How we generate a mine that's fair for everybody
Random worlds are great for replaying and terrible for leaderboards, because no two people are playing the same game. Strata's fix turned out to be simple.
The first version of Strata gave every player their own random mine, which is the normal way to do it. After a while of playing it ourselves it was obvious the leaderboard meant almost nothing.
Why random worlds break the leaderboard
In a mining game, what matters is what's underneath you: ore, ruins with artifacts, water, lava, loose gravel, and the five sealed vaults the game is built around. With a world per player, one person hits a rich seam eight metres down and can afford a better drill within three minutes. Someone else digs through forty metres of empty clay. Both played perfectly well. One of them is two hundred places higher.
We tried making worlds "fairer", like always putting some ore near the start. It helped a bit, but every rule you add makes the worlds look more alike.
So everybody digs the same one
Strata now makes one world a week, and everyone digs that world. A new one starts every Monday at midnight UTC.
That makes the leaderboard a real race. The seam that made someone rich is there for you too, in the same spot. A higher score means better decisions or more hours, not a luckier map. And it gives people something to talk about: "has anyone found the Granite Seal yet?" only makes sense if everyone has the same world.
A whole world from one number
The world isn't stored anywhere. It's 280,000 tiles and there's no need to save or send them.
It's built from a single starting number, a seed, that comes from the week, like
2026-W32. The same seed always builds exactly the same world, so your browser and our
server can each build it separately and always agree. When the week changes, so does the world, and
nobody has to do anything.
It makes cheating harder, too
Because the server can build the same world, it knows what's in every tile. When your game says "I mined ore here", the server checks there really was ore there and that you haven't already claimed it. Same for the Seals: announcing "I have all five" gets you nothing. We did this for fairness and got cheat resistance thrown in.
Why a week?
The big goal is five Seals between 48 and 1,105 metres down, then the Core Vault at 1,330 metres, then carrying what's inside all the way back up. Nobody does that in one sitting. A week is long enough to chip away at it over a few evenings, and short enough that a bad start doesn't haunt you. The boards reset with the world, but your achievements stay.