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Changelog
How is land actually used? - version history · major = architectural changes · minor = new countries or significant features · patch = bug fixes and small tweaks
- Shareable image: the score is 90% opaque - the percentage at the bottom left is now almost solid white instead of faint.
- Shareable image: the score is clearer and out of the way - the big percentage is now more opaque and drawn in front of the background map, but smaller and kept to the bottom left, so it no longer runs under the result message or the country outline.
- Shareable image: the caption is now the result message - the text at the bottom right of the image is the same message you see after submitting (for example "Expert! You know Panama's land balance with impressive precision."), in the language chosen to play. It replaces the earlier congratulation text. The leading emoji or flag is dropped, because the flag is already drawn at the top of the image. The Share button sends the same message.
- Shareable image: a faded map of the surrounding world - behind everything is now a zoomed-out, faded view of the part of the globe around the country, with faint latitude and longitude lines and the country picked out in amber, so the image shows where it is as well as its shape.
- New country: Panama 🇵🇦 - the 35th game, in Spanish and English. Land use comes from World Bank figures (rescaled to total area); the settlement and golf shares are approximate estimates and are marked as such. The electricity data is from the Panamanian regulator ASEP (13.1 TWh generated in 2024: hydropower 60%, thermal 27%, solar 8%, wind 5%).
- The Canal and its locks - the country note and solar reveal explain that the locks fill by gravity and use electricity mainly for gate and valve motors and the original locks' electric locomotives; that the Canal Authority runs its own thermal power station at Miraflores; and that it has trialled floating solar on Gatún Lake and expects a 26 GWh-a-year solar plant from 2027, covering about 15% of its own use. The Canal's total use (about 170 GWh a year) is our own estimate derived from that 15% figure, and the text says so.
- Land or floating panels? - the "powered the world" panel compares: the whole national grid needs about 8,150 ha, around a fifth of Gatún Lake's surface. Floating panels are possible there but compete with shipping, drinking water and the lake's ecology, so cleared pasture is the easier site; floating suits hydropower reservoirs better.
- The "World Completionist" badge now needs 35 countries, and Panama is in the home page map, dropdown and Data sources panel.
- Greenland now has a "Solar farms (current)" category - Greenland does have a little solar: crowd-sourced OpenInfraMap data lists one small farm of about 0.1 MW near Igaliku, plus a few off-grid village and cabin systems. It is far below one thousandth of a percent of the land (about a quarter of a hectare), so the slider and the answer are shown to seven decimal places. Greenland still has no golf category, because it has no golf courses. The Data sources panel links the OpenInfraMap page.
- Very small areas are shown properly - the "(~N ha)" label after an answer used to round areas under one hectare to "0 ha"; it now shows the real figure, such as 0.25 ha.
- Hints that gave the answer away have been softened - a check of every country found text, shown before you guess, that stated the exact figure for a category. Reworded, in every language: Canada (farmland "less than 7%"), Algeria (Sahara "more than 80%"), Hungary (forest "from 11% to 21%"), Oman (desert "82%" and mountains "15%"), Sweden (built-up land "around 3%"), Greenland (ice sheet "over 79%") and Iceland (glaciers "from 11% to 10%"). Figures about other things, such as share of the population or of electricity, are unchanged.
- Simple hyphens instead of long dashes - every long dash in the games, the home page, the changelog and the page titles is now a simple hyphen, in all languages. Number ranges such as 2023-2026 are unchanged.
- Egypt: the agricultural land text no longer gives the desert answer away - the card said Egypt is "92% desert"; it now says "nearly all desert".
- Russia: electricity mix wording - the country note now reads "dominated by fossil gas (~47 %) and coal (~14 %), nuclear (~20%) and hydropower (~18%)" instead of "fossil fuels (fossil gas ~47%, coal ~14%)", in English and Russian.
- "Fossil gas" is now the only term used for the fuel - every mention in the games (the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Thailand and Algeria), in the Arabic, Russian and Thai versions as well as English, and in the changelog now says "fossil gas". Where a text used just "gas" for the fuel (the UAE, Russia and Algeria), it now says "fossil gas" too.
- Data year range kept - the year range from the old "Data:" line (for example "2023-2026") now appears in the linked sources line, as "Sources (2023-2026): ...", on every country page and in both languages.
- One sources line, with links, directly under the country notes - the unlinked "Data:" line that sat under the country context and note boxes duplicated the linked "Sources:" line at the bottom of the page. The unlinked one is gone, and the linked "Sources:" line (all organisations and reports, each with its link) now sits under the notes, on every country page, in both languages. The bottom of the page no longer repeats it.
- New country: Algeria 🇩🇿 - the 34th game, in Arabic and English (the same pair as Morocco). Land use comes from FAO and World Bank figures (agricultural land 17.4%, of which only about 3% is arable; forest 0.8%; the Sahara and other barren land 81.3%); the settlement and water shares are approximate estimates and are marked as such.
