Visited, Lived or Bucket List: What Each Status Does to Your Record
· Nen
Every place you log in MapMyWorld carries one of three statuses: Visited, Lived, or Bucket List. It looks like a label. It is closer to a switch, because the status decides whether the place counts in your totals, what colour it paints on the map, and in one case what happens to the country around it.
Most of this is sensible. Two parts are not obvious, and one part can quietly leave your record wrong. This article walks through exactly what each status does, based on how the app behaves today, so you can pick the right one when you log a place and fix it when you picked the wrong one.
The three statuses in one table
| Status | Counts in your stats? | Default map colour | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visited | Yes | Green | A place you have been |
| Lived | Yes | Purple | A place you stayed long enough to call home |
| Bucket List | No | Blue | A place you intend to go |
You can change the colours in your settings; the greens, purples and blues above are what you get before you touch anything (shared/schema.ts, the color*Layer defaults). The add-place and edit-place dialogs offer all three statuses on every plan, including Free (client/src/components/add-place-dialog.tsx, edit-place-dialog.tsx).
What counts, and what does not
The rule is short: Visited and Lived count, Bucket List does not. The same two-status test appears in the main stats calculation, the achievement checks, the travel heatmap and the timeline (server/storage.ts, server/services/achievementService.ts, server/routes/stats.ts, client/src/lib/stats-utils.ts).
That has some consequences worth knowing:
- A Bucket List place never adds to your days abroad or the timeline, however many you save.
- It never adds to the World Heritage count in your stats or to a badge. If you save five UNESCO sites you want to see, that number stays where it was.
- Lived is not a lesser category. It counts exactly like Visited. The difference is colour: a Lived country is filled in purple, so it stands out from the countries you passed through.
Because the stats ignore Bucket List places, you can use the status as a staging area. Save the place now, and when you go, change the status to Visited and add the date. Nothing in your totals moves until you do.
When "Lived" is the right choice
Lived is for somewhere you were based, not somewhere you stayed for a long trip. There is no day threshold in the app; nothing changes automatically after thirty days or ninety. You decide.
A rule that holds up: if you had a lease, a work contract, a school term or a registered address there, mark it Lived. If you were a traveller who stayed a long time, mark it Visited and let the visit dates tell the story. Your record then answers two different questions cleanly: where have I been, and where have I actually lived. If you want a longer treatment of where the line sits for countries themselves, what counts as visiting a country goes through the common rules.
The part that surprises people: countries carry their own status
Your places and your countries are stored separately. A place has a status. A country has a status of its own, and the world map colours countries from the country status, not from the places inside them (client/src/components/map/maplibre-map.tsx).
When you create a place, the app looks at its country. If you have never recorded that country, it adds the country and gives it the same status as the place (server/routes/places.ts, the create handler). If the country is already in your record under any status, it leaves it alone.
Put those two rules together and you get a sequence that is easy to fall into:
- You save Kyoto as a Bucket List place. Japan is new to your record, so Japan is added as Bucket List and turns blue.
- Two years later you go. You edit Kyoto and change its status to Visited.
- Japan is still blue.
Editing a place does not touch the country. The update handler writes the new status to the place and stops there (server/storage.ts, updatePlace). Your stats will correctly count the Kyoto place as visited, but the country count, the map fill and the continent count read from the country status, and Japan is still Bucket List.
The fix is manual and takes ten seconds. Open the Countries page, find Japan, and set it to Visited. If you also want a first-visit date on it, set that at the same time.
The reverse also holds. If you log your first place in a country as Visited, then save six Bucket List places there, the country stays Visited. The order of your first entry decides the starting colour, and nothing later renegotiates it.
A trip can overwrite a country, including one you marked Lived
There is a second way a country's status changes without you touching it. When you create or edit a trip that is Completed or Ongoing and has a country set, the app marks that country as Visited (server/routes/trips.ts, in both the create and update handlers).
For most people that is what they want: you took a trip, the country is on your map. The catch is that the call sets the status outright. It does not check what was there first. If you had marked your home country as Lived, and then log a Completed weekend trip inside it, the country goes back to Visited.
If you live somewhere, check that country's status after you log local trips. It is a small thing, but it is exactly the kind of drift that makes a record disagree with itself years later. A planned trip does not do this: the country is only recorded once the trip is Ongoing or Completed, which matches the behaviour described in why a planned trip doesn't show its airports yet.
Bucket List places still use up a Free slot
If you are on the Free plan, the status of a place has no effect on the cap. Free allows 5 places, and that is a lifetime allowance: the app counts every place you have ever created, not the number currently saved, and deleting a place does not give the slot back (server/routes/places.ts, the placesCreatedTotal check).
A Bucket List place is a place. Saving a wish-list spot spends one of your five, permanently. If you only have five to spend, spend them on places you have actually been, and keep the wish list somewhere else until you need it. Free also allows unlimited countries, so a country marked Bucket List costs nothing. That is the cheap way to keep a wish list on the Free plan: mark the country, not a specific restaurant or museum in it.
On Pro there is no place cap, so the question disappears.
Changing many places at once
If you have been logging places with the wrong status, you do not have to open them one by one. My Places has a bulk edit mode where you can select several places and set them all to a new status in one pass, and the list can be filtered by status first so you are only looking at the Bucket List ones (client/src/components/places-bulk-edit.tsx). Remember that bulk-editing the places does not move the countries; you still change those on the Countries page.
A routine that keeps the statuses honest
Here is the short version, in the order that prevents most of the trouble:
- Log a place as Bucket List only if you want it on the map in blue. Otherwise leave it out and spend the slot on somewhere you have been.
- When you go, change the place to Visited and add the visit date. The date is what feeds the heatmap and timeline.
- Then open Countries and set the country to Visited too. This is the step the app does not do for you.
- Mark home as Lived once, then check it after local trips. A Completed trip in that country will reset it to Visited.
- Do a scan every few months. Filter My Places by Bucket List and ask whether any of them are places you have actually been. Those are the ones still waiting for step 2.
If you are rebuilding an older history rather than keeping a fresh one, the same status logic applies to every place you enter, so it is worth deciding up front. How to log your travel history retroactively covers the evidence-first method for doing that without guessing, and the status rules above are what you apply as you go.
The honest summary is that the three statuses are simple on the surface and slightly more tangled underneath, because places and countries each keep their own copy. Know where the two copies can fall out of step and you can keep your record in line with where you have actually been.