Privacy
Updated 16 August 2026. Covers Scrap Heap on iOS and Android.
Scrap Heap is made by The Next Beacon. There's no login, no account and no profile, so the game never learns who you are. That's not a privacy feature we're bragging about, it's just how the game is built.
Below is every field the game sends. Not categories, the actual fields. This list comes from the code that sends them, so it can be checked against the game rather than taken on trust.
What it sends
The game reports anonymous crash and gameplay events to a server we run. We use it to find crashes, see which screens people quit on, and balance the game.
About the device, once per batch
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
vendor_id | The identifier the phone gives us (Apple's identifierForVendor, Android's SSAID). It's scoped to us as a publisher, so it can't follow you into anyone else's apps, and it resets if you delete all our apps. |
install_id | A random id the game makes up on first launch. Ours, local, gone if you reinstall. Not derived from you or your hardware. |
platform, os_version | iOS or Android, and the version. Lets us tie a crash to an OS release. |
model_class | Just "phone", "tablet" or "desktop". A model name is close to a fingerprint and all we need is which of those three. |
locale, tz_offset | Language region, and how many minutes you are from UTC. More on these below. |
About the app
Version, build, and whether it's a release or a dev build.
The events themselves
Each one has a random id, a name, a timestamp and a counter. The names
are app_open, session_start,
session_end, screen_view,
ui_tap, run_start, run_end and
error.
The values attached to them are facts about a run, and this is the whole
list: cold, screen, control,
mode, class, kit,
ascension, outcome, depth,
pressure, gold, duration_s,
resumed. Which hero you picked, how deep you got, whether
you won. Nothing about you.
What it doesn't send
- No email, name, phone, address or birthday. There's nowhere to type them.
- No advertising id. There are no ads, so we never ask for it.
- No location. No GPS, and your IP address isn't stored anywhere by us.
- No contacts, photos, files, mic, camera, health data or purchase history.
- No third-party analytics or ad SDK. The server is ours. Nobody else gets any of this.
- Nothing you typed. There's nowhere to type anything.
There's also a filter on the server that throws away any field whose name looks like personal data (email, phone, address, coordinates, and so on). It exists so that this section stays true even if we break something in a future update.
Two things worth saying out loud
Language and timezone are rough location hints. Neither store counts them as "location" and neither one gets you closer than a whole timezone or language. Somebody was going to ask, so: that's what they are, and we use them to decide which languages are worth translating into.
Our hosting provider sees your IP, like every network in between does. Our code never reads it and it isn't in anything we store. So the claim is that we don't collect or keep your IP. It is not that no IP was involved in getting the request to us, which would be nonsense.
Buying things
There's one optional purchase that unlocks the full game. Apple or Google handle it end to end. We never see your card, your billing address or your store account. All the game keeps is a yes/no about whether you own the unlock, and that lives on your phone.
Kids
The game isn't aimed at under-13s, and it collects nothing that could identify anyone at any age. There's no chat, nothing social, and no way for players to post anything.
Keeping it, and deleting it
Events are kept for up to 24 months and then dropped.
Here's the awkward bit: with no account, we can't look you up. There's nothing to look you up by. What we can do is delete the records from a particular installation. Mail info@thenextbeacon.com from any address, ask, and we'll tell you what we need to find your records and delete them within 30 days. Deleting the app stops everything immediately, without asking us.
Depending where you live you may also have the right to ask what we hold, object to us processing it, or complain to a data protection authority. Same address for any of that.
If this changes
The date at the top changes with it, and we update the same summary inside the game under Settings.
Reaching us
info@thenextbeacon.com — The Next Beacon.