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CacheSleuth

Heartbeat Cache Builder

Build a tap-to-the-beat geocache. Ring lands on the donut, you tap, the reveal unlocks.

Sign in to save this cache to your account

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.

Heartbeat is a rhythm game with one control. A donut sits in the middle of the screen and rings spawn wide and shrink toward it. Tap the moment a ring lands on the donut. A twin ring is two rings a heartbeat apart and wants two quick taps. A pink ring patches a crack, if you have one to patch. A ring that slides past untouched cracks the donut, and so does a tap with no ring to answer it, so drumming on the screen is the fastest way to break it. Enough cracks and the donut gives out. Score is rings hit and nothing else. A tap in the very middle of the window is a perfect and builds a streak, but streaks are celebration only, so they can never change whether your cache unlocks. Rings close faster as the run goes on. Choose how wide the hit window is, how many cracks the donut survives, and how many rings finders must hit. Reaching your goal reveals the final coordinates or keyword.

The whole run is replayed on the server. The browser records only the moments a player tapped, and the server rebuilds the same rhythm and replays those exact taps itself before it accepts the run, so a score that was never really played cannot be claimed. A run also cannot be submitted faster than it could have been played. Your reveal is not in the page until the server sends it, and it is banked the moment the goal is passed, so missing the very next ring costs nothing.
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

The window is a share of each ring's own approach, never a fixed number of milliseconds, so it stays as generous at the end of a run as at the start. It is the only setting that changes the judging, and the goal range below moves with it.

A pink ring patches one crack back, so the budget is a running total rather than a hard count of mistakes.

On solve, reveal

Shown only after a player meets your 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 Heartbeat cache
Reach the goal to reveal the cache.