Exploring
World map
Open Map from the Nexus, pan and zoom across its Pixl landscape, and explore countries and cities. Guests can browse without signing in.
The World map is a picture of the world inside the Nexus's Map node. Browse the landscape, find countries by their flags and cities by their dots and labels, and zoom into a city's own canvas. You can explore as a guest without signing in.
Open the map
- Open the Nexus.
- Find Map, the node with a globe picture and an edge to Topics.
- Click or tap it to enter.
The map first fits into the available canvas space, showing country flags. Cities stay hidden in this overview. Zoom towards a region to reveal its cities; flags and cities outside the visible canvas are not drawn.
There are three different things here: Map is the door on the Nexus, the world picture is the background inside it, and the country flags and city dots are nodes above that background. Entering Map brings you to the world picture; entering a country or a city takes you into its own canvas.
Pan and zoom
The map uses the canvas's navigation gestures:
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Drag the background with a mouse | Pan across the map |
| Mouse wheel | Zoom around the pointer |
| Trackpad two-finger scroll | Pan |
| Trackpad pinch | Zoom |
| Drag the background on a touch screen | Pan |
| Use two fingers on a touch screen | Pan with their midpoint and pinch to zoom |
Zoom out for an overview, then zoom in to inspect a smaller area. The view stops at the map's edges, so dragging towards an edge does not carry you into empty canvas beyond the world picture.
For the general canvas gestures, see Nodes and the canvas.
Find and enter a city
Cities appear as dots with names once you zoom to twice the whole-map view. Only cities in the visible region appear, and panning reveals the cities you move towards. More names become eligible to appear as you zoom closer. Nearby labels may be hidden to keep them from overlapping; pan or zoom closer when you want to read a crowded area.
Click or tap a city dot to select it. To enter with a mouse or trackpad, put the pointer over its dot and continue zooming in at the map's closest zoom. City entry waits until that deepest view; zooming over a dot from farther out first brings the map closer.
Inside a city, you are on its node's canvas. To return one level, click or tap the large centre node. To leave the world map for the Nexus, zoom out beyond the whole-map view or use the route shown by the logo's depth rings. The Nexus explains that route.
Find a country
Each country is a flag: the 193 members of the United Nations, with Vatican City and Palestine. A flag sits at one point in its country, and very small countries and island states sit on their land even where it is too small to see. Flags keep a steady size on screen, growing a step as you zoom closer, and names appear beneath them once you are close enough. A name that would cover another flag or name stays hidden until you zoom in, and a crowded region may overlap at a wide view.
Click or tap a flag to select it. A flag stays where it is: it cannot be dragged. As with a city, entering a country's own canvas waits until the map's closest zoom.
Each flag is a real Pixl, drawn cell by cell on a 64 × 64 grid rather than copied from an image, so its creator can open and edit it like any other Pixl. A country may share its name with a city, as Singapore does: those are two nodes, a flag and a dot.
Tiles and editing access
The background is a grid of 300 × 100 Pixl tiles, each 32 × 32 pixels. The tiles make the world picture; they are separate from the country and city nodes above it.
Guests can view the map, but cannot edit its tiles. Signing in alone does not grant tile editing: your account also needs permission to edit them. Browsing a country or a city, or selecting its flag or dot, does not give you permission to change the background.