How we check a location.

On 5 August 2026 the region table on this site listed ten regions, each with a terrain description, each rendered with a “sourced” label. All ten came from a single page on a site that sells in-game currency. Two of its region names were misspelled. Two more were places we can find no evidence exist at all — one of which appears to be a real region name split in half. One genuine region, Legend Island, was missing entirely.

None of that announced itself, and the reason is worth stating plainly, because it is the whole argument for this page. A single source that supplies your entire table also supplies the comparison you would use to check it. Every entry agreed with every other entry, so the table looked internally consistent. It was internally consistent. It was also wrong.

The tell, when it came, was backwards. Our one dispute flag was sitting on Hokubu — a region that appears in every properly edited list and was never in doubt. It had been flagged because it disagreed with the bad source. The flag was pointing at the correct data.

The table now comes from two lists that were compiled independently and agree with each other completely: Gamereactor's region-by-region map guide, and a VGC guide whose author collected all 200 mascots and recorded which region each was in. The terrain descriptions got shorter and duller in the process, because we cut them back to what both sources actually support. The neon-and-ski-slope phrasing that read so well came from the source we removed.

The same afternoon turned up a worse version of the same problem in the troubleshooting guide: several widely repeated “fixes” that we had attributed to GamesRadar and Traxion, neither of which had ever said them. They had come from content farms. Nothing on this site is worth more than that attribution being real, so those claims are now labelled unverified on the page itself rather than deleted — an audience that can see what we could not confirm has some basis for trusting what we could.

A location gets published here when it can be traced to a page with a named author at an outlet that employs editors, or to a first-party statement, or to our own pass through the spot in game. The source has to be fetched and read, not summarised from a search result — the region table failed exactly because a summary was treated as the thing it summarised.

• Two independent sources beat two agreeing sources. If both trace back to the same original, that is one source cited twice. Whether the outlets we cite are genuinely independent of one another is not something we can always establish, so we do not claim it — we name them and let you judge.
• Commercial sites that are not editorial do not qualify. The currency reseller was the lesson; the rule is broader than that one site.
• A quote is stronger than a paraphrase. Where a claim rests on one sentence, that sentence goes on the page verbatim with a link, so you can check whether we read it correctly.

What the labels mean

• Re-checked — we went and looked ourselves. Currently 1 of 6 entries, and the date of that check is printed beside it. An old check on a hunt whose week has expired is a record, not a live confirmation.
• Sourced only — someone else found it, we are relaying it and naming them. Still shown, because a labelled lead beats an empty page.
• Conflict — sources disagree. Not published as fact until it is resolved. Right now that applies to 0 of the 10 regions.

The first move is to check whether they are actually disagreeing. Most apparent contradictions in this material are two people describing the same thing at different resolution.

The Hokubu hunt is the example we keep coming back to. GamesRadar says you cannot fast travel directly to the chest, only get close. PC Gamer says you can fast travel to the Flower Run speed trap and drive north from there. Read as headlines those look opposed; read as instructions they are the same instruction, and the route we publish reflects that rather than picking a winner.

When it is a real disagreement, nothing gets published as fact. The entry says which sources say what, the label goes to conflict, and it stays there until someone goes and looks. We would rather carry an unresolved entry for a month than resolve it by choosing whichever source sounds more confident, which is how the region table went wrong in the first place.

What we do not do

We do not fill blanks with plausible-sounding guesses. Where a clue, a reward or a location was never recorded, the entry says so in plain words instead of showing a number. A wrong location costs you a lap of the map, so saying nothing is the cheaper failure.

We also do not score difficulty ourselves. On the archive that column is quotes from whoever covered the week, with a link, and it is empty for most rows. A star rating we invented after the fact would fill the table nicely and mean nothing.

Still open

No region is currently in dispute between sources. That is not the same as re-checked: the in-game pass over the region table is still outstanding, and until it happens every region here is other people's reporting, not ours.

Found something wrong?

Tell us and we will correct it. A tracker that is wrong once is worse than no tracker at all — that is why each entry prints its sources. Corrections that change a published fact get written up rather than silently patched; the region table has its own post.