Gowalla has made a few changes to the items that are declared as “missing” and that are therefore displayed in Gowalla Tools as “Missing Items”.  To clear this up I’ve put together a short guide as to how missing items work followed by the items that have recently changed.

So, what are missing items?

Good question! If you view your items on the Gowalla website, you’ll find a little tab that says “Missing”.  These items are those that you don’t currently have stashed away in your collection (formally known as your “vault”).

Sounds simple enough

Indeed it does but there are several items which are missing from the missing items list.

Missing missing items?

Correct.

And why is that then?

Well at one point there were a lot of items in circulation that were released early by accident.  These included such things as the dollhouse, teddy bear, and yo-yo to name a few.  If you were lucky, you could find these dropped at various locations but they generally had item numbers under 100.  They never showed up in the “missing items” list because they hadn’t officially been released.  Of course, all three of those items have now been released and are in wide circulation so they have made it onto the “missing items” list but there are still a few out there which haven’t been released as proper items yet.

This sounds like an old problem - why the post now?

Well, interestingly there are some newer items that have now disappeared from the “missing items” list even though they were released fairly recently.  This suggests that some items are now time limited in how long they will remain in circulation.

Your point being…?

That a) GowallaTools isn’t broken when it tells you how many missing items you have (it’s getting it from Gowalla after all) and b) you might want to snap up the items that are no longer declared as missing as quickly as possible if you find them somewhere…

Ok, I’ll bite.  What items are now missing missing?

Here is a full list of items that you might still find in spots that have been dropped but you are unlikely to get randomly given to you as a popup.  This includes some that disappeared from the radar a while ago (e.g. Americano) but also the newer ones that have gone missing in action:

• 97 Bottles Button
• A Crush It! book
• Airbag Industries Pin
• Americano
• Chinese Lantern
• Conference Badge
• Festive Americano
• Firecrackers
• Glove
• Hand Rake
• Headdress
• Red Silk Robe
• Rubber Tree
• Turquoise Mask
• Two-Headed Serpent
• Watering Can

I’ve not included items that were released prematurely but have yet to enter full circulation (e.g. Acoustic Guitar) or special items such as the Golden Gift.

Looks like Gowalla have been busy clearing out some items but my advice would be to save anything you find on this list as they are certainly going to become a lot rarer!

Update: Brian Bailey (Alamofire Developer) says “we’ll be tweaking the missing items view to make this a little clearer, hopefully soon.” - view the post on the Gowalla GetSatisfaction boards.

Update: “I have had 2 Turquoise Masks, a Fire Crackers, and a Red Silk Robe as pop ups in the past week, so these are still about.” - @Frideswide1

Update 3rd March: All of these items are now back in the Missing Items list (even the ones that disappeared months ago) - looks like it was a bug with Gowalla that they’ve now fixed.