As a solo developer I wanted a fast, mobile-friendly interactive map for Palworld that didn't bury me in ads. The result is Pindrop, and here are a few of the technical decisions behind it.
Rendering 1000+ markers without jank
The interactive map uses Leaflet with a custom marker-clustering layer. Markers are served as static JSON from the edge and hydrated client-side, so the first paint is server-rendered and the heavy marker work happens after.
A breeding calculator as a pure function
Palworld's breeding combos are deterministic, so the breeding calculator is just a lookup over a precomputed table rather than a backend call. That keeps it instant and fully cacheable.
