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Scavenger Hunts

Build a scavenger hunt through your tour

Turn a tour into something a visitor plays: add stops in order, pick how each one opens, clear the checks that block publishing, and share the link.

Video walkthrough

Video coming soon. A recorded walkthrough of these exact steps will appear here.
Narration script

The walkthrough has not been recorded yet. This is the narration it will follow, step for step.

Let us turn a tour into something a visitor plays. I open my destination and click Hunts, next to Connections and New scene. Every stop lives inside a scene, so add scenes first if we tell you to. I scroll to New hunt, type a title and an introduction, click Create hunt, and I am in the editor: Before you publish, Hunt settings, Stops, and Where scenes are in the world. I click Add a stop. Title, then which scene the visitor is standing in, then two bits of text doing different jobs. The Clue is what they read before it opens. The Reveal is what they read after, and that is where your teaching goes, so do not waste it. Then the interesting choice: How it opens. Freely, once the stop before it is done. Or the visitor types the right answer, which gives me a box for accepted answers, comma separated, and I list every spelling a reasonable person might type, because case and accents and stray spaces are already forgiven. Or the visitor holds the right keys. Or the visitor is physically there, which gives me a radius in metres, starting at forty. Save. Here is what people trip on: stops run in strict order, and a locked one just shows a question mark. So Move up and Move down are not cosmetic. A key only counts as reachable if something earlier hands it out, which means reordering can quietly break a hunt that worked. That is what Before you publish watches. Errors mean nobody can finish, and they hold the Publish button down until you fix them. Warnings never block you. And do not set a radius under twenty five metres, because phone G P S is five to twenty metres out on a good day. I click Publish and the badge flips. That second badge, Playable anywhere or On site, I do not control: one arrival stop makes the whole thing On site, so visitors are never promised something the stops contradict. Last thing, and it catches people: nothing links to your hunt. Its address is your tour's address plus slash hunt slash its slug, and you hand that out yourself. The tour has to be public too.

Steps

  1. Open your destination from /creator/destinations and click Hunts, in the row of buttons next to Connections and New scene. If you see the message 'Add scenes to this destination before building a hunt.', add at least one scene first: a stop always sits in a scene.
  2. Scroll to New hunt. Fill in Hunt title and Introduction (shown before the first stop), then click Create hunt. That drops you straight into the hunt editor, which has four sections in this order: Before you publish, Hunt settings, Stops, and Where scenes are in the world.
  3. Click Add a stop. Give it a Stop title, pick the Scene the visitor is standing in, and write the two pieces of text: Clue (shown before the stop opens) is the prompt, and Reveal (shown after it opens) is the payoff, which is where the actual teaching goes.
  4. Choose How it opens. There are exactly four: 'Freely, once the stop before it is done' needs nothing. 'The visitor types the right answer' reveals an Accepted answers (comma separated) box; case, accents and extra spaces are forgiven, so list every reasonable spelling. 'The visitor holds the right keys' reveals Required keys (comma separated), and the visitor must hold all of them. 'The visitor is physically there' reveals Unlock radius (metres), which starts at 40.
  5. Every stop also has a Grants this key when it opens box, whatever kind it is. Leave it empty unless a later stop, or something hidden elsewhere, should open once this one is done. Click Save when the stop is right.
  6. Stops run strictly in order: a visitor is never offered a stop until the one before it is done, and a locked stop shows a question mark instead of its title. Use Move up and Move down to reorder. Order is load-bearing, not cosmetic: a required key only counts as reachable if something EARLIER grants it, so moving a stop can make a working hunt unfinishable. The checks re-run every time you move one.
  7. Read Before you publish. Problems come in two levels. Errors mean a visitor cannot finish, and they block publishing: the Publish button stays disabled until the count reaches zero. Warnings are judgement calls, they never block, and you can publish straight past them once you have read them.
  8. Clear the errors. 'This hunt has no stops yet.': add a stop. A stop that 'unlocks by arriving somewhere, but its scene has no real-world position': either fill that scene's Latitude and Longitude down in Where scenes are in the world and click Save position, or change How it opens to something that does not need a location. A stop that 'needs the key ... which nothing before it grants': either add that word to an earlier stop's Grants this key when it opens box, or use Move up to bring the granting stop above the stop that needs it.
  9. Two more errors exist but you will rarely see them, because the stop form refuses to save those shapes in the first place: it answers 'An answer stop needs at least one accepted answer.' and 'A key stop needs at least one required key.' The publish check repeats both as a backstop.
  10. Look at the warnings before you ignore them. A radius under 25 metres will fail for visitors standing in exactly the right place, because phone GPS is routinely off by 5 to 20 metres and worse between tall buildings. A stop that reuses a scene an earlier stop already used is allowed but reads to visitors like a bug. An arrival stop with the remote fallback switched off cannot be finished by anyone who cannot travel to it.
  11. Click Publish. The badge on the hunts list flips from Draft to Published. The second badge, Playable anywhere or On site, is worked out from your stops rather than set by you: one arrival stop anywhere in the hunt makes the whole hunt On site, so the badge a visitor sees can never disagree with what the stops actually demand. Unpublish is the same button and is never blocked.
  12. Share the address yourself. A published hunt lives at your tour's address with /hunt/ and the hunt's own slug on the end, like /en/tours/your-tour/hunt/your-hunt-title. That slug is built from the title at the moment you clicked Create hunt and does not move afterwards, so renaming the hunt changes the heading visitors read but not its link. There is no copy-link button for hunts and the public tour page does not list them. The destination has to be public too: a hunt on a private tour returns Not found even for someone holding a private preview link, because a preview link is for showing a tour, not for handing out a game.