The Researcher

How to unlock The Researcher in Cheevos. Visit 10 different domains within 15 minutes. Worth 25 XP.

The story

Partner. Ten different domains in fifteen minutes. You were building something.

Cache can tell the difference between browsing and investigating. Browsing wanders. Investigating moves fast and covers ground, jumping from site to site because no single source has the full picture, and you know it.

Ten domains in a fifteen-minute window means you were cross-referencing something. A picture you were assembling from pieces. An argument you needed to check from more than one angle before you trusted it. A purchase decision that required comparing five different retailers and at least two review sites before you felt sure. Whatever it was, it required primary sources from multiple places, and you went and got them, fast.

Cache has a name for this kind of session. He calls it "active synthesis," and he keeps a folder for it, separate from ordinary browsing logs. Sessions in that folder look frantic from the outside and completely coherent from the inside, which is exactly how real research usually looks.

You just added to that folder. Cache is filing it now, still slightly out of breath from watching you move that fast.

The catalog entry

TEN DOMAINS IN FIFTEEN MINUTES Acquired: Visited 10 unique domains in a single 15-minute window. Condition: Cross-referenced. Rarity: Uncommon. Cache's Notes: Ten domains in fifteen minutes means you were building something. A picture. An argument. A purchase decision. Something that required primary sources from multiple places. Cache calls this kind of session "active synthesis." He has a folder for those. You just added to it.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

You need to visit 10 unique domains, not just 10 pages, inside a 15-minute stretch.

  1. Start a focused research session on something that needs multiple sources: a purchase, a fact-check, a comparison.
  2. Visit different domains rather than staying on one site, for example moving between a news site, a retailer, a forum, and a review page.
  3. Reach 10 distinct domains within the same rolling 15-minute window. Cheevos tracks the domain and the timestamp of each visit to check this.

The key distinction here is domains, not pages. Visiting ten pages on the same site does not count, since the achievement is specifically about breadth across different sources rather than depth on one. This pattern mirrors how real fact-checking and comparison shopping actually work: no single source is trusted alone, so the fastest path to a confident answer runs through several independent ones in quick succession.

Where it fits in the Stash

Cache files this one under the sessions that look chaotic from the outside and turn out to be the most organized thing in the whole Stash. It rewards speed paired with genuine breadth. To meet the raccoon who appreciates a session moving that fast, read the story.