Regress — Design Notes (v0)

A location-based capture game in the spirit of Ingress, running as a nostr-native app on Archipelago. Instead of Niantic's fictional "portals," Regress uses real Bitcoin-accepting merchant locations pulled from BTC Map as the capturable objects. First scope: Madeira, Portugal.

1. What Ingress actually does (researched)

Portals are real-world landmarks agents physically travel to and interact with via the app. In Regress, a BTC Map place (merchant/ATM/etc.) is the portal-equivalent.
XM (Exotic Matter) is the fictional currency/fuel players collect by walking around; spent on all actions. Needs a Regress equivalent (see open questions below — sats? a synthetic in-app resource? nothing at all?).
Capturing a neutral portal: deploying a resonator claims it instantly for your faction. Up to 8 resonators per portal ("fully resonated").
Mods: optional items that buff a portal's defense/utility.
Keys & Links: hacking a portal yields a key to it. That key, used at a different fully-resonated friendly portal, creates a link between the two — you cannot link a portal to itself.
Control fields: three mutually-linked portals form a triangle that "fills in" — this is the actual territory-capture unit, not the portals themselves.
Factions: Enlightened (green) vs. Resistance (blue); an AI-controlled third faction, Machina (red), exists in later content.
Attack/defense: XMP bursters and Ultra Strikes destroy enemy resonators; a portal with zero resonators reverts to neutral and can be recaptured.
Anomalies: live, time-boxed global events tied to real Ingress storyline/lore — probably out of scope for v0.

Sources: ingress.com, Fev Games Ingress guide, Fev Games glossary

2. BTC Map as the location data source (researched, live-tested)

BTC Map (teambtcmap/btcmap-api) is a real, actively maintained, crowdsourced map of Bitcoin-accepting places, backed by OpenStreetMap tag data. It has a public, unauthenticated REST API v4 at https://api.btcmap.org/.

Key endpoints we'd actually use:

GET /v4/places?fields=... — chronological sync of every place, with updated_since/limit for incremental sync (bring-your-own cache pattern, good fit for a self-hosted Archipelago app that wants an offline-resilient local copy).
GET /v4/places/search/?lat=&lon=&radius_km= — places within a radius. This is what a "load the map around me" or "load this island" view would use.
GET /v4/places/{id} — single place detail (name, address, phone, website, socials, osm_id/osm_url, verified_at, icon).
GET /v4/places/{id}/comments, /v4/places/{id}/areas — community comments and country/community area membership.
GET /v4/areas?lat=&lon= — which named areas (country/community) contain a point; GET /v4/areas/{id|alias} — area metadata + icon image.

No API key needed for reads. Write/RPC endpoints exist for community editing but aren't needed for a read-only game client.

Live-tested against Madeira right now: a 45 km radius search centered on Funchal (32.7607, -16.9595) returns 167 real, currently-tracked places — comfortably covers the whole island (~57 km × 22 km). Category breakdown from the actual data:

Count	Category (icon)
35	restaurant
14	café
13	storefront (general retail)
10	pharmacy
7	hotel
6	bakery
5 each	fitness, hair/barber, "business", medical
...	long tail: bars, dentists, spas, tour operators, ice cream, a boat charter, a surf shop, a music venue, a bike rental, etc.

This is real, not a mock — it's what the live API returns today. Full raw dump saved at data/madeira-btcmap-2026-08-04.json for reference (167 records: id, lat, lon, name, icon, osm_id, verified_at).

Source: btcmap-api docs

3. Proposed Regress concept (draft — needs your input)

Every BTC Map place in scope starts unclaimed (Ingress's "neutral grey"). Players claim it, link claimed places together, and linked triangles form a control field over that territory — same core loop as Ingress, but the portals are real Bitcoin-accepting businesses instead of public art/landmarks.

Open questions before I design further

What does "claiming" cost/require? Ingress ties everything to XM gathered by physically walking near portals. Options for Regress:
- Physical presence required (GPS check-in via phone, like Ingress) — most faithful to the genre, but means players must actually be in Madeira.
- Sats/Lightning-gated — claiming costs a small zap/payment (fits the Bitcoin theme hard, ties into podsteadr's existing Cashu/Lightning plumbing you already have running).
- Nostr-native "proof of visit" — e.g. NFC/QR at the merchant, or a merchant-signed nostr event, so it's cryptographically real rather than GPS-spoofable.
- Some combination.
Factions or free-for-all? Ingress's whole metagame is two-faction conflict. Do you want teams, or is this more like an individual/community "claim businesses you actually support" thing?
Does "unclaimed" ever mean anything to the real business owner? i.e. is there a path for the actual merchant to claim their own listing (like podsteadr's owner-exemption pattern), or is Regress entirely player-vs- player over data about businesses that don't participate?
Archipelago integration shape — same fork as podsteadr had: does Regress run standalone on its own domain (external, identity-aware via the nostr-provider.js shim like we just wired for podsteadr), or does it need full orchestrator-managed packaging? I'd default to the podsteadr pattern (external + identity-aware) unless you want it embedded differently.
Nostr event shape for claims/links? Worth defining a custom kind (or piggybacking parameterized replaceable events) early since that's the actual interop surface other clients could read.

4. Next steps once the above is answered

Pull the full Madeira dataset via /v4/places (chronological sync endpoint) rather than the radius search, so we get a clean incremental-sync foundation instead of a one-off snapshot.
Define the Regress data model: place (from BTC Map, cached locally) → claim → link → field, plus whatever resource economy answers question 1.
Stand up the repo skeleton (backend + frontend, matching the podsteadr stack unless you want something different) and wire BTC Map sync as the first real feature.

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