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A routing profile decides how the routing engine connects your anchor points — which surfaces it prefers, how hard it avoids climbs or busy roads, how fast the vehicle travels, and much more. Pick a vehicle and variant for a great default, adjust a few preferences, or go all the way into Expert mode and save your own. Routing profiles live in the Route Planning tool panel. See Route Planning for placing and editing anchor points.

Choosing a vehicle

The icon row at the top of the panel selects the vehicle: Hike  ·  Bike  ·  Motorcycle  ·  Car  ·  Boat  ·  Rail When a vehicle offers more than one style, a row of variant chips appears beneath it. Each variant is a tuned starting point:
VehicleVariants
HikeModerate · Easy · Alpine
BikeTrekking · Gravel · MTB · Road
MotorcycleADV · Street
CarFastEco · Fastest · Scenic · Toll-free
Motorcycle, Bike, Hike, and Car use Rendzo’s own tuned profiles. Boat and Rail use standard profiles and don’t expose the preferences below.

Basic preferences

Below the vehicle row, a short list of Basic preferences lets you nudge the route without leaving the defaults — for example Avoid climbs, Avoid busy roads, Prefer bike routes, or Never use unpaved. The exact controls depend on the vehicle.
  • Avoid sliders show an intensity (Don’t avoid → Slightly → Moderately → Avoid → Strongly avoid) rather than a raw number.
  • A small reset appears next to a control once you’ve changed it, restoring the variant’s default.
  • Allow private roads lets the engine use roads tagged private.
Only enable Allow private roads if you have local knowledge of the area and permission to use the roads in question.
Basic preferences are free for everyone.

Expert mode

Expert mode and saved profiles are Pro features.
Click Expert to open the full editor for the active vehicle — every knob the profile can set, grouped by category (surfaces, road types, hills, environment, and more). Each knob shows one of three states:
  • Unset — dimmed, “(default)”. The variant doesn’t set it; it has no effect on routing.
  • Variant default — the value the variant chose.
  • Edited — a value you changed, marked with a blue dot. The header shows how many changes you’ve made from the preset.
Numeric knobs show their exact value in a chip (4.5×, 1.5%, 90 kg), and cost knobs read out a Prefer ⟷ Avoid descriptor. Click the next to a knob for an explanation. Use the reset button to clear all edits back to the variant.

Saving from Expert

From the Expert header you can:
  • Save as profile — store the current settings as a new entry in My Profiles.
  • Save changes — when you’re editing a profile you loaded, overwrite it in place.
  • Save as new — fork a loaded profile into a separate copy.

My Profiles

The My Profiles button (a person with a star) at the end of the vehicle row opens your saved custom profiles. (The list replaces the Basic preferences while it’s open.) Each saved profile row offers:
  • Load — apply it to the route. The selected profile becomes active.
  • Click the name — rename it inline.
  • Edit — load it and open Expert to tweak its settings.
  • Export — download it as a file (see below).
  • Delete — remove it.
A loaded custom profile is an Expert artifact, so the Basic preferences are hidden while it’s active — edit it from the button or the Expert panel.

Sharing profiles

Profiles are shared as files — there’s no account-to-account linking, and an imported profile is always an independent copy.

Export

Click on a profile to download it. A normal (knob-based) profile exports as a small .json file you can send to anyone.

Import

Click Import (in the action row, where Expert sits, while My Profiles is open) and pick a file. Rendzo detects the type automatically:
  • A .json profile exported from Rendzo is re-created as your own independent copy — fully editable in Expert.
  • A .brf file is treated as a raw BRouter profile (see below).

Bring your own BRouter profile (.brf)

If you have a hand-written or community BRouter profile, import the .brf file directly with the same Import button. Rendzo validates it with the routing engine and adds it to My Profiles. A .brf profile is opaque — it routes exactly as written, so:
  • It has no Basic preferences and isn’t editable in Expert (no button).
  • Its Export downloads the original .brf.
If the routing engine rejects a .brf, Rendzo shows the error and doesn’t save it. Profiles are capped at 256 KB — real-world BRouter profiles are a few KB.
Profiles are stored as text and only ever sent to the routing engine — they’re never executed by the app. A profile only affects how your routes are calculated.