Every change that shows up on your map, newest first. Overland Map Studio is invite-only while it settles down.
Overlays has a new layer, Smoke forecast (NWS): the National Weather Service forecast of wildfire smoke near the ground, for the current hour. Light smoke shows as a pale grey-brown haze, heavy smoke as dark brown, and very heavy smoke as rust to orange-red. The forecast comes out once a day, so smoke from a fire that grew today may not be on it yet.
Tribal land and military land were both outlined in a similar red-brown dashed line, and were easy to mistake for each other — especially if you are colour-blind. Tribal land now has a darker brown border and a tan tint, so the two are easy to tell apart, and the border no longer blends into the contour lines.
The border around a national park is drawn bolder, so you can pick the parks out on an overview without zooming in. It also has its own row in the legend now, separate from other public land.
Unpaved roads now draw the way a paper topo map draws them — two short parallel lines with a gap, instead of a solid band — so you can tell at a glance which roads are dirt and which are paved. Four-wheel drive roads keep their red colour, dirt roads their brown.
In national forests, most roads were on the map twice: once from the Forest Service and once from OpenStreetMap, a few metres apart. Solid lines hid it. Dashed lines would not have, so the duplicates are gone — the Forest Service version stays, because it is the one that carries the road number.
Forest road numbers now come from the Forest Service’s own data, so many more of them appear on the map — in some forests three times as many as before — and they all show in the same green badge.
Streets that OpenStreetMap records as gravel or dirt were drawn as if they were paved. They now draw as dirt roads, dashed like the rest.
The road data changed, so the app will tell you your downloaded states are out of date. Downloading them again picks up the new roads; the part that changed is a small share of each state.
Overland Map Studio has a new face — a blue compass rose on white, in place of the green and red one on sand, and the colour that shows behind the app while it opens has moved with it. If you have added the app to a phone home screen, the old icon will stay there until you remove that shortcut and add it again — a phone keeps its own copy outside the browser, so nothing we publish can replace it on its own.
Whatever you type is now picked out in the results — in the waypoint’s name when that is what matched, and in the line of description underneath when it was your notes that matched. On a long list of similar names it saves reading each one to work out which part you were looking for.
The search box above your map data now looks at what you have written in a waypoint’s description as well as its name — so searching locked gate or windlass finds the places you wrote that about, even when the words are nowhere in the title. When a result matched on its description, the matching sentence appears underneath it with the word picked out, so you can see why it came up without opening anything. Results that matched on their name look exactly as they always did.
A GeoJSON file whose waypoint or folder titles were plain numbers rather than text could empty the whole left-hand panel — a numbered folder emptied it on load, and a numbered waypoint the moment you typed in the search box — until you reloaded. Numbers are read as text now.
Searching for a place gives you the state next to each result, so seven different Kingstons are tellable apart. That was added a week ago, but anyone who had already used the search kept an older copy of the place list and never saw it. The app now notices and fetches the current one.
The creeks, washes and rivers added yesterday come from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, and that credit was missing from the About page. It is there now, alongside the other map sources.
On a patchy connection the map could come up without its named canyons, basins, mountain ranges, parks and rivers — and once they were missing they stayed missing until you reloaded the page, however long you kept it open. The map now goes back for them on its own, so the names turn up a moment later instead of being gone for the session.
Switching to satellite left the topo map’s canyon and basin names, and the new creek lines, drawn on top of the imagery — so the one view you pick specifically to see the ground as it is came with labels scattered over it. They hide with the rest of the topo layers now, and still come back if you turn on the trails-and-labels overlay.
Those same names — canyons, basins, mountain ranges, parks, reservations and rivers — are now kept on the device once you have opened the map with a connection, so they draw out of range like the rest of a downloaded state. Until now they needed a live connection every time, whatever you had downloaded.
Across the whole West the map now draws the watercourses — creeks, washes, rivers, canals and ditches — and names about 39,000 of them, from the USGS national hydrography data. Out in the basin and range country most of this ground had no water drawn on it at all before today, which made one drainage impossible to tell from the next. Named creeks appear from zoom 11 and the unnamed dry washes from zoom 13, so the braid of washes shows up when you are close enough to drive it and stays out of the way when you are not. Names lie along the watercourse the way they do on a paper topo, rather than sitting across it.
The water comes with the state you download, so it works with no signal like everything else. That adds roughly a tenth to each one — Nevada goes from 177 to 208 MB, California from 1,069 to 1,123 MB. If you have already downloaded a state, the app will offer you the updated version.
Zooming in is supposed to show you more, and on some screens it showed you less — a road you were following could vanish at the exact moment you leaned in to look at it. It stays put now, all the way in.
A road could be drawn for a mile, break for a few hundred yards, then carry on — making one continuous road look like two dead ends. The missing stretches are back, so a route you trace on screen is the route on the ground.
Zoomed out to about the scale of a county, graded dirt roads were drawn while the paved roads running alongside them were not — which made the back country look better connected than the highway network. Both now appear together, so what you see is the whole road system, not half of it.
Ranch and service roads only drew when you were zoomed right in, so they seemed to appear out of nowhere as you closed on a spot. They now come in a zoom sooner, at about the scale you plan an approach at.
Small towns used to be a name and a dot until you were nearly on top of them. Their street grid now appears while you are still looking at the surrounding country, which makes it far easier to see where a town is relative to the road you are on.