- The fossil-fuel and finance story is front and centre - the subtitle, the country note, the solar reveal, the "powered the world" panel and the grade messages all point out that about 99% of Algeria's electricity is made by burning fossil gas. The fossil gas is not imported: Algeria produces about 101 bcm a year and exports it, with hydrocarbons over 90% of export revenue. So every cubic metre burned at home is one not sold abroad; our rough estimate is 18-23 bcm a year, worth about $5-8 billion at recent export prices. Building solar+battery for the whole grid would cost about $47 billion at the default cost assumptions, so on paper it pays for itself in under a decade. The fossil gas volume and value are our own derivation from the 86 TWh generated and typical plant efficiency, not official statistics, and the text says so.
- Illustration caption moved - "The dashed circle is illustrative..." now sits directly under the map illustration, above the cost panel, on every country page.
- The "World Completionist" badge now needs 34 countries, and Algeria is in the home page map, dropdown and Data sources panel.
- Rough cost estimates on every country page - the "powered the whole world" panel now shows the approximate cost of the solar+battery build-out for the country's own grid and for the whole world, plus the combined cost per kW. Defaults: $700/kW solar + $130/kWh x 4 hours of battery = $1,220/kW, at a footprint of 1 MW per hectare. Costs are formatted for the chosen language, and the panel follows the language toggle.
- "Adjust cost assumptions" with a manual Update button - edit the solar $/kW, battery $/kWh and footprint, then press Update. Nothing changes until you press it, and the defaults are used until then. "Reset to defaults" restores the original values.
- Caveat and sources - the panel states that a real grid would never be solar-only, that the figures are a thought experiment and not a forecast, and links Lazard LCOE+, IRENA and BNEF as the default sources.
- Shareable image now links to benvost.fr/land-use-map/ - the link printed on the image and the link sent by the "Share result" button are now https://benvost.fr/land-use-map/ for every country.
- Switching language after you submit now switches the whole page - previously, only some parts followed the toggle once you had submitted. Now the category names and descriptions on the cards, the per-category result lines ("Answer: … spot on! / … off → … pts"), the "Data:" and "Sources:" labels, the solar+battery reveal text, the grade message, the browser tab title and the "powered the world" panel all change language together. The words in the result lines ("Answer", "spot on!", "off", "pts") and the "Data" and "Sources" labels are now translated into all 17 languages; before, they were always English, even on the local-language version.
- Fixed the "Submit all guesses" button staying in the previous language - after you submitted your guesses and then switched language, the (now disabled) submit button kept its old text, for example "Enviar respostas" on the English version of Brazil. It now switches language together with the rest of the page. This affected every country; it was already present before v6.
- Shareable result image - after you submit, the results panel has two new buttons: "Share result" (opens your device's share sheet where supported) and "Download image". Both make a 1200×630 PNG with the country's flag and name, the link to that country's game, a large faint version of your final score, the country's outline with a scale bar, and the line "Congratulations! Your estimation for powering [country] with just solar and batteries was [score] correct!". The percentage is the same final score shown in the results.
- The image is made in the language you are playing in - the caption, the country name and the button labels follow the language shown on screen when you tap, in all 17 languages of the game. Canada played in French gives a French image, Qatar played in English gives an English image, and switching language and tapping again gives the other version. Everything is drawn in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
- All data sources are listed, with links, on the home page - a "Data sources" link in the footer opens a panel with every country's sources, each linked: the organisations named in the "Data:" line and the specific reports behind the numbers. Press Esc or ✕ to close it.
- Completion badges are back on the home page - removed in v5.10.2, restored with the same behaviour as v5.10.0: a "X / 33 countries completed" counter, five badge pills (First Explorer, Getting Around, Well Traveled, Globe Trotter, World Completionist) and a ✓ next to each completed country in the dropdown. Your best score per country is stored only in your own browser; nothing is synced between devices.
- Every data source is now listed, with a link, at the bottom of each country page - the "Data:" line at the top names the organisations behind the numbers (FAO, World Bank, IRENA, national statistics offices, and so on), but only some of them were linked in the Sources list below the game. The Sources list now includes every organisation named at the top, each as a link to its official website, alongside the existing links to the specific reports and pages. Organisations that were already covered by a specific link are not repeated.
- New architecture: one shared game engine plus one data file per country - all 33 games now run on a single engine (
engine.html) and read their country-specific content (categories, answers, text in each language, map position, solar figures) from a small data-xx.js file. Before, every country page carried its own full copy of the game code, in three slightly different generations. The old xx-land-use-game.html addresses still work: they forward to the new engine, so existing links and bookmarks are unaffected.
- Fixed "Play again" on the US, UK and Australia pages - the button stopped with a script error on these three older pages, so a second round needed a page reload. It now works on every country.
- Fixed "undefined" in the allocation label on the US, UK and Australia pages - the line under the progress bar read "0.0 undefined" until you moved a slider; it now reads "0.0 / 100% allocated".
- Fixed missing "million" for Greenland and Nigeria - the "what if this country powered the world" text said "about 37.2 hectares" and "16.5 hectares" instead of "37.2 million hectares" and "16.5 million hectares".
- The grade message now follows the language toggle - after submitting, switching language previously left the grade comment ("Expert! You know…") in the old language. It now switches with everything else.
