Japan’s spears join a long line of geometric oddities popping up in Microsoft’s big digital planet Earth, including that massive void wot’s eating the heart of Brasil. Assuming these are glitches, of course - with everyone being indoors these days, who’s to tell these aren’t accurate terrors?
Anyway. Japan’s “majestic peaks” were spotted by UnstableMisanthrope over on Reddit earlier this week, with our pals at PC Gamer providing the lovely gif above. While there’s no consensus as to what’s caused these monstrosities, it does on the face of it seem like a few vertices have been thrown a little higher than intended, stretching a column of surrounding land, forest and manmade structures along with them. It’s somewhat jarring considering Japan just got a bespoke World Update aimed at making the simulation a whole lot nicer - one that, along with new cities and airports, also claimed to improve the accuracy of environment mapping. Again, I won’t write off the possibility that the world is destabilising under our noses and that Microsoft’s mapping is working as intended. But then, I’d imagine we’d have heard something from the residents of that tower block impaled by one of the spires. If you want to find Japan’s newest peaks, you’ll want to hop a Westbound flight from the nearby RJFS Saga airport. Watch for the SIOTA marking on the map, and you shouldn’t miss ’em.