Springs and water sources were drawn as large coloured badges, and in spring-rich country like central Nevada they crowded out the map underneath. They are now small blue dots with the name beside them — the way a topographic map has always drawn water — so you can see the terrain and the springs at the same time. Nothing was removed; every spring that was there before is still there.
Zoom in anywhere in the West and the canyons and basins around you now carry their names — about 45,000 of them, from the USGS national gazetteer. Basins appear from zoom 10 and canyons from zoom 11. Out in the basin and range country a lot of ground had no names on it at all before this, which made it hard to tell one drainage from the next.
Tapping a route or track on the map has always brought up a small card with its name and height. That card now has an Elevation profile link on it, which opens the full chart — distance, climb, descent, and an estimated walking time. The chart was already there, but the only ways in were a right-click or a button inside the editing panel, so on a phone it was effectively hidden.
The map symbols in the legend are now sorted into headings — natural features, historical, camping, access and facilities — instead of one long unsorted list. A handful of internal codes had also been showing up among the symbols; those are gone. Mountain passes were missing from the legend entirely and are now listed.
That legend entry marks a track that is closed to the public — a farm, ranch or timber road behind a gate — and the old wording did not make that clear. It now reads Track (private / no access). It is about permission, not surface, and out there that is the difference between a route and a trespass.
You could already add your own live map layers from Esri map services. Now you can add one from a plain GeoJSON file or feed as well — paste the address and it draws, with a tap for the details behind each line or shape. A lot of public agencies publish exactly this and there was no way to use it before. Park road closures are a good first thing to point it at.
If you added your own live map layer and it contained roads, trails or rivers rather than areas, each one was also being shaded in as though it were a closed shape — so a single road turned into a wedge across the map. Lines now draw as lines. Shaded areas are unaffected. They are also drawn a little thicker, which makes them easier to tap on a phone.
Settings has a “What’s new” button now, sitting just above About. It opens this page in a new tab, so what changed on your map is findable from the map itself rather than only from the website.
Search the map for a place and each result now says its state alongside the type and distance. Names repeat constantly across the West — there are Paradises, Summits and Midways in nearly every state — so a list of matches used to look identical. Now you can tell them apart at a glance.
When waypoints sit close together the map groups them into a numbered circle, which meant a group never showed any names. Now the grouping steps aside at whatever zoom you have chosen for names, so the pins and their labels appear together. Zoomed further out than that, groups still form — move the slider and you decide where the line falls.
Waypoint names used to switch on at a fixed zoom. There is now a slider in Settings — “Waypoint names appear at” — so you can have them show while you are still looking at a whole basin, or keep them tucked away until you are closer in. The dots themselves are unchanged, and so is the default: if you never touch the slider, nothing about your map changes.
Small places out in the country — Denio, Fields, Swall Meadows and thousands like them — used to appear only once you had zoomed fairly close. They now show at the scale where you are still choosing a route, so an empty-looking basin turns out to have a name on it after all. Towns near cities are left alone, so built-up areas do not fill up with old neighbourhood names.
If a map library hiccuped on its way to your browser at just the wrong moment, the app could keep re-serving the broken copy — roads, labels and points all missing — until a hard refresh. That can't be saved anymore: a failed download is thrown away, never kept.
Pressing Esc or tapping away right after opening a panel — basemaps, overlays, offline, settings — was sometimes ignored while the map was busy loading. It isn't anymore.
Tilt the map and the horizon looks like a horizon instead of a white wall.
Add a WMS overlay — a mineral survey, a geology map, anything published as one — and tapping a symbol now tells you its name and links to the source's own page. If your first tap misses by a few pixels, it widens the search rather than shrugging.
Set an overlay to 10% and reopen the panel: it still says 10%.
Dragging the map used to move a pin if you happened to start on one. Moving a waypoint now takes the waypoint tool, or right-click → Move.
Smaller paved roads — the kind that get you to a trailhead — now appear a zoom level earlier, so the network makes sense before you zoom all the way in.
Roughly 94,800 recorded fire perimeters across the western states, in one layer, labelled with the year and the fire's name. Turn it on from Overlays.
Open a waypoint and it shows the full folder path. Click it to jump to that spot in the tree.
If your device had unsaved edits and the cloud copy had also moved on, reloading the page used to push your older copy over the newer one. It now asks.
The coordinate box now takes names as well as coordinates. It searches 103,366 places from an index on your device, so it works with no signal.
Select several items, right-click, and export only those.
Offline state downloads now carry the version of the maps inside them, so a state you saved months ago says so instead of looking current.
Playas render as playas, and they're named.
Paste the address of any ArcGIS Feature Service and it draws as a live, clickable layer over your map.
Grab the dot and drop it where it belongs. One undo puts it back.
Public-domain aerial imagery at 30 cm, sharp enough to pick out a two-track. It had been removed when the only affordable option looked bad; this one doesn't.
Three more overlays. Alerts are clickable — tap a warning polygon and read the actual warning.
Named backcountry cabins were being crowded off the map by unnamed service points nearby. Outdoor features now outrank services, and 640 missing cabins were restored.
A dedicated panel with live wildfire perimeters, public land ownership across eleven agencies, and the PLSS survey grid — plus room to add your own. Free.
Re-import a file you've imported before and it updates what's there rather than leaving you two of everything.
Five ways to narrow it down — a folder, the current view, a shape you draw, and more — instead of all or nothing.
Offline downloads by state, the vector topo basemap, waypoint clustering, trail difficulty and mileage, elevation profiles, and the folder tree all landed earlier in the summer, before these notes started.