- The page language is now set correctly when you toggle - on the twelve older bilingual pages (Brazil, China, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, India, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Madagascar, Mexico) the browser was told the page was in the local language even when English was showing. Screen readers and translation prompts now see the right language.
- Canada's language order is no longer a special case - it is now just two fields in Canada's data file (English first, French second), the same as every other country.
- "Spot on" now always matches the score - on the twelve older bilingual pages an answer could show "+0.5% off" next to a 100-point score, or "spot on!" next to 89 points. The label now follows the same rule as the score everywhere.
- Land-area readouts and percentages - small areas now show exact hectares (for example "~1,172 ha") instead of being rounded to the nearest thousand or shown without separators; answers that have two decimals in the data (for example 66.74%) show both; and very small values (under 0.01%) always show four decimals. UAE and Qatar's "times the country's size" figure now shows one decimal (1.4) instead of rounding to a whole number (1).
- After submitting, the US, UK and Australia area maps now also include the solar+battery block - as the other thirty countries already did.
- Progress-bar colour - the bar blends toward each country's own accent colour in all games (a few older pages used a slightly different green or blue).
- Removed the player completion badges introduced in v5.10.0 - the "X / 33 countries completed" counter, the badge pills (First Explorer to World Completionist) and the per-country ✓ checkmarks in the dropdown are gone from the home page, and the 33 country pages no longer store progress in the browser. Badges will return in v6 together with the shareable result image.
- Fixed Canada's "Note" and "Country context" labels being swapped between languages - Canada is the one country where English is the default ("local") language and French sits under the toggle, and the earlier label-translation fix didn't account for that, so the French labels ended up on the English page and vice versa. Both languages now show the correct labels.
- Added player completion badges - finishing a country's guesses now saves your best score for it in your browser, and the map page shows a progress count ("X / 33 countries completed") plus a row of badges you unlock as you go: First Explorer, Getting Around, Well Traveled, Globe Trotter, and World Completionist for finishing all of them. Countries you've already completed also get a small checkmark in the country dropdown. Progress is stored locally in your own browser, so it isn't shared between devices.
- Fixed "Note" and "Country context" labels staying in English across all 25 bilingual countries - the body text of these boxes was already being translated correctly, but the bold label prefixes themselves ("Note:", "Country context:") were hardcoded in English directly in the page's JavaScript, so they never changed when the language toggle was used, no matter which language was selected. Every bilingual country now has these labels properly translated and wired into the toggle alongside everything else, and any leftover static English markup that briefly appeared before the page's script ran has been cleared out too.
- Fixed "Country context" box not translating in 12 countries - Brazil, China, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, India, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Madagascar and Mexico all had a hardcoded, English-only country-context box left over from an earlier mass edit that didn't account for bilingual pages - it never updated when the language toggle was used. Each country's context text is now genuinely translated (Portuguese, Chinese, German, Danish, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Swahili, Arabic, Malagasy, Spanish) and properly wired into the language toggle alongside the rest of the page.
- Data consistency audit and repair across 15 countries - preparatory work for a future shared-data architecture surfaced two classes of long-standing bugs. First, category percentages in 10 countries didn't sum to exactly 100%, most severely in the UK (115.9%) and Australia (90.2%), with smaller drift in Spain, India, Lebanon, China, Germany, Denmark, France, Japan and the US - all corrected by proportionally rescaling each country's categories to sum to exactly 100%, preserving their relative land-use balance rather than re-deriving fresh figures. Second, 15 of the project's earliest country files were missing per-category hectare figures entirely, so the "Answer: X% (~? ha)" reveal silently showed no hectare value - now backfilled for every category using each country's known total land area. All 33 countries now verified to sum to exactly 100% with complete hectare data.
- Canada added - English/French toggle; the country's boreal forest alone (37% of the land) is larger than the entire land area of India, and it holds roughly 20% of the world's fresh water across some 2 million lakes. The country context box highlights a genuinely unusual case: Canada is a top-5 global oil exporter, yet its own electricity grid is already about 85% non-emitting thanks to hydropower (~60%) and nuclear (~15%, concentrated in Ontario) - the oil sands' output is mostly exported rather than burned for domestic power, so the two systems coexist rather than compete. World card: Canada's sheer size means the world-solar circle fits comfortably within its own borders despite only ordinary, UK-like solar conditions - a reminder that total land area and per-hectare solar quality are separate variables.
- Country dropdown now scrolls - with 34 countries in the list, the menu had grown too tall to fit comfortably on screen, and had no way to scroll since it was clipped with
overflow: hidden. Capped the menu's height to show roughly 23 entries at a time, switched to a scrollable list beyond that, and styled the scrollbar to match the rest of the interface rather than leaving a raw browser default.
