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Nightfix
From WowCool Wiki, the free encyclopedia
For the 1997 film, see Nightfix (film). There is no 1997 film.
 Daily Brains · no GPS, just the stars. Bring Polaris or the south pole down to the horizon with a sextant, time a star across your meridian, and plot where the ship is. | |
| Developer | John |
|---|---|
| Publisher | WowCool World |
| Genre | Puzzle |
| Platforms | Computers, Phones |
| Mode | Single-player |
| Release | November 3, 2026 |
| Version | A |
| ▶ Play Nightfix | |
Nightfix (puzzle game, 2026) — Daily Brains · no GPS, just the stars. Bring Polaris or the south pole down to the horizon with a sextant, time a star across your meridian, and plot where the ship is.
Nightfix is the celestial-navigation puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily), the third of the fieldcraft puzzles after TopO and Sightline. Every day is a real night at sea somewhere in the world: you stand on the foredeck of a yacht under the true sky for that place and moment, with a sextant, a chronometer and the night's almanac card, and you work out where the ship is the way navigators did before GPS. Latitude comes from the height of the celestial pole (Polaris in the north, the south pole found with the Southern Cross in the south) or from a star's height on the meridian; longitude comes from the time a star crosses your meridian against the time it crosses Greenwich, 15 degrees for every hour. Plot your fix on the world chart and see how close you came. Monday is Polaris with every star named; by Sunday there are no names and a cloud bank on the horizon.[citation needed]
Plot
Why the stars know where you are
The sky turns about the Earth's axis, so it has two fixed points: the celestial poles, straight above the Earth's poles. From anywhere on Earth your pole stands as high above the horizon as you are far from the equator: overhead at the North Pole, on the horizon at the equator, 40 degrees up at 40 degrees north. Measure the pole's height and you have your latitude. Longitude is harder, because the sky looks the same from every meridian, one after another, as the Earth turns: 360 degrees a day, 15 degrees an hour. So you need a clock. If a star crosses Greenwich's meridian at 21:14 and yours at 01:38 the next morning, the Earth turned 4 hours 24 minutes between the two, 66 degrees, and you are 66 degrees west of Greenwich. That is why John Harrison's marine chronometers (his H4 went to sea in 1761) mattered so much, and why the Nautical Almanac, first published by Nevil Maskelyne for 1767, lists when the stars and the Sun pass Greenwich. Ships navigated like this until satellite navigation, and navigators still learn it as the fallback that needs no electricity.
Polaris, almost at the pole
Polaris (alpha Ursae Minoris) is the one bright star close to a celestial pole, which is why the north is easy. To find it, follow the two stars at the end of the Big Dipper's bowl, Merak and Dubhe, about five times their distance apart; when the Dipper is low, Polaris sits off the middle of Cassiopeia's W, on the far side of the pole. It is not exactly at the pole: in the game's J2000 sky it is 0.74 degrees off (about 0.63 in 2026, closing until around 2100), so its height swings about 0.7 degrees either side of your latitude as the sky turns. The Nautical Almanac's Polaris tables give the correction for the moment of your sight; the game's almanac card prints tonight's. Polaris is highest when Cassiopeia stands above it, and lowest when the Big Dipper does.
No pole star in the south
The south celestial pole has no bright star: sigma Octantis, 1 degree from it, is magnitude 5.5 and barely visible. Southern navigators find the empty pole with the Southern Cross: run its long bar from Gacrux through Acrux about four and a half times its own length, and the line midway between the two Pointers (Rigil Kentaurus and Hadar, alpha and beta Centauri) crosses it near the same spot. The rule is a good one but not exact: in J2000 positions the Cross's axis passes 2.7 degrees from the true pole, and where it meets the Pointers' midline is about 3 degrees out. The game only uses nights when the construction gives the latitude within 2.5 degrees, and the Cross's days (Tuesday and Friday) score 1000 within 330 km. Beware the False Cross in Carina and Vela: bigger, dimmer and with no Pointers beside it.
A real sky
Every star to magnitude 5.5 is there, 2,871 of them from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue at their J2000 positions, with close pairs the eye cannot split (Acrux, Rigil Kentaurus, Mizar, Castor) merged into one point of their combined light. Colours come from each star's B-V index; stars dim and twinkle more toward the horizon, the way thick air near the sea makes them. The Milky Way is drawn in true galactic coordinates: the bulge and the Sagittarius star cloud, the Scutum and Cygnus clouds, the Carina and Crux clouds, the Great Rift from Aquila to Cygnus, the Coalsack beside the Cross, with the Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda galaxy at their real places. The Sun and Moon are placed for that night with the almanac's own low-precision formulae: a night is only used when the Sun is 15 degrees or more below the horizon, and when the Moon is up you get its phase, moonlit sky and a glitter path across the water. The planets are left out.
