The Voyager

How to unlock The Voyager in Cheevos. Visit websites on five different country-code domains in one session. Worth 20 XP.

The story

Partner. Five countries. One session. You left home.

Most browsing stays close to a handful of familiar domains, the same handful of countries' worth of servers, over and over. You did something different. In a single sitting, you crossed into five separate country-code corners of the internet.

Cache keeps a folder for every country-code top-level domain he has ever logged a visit to. It is one of his favorite folders, because no two entries look the same. Different character sets. Different naming conventions. Different assumptions, baked right into the structure of the address, about what a web address is even for.

The turn: Cache expected the domestic internet to be enough for most partners. It rarely is, once you start noticing the door. A country code at the end of a URL is a small, easy-to-miss signal that you have left one part of the internet and entered another, built by different people for different reasons.

Five is not a record. Five is a start, and Cache has already begun wondering how many you will find next.

The catalog entry

FIVE COUNTRY-CODE TLDS Acquired: Visited websites from 5 different country-code top-level domains in one session. Condition: International. Rarity: Uncommon. Cache's Notes: Five country codes. You left the domestic internet and went somewhere else. Cache has a folder for every country-code TLD he has ever encountered. He finds the variations very interesting. Different character sets. Different structures. Different cultural assumptions built into the URLs. Five is a good start.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

This one is easiest if you go looking for it deliberately, though it also happens naturally to anyone who reads international news or shops abroad.

  1. Visit a website whose domain ends in a country code, like .de (Germany), .jp (Japan), .uk (United Kingdom), .ca (Canada), or .fr (France).
  2. Visit sites from 4 more distinct country-code domains.
  3. Do this within a single browsing session. Cheevos checks the domain suffix of each site you visit.

Country-code top-level domains, or ccTLDs, are the two-letter suffixes assigned to individual countries and territories by IANA, the organization that manages the internet's domain name root zone. They're distinct from generic top-level domains like .com or .org, which aren't tied to any specific country. Some ccTLDs get used far outside their home country because the letters happen to spell something catchy: .io, technically the British Indian Ocean Territory, and .co, technically Colombia, are both popular with tech startups for exactly this reason.

Where it fits in the Stash

The Voyager sits with Cache's collection of country-code folders, the part of the Stash that keeps growing every time a partner wanders somewhere unfamiliar. For the story of the raccoon who catalogs every corner of the web, read the story.