The short answers. If something here is missing, use Send feedback under the game.
Who made this?
Far Out is a small independent project, developed by an engineering student at University College Dublin. It’s a daily word game for people who like finding unexpected connections between words. If you have a question, spot a link that should exist, or have an idea, use Send feedback under the game. It goes straight to the person who made it.
What is a light-year here?
It’s just the game’s unit for how far you got. A perfect run is 1,000 light-years, and a typical good one lands somewhere between 600 and 900. There’s nothing astronomical behind the number.
How is my distance worked out?
It’s built from a few parts, added together:
- Reach, up to 500. How far from the start word your chain got. Your farthest word counts most (60%), and how far out you stayed counts for the rest (40%), so drifting back toward the start still costs you.
- Leaps, up to 300. How surprising your links were, on average.
- Length, up to 200. The longest tier you reached: Easy 50, Better 130, Great 170, Amazing 200.
- Small bonuses. Each great leap adds a little, so does moving on to a new topic, and every link past the 16th keeps adding.
Reach and leaps count in full once your chain is 16 links long. A shorter chain gets proportionally less, so a quick run can’t reach the top ranks. A chain that never leaves one subject is held back from the top as well, and every new topic raises that limit.
A gentle curve at the end lifts middling distances by a few light-years, so the parts you see won’t always add up exactly to the total.
What makes a link “great”?
A great leap, shown in red, is a link that’s much more surprising than most. Good leaps are yellow and ordinary links are white. Obvious pairs never count as great, however far apart the words look: words from the same family (plan and planner) and plain synonyms.
Why wasn’t my word accepted?
A word has to connect to the one before it, and the game only knows the links in its word data, which comes from dictionaries, a thesaurus and a common-sense database. A link you’d call obvious may simply be missing. If so, tell us with Send feedback and name the two words. A small number of slurs and explicit terms are blocked and can’t be played. A word the game doesn’t know at all, or a typo, only costs you time, and a mistyped word will offer a correction if it’s one slip away from a word that fits.
Why does the clock get shorter?
Each link has a time limit: 25 seconds for the first five links, 20 for the next five, 17 for the next five, then 15 seconds from the sixteenth link onward. A longer chain is harder to keep going, and the clock reflects that.
When does the next word arrive?
At midnight, your own local time. Everyone gets the same word on the same date, and it arrives when your day changes, so friends in different time zones get it at different moments. The countdown under your result shows how long you have to wait.
Can I play today’s word again?
Your first finished round of the day is the one that counts. You can play as many practice rounds as you like, with random words, and they aren’t saved or counted towards your streak or stats.
How do streaks and stats work?
A streak is the number of days in a row you’ve finished the daily word. Your stats and streak are saved in your own browser, on this device only. Clearing your browser’s site data resets them, and they don’t follow you to another phone or computer.
What do the circles in a shared result mean?
One circle per link: ⚪ ordinary, 🟡 good leap, 🔴 great leap. The share card shows your start and end words, your distance, your rank and how many links you made, but not the words in between.
What do you keep about me?
Very little. Your results, streak and stats stay on your own device, and there are no accounts. When you finish the daily word, a tally goes up by one (just the game number and your rank, nothing about you). If you send feedback, what you type goes to the developer’s inbox. The full details, including who handles it, are on the privacy page.
Where does the word data come from?
From open sources, listed with their licences on the credits page.