Official Rulebook

1. One global board

There are no regional boards, no local hunts and no geo-locked content. Every hunt published anywhere is visible and solvable by every player on Earth. Where you live never determines what you can play — only what you can reach for a photo, which is why squads exist: a squad-mate anywhere in the world can shoot the capture photo for the team.

2. Two currencies, one scoreboard

Points are fuel. You earn them from Trials, Grail Guess, Bounty Grid, Vault Crack, the daily stipend and riddle solves, and you spend them on Hunt Keys, clues and shields. Points never appear on the leaderboard.

Rank is the scoreboard, and it is earned in the field only. Solving a riddle pays points and unlocks your capture attempt; it does not move Rank. Rank is awarded exclusively when a live photo capture passes verification. Sofa play can never out-score hunting.

3. How Rank is scored

A verified capture is worth 100 Rank on an Easy hunt, 250 on Medium and 500 on Cryptic. Two tapers keep the ladder honest:

Weekly volume taper. Your first 10 rank-scoring captures each week pay full value. Captures 11–20 pay 50%. Captures 21 and beyond pay 25%. Time spent grinding stops beating skill.

Category taper. Each repeat capture in the same category during the same week pays 15% less than the last, down to a 40% floor. Breadth across the board beats camping one shelf.

Tapers apply per holder: a squad shares one taper, so adding members never multiplies a squad's ceiling. Weeks reset Monday 00:00 UTC.

4. Squads

Squads are capped at four hunters and share one vault: all points earned inside a squad belong to the squad, and Hunt Keys are paid from it. A hunt's Riddle Mastery bonus pays a squad once, and only one squad member can take the Capture Jackpot — and it must be the member who personally performed the verified capture. Jackpots may not be assigned, traded or rotated inside a squad. Daily allowances are shared per squad, not per member, and roster changes are capped at three per week so nobody can rotate members to reset limits.

5. Fair play

One account per person. Multiple accounts, shared devices used to farm minigames, bots, emulators, spoofed locations or devices, edited, re-used or stock photos, and answers traded outside your squad are all prohibited. Device and network fingerprints are checked on every scoring action.

No proxy play. The account holder must personally perform the capture. No other person may locate, retrieve, stage, hold or position the item, operate the capture device, or perform the action prompt on your behalf. Handing your phone to someone standing at the item is account sharing, not a capture, and it voids the Rank it produced.

Anti-collusion. Collusion is any coordinated activity intended to transfer Rank, capture opportunities or competitive advantage between accounts — whether or not it forms a closed loop. Trading captures, feeding a partner easy hunts, or running poster accounts whose hunts exist to be captured by one circle all qualify. Confirmed collusion voids the affected captures, removes the Rank they produced and can close the accounts involved.

Rank rewards independent opposition. Capturing hunts posted by the same person pays full Rank the first time and steadily less on each repeat within 30 days. Spinning up a fresh poster account does not reset that: a poster whose hunts are only ever captured by the same small circle pays a fraction of full Rank, and posters less than a week old pay half. Points are unaffected — beating the same rival often is fine, but climbing the ladder means competing broadly.

Poster quality. Hunts that draw upheld reports are hidden from the board and the poster's Hunt Keys are not returned. Junk hunts are not an economy.

5a. Alt accounts and farming — what actually stops it

The honest answer used by every serious hunting game is that you cannot prevent someone from creating a second account. You make the second account worthless. VaultRun is built that way on purpose:

Alts can only farm points, and points are not the scoreboard. Trials, the daily stipend, Grail Guess, Bounty Grid and Vault Crack pay points. Points never move Rank. An alt farming all day produces spending money for a game it isn't playing.

Rank needs a real photo of a real item. The only action that scores is a live capture that passes image verification. A second account does not create a second collectible, so a solo player with two phones still has exactly one shelf to photograph.

Device, network and behaviour fingerprints. Every scoring action records a device identifier derived from hardware traits, not just browser storage, so clearing data or making a fresh account on the same handset resolves to the same device. Captures from the same device or network as the poster do not score.

Familiarity taper. Rank from capturing the same poster's hunts decays by 40% each repeat within 30 days, to a 10% floor. Feeding an alt hunt after hunt collapses toward zero by the third or fourth trade.

Server-issued capture challenges. The action prompt you photograph is minted by our servers at the moment you start verification. It is single-use, expires in minutes, and is bound to your account, that specific hunt and the device you started on. A photo taken earlier, taken for someone else, or re-sent from another handset does not satisfy it — so a capture proves that the account holder was at the item, not merely that the item exists.

Network-level collusion review. We analyse the whole capture graph across accounts, squads, devices, networks and posters. Coordinated reciprocal capture networks — including indirect rings where A captures B, B captures C and C captures A — are treated as collusion even when no single pair ever repeats. Detection thresholds are deliberately not published. Confirmed collusion voids the captures, removes the Rank and can close every linked account.

Shared squad limits. Daily allowances and tapers apply per holder, not per member, and roster changes are capped, so stacking accounts into a squad never raises a ceiling.

Taken together: an alt costs real effort, earns a currency that cannot buy Rank, and the only path it has to the leaderboard is taper-decayed and monitored. Farming is not blocked by a wall — it is made unprofitable.

6. Verification and disputes

Captures are checked by automated image analysis against the hunt's item. Condition never matters — sealed, loose, graded or battered all pass equally. You may dispute one verdict per find; a human reviewer makes the final call, and a pending dispute does not break your streak.

