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CacheSleuth

Cliff Drift Cache Builder

Build a one-button drift-runner geocache. Keep the car on the road, unlock the reveal.

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Free, just a username and passphrase, no email. Caches you build show up in My Caches so you can reopen and edit them without hunting for the edit link, and watch plays and wins. The same account syncs My Puzzle Texts across devices and manages your short links.

My Caches

Play your own cache before you publish it

Settings that look fair in this form can be brutal, or trivial, in the field. Finish the game yourself, start to end, on the kind of device your finders will use, and check that the difficulty, timers, hints, wording, and the final reveal all behave the way you intended. Every cache you create here comes with a play link and an edit link, so you can test it, tune it, and test it again before anyone else sees it.

Cliff Drift is a one-button arcade game. A car drives itself forward along a narrow road floating over nothing, seen from a fixed isometric angle. The road only ever runs in two directions, and there is one control: hold anywhere on the road and the car leans toward one of them, let go and it leans back toward the other. Time each corner and the car drifts round it. Get it wrong and the car goes over the edge and the run is over, with a brand new road waiting for the next try. Driving your distance goal reveals the final coordinates or keyword.

The road is not the same all the way along. It widens out into generous stretches and pinches down into tight ones, narrow bridges show up in a different colour, dips make the car squat on its suspension, and a ramp launches it properly into the air, with the road surface visibly rising into the hump and dropping into the bowl so a player sees it coming. While the car is airborne the steering does nothing, so a jump is a moment to commit and wait, and the landing always has room in front of it before the next corner arrives.

Coins sit on the driving line and are picked up simply by driving over them, so nobody has to leave the racing line to collect one. You can leave them as scenery, or set a coin target and make them a second thing a player has to earn: with a target set the reveal unlocks only when a player has driven the distance and collected that many coins. Someone who reaches the distance still short on coins simply keeps driving until they have them. The builder caps the target well below what a clean run actually passes over, so a cache with a coin target is still comfortably winnable.

The whole run is replayed on the server. The browser records only the moments a player pressed and released, and the server rebuilds the same road and drives those exact inputs itself before it accepts the run, so a run that did not really stay on the road cannot be claimed. Players are also only ever given the stretch of road they have driven to, never the road ahead, and that road cannot be collected faster than it could be driven. Your reveal is not in the page until the server sends it, and it is banked the moment the goal is met, so a crash on the victory lap costs nothing. If you set a coin target the server counts the coins from that same replay, so a run that did not really drive over them cannot claim them either.
Anything you create here is public to anyone with the link, and you are responsible for what you publish. Keep a copy of your edit key, it is the only way to change or delete your cache later.

Your cache

Shown to players as a link to your cache page.

Only the site admin can see this, in case they need to reach you about your cache. Never shown to players.

Game settings

How far a player has to drive, in metres, before the reveal unlocks. 300 to 3000. There is no timer and no limit on attempts, and every attempt is a brand new road.

Leave this at 0 for a distance-only cache. Set it and a player has to drive the distance and collect this many coins before the reveal unlocks. Coins sit on the driving line, so this asks a player to drive well rather than to detour.

The ramp sets how wide the road is, how much that width varies from stretch to stretch, how often a corner arrives, and how fast the car goes. All of it tightens as the run gets longer, so even the gentle setting gets harder the further a player drives, and by the far end of a long run the road stops varying and stays narrow.

A squeeze is a short stretch, well clear of both corners, where the road crumbles back to about half its width. The only thing that gets a car through one is having come out of the corner before it on the centre line, so squeezes ask a player to time the drift precisely rather than just early enough. They are cut into the road you can see, never hidden, and a jump always clears whatever is under it. Leave this off and the road behaves exactly as it always has.

A faster car turns just as sharply, so the road does not need to be wider. What a player loses is thinking time: the same corner arrives sooner and the window to start the drift is the same distance but less of a moment. This stacks with the ramp, so a flat out brutal car is the fastest thing the game has.

Squeezes and a faster car both lower the furthest distance you are allowed to ask for, because we measure what a real thumb can drive before we let you publish it. The distance slider moves its own ceiling when you change either one. Caches you have already published are untouched by both settings.

On solve, reveal

Shown only after a player drives your distance goal. Reveal either the final coordinates or a keyword, not both.

Where can I host an image for free?

Paste a direct https:// link to an image. Free image hosts that give a direct link include ImgBB, postimages.org, and Cloudinary. A geocaching.com image link works too. The link must start with https://.

Keep your cache in play to keep it live. Share the play link so people visit it; unused caches are cleaned up over time.

Live preview

My Cliff Drift cache
Drive the distance goal to reveal the cache.
Goal: 800 m