The method
Every other hunting app sells a “game activity” percentage built from moon phase and a proprietary curve, presented as if it predicts what animals will do. It doesn’t, and no published study says it can. Ours scores something we can actually measure: the conditions for you to hunt well.
A hunt is executed against the weather: you keep the wind in your face, move quietly, and glass the country. Those three things are physics, and we measure every input to them. The score is a 0–100 blend of four factors, each of which you can expand in the panel to read the exact reason for its value.
| Factor | Weight | Measured from |
|---|---|---|
| Scent control | 40% | Sustained wind speed, and our thermal model. Any steady wind from ~2 to 9 m/s scores full — a plateau, not a narrow ideal, because a firm direction is what you play. It falls off toward a near calm (scent pools) and, more gently, toward a roaring wind that swirls in terrain. An active reversal caps it at 0.25 no matter the speed — when the wind is turning over, direction can’t be trusted. Established up- or downslope flow raises it. |
| Quiet movement | 20% | Precipitation and wind noise. A trace of rain (≤1 mm/hr) damps the forest floor — the best stalking cover there is; a downpour (≥5 mm/hr) is loud and miserable. On a dry day, wind noise is the cover instead, so a dead-calm dry hour scores lowest. |
| Visibility | 25% | Near-surface smoke (µg/m³, the same field as the smoke overlay) and heavy rain. Glassing degrades from ~35 µg/m³ (AQI “moderate”) and is effectively over by 150. Overcast is fine — flat light, no glare. |
| Comfort | 15% | Temperature against a comfortable working window (−12 °C to 27 °C). Outside it, endurance and safety — the hunter’s, not the animal’s — degrade. |
The overall score is the weighted average of whichever factors have data. A missing input drops out of the blend rather than being guessed. Bands: Excellent ≥78, Good ≥60, Fair ≥40, Tough below.
A Red Flag Warning, winter storm, blizzard, high-wind, ice, or flash-flood alert over your point — or a forecast gust past ~17 m/s — shows as a banner above the score, not folded into it. A pleasant blend of scent and visibility must never paper over a day the National Weather Service says is dangerous.
It never says an animal will move, feed, or rut at a given time. We don’t model that, because no one honestly can from weather and a moon phase — and claiming to would be the exact thing we built this company to be the alternative to. Moon phase and solunar times are shown separately in the panel, labelled as the folklore they are.
The whole formula above lives in one file, conditionsIndex.ts, and ships in the open-source core. When the repo goes public at launch you can read every constant and change your own copy. The current published formula version is 1; saved hunt forecasts stamp this value so later changes never rewrite what the app showed in the field.