Reading and the press

What appears as you approach

You approach	What happens
A tree	Its card appears once you slow down within about 7 m.
The corpus redwood	A card about the redwood appears within 16 m of the hub. Dismiss it and it stays away until you drive more than 20 m from the hub.
An exhibit's plaque or a grove's signpost	Nothing appears on its own. Tap the plaque to read it at reading size, or tap the signpost to list the grove's books.
A grove's stop on the guided tour	The tour shows a caption about the grove for 5 seconds. See Driving and the tour.

Silent mode turns off the cards and captions that appear on their own. Tapping always works.

Read a tree

Drive up to a tree. Within about 7 m of the trunk, and with the cart slowed, the book's card appears: its title, author, genre, an excerpt, and how many leaves it has. The card has two buttons.

• Read (or E, or A on a gamepad) puts the book in your press. Each pressed book rides in the cart's bed, in its grove's color.
• Open the book opens the book's text.

Clicking a tree pins its card, so you can read the card of a tree you are not next to. Clicking open ground clears it.

Silent mode stops cards from appearing on their own. E still reads the nearest tree, and clicking a tree still shows its card. Turn it on from settings.

Open the book

Open the book shows the book's text in the reader, a chapter at a time.

• Pick a chapter from the menu at the top, or use Previous and Next at the bottom.
• Left and Right turn the chapter. Up and Down scroll the page.
• Esc, the close button, or a tap outside the page closes the reader. It remembers the chapter you were at for the rest of the visit.

Chapters are the book's own sections. A very long section is split into parts, shown as "(Part 1 of 4)" and so on. A diary's chapters are its dated entries.

The text comes from a file per book served next to the page. On the published site every book is there. In a local checkout the files have to be generated first; see Book text.

The press

The press is the list of books you have read. L, or the Press tab under Browse in the top bar, opens it. The Browse button shows how many books the press holds. Each entry opens the book or jumps to its tree.

A book stays in the press until you empty it: Empty the press, at the bottom of the Press tab, asks first, then takes every book out. The quests that count books start over. Reset all settings leaves the press alone. The count is saved in this browser; see Where your progress lives.

Quests

Five hints appear as you drive, each a small thing to do in the forest:

Quest	Done when
First impressions	You have read three trees.
A Stoic	Your press holds Meditations, Epictetus, or the Enchiridion.
The Dane	Your press holds Hamlet.
Bare wood	You have switched the season to winter.
Across the press	You have visited four genre groves.

A hint can be dismissed. Silent mode hides them. They are for your own amusement; nothing is locked behind them.