Hop.Earth Guide › Where to Drive
The Best Places to Drive in Hop.Earth
Drive in France or Spain. Those two countries and their islands are the only parts of the planet rendered at up to a 2 metre grid — everywhere else on Earth is built from 30 metre data, and Antarctica isn't in the game at all.
Play Hop.Earth →Terrain Resolution Decides Everything
The game is the same wherever you go. The ground underneath you is not. Hop.Earth builds its world from elevation data whose quality varies enormously by country, which is why two players can describe completely different experiences of the same game.
| Where | Resolution | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|
| France & Spain incl. Corsica, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands | Up to 2 m grid | Hills, cambers, ridgelines and switchbacks with real shape to them. The car is genuinely working against the terrain. |
| Everywhere else | 30 m base | Correct large-scale landforms, but fine detail is smoothed away. Flat regions read as very flat. |
| Antarctica | Not available | Not covered. |
You can see why in the game's own data credits, which name Copernicus DEM (COP-DEM-GLO-30) alongside IGN RGE ALTI and CNIG LIDAR. The first is the 30 metre global model that covers the whole planet. The other two are the French and Spanish national elevation surveys — far denser, and openly published. So the map of good terrain in Hop.Earth is really the map of countries whose survey agencies give their LIDAR away. More countries are being brought up to high resolution over time, but as things stand, France and Spain are where the engine gets to show off.
No Buildings Means the Land Is the Scenery
This is the other half of the picture, and it changes where you should be pointing yourself. The developers are blunt about it: "There are no buildings. Who needs them anyway? You can't drive on them." The innovation they care about is drivable roads, intersections and tunnels with physics — not a skyline.
Follow that through and a dense city becomes the least interesting destination in the game. Strip the buildings out of Manhattan or Shibuya and you're left with a grid of empty asphalt on ground that barely moves. There's nothing for the eye or the suspension to do.
Elevation is the content. Which is why the recommendation collapses into one sentence: find somewhere the land does something dramatic, inside the 2 metre zone.
The Shortlist
Hop.Earth doesn't curate destinations, so this is a starting point rather than an official list — real-world roads that sit inside the high-resolution area and have serious topography under them. Type any of them into the Go to search box on the map view. Anything you pick has to exist in OpenStreetMap to be drivable, which for well-known mountain roads it reliably does.
The French Alps
The obvious first stop. Alpine passes are long sequences of stacked hairpins cut into steep ground, which is precisely the geometry that 30 metre data destroys and 2 metre data preserves. The Route des Grandes Alpes corridor and the passes around it — Galibier, Iseran, Izoard — give you climbs where you can actually see the road you drove ten minutes ago below you. The Gorges du Verdon is the same idea with a canyon instead of a summit.
The Pyrenees
Quieter, and it has the advantage of straddling the border — both sides are high resolution, so a run over the Tourmalet or the Aubisque and down into Spain never drops out of the good data. Long climbs, few intersections to snag on, which matters more than it sounds.
Corsica
Probably the single best-value destination in the game. Corsica is a mountain range in the sea, so the coast road is permanently carved into a cliff with the water on one side and rock on the other. The western coast around Piana and the Cap Corse loop at the northern tip are the classic runs. Narrow roads on steep ground are where 2 metre terrain earns its keep.
The Canary Islands
Volcanic islands, which means gradients that don't exist in mainland Europe. Tenerife's climb up to the Teide caldera takes you from sea level to a high-altitude plateau in one continuous ascent, and La Palma and Gran Canaria are similarly vertical. If you want the terrain engine to look unlike anything else you've driven in a browser, this is it.
Mallorca and the Balearics
The Serra de Tramuntana on Mallorca's north-west coast is a compact version of everything above — the Sa Calobra descent in particular is a famous stack of tight hairpins folding back on itself. Good if you want intensity without a long transit.
Northern Spain
The Picos de Europa and the roads into the Sierra Nevada are the mainland equivalents: high, remote, steep, and far less crowded with other players' race markers than the Riviera.