- UAE added - Arabic/English toggle; over 92% desert and sand dunes, including the towering Liwa dunes of the Empty Quarter. The country context box covers the UAE's economic pivot: non-oil sectors now exceed 70% of GDP (up from ~10% in 1980), funded rather than replaced by oil wealth. Covers the Barakah nuclear plant (the Arab world's first, ~25% of UAE electricity, built explicitly to free up fossil gas for export), Masdar's clean energy investments across 40+ countries (20 GW in 2022 to 65 GW by January 2026, targeting 100 GW by 2030), and green hydrogen as a new export commodity - making the UAE an energy power for other nations through investment, not just oil exports, while ADNOC continues expanding oil production in parallel. World card: despite world-class desert solar conditions, the UAE's small land area means it just misses fitting the whole world's electricity demand within its own borders (~1.4× overflow) - a near-miss illustrating that exceptional sunshine per hectare can't fully offset a small total footprint.
- Sweden added - Swedish/English toggle; nearly 69% forest, with an economy built on timber and pulp exports. The country context box covers Northvolt, once Europe's flagship EV battery hope, which went bankrupt in March 2025 costing 5,000 jobs, then was acquired out of bankruptcy by California's Lyten in February 2026 with production restarting - worth noting Northvolt's cells used cobalt-dependent NMC chemistry, not the cobalt-free LFP batteries increasingly dominant elsewhere. Also covers Sweden's own energy story, which looks nothing like a country chasing solar: hydropower, nuclear and wind already deliver a grid over 90% fossil-free. World card: unlike Nordic neighbours Denmark and Iceland, Sweden's sheer land area means the world-solar circle just about fits within its own borders despite similarly modest high-latitude sunshine.
- Fixed inconsistent scoring across categories - two guesses off by nearly the same amount (8.8 and 9.7 percentage points) were scoring 100 and 38 respectively, because error was measured relative to each category's own answer size. A big-answer category (e.g. 62% barren land) tolerated a huge absolute miss before losing points, while a smaller-answer category (e.g. 19% farmland) was punished harshly for a similarly-sized absolute miss. Error is now measured as a fraction of each category's own slider range instead, so a miss of a given size means roughly the same thing wherever it happens. The same two example guesses now score 72 and 22 - both clearly "off," rather than one masquerading as perfect.
- Verified source citations are already consistent - audited all 30 games for the reported inconsistency in where/how sources are cited; every game already has a single "Sources:" footer with real, clickable links in the same position, so no changes were needed here.
- Iceland added - English only (see note in-game on why Icelandic isn't offered). Around 62% barren volcanic highland and 10% glacier, with agricultural land almost entirely sheep pasture rather than crops. Iceland has the most golf courses per capita of any country on Earth. The country context box makes the point explicit: given Iceland's far-northern latitude, solar power could only ever be a minor, supplementary contributor - insolation collapses for months around midwinter, and even summer's midnight sun arrives at a shallow angle through frequent cloud. That's not a problem, though: Iceland already generates virtually 100% of its electricity from hydropower (~70%) and geothermal energy (~30%), neither of which depends on the sun. World card: Iceland is one of the most dramatic overflow cases in the game, needing a circle over 4.5× its own land area for world solar - a deliberate illustration that "renewable" doesn't have to mean solar.
- DR Congo: added the diesel-desulfurisation cobalt comparison - the country context box now notes that cobalt-molybdenum catalysts have stripped sulphur from diesel since the 1950s-60s, decades before EV batteries existed, with far less public scrutiny despite the same DRC supply chain. Refinery catalysts deactivate and are typically discarded or regenerated roughly every one to two years, historically often to landfill, versus an EV battery's 10-20 year service life - though actual battery recycling rates remain low in practice today (under 5% in the US) even as the technology to recover 90%+ of a battery's cobalt already exists.
- DR Congo added - French/English toggle; two-thirds Congo Basin rainforest, the world's second-largest tropical forest after the Amazon. The country context box covers artisanal cobalt mining (an estimated 40,000 child labourers, often for under $2/day) alongside the shift in EV battery chemistry away from cobalt entirely: cobalt-free LFP batteries now exceed half of global EV battery volume and 90% of grid storage, with industry projections of cobalt-containing chemistries falling below 10% of the mix within a decade. Also covers off-grid pay-as-you-go solar as the practical, working answer to energy poverty for the 80%+ of Congolese without grid access - genuinely affordable relative to grid infrastructure, but still a real daily trade-off against food and other essentials for extremely poor households. World card: DRC's vast size keeps the thought experiment well within physical bounds despite only moderate rainforest-dampened sunshine.
- Fixed locator ring hijacking Australia's clicks - the tiny-country auto-detection heuristic was occasionally misclassifying Australia as "tiny" under certain conditions, producing a locator ring that overlapped Australia's own clickable shape - so clicking inside a ring meant for another country (e.g. Tuvalu) sometimes loaded Australia instead. Australia is now explicitly excluded from the locator system.
- Fixed v5.4.0's changelog badge - it was mislabelled "major" despite following the project's own convention that major bumps (x.0.0) are reserved for architectural changes. Corrected to "minor," matching the addition of Zambia and the URL/filename changes that shipped in that release.
