ATLAS v1.9: Country Streak, Custom Maps, and Six Seconds Off Every Round

Two new modes, rounds that finish sooner, and Duels playing again. Further down there are two faults that had been quietly costing points for weeks, because they are part of the release even if nobody could see them.

What changed

Country Streak, and any map you like

Country Streak is a mode of its own now: name the country, round after round, until you miss one. And Custom lets you paste the address of any community map into Bot Settings and have the bot play that instead of the world. The Custom button was on screen before this release and the bot quietly played the world map regardless, which is fixed in the same breath.

Every round finishes sooner

Five fixed waits came out of the round loop. The panorama is captured as JPEG rather than PNG, the bot waits for the result screen to appear instead of counting to two, and three more flat pauses that were waiting for things which had already happened are gone. Measured on the bench or the trace behind each one, that is about six seconds less waiting in every round. Nothing about how the guess is worked out changed, so the accuracy is the same and only the sitting still is shorter.

Duels works again

GeoGuessr rebuilt the Duels lobby, and the bot could no longer find the movement setting or the Ranked switch, so it never started a game at all. It reads the new lobby, and it closes the season notice that had been sitting over the whole screen. Team Duels had a second problem: GeoGuessr remembers your last team, so the bot kept queueing with the same person game after game. It clears that first and looks for someone new.

Helper mode, keybinds, and looking back at a round

Helper mode and the in-game keys arrived in v1.8 and never got a write-up here, so they belong in this one. You play, ATLAS watches: it never moves the camera and never picks a mode, it reads the screen and answers when you ask, on six rebindable keys that work inside the game window. New in v1.9: open any round from Game History afterwards and see the four views, your guess, the real location and the distance. Your name, avatar and plan now live in the app as well, and after an update ATLAS finally tells you what changed.

It said Move and played NMPZ

GeoGuessr changed the movement buttons in its lobby at the start of July. ATLAS kept looking for the old ones, found nothing, and said it had set Moving anyway. For ten weeks it played whatever the lobby happened to be on. If that was NMPZ, every bit of looking around was thrown away and the four views the guess was built from were four copies of one picture. ATLAS now reads the game's own rules back after it picks, and stops rather than playing on if they do not match what you chose.

The same round could give two different answers

A setting that belongs in training was left switched on while playing. Ask the same round twice and you could get two different places: more than one round in five moved when it was recomputed. It is off now, so the same picture gives the same answer, and the answer is the better of the two.