Where the game simplifies
Real navigators correct a sextant reading for refraction, for the dip of the sea horizon below eye level and for the sextant's own index error, and their almanac gives positions for the actual date, precession and all. Nightfix keeps one consistent model instead: J2000 star positions with no refraction or dip, and an almanac worked out from those same positions, with transit times counted at exactly 15 degrees an hour from the moment of your sights (against the stars the Earth really turns 15.04 degrees an hour, which would move a transit by up to two minutes over half a day). So every method the game teaches is exact inside the game.
Gameplay
On deck
Drag to look round the sky, pinch or scroll to zoom (zooming in also shows fainter stars), and tap a star for its name, magnitude, colour and bearing. A compass tape along the top gives your bearing. You stand on the foredeck of a yacht rolling gently on the swell: the sky and sea rock, the pulpit rail and lifelines in front of you do not. The chronometer under the sky shows UTC at the moment of your sights.
The sextant
Face a star and open the sextant. Like a real one, its eyepiece is split: the left half looks straight at the horizon, the right half is the mirror that brings the sky down by the angle on the arc. Drag the star's reflection down until it rests on the horizon (a soft click tells you it is within a minute of arc), drag sideways to swing, pinch or scroll for magnification. The brass arc shows the degrees, the vernier under it and the micrometer drum below the eyepiece the minutes, the readout the tenths. The sextant measures the angle between star and horizon, so the ship's motion does not matter, which is exactly why sextants work at sea. Log sight writes the reading into the almanac's sight log.
The almanac card
A printed page for the night: the chronometer reading, the time each of several navigational stars crosses the Greenwich meridian (UTC, to the minute), and whatever the ship's log already knows (the longitude on Monday and Tuesday, the latitude from the noon sun on Wednesday). Northern nights carry the Polaris correction. From Friday the card prints declinations, so a star's height on the meridian can give the latitude too; on Sunday it adds each star's magnitude and colour, because the sky has no names.
Strings and midlines
Tap a star and choose String, then tap a second star: a string runs from the first through the second and on across the sky, with a knot at every length (the Southern Cross rule, or Merak and Dubhe to Polaris). Midline, then a second star, lays the line that is everywhere equally far from both (the Pointers' rule). Strings show in the sextant's mirror too, so an empty point of sky, like the south pole where a string meets a midline, can be brought down to the horizon and measured.
Latitude
North of the equator: Polaris's height plus the almanac's correction. South of it: the height of the pole you found with the Cross and the Pointers. Or, any night the card prints declinations, a star on the meridian: north of the equator latitude = declination + (90 degrees - height); south of it, declination - (90 degrees - height).
Longitude
One of the almanac's stars is exactly on your meridian at the moment of your sights: due south from a northern ship, due north from a southern one. Find it, read its Greenwich time on the card and compare it with your chronometer. Every hour between them is 15 degrees: if it crossed you later than Greenwich you are west, earlier and you are east. If the gap is more than 12 hours, go round the clock the other way (you have crossed the date line's side of the world).
The fix and the score
Open the Chart (a Mercator projection, like a nautical chart), tap your fix, drag it to adjust and zoom in for precision: the readout gives it to a tenth of a minute. On the single-coordinate days the fix slides along the dashed line of the ship's log. Fix position scores by the great-circle distance to the ship: 1000 inside the day's circle, 500 at the half-score distance, and halving again for every further step of the same size. 500 or more keeps your streak. Then the reveal: the chart draws the ship's true lines of position, the ship and the distance in kilometres and nautical miles, the results card works through tonight's sky, and back on deck the sky shows the true pole with its height and the star that was on your meridian.