- Fixed manual URL hash edits not navigating - changing the address bar directly (e.g. editing
#au to #fr) didn't load the new country, because the hash was only ever parsed once, on initial page load. Editing the address bar fires a hashchange event rather than popstate, and nothing was listening for it. Added a hashchange listener that reuses the same alpha2/legacy-numeric resolution logic as the initial load and click-through navigation, and made sure the resulting history entry carries the same state object our own navigation uses, so the back button keeps working correctly afterwards too.
- Zambia added - English only; 60% forest (miombo woodland, being cleared for charcoal at over 170,000 hectares a year), with national parks covering roughly 30% of the country. The country context box covers the August 13, 2026 election (incumbent Hichilema, economic reformer, widely favoured to win) and the deeper energy story: Zambia has essentially no oil, its resource wealth is copper and cobalt critical to the global EV/battery supply chain, while its own electricity grid - 85% dependent on a single drought-exposed lake - suffered blackouts of up to 21 hours a day during the 2023-24 crisis, now driving a genuine mining-led solar investment boom.
- Human-readable URLs - country links now use two-letter codes (
#fr, #tv) instead of raw ISO numeric IDs (#250, #798). Old numeric-hash links (e.g. from before this change) still work via a legacy fallback, so no existing shared links break.
- France's file renamed -
france-utilisation-terres.html is now fr-land-use-game.html, matching the two-letter-code convention used by every other country.
- Venezuela added - Spanish/English toggle; 52% forest, 24% Llanos savanna and farmland, with electricity already ~78% clean thanks to the Guri Dam alone. The country context box covers the January 2026 US capture of President Maduro and the push to rapidly expand oil drilling - but notes that ~90% of Venezuela's reserves are extra-heavy, sour Orinoco Belt crude that must be diluted and chemically upgraded before it can become petrol, diesel, jet fuel or ammonia feedstock, with breakeven costs above $80/barrel. World card contrasts this directly with solar: unlike the oil, sunlight needs no dilution or decades of capital investment - Venezuela's land area and solid tropical solar resource mean the whole world's electricity could theoretically come from just 18.5% of its territory.
- Scoring made more forgiving of slider precision - it was possible to be rounded to "0.0% off" on screen and still only score 75 points, because the display rounds to a category's decimal precision while scoring compared the true, unrounded slider value. Sliders are hard to place exactly, so full marks are now awarded either within a relative error of 15% (up from 8%) or within about 1.5 slider steps of the true answer, whichever is more generous - the second rule directly targets the display-vs-scoring mismatch. Middle and low scoring bands were widened to match. The "spot on!" label now uses the same 1.5-step tolerance as the 100-point band, so it never appears next to a score under 100.
- Qatar: agricultural land category added - a follow-up question ("does Qatar import all its food?") revealed a gap: agriculture was missing entirely from the category list. Fixed with a new 0.4% category covering Qatar's post-2017-blockade farming sector - hydroponic greenhouses and modern dairy/poultry operations like Baladna, which reached near-total self-sufficiency in dairy and fresh poultry despite the country's tiny arable land area. The country context box now addresses both questions this game has prompted: renewables pace (Qatar is not OPEC's fastest) and food self-sufficiency (no longer fully import-dependent).
- Qatar added - Arabic/English toggle; nearly 80% desert and barren land, with over 99% of the population living in the urban fringe around Doha. The country context box directly addresses whether Qatar is OPEC's fastest-transitioning nation on renewables - it isn't: Saudi Arabia and the UAE lead the Gulf's pace of change, while Qatar has taken a more measured approach, instead expanding LNG production capacity by 85% by 2030. World card: despite near-uniform, world-class solar conditions (~375 ha/TWh), Qatar's tiny land area means the circle needed for world electricity demand is over 1,000× the size of the entire country - the most dramatic overflow case in the game, illustrating that per-hectare solar potential and total land area are entirely separate questions.
- Locator ring is now clickable - clicking anywhere inside the shrinking ring for a tiny country (Lebanon, Tuvalu) now loads that country's game, using the same proximity detection that triggers the ring's hover animation. This matters most for Tuvalu, whose shape is too small to click directly (and may not even exist in the underlying map data) - the ring is effectively its only clickable target on the map. A pointer cursor appears while hovering in range as a visual cue.
- Fixed Tuvalu's locator ring position - it was appearing in the wrong place (northwest of Australia) and not triggering at all from the dropdown. Root cause: Natural Earth's 50m dataset, used for the world map, likely omits Tuvalu entirely, so there was no map feature to compute a location from. Tuvalu now uses a hardcoded real-world coordinate instead of relying on the (probably absent) map feature, matching the location used inside Tuvalu's own game page.
- Fixed map cropping in Chrome - the world map's top and bottom were being clipped in Chrome but not Firefox. The map used SVG "slice" mode, which crops content to fill the frame; a leftover, invalid CSS rule meant to control this had no actual effect in any browser, masking the real cause. Switched to "meet" mode, which always shows the full map without cropping, in every browser.
- Locator ring for tiny countries - countries too small to reliably see or click on the map (currently just Tuvalu) now get a shrinking accent-coloured ring that pinpoints their location. It triggers two ways: hovering the country's entry in the dropdown list, or simply moving the mouse near its real position on the map, even though the country's actual rendered shape is too small to hit directly.
