Archery Range
Aim, hold and release while reading the wind, the distance and a target that will not always stand still. Five modes, ten scoring rings, and a daily twelve that is the same for everyone.
Twelve arrows at 18 m on a small face. No wind, no clock.
No Indoor Calm round recorded yet.
Indoor Calm — press Start when you are ready.
Side view, 18 m — heights exaggerated
- Draw
- 50%
- Held
- 0.0s
- Steady
- —
- Guide
- on
Drag the pad to move the sight, W and S to change the draw, Space to loose. The ring on the target is how far out the arrow could land — wait for it to shrink, but not too long.
The thing that surprises everybody
Do not loose straight away, and do not wait too long. The bow is already drawn when your turn begins, and the sight is wandering. Over the first second or so it settles; after that your arm tires and it wanders again, worse than before. The ring drawn on the target is exactly how far out the arrow could land — watch it shrink, and loose while it is small.
Measured against a bot that always holds for the same length of time: shooting instantly averages under three points an arrow indoors, the steady moment averages over nine, and three seconds of holding averages under one. It is the largest single thing you can change about your shooting.
The steadiest moment is around 1.1 seconds, but it moves a little on every arrow, so there is no number to memorise. Read the ring, not the clock.
How to play
Press Start. Drag on the pad to move the sight — up and down for elevation, left and right for windage. W and S change how far you draw, which sets how fast the arrow leaves and therefore how far it carries. Space looses.
Letting go of the pointer does not loose the arrow. Aiming and shooting are two separate decisions, so you can settle the sight before you commit — which is the whole game.
The strip under the range shows the flight from the side, so you can see the drop. Heights there are exaggerated; the distances are true.
Reading the wind
A crosswind pushes the arrow sideways, and the drift grows with the square of the time it is in the air. So a long shot is punished twice — once for the distance and once for the extra seconds — and a weak draw is punished the same way, because a slower arrow is out there longer.
Aim into it. At 70 metres on the big face, ignoring the strongest wind in the game costs about six rings an arrow; every arrow still lands on the target, which is deliberate, because a wind you cannot aim off is not weather — it is a coin flip.
The flag beside the range and the line above it both read the same value the arrow actually flies in. There is no second number kept for display.
Scoring
A face carries 10 rings of equal width. The middle is worth 10, the outermost is worth 1, and an arrow off the face scores nothing. The rings are pure geometry — each is a tenth of the face's radius — so the score is simply how far from the middle the arrow landed, and every boundary is exact.
An arrow that never reaches the boss is recorded as short rather than as a miss. A miss is an aiming problem; a short arrow is a draw problem, and only one of them is fixed by aiming better.
The scorecard also reports your group — how far from the middle your arrows landed on average. A tight group away from the centre is a sighting problem; a wide group around it is a holding one. The score alone cannot tell you which you have.
Modes
- Indoor Calm
- — twelve arrows at 18 m on a small face, with no wind at all
- Outdoor Wind
- — twelve arrows at 50, 60 and 70 m, with a crosswind that changes every arrow
- Moving Targets
- — the face slides sideways while the arrow is in the air, so you have to lead it
- Endless Accuracy
- — the distances grow and one arrow off the face ends the round
- Daily 12
- — twelve arrows, the same for everybody, every UTC day
Each keeps its own best, and they are deliberately not pooled: one has no wind, one forces the long distances, and one ends the moment an arrow misses. A single number across all five would tell you that you had got worse when you had only changed mode.
Tips
- Draw harder than feels necessary at long range. A slower arrow spends longer in the wind, so a weak draw misses twice.
- Change one thing at a time. The group on the scorecard tells you whether your last change helped far more reliably than one arrow does.
- In Moving Targets, aim where the face is going, not where it is. At 40 m the arrow is in the air for most of a second.
- If arrows are falling short, that is the draw and not the aim — the line above the range says so before you shoot.
Privacy and local play
Everything runs in your browser. Your bests, your daily history and your settings are kept in this browser's local storage and are never sent anywhere — there is no account, no server and no leaderboard. The arrows are simulated on your own device and the sounds are synthesised there too; nothing is downloaded. The button under the controls deletes this game's stored data and touches nothing else on Zerdly.
Frequently asked questions
- Why do my arrows go everywhere when I shoot straight away?
- Because the bow is already drawn and the sight has not settled. The ring on the target is exactly how far out the arrow could land, and at the moment your turn starts it is at its widest. Measured against a bot that always holds for the same length of time, shooting instantly averages under 3 points an arrow indoors; waiting for the sight to settle averages over 9. It is the largest single thing you can change.
- So should I always hold as long as possible?
- No — and that is the point. The sight settles for about 1.1 seconds and then your arm tires and it wanders again, worse than before. The same bot scores over 9 at the steady moment and under 1 after three seconds. Hold for four and a half and you have to let the bow down and start the draw again.
- Is the steadiest moment always the same?
- No. It moves a little on every arrow, drawn before you do anything, so there is no stopwatch answer to memorise. Read the ring on the target rather than counting — that is what it is there for.
- How much does the wind really matter?
- A lot, and it is worth aiming off for. At 70 metres on a 122 cm face, an archer who ignores the strongest wind in the game averages about 3 points an arrow; one who aims into it averages far more. The drift grows with the square of the time the arrow is in the air, so a long shot is punished twice — once for the distance and once for the extra seconds. A weak draw is punished the same way.
- Is the wind I can see the wind that is actually blowing?
- Yes, exactly. There is one wind value: the flag and the line above the range both read it, and the arrow flies in it. There is no second number kept for display, so the two cannot drift apart.
- What is the difference between a miss and a shot that fell short?
- A miss reached the target and landed off the face — that is aim. A short arrow never got there at all — that is draw. They are counted separately on the scorecard, because they are two different mistakes and only one of them is fixed by aiming better. The line above the range warns you before you shoot if your draw cannot reach the distance you are on.
- Does the game run the same on a slow phone or a 120 Hz screen?
- Yes. The arrow is fully resolved the moment you loose it, and what you watch afterwards is a replay. The moment it reaches the target plane is solved exactly rather than sampled at the frame rate: measured over 60,000 aimed arrows, scoring at whichever animation frame happened to land past the target puts about two arrows in three in the wrong ring at 60 Hz — nearly 5 cm out against a 6 cm ring — and even at 240 Hz one in six is still wrong.
- Is the Daily the same for everyone?
- Yes. Daily 12 is seeded from the UTC date, so every player gets the same twelve arrows — the same distances, the same winds and the same steadiest moments — on the same day, and it is recorded once. Everything else is seeded on your own device.
- Why is there no leaderboard?
- There is no server and no account, so there is nobody to compare you with. Your bests, your daily history and your settings live in this browser and nowhere else, and the button under the controls deletes all of them without touching anything else on Zerdly.