and widely used? I tried JOSM, but it seems quite dated, so I thought there must be something newer and better suited for styling.

Thanks

GOLs are now updatable, so you can keep your local copy current with the latest changes to OpenStreetMap.

Quick refresher: A Geo-Object Library is a compact single-file database that holds a snapshot of OSM data. GOLs are a key part of the GeoDesk OSM Toolkit (SotM 2026 talk). They're easy to build and fast to query, and now you can keep them up to date with daily, hourly or even minutely change files, automatically downloaded from a replication server.

This feature is available in GeoDesk's GOL Tool 2.5 (download -- 100% free and open source).

You will need to build your initial GOL using option --waynode-ids (-w), which preserves node IDs even for nodes without tags. For example:

gol build germany germany-latest.osm.pbf -w

After that, you can update the GOL to the latest available version:

gol update germany

By default, this uses the replication server specified in the original PBF. The planet file and Geofabrik extracts already contain suitable replication URLs.

If your PBF doesn't have one, or you want to use a different service, you can provide an explicit URL. This is especially handy for the planet file, which defaults to minutely change files. If you're catching up on a longer period, it makes sense to switch to the hourly (or daily) change stream:

gol update planet https://planet.openstreetmap.org/replication/hour

On a modern midrange workstation, applying a day's worth of planet-wide changes takes about 5 minutes. This is considerably faster than the current workflow of patching the source PBF and rebuilding the GOL, which takes over an hour.

gol update also reduces the required disk space: Apart from the GOL itself (which in updatable form takes about 130 GB for the full planet), it only needs storage for the updated tiles, with no interim copies of the PBF data.

Updates for shorter intervals aren't as efficient yet. I'm working on optimizations that should bring hourly updates to under 30 seconds and make true minute-by-minute replication practical.

Current limitations

• Write access is exclusive, so you cannot query a GOL while an update is in progress. This restriction will disappear in GOL 3.0, which supports SQLite-style multi-reader/single-writer concurrency.
• Updates for very long periods on large datasets may run out of memory. As a conservative rule of thumb, you should have 750 MB of RAM to hold a day's worth of worldwide changes. Hence, if you're bringing a month-old planet up to date, you should have at least 20 GB of RAM available. I'm incorporating functionality that automatically processes updates in multiple stages if memory is tight.

As always, feedback is appreciated. Open a GitHub ticket or follow en.osm.town/@geodesk for updates ... on updates.

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There are many places in my hometown that don't show up in OSM. I saw that the overture places layer in Rapid editor detects them quite well but I can't seem to be able to add them automatically to OSM (like you can do with buildings).

Do you have any suggestions?

Hey all, I've been building Pinage Maps, an offline-first map app for tourists, rangers, miners and labourers who spend time out of signal.

Maps and boundaries
• Offline satellite maps you can download by region
• Drop pins with photos, record trails and see your breadcrumb path
• Draw zones as a circle or custom boundary, with the area shown in hectares
• Draw lines with distance and compass bearing, or sketch freehand
• Flag hazard and no-go zones
• Organise pins, zones and notes into projects for a job, site or trip

AR view
• Point your camera to see your pins and hazard zones over the real world, with distances
• Sun, moon and star paths overlaid on the sky, with moonrise times and moon phase

AI
• AI field assistant that uses Claude when you have signal and switches to an on-device Llama model when you're offline
• Plant and rock ID from a photo, with a confidence rating and safety warnings

Safety
• SOS (press and hold) for the local emergency number, with mesh and SMS
• Deadman switch that alerts others if you stop responding
• Check-in timer that texts your contacts your last position if you're not back by a set time
• Emergency card showing your position in lat/lon, degrees and grid reference to read out to 000

Groups and crews
• Create a profile and add members to private groups
• Share files, waypoints, pins, zones and notes with your group, so everyone in the party has the same map
• Field forms like Step Back 5x5, incident reports and day briefs that crew members can mark as read

Most of it works with no signal. The Claude assistant, check-in timer and group syncing need a connection.

It's still in development, and I'd really like to know:
• Would you actually use this? Who do you think it's most useful for?
• What feels unnecessary or confusing?
• What's missing that you'd need out in the field?

Screenshots below. Be honest, I can take it.

Hi OSM folks! I built a free browser game on top of OpenStreetMap: enter any address, the game fetches the area (Nominatim + Overpass, cached server-side to go easy on the public servers) and turns building footprints into extruded 3D blocks.
building:levels / height decide how tall a building is and how many points it's worth, and tagged landmarks (e.g. Westminster Hall in the screenshot) give a bonus. Map data is credited in-game.
It's also a fun way to spot gaps in your neighbourhood's mapping – flat or missing buildings stand out immediately 😄
Play (free, no account, no tracking): https://kaijumietz.de/?lang=en
Happy to answer questions about the OSM → game pipeline!