- Dropdown menu made more translucent again - opacity lowered from 62% to 50%, blur reduced from 9px to 7px.
- Country context split into its own boxout - the disclaimer box previously mixed the generic "thought experiment, not a policy recommendation" boilerplate with each country's specific facts, sources, and political context, making the specific content easy to miss. All 24 games now show a separate amber "Country context" box above the plain grey disclaimer, so country-specific notes (energy policy, political events, data sources) get their own visual space.
- Oman added - Arabic/English toggle; over four-fifths desert and gravel plains, with agriculture and settlement confined to a thin coastal fringe watered by the millennium-old falaj irrigation system. The disclaimer covers Oman's oil-dependent economy (75% of government revenue from hydrocarbons) alongside its Vision 2040 pivot to green hydrogen exports. World card: Oman's exceptional solar irradiance (~429 ha/TWh, among the best on Earth) means the whole world's electricity could theoretically come from 43% of Oman's land - yet independent analysis shows Oman's own 2030 green hydrogen targets alone would need more renewable electricity than its entire current grid produces, illustrating that the barrier is built infrastructure, not sunlight or land.
- Dropdown menu made more translucent again - opacity lowered from 72% to 62%, blur slightly reduced from 10px to 9px, for an even clearer view of the map underneath.
- Fixed stuck map highlight - hovering a country in the dropdown could occasionally leave a previous country highlighted (e.g. Australia staying lit after moving on to Egypt), most likely from a missed mouseleave event during fast mouse movement, or a leftover selection state sharing the same highlight colour. Made the highlight self-healing: every hover now clears all highlights before applying the new one, with an additional safety net that clears everything if the pointer leaves the dropdown entirely.
- Dropdown menu made more translucent - background opacity lowered from 98% to 72%, with a stronger blur to compensate, so the map (and the newly-highlighted hovered country) stays visible through the open dropdown while text remains legible.
- World map switched to Equal Earth projection - replaces Natural Earth with an equal-area projection, so country sizes on the hub map are proportionally honest rather than distorted, fitting a game that's fundamentally about land area.
- Hovering the country dropdown highlights it on the map - makes tiny countries like Tuvalu, which are too small to reliably click directly on the map, easy to locate: hover the name in the list and its territory lights up (and is brought to the front so it's visible even under larger neighbours).
- 🇲🇦 Morocco added - Arabic/English toggle; two-thirds "agricultural land" is mostly semi-arid rangeland, not cropland. Land use figures exclude the disputed territory of Western Sahara, which is disclosed transparently rather than assumed. The disclaimer covers Morocco's electrostate ambitions: a 52% renewable capacity target by 2030, the Noor Ouarzazate CSP complex, and the UK government's abandonment of the £24bn Xlinks subsea cable project in early 2026 - a setback to Morocco's plans to export clean power abroad. World card: Morocco's exceptional Sahara-adjacent solar resource (~450 ha/TWh, better than Egypt's) means the whole world's electricity could theoretically come from just 31% of Morocco's land - one of the more physically credible "fits" cases in the game.
- Fixed scroll fight on submit - v4.15.1's fix to scroll to the land-use graphic was being immediately overridden by a second, later
scrollIntoView() call on the world card, fired synchronously within the same click handler. Since both animations were smooth scrolls competing for the same frame, the world card's call always won, undoing the intended fix. Removed the world card's own auto-scroll - it still renders and draws after the usual short delay, but no longer fights for the viewport.
- Submit now scrolls to the land-use graphic, not the world card - hitting "Submit all guesses" previously only auto-scrolled once the world card appeared, well below the fold. The proportional area map and score are the actual point of the game; the world card is a bonus feature. All 23 games now scroll to the treemap immediately on submit, letting the world card render further down without demanding attention first.
- 🇭🇺 Hungary added - Hungarian/English toggle; 57% farmland, 21.1% forest (a century-long record as of end-2024), and one of the highest solar shares of electricity generation in the world (24% in 2024, over three-quarters of green electricity). The disclaimer notes Hungary's April 2026 election, in which Péter Magyar's Tisza party defeated Viktor Orbán's Fidesz after 16 years in power; the new government has since dropped Hungary's EU veto on Ukraine's accession and moved to restore judicial independence. Energy figures reflect the system inherited from the outgoing government, as the new administration's policy was still forming at time of writing.
- 🇹🇭 Thailand upgraded to bilingual - added a Thai/English toggle to the previously English-only Thailand game, following the "always add the local language, or explain why not" principle now applied across the game.
- 🇹🇭 Thailand added - English only; 41% farmland (a top global rice exporter), 37% forest despite decades of development, and over 250 golf courses making it one of Asia's top golf tourism destinations. Highlights EGAT's floating solar programme on Sirindhorn Dam - the world's largest hydro-floating solar hybrid - which sidesteps land-use conflicts entirely by sharing reservoir surfaces already dammed for hydropower. World card: Thailand's tropical solar resource and reasonably large land area mean the world's electricity could theoretically be powered from just 33% of Thailand's land - one of the more physically grounded "fits within the country" cases in the game.
