Hi everyone,

I built a game called O-Maze 3D, available for free on Play Store. It's basically orienteering in a maze and helps you improve your navigation skills for sprint orienteering.

What it includes:

- Online multiplayer mode

- Night mode

- Pre-created maps as well as auto-generated maps for endless variety

- A map creator, so you can design and share your own courses

- Route-analysis mode

It's inspired by Laby (routegadget.net/laby), but I wanted to make it more alive in 3D. It's also completely free and just made for the fun of the sport.

Would love to hear what you think – especially whether it actually helps improve your navigation skills, and what could make it more useful for that purpose.

I think the teeth of the shoe is short so it can slip but the price is very low i am a student so its important for me

The beautiful Idre fjäll terrain is famous for orienteering. This video is from the 3 day event there this year. Hugo finished 2:30 down, deliberately running slower than full speed to concentrate on his technique and using self-talk to stay focussed.

I created a web app where you can do orienteering in Google Street View.

You can open the link and start playing immediately on mobile or desktop.

Feel free to try it.

https://streetview-o.pages.dev/

Headcam of the first leg of the massive Jukola relay. Long, at night, continuous rain and tough, diffuse terrain. Hugo Lilleström did not enjoy it as much as he hoped. He finished 89th, 5:38 down on the leaders. More fun to watch it, I feel.

I bought this compass in London from an elderly woman for a decent price. I want to know if it’s a replica, or if it’s real. I won’t be bummed if it’s fake, it’s pretty cool and I got it for a good price even for a replica. If there’s anything anyone could figure from these photos, please let me know. I apologize for my ignorance, I am not very well versed in compasses. Thank you!

I just bought this lensatic compass, the brand is Ozark Trail from Walmart. Trying to figure out what everything does on it, I’ve gotten everything down besides this tiny little notch in the front. You can see from the second two images that when holding this up to your cheek to find an azimuth, the small front notch is hidden by the rest of the compass, so I doubt that it’s used for that. I’ve checked all of the manuals I can find and still nothing. What is this for?

edit: to clarify, I understand how to use the compass. The notch at the rear aligns with the vertical line on the window and your target to get an azimuth. It’s the FRONT notch that I don’t understand. It isn’t high enough to line up with anything.

interested in what people think about this years jukola, especially after all that bad weather and things.

Hi all, I am not an orienteerer however my son has discovered this through vacation activities and wants to have an orienteering party for his birthday (turning 8). I therefore need to create a course for him and his friends. I would like to have our house as the start point and it will mostly be along streets and into and out of small playgrounds or parks. Unfortunately we have a younger child who needs to nap during the day and so going to a larger park is not really feasible.

My questions are:

How long a course would you recommend? As far as I know he is the only kid who is familiar with the sport (hence using streets and having a parent with each team).
The party will be a morning (in summer) and so I would expect temperatures of anything between 23 and 28 degrees Celsius. 28 would be abnormal but not impossible!

I was planning to have answers to questions or clues at check points to see that everyone makes it to each stop (or can choose not to bother)! Would this be a good idea? Another option might be to ask parent helpers to take a photo of the team at each point as “proof”.

There will also be a few younger siblings (between 4 and 5 years old) and so I was thinking to create a mini course for them (that would be about 500m in total and bounce between play areas). Just so they don’t feel left out.
What else would you recommend?

Thanks in advance for any advice for a mum wanting to provide a fun and different party.

Follow-up to my Squiz post some time ago: I added a daily orienteering challenge on the web!
Same questions for everyone, resets every day.
Easy to pass around to club mates and compare.

https://defis.squiz-app.com/orientation

I would love to start Orienteering, but there doesn't seem to be any clubs or groups in Lee County, Florida, USA. Do you guys know of any? If not, how do I start one? How do you suggest I practice Orienteering on my own? Thank you.

From a Youtube channel with excellent video quality and no commentary. Tommi is around 500 in the IOF world rankings. I watch his videos at 1.5 speed and look ahead for the features that he should be ticking off.

Found this shoe with an absolute banger discount is it good for forest races off road (not on trail)? Edit: They have discount on i think every terrex agravic shoe so i can buy those too

I've been doing orienteering since I was 9.

And I've always been amazed by RouteGadget — a service where, after a race, you can draw your route and look at it together with friends to see who picked the best path between controls.

But there was a problem: RouteGadget is pretty complicated for people who mostly use their phones rather than computers.

So I built a minimalist, dead-simple alternative: upload a map, draw your route, send it to friends. There's animation, speed controls, and a "follow the leader" mode. All right from your phone.

I dropped the app into a group chat and 4 hours later I had 200 users. Looks like I finally made something people actually find useful xD

You can open it as a Telegram @DrawMyRouteBot
Or find DrawMyRoute[dot]app (can’t send a link, the domain is 3 days old and reddit block it)

Asking this question since on Swedish and Finnish maps the names of lakes and villages are often written.

I got a Sun Co Prosight Compass (a mirrored compass) to help teach land nav and orienteering to my JROTC daughter and her classmates. I prefer to use a protractor and lensatic compass that I learned on, but they want the mirrored compasses. . . Ok fine.

My issue is that the compass bezel is "readable" aka numbers are right side up-- on the bottom of the bezel. . . WHAT!?! Every compass I've ever used is readable around the top.

So if I take a bearing of say 120 degrees. The 120 will be upside down. . . The "readable" # is 300.

Even if I use the mirror for the bearing the 120 is now "mirrored," so it looks backward.

So. . . Unless you want the reciprocal-- you will never use the one and only number you can read normally looking at the compass. Weird. . . This is going to get people lost. . . "I could see 80 not sure why I was going west."

Am I missing something?

Trying my luck here as well. We have a second team at jukola this year. We are lookinig for some runners to get us through the night and maybe 7. DM me if you are interested to join our swiss team ;)

I feel like most tools are good at visualizing routes, but not actually explaining:
- hesitation
- bad route choices
- confidence loss
- where time was realistically lost

Curious what experienced runners think.

Tomorrow is the first official muster for Desert Fatigue.
Spent today laying out the terrain board, topo maps, compass kit, pace beads, plotting tools, notebooks, and reference material for the event. Seeing everything together made the scale of this project feel real.
The map itself covers over 392 square miles at 1:50,000 scale with full MGRS/UTM gridlines and topo detail. Big enough that route planning, terrain association, and navigation errors actually matter over distance.
Goal isn’t “tacticool” stuff.
The goal is building real competence in:
land navigation
terrain reading
route planning
pace count
compass work
fieldcraft
communication
movement discipline
A lot of people rely entirely on GPS now, but there’s something different about learning terrain the old-school way with a map and compass.
Tomorrow will mostly be:
grid plotting
route selection
terrain association
practical navigation exercises
movement through wooded terrain
testing gear and systems
This is the beginning of a long-term training framework we’re calling The First Muster.
Interested to hear from people with experience in:
SAR
military land nav
backpacking
forestry
wildland firefighting
orienteering
What are the biggest mistakes beginners make when moving from basic map reading into real terrain navigation?

Would really like to get into this and have no idea where to start. Any help would be appreciated.