Fair by construction
The 490-night book (70 weeks from puzzle #1) is generated offline by scripts/nightfix/build-book.mjs and re-proved by scripts/test-nightfix.mjs from the shipped files. Every night is between 18:00 and 06:00 local time with the Sun 15 degrees or more down; the ship is on open water by the game's own coastline, 10 km or more off any coast and 350 km or more from every other night's position (181 nights lie within 150 km of a coast, in 55 named seas and oceans). The stars a method needs are up (Polaris 12 degrees or more with the Dipper's pointers or Cassiopeia to lead to it; the Cross and the Pointers 10 degrees or more), out of the Moon's glare and clear of any cloud, and on cloudy Sundays the bank really does hide the pole. The meridian star is on the meridian to a hundredth of a degree, 25 to 75 degrees up, with no near-as-bright star beside it and its almanac neighbours 25 degrees of hour angle or more away. The test then solves every night using only what the game prints: Polaris plus correction and meridian altitude land within 0.1 minutes of arc, the clock within 7.5 minutes of longitude (the card's times are to the minute), and every night scores 1000 by the intended method, with the Cross method also winning (500 or more) on every southern weekend night.
Rules and help
How to play opens a five-page illustrated deck (the instruments, Polaris, the Cross, the sextant, the clock, then a Good to know page). It never opens by itself; the puzzle always starts on the sky, with one line saying what tonight asks for.
The week
One night a day. 1000 points inside the first distance, 500 at the second.
| Day | Level | Work out | Sky | Almanac card | 1000 within | 500 at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Gentle | Latitude, north; longitude from the log | figures and names | Polaris correction | 150 km | 700 km |
| Tuesday | Easy | Latitude, south; longitude from the log | figures and names | the log's longitude | 330 km | 900 km |
| Wednesday | Steady | Longitude; latitude from the noon sun | figures, names, the meridian marked | 4 stars | 100 km | 600 km |
| Thursday | Tricky | Both, north | figures and names | 5 stars, Polaris correction | 80 km | 500 km |
| Friday | Tough | Both, south | figures and names | 5 stars with declinations | 330 km | 800 km |
| Saturday | Hard | Both, either hemisphere | no figures; names on tap | 6 stars with declinations, Polaris correction | 60 km | 450 km |
| Sunday | Fiendish | Both, either hemisphere | no names; a cloud bank (over the pole about 4 Sundays in 10) | 7 stars with declinations, magnitudes and colours | 50 km | 400 km |
The methods
| Method | You measure | It gives | Good to (in the game) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polaris | Polaris's height, plus the almanac's correction | latitude | 0.1 minutes of arc |
| The Cross and the Pointers | the height of the spot where the Cross's string meets the Pointers' midline | latitude | 2.5 degrees (the rule itself misses the pole by about 3) |
| Meridian altitude | a meridian star's height, with its declination | latitude | 0.1 minutes of arc |
| The clock | the gap between a star's Greenwich time and your chronometer | longitude | 7.5 minutes of longitude |
Rewards
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| A fix of 500 or more | 15 Tickets (daily_solve) |
| A perfect fix (1000) | 25 Tickets (daily_perfect) |
Achievements
| Badge | How |
|---|---|
| Landfall | Score 500 or more on a night's fix |
| Pole Star | Find a northern latitude to within 25 km |
| Meridian Passage | Find a longitude by the clock to within 10 km |
| Under the Cross | Score 1000 on a night south of the equator |
| A Perfect Fix | Score 1000 |
| Weekend Watch | Score 900 or more on a Saturday or Sunday night |
| Within a Mile | Plot your fix within one nautical mile of the ship |
| Through the Cloud (secret) | Score 1000 on a Sunday when cloud hides the pole |
| Three Night Watches | Three days in a row |
| Ocean Passage | Seven days in a row |
| Master Mariner | Thirty days in a row |
Gallery
Version history
- Version A (2026-11-03)
- First version: the third fieldcraft puzzle in Daily Brains, after TopO and Sightline.
- A real night at sea each day: 2,871 stars from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue with B-V colours, extinction and twinkle, a WebGL Milky Way in galactic coordinates, the Magellanic Clouds, the Moon with its phase, moonlight and glitter path, a rolling sea and a yacht's foredeck in silhouette.
- Instruments: a split-eyepiece sextant with arc, vernier and micrometer drum; a chronometer; the night's almanac card with a sight log; strings and midlines for star-line constructions; a Mercator world chart (Natural Earth coastlines) with a fix readout to a tenth of a minute.
- Methods: Polaris plus the almanac's correction, the Southern Cross and the Pointers, meridian altitude, and longitude by the clock at 15 degrees an hour.
- A weekday ramp from Monday's named Polaris to Sunday's nameless sky and cloud bank; 490 generated nights, all re-proved by scripts/test-nightfix.mjs.
This page documents version A of Nightfix. It was last edited by someone who should have been playing instead.