New: the relief scanner. Tap the scanner button and the map shows the ground itself: ditches, banks, mining pits, spoil heaps and old tracks hidden under woods and fields. It is based on official laser scans, at one metre or finer in ten German states, plus Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Norway, Czechia, Poland, England and Italy. You can adjust contrast and sharpness so that fine structures stand out. The relief comes in grey or on top of the map. Without Pro the scanner shows a preview of one kilometre around your point, with Pro the whole map. Also new: aerial imagery, official photos for all of Germany and Austria, visible from zoom level 10. The English version is now fully translated, and old texts no longer linger after switching the language.

New: the coal beneath the Ruhr and the Saar. Two new layers show where the coal seams run. More than 23,000 lines are now on the map, together with the height of the Carboniferous surface: in the south it reaches up to 300 metres above sea level, in the north it lies 840 metres below, buried under younger rock. One thing worth knowing: the seams are drawn at the top of the Carboniferous, not at the ground surface. North of the Ruhr that surface lies hundreds of metres deep. The maps were compiled between 1949 and 1954 by the Geological Survey of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Saarland environmental agency. Visitor mines are now marked as such, with a note that you may only enter them on a guided tour. The layer list has been tidied up. Layers are grouped, and each one explains where its data comes from, how old it is and what it does not show. orecast now also starts in German on a German device. You can switch the language in your account.

This update mostly changes things under the hood. The free version now shows an ad banner at the bottom of the map. It hides itself whenever you open a place card, and it pushes the controls up instead of covering them. With orecast Pro the app stays completely ad-free. The map data, the sites and everything you can do in the app are unchanged.

NEW: Find talk. Comment on other collectors' finds and leave likes — with reporting and blocking to keep things civil. Rolling out gradually after the update. NEW: Pick the find spot on the map — for finds you log at home rather than on site via GPS. NEW: "War/WWII" map layer — bunkers and war sites as their own toggle in the legend. FIXED: The map button for adding a find never fetched a GPS position, blocking submission. CLEARER: "Report a find" is now "Add a find" throughout.

NEW: Your finds, right in the app! • Save your own finds: photo, note and the exact spot. Private, visible only to you. • Share if you like: after review your find appears anonymously on the map, coarsened to about 5 km. Your exact spot stays secret. • Add photos to places: contribute up to 4 photos per map point and collect likes. • Explorer levels: earn XP for approved contributions, with your level right on the map. • Meet Werner: our wolf now guides you through the app. • Easier to read: larger text everywhere plus a new text size setting in Account (Standard, Large, Extra large). • Large photos are resized automatically on upload. • New in Account: legal info, data export and account deletion. Happy exploring!

Four additions to the map. Gold panning rivers: 37 rivers across Europe where panning is worthwhile, among them the Rhine, Eder, Isar, Oker and Zwickauer Mulde. Part of orecast Pro. Amber areas: 15 documented sites, free for everyone. Fossils with substance: sites now show what was actually found there. Instead of just a collection name you get the fossil group with its own picture, the most common genera, the age in millions of years and the formation. Records from museum collections also carry the locality, the year of the find and the holding institution. The age is deliberately given as a range. These are the boundaries of the geological interval, not a measurement taken on a single fossil.