This World Will Be Deleted on October 26

Every two weeks, the Shared World of Minesweeper Worlds Online ends. The map that everyone has been digging stops accepting moves, the game tells everyone still playing that the season is over, and a new world with a new map starts in its place. You cannot go back. The old world survives only as a record.

Season 7 started on October 12 and ends on October 26 at 15:00 UTC (midnight on October 27 in Japan). This note is about what will be lost — and why we built the game so that it is lost on purpose.

The biggest world so far

Season 7 has already broken every record the Shared World keeps. As of October 24, with two days still to go, its players have cleared 23,347 areas and opened more than 1.2 million cells. They have also hit 3,899 mines, nearly twice as many as any earlier season.

For comparison, here is every two-week world since early August:

• Season 2 (Aug 3–17): 17,268 areas cleared, 85 players.
• Season 3 (Aug 17–31): 17,209 areas, 69 players.
• Season 4 (Aug 31–Sep 14): 18,089 areas, 98 players, 1,501 mines hit.
• Season 5 (Sep 14–28): 21,637 areas, 74 players, 2,201 mines hit.
• Season 6 (Sep 28–Oct 12): 20,825 areas, 79 players, 2,117 mines hit.
• Season 7 (Oct 12–26, two days left): 23,347 areas, 60 players so far, 3,899 mines hit.

Fewer people, more digging. Six new continents have been born in Season 7, the last of them, 丹後 (Tango, a region of Kyoto), on day 8. The next one would need 32,000 cleared areas (each continent needs double the previous one's total: 500, 1,000, 2,000 and so on). At the current pace it will not arrive before the end, so 丹後 will almost certainly be the last continent this world gets.

The shapes people left

Look at the map above and some shapes do not look like exploration at all. They look like someone was making something.

• The long winding road from the Origin Land up to the continent たけのこの里 was dug mostly by two players: Player_o1VOB2 (1,482 areas) and Torishin (455).
• The ring at the very top, 807 areas, appeared between day 9.7 and day 11. Player_o1VOB2 dug 781 of them.
• The thin straight line running south was dug mostly by Player_SASUKE between day 7 and day 10 — the same player who found and named 丹後.
• The large settlement on the right, around the continent 犬小屋 ("the doghouse"), covers 5,483 areas. One player, 椿, cleared 4,713 of them: about one fifth of everything cleared in the whole season, by one person, around a continent they named themselves.

None of this earns anything special. There is no reward for a ring. It is the kind of thing people do in a shared space when they know other people will see it — and, in this case, when they know it will disappear.

Why we delete every world

When we designed the Shared World, the obvious idea was one permanent world that grows forever. We decided against it. A permanent world runs out of change: once the early excitement fades, nothing new arrives to pull people back, and shared worlds like that tend to go quiet.

So the map is infinite in space but limited in time. The infinite map means there is always somewhere new to dig and nobody can claim it all. The time limit means every two weeks everyone starts again together on a fresh map, with new continents waiting to be born and named, and the finished world is kept as a record. The cost is that everything you build is temporary. We think that is also what makes the shapes above worth looking at.

What survives

When a season ends, the game keeps a record of it. In the app, Season Records shows each past world: its final shape, how many areas were cleared, how many pioneers joined and how many continents were born.

And there are notes like this one. There Is No Edge tells how continents are born and named, and In This Minesweeper, Strangers Bury You covers what happens each time someone hits one of those 3,899 mines.

The last two days

There is still a race on. On October 24, the season ranking had Player_o1VOB2 at 5,657 points and 椿 at 5,632 — 25 points apart after eleven days. Torishin is third with 3,213. A score is the number of areas you cleared, minus 10 for each of your areas still locked by a mine, so one careless click can decide the season.

You can still dig in Season 7 until October 26 at 15:00 UTC, in your browser or in the iPhone and Android app. After that the world closes, and Season 8 starts on a map nobody has seen. If you are new, the guide to the Shared World explains how it works.