One challenge per attempt. The action prompt is minted by the server, single-use and short-lived. You may swap a prompt you physically cannot perform, but each hunt allows a limited number of prompts per day; failed, abandoned and expired prompts all count. Re-rolling until a convenient action appears is not a strategy the system offers.

High-value captures are filmed. When a hunt's pool reaches 2,000 points, the capture must include a short continuous video of the action prompt being performed at the item, not just a still. Stills can be staged or relayed; moving footage gives the review desk something real to rule on when a jackpot is contested.

6a. Posting requires possession

Posting is charged in Hunt Keys by difficulty — Easy costs 1 key, Medium 2 keys and Cryptic 3 keys — and a hunt cannot be published unless the poster holds them. A Hunt Key alone does not put a hunt on the board. Before publishing, the poster draws a random, single-use prompt from the server and photographs the item in their own hands satisfying that prompt — including a handwritten code they could not have known in advance. The proof expires in minutes, is tied to the device it was issued to, and is checked against the catalogue photo.

This is why catalogue scrapes, stock photos and items you do not physically hold cannot become hunts. Posting is a supply line into the competition, so it is gated like one.

6b. What the Keeper will and will not say

The AI Keeper is not a chatbot with the answer in its head. Your question is read by one system that has never seen the item and is reduced to a single factual claim — category, product family, decade, release year, country, material, size, licensed or not, main colour. A separate piece of code, which never sees your question, compares that one claim to the item's stored attribute sheet and returns Yes, No, or silence.

Multi-part questions, lists and “is it A or B” are refused, and no free text ever reaches you. There is no wording that talks the Keeper into naming the item, because nothing that knows the item ever writes a sentence.

7. Competitions and prizes

Competition seasons are skill contests. No purchase is necessary and buying nothing never affects your chance of winning. Entry is open to players aged 13 or older; entrants under the age of majority where they live need a parent or guardian to accept the prize. Winners are the highest Rank holders in each division (Squads and Lone Trackers ranked separately) at the published close time, verified against the anti-fraud log before payout.

Prizes are gift cards of stated value awarded by VaultRun. Prize suppliers named on cards are not sponsors of, affiliated with, or endorsers of VaultRun. Winners are contacted at their account email and have 14 days to respond; unclaimed prizes pass to the next eligible holder. Void where prohibited. Any dispute is decided under the laws of Ontario, Canada.

7a. Winner adjudication before any prize is paid

Friction is proportional to what is at stake. An ordinary capture needs a live camera photo against a randomised prompt. An unusual capture attracts extra evidence. A capture that could decide a prize gets read by a human.

When a competition closes, staff review every contender whose legitimacy could change the payout — not just the winner. That means the prize places plus anyone close enough that a single voided capture would move them into the money. For each contender staff see the full capture timeline, difficulty and category spread, which posters supplied the hunts, time-to-capture, device and network history, squad history, prior flags and the original evidence, and record a Pass, Fail or Escalate ruling with a written reason.

Every ruling stores a frozen snapshot of the evidence it was based on. Those records are retained after the competition so repeat patterns across seasons — shared handsets, feeder posters, impossible travel, coordinated accounts — are recognised the next time they appear. A failed adjudication forfeits the prize and the placement passes down the board.

8. Beta status and the end-of-beta reset

VaultRun is in open beta and free to play. There is nothing to buy: purchases and paid memberships are disabled for every player during beta.

When beta ends we will run a full economy reset with at least 14 days' notice posted here and in-app. At reset, points, Hunt Keys, clues, shields, Rank and streaks all return to their starting values, and hunts posted during beta are retired. What is kept permanently: your account, your handle, your squad, your verified find history and any Victory Crests you earned. Competition prizes already awarded are never revoked by a reset.

9. Community flags and collusion review

Any hunter can flag a hunt. Flags are weighted by reason and counted once per hunter, so a single player — or one squad — cannot bury a rival's post. When credible flags from several different hunters cross the threshold, the hunt is hidden from the board automatically and queued for staff review. Staff can reinstate it, which clears the flags against it.

Flags pause the clock, they do not burn it. While a hunt is hidden for integrity review, its 48-hour scoring clock stops. If it is reinstated, the clock resumes with exactly the time it had left, so a coordinated pile-on cannot destroy a rival's hunt by running out its window. Bad-faith or coordinated reporting is itself a sanctionable offence and is reviewed alongside the hunt.

Flagging is not a weapon. Flags from a hunter who keeps targeting the same poster lose weight sharply with each repeat, and a hunter whose past flags were dismissed carries less weight everywhere. A hunt hidden by flags is reinstated automatically if staff have not ruled within 12 hours, and the flags that hid it are dismissed — the review queue itself can never be used to keep a rival's hunt off the board.

We continuously review poster/capturer relationships — as pairs and as networks. Repeated, unusually fast captures, reciprocal capture rings of any size, and clusters whose captures overwhelmingly benefit each other are all surfaced for review. Graph proximity triggers an investigation, never an automatic penalty: genuine friend groups who play together are expected to show up as clusters, and are cleared by their independent activity — varied posters, varied categories, ordinary timing. Sanctions follow evidence of transferred advantage, not closeness. Confirmed collusion removes the Rank it produced and every account involved faces suspension.

10. Changes and contact

Rule changes are published on this page with a new date, and any change that affects an active competition takes effect only in the following season. Questions, disputes or exploit reports: support@vaultrun.ca. Report an exploit before using it and your account keeps its standing.