Ingress in Tsukuba

After having gone to the Tokyo Ingress Meetup last week, I'm fired up again! Today, I did my duty as a Resistance and went to capture all the uncaptured (unfortunately, there's not a lot of players around) portal around Tsukuba.

For planning, the Ingress Intel map is essential. However, the Intel map would only show low level portals when zoomed in, so it's not very useful for finding the many uncaptured portals around Tsukuba. Fortunately, there's a workaround. By using the 'zoom out' function of your web browser while zoomed in on the map, you can get an overview of all the uncaptured portals in a large area.

After locating each portal (or group of portals), I then plot it on Google Maps for easy access on the go.

So let me introduce the various portals in Tsukuba. A very convenient cluster of portals is located at Chuo Park. Twelve easily accessible portals are located in this very tight space (such that if you use a bicycle, you can make around and still have to wait for the 5 minutes cool down period). The one uncaptured portal is located in the Tsukuba Expo Center which is very difficult to access.

The Tsukuba University, like any other large universities, also has a lot of portals. However, it is more spread out that the portals at the Chuo Park.

Other portals around the area are often located around religious places such as shrines or graveyards.

One other interesting portal is a nice painting inside a tunnel near Tsukuba University. If it weren't for Ingress, I wouldn't have found it!

I've also found an alumni of Tsukuba University in the COMM (in-game chat), unfortunately, we missed each other in the real world. I've also managed to level up to level 6, only 2 more levels to go! Below is the Intel map of Tsukuba after all portals are captured. (The green one below is inside JAXA which was closed by the time I got back, so, unfortunately, I couldn't attack it.)