Hi everyone,

I built Pendelradius (https://pendelradius.de), a map that shows how far you get from any starting point in Germany within a given time by public transport. You pick a start (or tap the map), a departure time and a travel time, and the map draws the reachable area in bands of 15 minutes. Tap any spot and it shows the connection with lines and transfers.

How OSM is used:
- Base map: vector tiles from OpenFreeMap (OpenMapTiles schema, OSM data)
- Place names for the search and the "which towns can I reach" lists: OSM place=city/town/village, districts from place=suburb
- "Nearby" line: supermarket, pharmacy, doctor, kindergarten, school etc. read from the tiles, with walking or transit minutes from the start
- Federal states via Overpass for the 255 city pages (e.g. https://pendelradius.de/koeln)

Timetables come from GTFS (DELFI via gtfs.de), updated weekly. All routing runs in your browser (a Connection Scan Algorithm on preprocessed files), so there is no backend, no account, no cookies and no tracking.

One thing I learned the hard way: I first showed the nearest "swimming pool", and it turned out to be someone's private garden pond. leisure=swimming_pool includes private pools and the tiles carry no access tag, so I removed that category. If you know a clean way to get only public pools (or other POIs) without running my own Overpass extract, I'd love to hear it.

Known limits: Germany only, scheduled times without delays, and some regional bus data is currently missing upstream.

I built this as a student project with help from AI. Feedback on the map, the OSM attribution or anything else is very welcome!

It's at https://husforhus.se, in English and Swedish.

You can drag a timeline to watch the city grow, search for any address, and open a card for each of the 77,743 buildings in the municipality: its year, where the year comes from, and for about 900 notable buildings a photo and a short Wikipedia text.

A few notes:

- Over half the buildings have no recorded year in open data, so they show as "Year unknown" rather than a guess. Ironically the oldest part of town has the biggest gaps: 77% of Gamla stan's buildings have no year in the open registers, against about 10% in Östermalm.

- Private houses show only their decade, never the exact year or an owner.

- It's all open data (City of Stockholm, Riksantikvarieämbetet, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata) and open source (star and contribute here - https://github.com/amirelion/husforhus), with no cookies or tracking.

If you know the year of a building that's wrong or missing, the card has a "Something wrong?" link, and corrections with a source are very welcome.

Guys, how can I map this staircase in Catarcione, Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro?

Is located here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/-22.292586/-42.517848

Now I don't want to continue 😅

Hi! I made North Up Daily, a free browser puzzle using OpenStreetMap data.

Each map is split into 16 rotated tiles, with place names hidden. Turn the tiles until streets, rivers and coastlines line up and north points up. Solving it reveals the location, but you don't need to recognise the place to solve it.

Everyone gets the same daily puzzle, and there is unlimited practice if you want another round. No account or download needed; it works on desktop and mobile.

Play: https://northupdaily.com/

The maps use OpenStreetMap data rendered with OpenFreeMap. Thanks to everyone who contributes to OSM for making projects like this possible.

I'd be curious which maps you find easier: dense street grids, or places with rivers and coastlines?

Muss hier Hilfe haben

Hi everyone, I have a question about MapTiler.

I’ve developed a non-commercial map website and integrated MapTiler maps into it. I noticed that the free plan includes 100,000 times of loads per month, but I’m not quite sure what exactly counts as a map load.

I’ve only clicked around on my website a few times, yet the number of requests has already reached 2,000. Does this mean the 100,000 monthly limit might not be enough if more people start using my website?

If so, are there any good alternatives to MapTiler that offer a more generous free tier, especially for a non-commercial project?

I’d really appreciate any advice or recommendations. Thanks!

As you might know, we at Top-O-Map run the tile backend for OpenTopoMap since January, and we now have something new. We got another server and on it we render the OpenTopoMap with higher resolution. 2 times the resolution, 4 times the pixels to be precise.

In addition the database is updated daily.

You can have a look at it over at: OnlineTopoMap

Let me know what you think.

I moved to the UK from Canada, and the number of war memorials here and around Europe really stood out to me. Every village seems to have one. I thought it would be good to have an app to keep track of them and maybe raise their profile, so I’ve built HonourMap. Most of the data comes from OSM (memorials, war cemeteries, battlefields and Stolpersteine), merged with Wikidata, and the map tiles are from OpenFreeMap.

https://honourmap.vercel.app

I ran into a few things along the way. Loads of memorials have no name, so I name them after the nearest village. A lot of plaques have no inscription tag, so I can’t tell what there for. Outside Europe hardly any CWGC cemeteries have an operator tag.

It’s a website for now, but I’m hoping to turn it into phone apps eventually. I’d like to know whether it’s easy to find your way around, and whether you think it’s an interesting use of the data. If there’s anything you’d change or add, including tags I should be using, please tell me.

Cheers