Terms

For entertainment

Pancakes Boat is an entertainment sailing simulation featuring Captain Pan. Its real-scale Earth position, licensed terrain relief, represented ETOPO1 ocean depth, anchoring, visual swell, simulated weather and geographic sunlight are not charts, navigation software, official warnings or seamanship training. Source data can be coarse, old, incomplete or wrong. Optional live weather may also be delayed or unavailable. Nothing in the game, sailor profiles or leaderboards may be used for real-world marine decisions or as proof of real-world travel.

Guest play and adult accounts

Guest sailing does not require an account. Optional sailor accounts and their public social features are for people who are 18 or older. You must make an honest age assertion, protect your password and recovery code, and use only an account you are authorized to control. Pancakes Boat cannot email back a lost recovery code because the first account release does not collect email addresses.

Profiles and community conduct

Your handle, display name and bio must not impersonate Pancakes Boat staff or another person, contain links or markup, threaten or harass people, promote unlawful activity, or evade a block or suspension. Do not post private information. You keep responsibility for the profile text you submit and allow Pancakes Boat to display and process it only as needed to provide and moderate the social features.

Profiles, discovery and leaderboard visibility start private or off. Publishing is your choice and you can turn it off later. Blocking and reporting are provided for player safety, but they are not emergency services.

Fair nautical-mile rankings

Imported local distance is Lifetime NM only and is never eligible for rankings. Verified NM is accepted only through bounded server voyage checkpoints. Leaderboard credit is capped at 300 NM per sailor per UTC day, but your personal Verified NM and Lifetime NM retain all accepted miles. Sustained event rates above the game envelope may be held from rankings for review. Do not forge requests, replay checkpoints, automate accounts, manipulate clocks or speed, exploit bugs, or interfere with another sailor's ranking. Server validation reduces simple cheating but cannot make a browser competition perfectly cheat-proof.

Rankings may be corrected, held, hidden or disqualified when evidence indicates abuse or a technical error. Equal totals share a competition rank under the published weekly, monthly and all-time periods.

Moderation and account deletion

We may hide profile text, remove leaderboard eligibility, suspend access or delete accounts that violate these terms, create a safety risk or disrupt the service. Reports are reviewed in context and corrections may be reversed when appropriate. You may export and delete your own account from the Sailors panel. Deletion revokes sign-in access and removes identifying profile data, subject to minimal integrity, moderation and backup retention described in Privacy.

Live versus simulated weather

Seeded weather is the default. When separately enabled, live wind, clouds, precipitation and pressure come from MET Norway at the yacht's rounded game coordinate. Radar-derived nowcast is available only where MET Norway confirms Nordic radar coverage; no coverage is reported as unavailable, not clear weather. Visual waves and hurricane tracks remain simulated. Terrain and represented depth use Mapzen Terrain Tiles when available. Data from MET Norway is licensed under CC BY 4.0 and adapted into game states.

Choosing a starting place

If you choose Start near me, your browser may provide a precise coordinate. You may instead choose a place manually on the bundled World chart without requesting device location. After confirmation, Pancakes Boat requests a bounded real-terrain tile area through its privacy-minimizing same-origin proxy, finds represented navigable water and may save the resulting boat position locally. These options are not a location service or maritime safety feature. Your location is not added to a sailor profile or leaderboard.

Fair use and availability

You may play the game for personal entertainment. Do not disrupt the service, attempt unauthorized access, extract private account data or redistribute the game as your own product. The game, account service and provider data are provided as available. Features, rankings and coverage may change as we improve them, and guest sailing may remain available when social features are temporarily unavailable.

Geographic data

The World chart uses approximate Natural Earth data. The local 3D world uses numeric Mapzen Terrain Tiles on AWS, including NOAA ETOPO1 bathymetry and multiple credited land elevation sources. Full source credits and limits are on the terrain attribution page. All geographic representations remain entertainment context only.