- Tuvalu: EEZ note added - the world card footer now addresses whether Tuvalu's vast 749,790 km² ocean territory (nearly 29,000× its land area) could host offshore solar or wind. Short answer: not easily - open-ocean floating solar has no proven cyclone-resistant design anywhere in the world, and Tuvalu's atolls drop into deep water almost immediately offshore, ruling out fixed-bottom turbines. The EEZ's real value to Tuvalu remains tuna fishing licence fees, not energy.
- 🇹🇻 Tuvalu added - English only; one of the four smallest countries on Earth at just 26 km² (2,600 ha), averaging under 2 metres above sea level. Categories highlight the existential threat of sea-level rise for low-lying Pacific nations: pulaka swamp-taro gardens poisoned by saltwater intrusion from below, a freshwater lens contaminated by encroaching seawater, and engineered land built by the Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project because there is no higher ground to retreat to. World card: Tuvalu's entire national territory would fit inside the land needed for world solar over 6,400 times - the starkest scale mismatch in the game, underlining just how small and vulnerable this nation of 11,000 people truly is.
- 🇳🇬 Nigeria added - English only; Africa's most populous nation (220 million) and largest oil producer, yet generating less grid electricity than Norway. 46% farmland, 22% forest (rapidly declining - one of the world's highest deforestation rates), 25% savanna. Golf courses cover more land than all utility-scale solar farms combined. World card: Nigeria's exceptional solar resources (Sokoto gets 7.5 peak sun hours/day) mean the world's electricity could theoretically be powered from 18% of Nigeria's land - roughly the same area Nigeria already uses for cities and roads.
- 🇬🇱 Greenland added - English only; 79% of the world's largest island is buried under the second-largest ice sheet on Earth, reaching 3 km thick. The remaining coastal fringe is tundra, bare rock and sheep pastures. The world card is the most striking in the game: the solar circle technically fits within Greenland's outline at 17.2% of total land - but represents 91% of all ice-free land on the island, essentially the entire exposed coastline. Greenland already generates 87% of its electricity from hydropower (Nukissiorfiit), using glacial meltwater from the retreating ice sheet.
- Russia: Settlement & roads added - cities, towns and infrastructure were missing as a separate category, buried inside "Other land". Now split out at 1.5% (~25.6M ha), covering Moscow, St. Petersburg and Russia's 13 other million-plus cities. "Other land" corrected to 32.8%.
- Russia: land use figures corrected - categories now sum to 100% using FAO FAOSTAT 2022 territorial area (1,709.8M ha) as denominator: Forest 49.8%, Other 32.8%, Agricultural 13.0%, Water 2.9%, Settlement 1.5%.
- Russia: golf courses added as a category - ~35 clubs × ~65 ha ≈ 1,700 ha = 0.0001% of Russia's land. Strikingly, this is roughly the same area as all of Russia's solar farms combined, making it the most vivid illustration in the game of how little solar Russia has deployed.
- Pakistan: "spot on!" scoring fixed - the spot-on threshold was a fixed 0.3% absolute for all non-solar categories, enormous relative to a 0.0008% answer. Now uses
cat.step × 0.5 so the threshold scales with the category's resolution. (Fix was in v4.10.0; this patch confirms the correct file is in the zip.)
- 🇷🇺 Russia added - Russian/English toggle; nearly half of the world's largest country is boreal forest - bigger than the entire Amazon. Russia holds ~20% of global forest cover and the world's greatest freshwater reserves, yet generates just 0.28% of its electricity from solar (IRENA 2023), relying instead on fossil gas (~47%), nuclear (~20%) and hydro (~18%). World card: despite minimal current solar, the southern steppes could power the whole world with just 1.5% of Russia's land.
- 🇵🇰 Pakistan added - Urdu/English toggle; ~47% farmland, just 4.7% forest, with the Thar and Cholistan deserts covering much of the rest. The solar category highlights Pakistan's extraordinary rooftop solar boom: in 2024 alone it imported more solar panels than almost any country bar China and the US - nearly all onto existing rooftops, adding essentially zero new land use. World card: Pakistan's deserts could power the whole world from just ~23% of its own land.
- Category cards truncated - fixed - v4.8.2 introduced a
ReferenceError in older files that store state in DOM sliders rather than a guesses object, silently aborting buildCards(). Fixed by reading each slider's current DOM value before rebuilding.
- Changelog opens in same tab - the version badge link no longer has
target="_blank".
- LF line endings enforced across all files.
- Language toggle preserves slider positions - card rebuild always set sliders to
value="0". Fixed by reading each slider's existing DOM value and writing it back to the new element.
- Sol100 recalculated for consistency - US, UK and France used inconsistent assumptions from earlier sessions. Corrected to the same model as all other countries. US:
23 M → 2.4 M ha; UK: 1.1 M → 297 k ha; France: 1.6 M → 336 k ha.
- Globe rotation in all games - the orthographic globe now spins on reveal in all 16 games; it had only been added to Egypt.
- Carries forward v4.7.1 flag images, back-button fix, and the v4.8.0 Egypt addition.