Why Everybody Ends Up in Monte Carlo
Look at the public race list and you'll notice the same coordinates over and over — a huge cluster around 43.73, 7.42. That's not a coincidence and it isn't a bug. The official "Start Here!" lobby drops you into Monte Carlo by default, so it's simply where most people first touched the game and first drew a route.
It's a good default. Monaco sits inside the high-resolution zone, it's stacked vertically against a mountainside, and the Monaco street circuit is right there under your wheels — the tunnel, the waterfront, the climb up to the casino. When you build a route there the game reports the starting street back to you by name; ours came out as Quai Antoine 1er, 1.82 km, asphalt, 42 m elevation. If you want to try that yourself, the race creation walkthrough covers the whole flow.
One catch on your first visit
Hop.Earth runs on real-world local time. Landing in Monte Carlo while it's the middle of the night there gets you a nearly black screen, and plenty of people conclude their graphics are broken. They aren't. Either use Go to to hop to the daylight side of the planet, or wait — but check the local hour before judging a location.
Driving Your Own Street
Almost nobody's first search is a mountain pass. It's their own address — and you should absolutely do it, because it's the thing this game does that no other driving game can. Open the Go to box, type your street, and go and look at your commute with the buildings deleted.
Two conditions. First, your road has to be in OpenStreetMap; the entire road network is generated live on your device from OSM data, so if a lane was never mapped it doesn't exist in the game either. Second, if you're outside France or Spain, set your expectations to 30 metre terrain — the roads will be laid out correctly, but a flat suburb will look genuinely flat.
The player-made race list shows how universal this instinct is: routes named in Korean, Bulgarian, Catalan and Romanian, all of them ordinary local streets somebody wanted to drive. Do that first, then go to the Alps to see what the engine is capable of.
Before You Set Off Anywhere
Picking a great location is wasted if the first sixty seconds go wrong, and for most people they do. The most common reaction on Hacker News to landing in a beautiful place was:
"Where's the car? 'F' does nothing."
Two different keys. Hold X to summon a vehicle, let it drop in and settle, then press F to get in. Pressing F with no car nearby correctly does nothing. Full list on the controls page.
Two more things that specifically affect remote and mountainous destinations. Terrain is generated on your own machine as you travel, so arriving somewhere new means waiting a few seconds while the ground builds itself — the developers acknowledge "some jank when approaching the next tile", and if it never resolves at all, the loading and stuttering fixes are the place to look. And around 5% of intersections still render badly; when your car snags on invisible geometry halfway up a pass, press and hold J to hop over it. That is literally what the game is named after.
One last scouting trick: the game ships with a flyable helicopter. If you're hunting for a good road rather than a known address, seeing the shape of a valley from above beats guessing on the map.
Questions People Ask
Where is the best terrain in Hop.Earth?
France and Spain, including Corsica, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands. Those are rendered at up to a 2 metre grid; the rest of the world uses 30 metre base data.
Can I drive anywhere in the world?
Anywhere except Antarctica, which isn't covered — and anywhere with roads mapped in OpenStreetMap. The current mode is free roam, so there's nothing gating where you go. Racing and GPS navigation are listed as coming soon.
How do I go to a specific place?
Use the Go to search box on the map view and type a place, street or landmark. M opens the world map once you're in.
Why does my city look so flat?
Two reasons stacked on each other: outside France and Spain the elevation data is 30 metre, and there are no buildings anywhere in the game by design.
Are more countries getting high-resolution terrain?
The developers say additional countries are being added over time. No dates have been given, so treat the current list as the current list.
More Hop.Earth Guides
Unofficial fan site. PlayHopEarth.com is an independent player-made guide. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by Hop.Earth or its developer, and it does not host the game — every play link points to the official site at hop.earth. Controls were verified in-game; you can confirm them yourself by holding H in game. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors; elevation data © EU/ESA/IGN/CNIG.