- 🇩🇰 Denmark added - Dansk/English toggle; >62% farmland (world's highest share). Golf courses and utility solar are similar-sized slivers. World card: Denmark would need 6× its land area for world solar - wind covers ~55% of its electricity.
- 🇩🇪 Germany added - Deutsch/English toggle; 50% farmland and 30% forest. Golf courses (~0.157%) and utility solar (~0.21%) cover almost exactly the same area. Includes a disclaimer on the automotive industry's EV transition: VW cutting 35,000 jobs, EV sales down 27% in 2024.
- World card translated - the "what if [country] alone powered the world" card now switches language correctly along with the rest of the page in all 10 bilingual games; it was previously English-only regardless of the toggle
- Map legend contrast fixed - the country outline is now a clearly muted grey-brown and the land-area-needed circle a vivid orange, matching the legend dots
- "What if [country] alone powered the whole world?" - card revealed on submit, showing land needed at each country's own solar conditions for ~31,000 TWh/yr. Ranges from <3% of land (sunny countries) to 4× the country's area (cloudy ones), with the circle overflowing into neighbours.
- Zoomed inset map - alongside the world globe view, a second zoomed-in panel shows the same equivalent-area circle at a scale where it's actually visible, with a kilometre scale bar for a tangible sense of size.
- Scores normalised to percentages - replaces the old "points out of 800" system, which was actually out of 700/800/900 depending on how many categories a country had. All games now show a single comparable 0–100% accuracy score, with grade thresholds rescaled to match.
- Golf courses restored as a category in US, Australia, Spain, China and Mexico - the original inspiration for this game was comparing land used for golf vs. solar+battery, so it's back where the numbers are meaningful (UK, France and Japan already had it)
- 🇲🇽 Mexico added - Spanish/English toggle; pastureland is the largest single land use at 41.7%, with a third of the country forested despite its desert reputation
- China solar banner translated - the dedicated callout about China's 2024 solar build-out now switches language with the rest of the page
- Language toggle - games now open in the country's majority language with a button to switch to English: Arabic (Lebanon), Hindi (India), 日本語 (Japan), Português (Brazil), 中文 (China), Kiswahili (Kenya), Malagasy (Madagascar). France, Spain, UK, US and Australia remain single-language.
- Browser back button - navigating back now correctly returns to the world map; game URLs update to e.g.
#840 so direct links work
- All game files rebuilt from clean template - eliminates recurring JS string escaping issues
- Madagascar, Kenya, Brazil fixed - unescaped apostrophes in JS grade labels were breaking all three games
- Madagascar, Kenya, Brazil link fixes - FAO, IRENA, IBGE, MapBiomas and EPRA source links corrected
- China cropland description - no longer gives away the answer percentage
- 🇯🇵 Japan added - forests cover 66% of the land yet most is inaccessible mountain terrain; solar+battery for 100% electricity is the largest land requirement in the game due to Japan's lower solar irradiance
- Changelog page - version badge now links here
- METI link fixed for Japan
- Source links fixed - all broken or incorrect URLs replaced with verified working links to primary sources
- Source links added - clickable links to primary reports in all game footers
- Spain deduplication - file had two complete HTML documents concatenated; fixed
- Update buttons commented out - disabled pending API fix (caused fatal JS error breaking all games)
- 🇮🇳 India added - ~43% of land feeds 1.4 billion people; utility-scale solar already at 79 GW and growing rapidly
- Tooltip flags - hovering a country on the map now shows the flag and name
- Grid-scale clarity - all solar descriptions now explicitly state utility-scale, grid-connected
- Lebanon solar clarified - existing ~1.9% is rooftop/off-grid, distinct from the grid-scale sol100 figure
- Dropdown alphabetical - country list now sorted A–Z
- Lebanon solar - rooftop vs grid-scale distinction clarified in descriptions and reveal text
- Grid-scale language - solar categories across all games updated for clarity
- Layout overhaul - dropdown selector above the map, full-width map on desktop, fits one viewport
- Available/Selected legend removed - evident from map colours
- 🇱🇧 Lebanon added - citizen-led solar boom driven by electricity crisis; rooftop solar already covers ~1.9% of land
- Country dropdown - replaces sidebar list, scales to any number of countries
- 100% cap fixed - proportional clamping so any slider can be increased at any time
- Spoiler text hidden on submit - "Revealed after you submit" disappears when results show
- Disclaimer added - AI thought experiment caveat, tailored per country with energy context
- D3 + TopoJSON map - replaced hand-drawn blobs with Natural Earth 50m proper country outlines
- Solar → Solar+battery - renamed throughout; sol100 figures ~2× panels-only to account for storage overcapacity for nights and cloudy periods
- ↻ Update figures button - AI-powered live data refresh via Anthropic API with web search (currently disabled)
- World map hub - index.html with clickable country map replacing separate game links
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom, 🇫🇷 France, 🇺🇸 United States - initial release
- 🇦🇺 Australia, 🇪🇸 Spain added at v1
- Proportional area map, slider capping, scoring, grade labels
- Inspired by Dr. Simon Clark's YouTube short on UK land use