It turns a walk in the forest into a game. You photograph the mushrooms you meet, the app identifies them, and each find becomes a collectible spec card with a score. The first time you photograph a species it has never seen from you, the card gets a gold “New species!” badge. Over a season you build an album, learn what grows where and when, and race friends and family up the leaderboard. Points come from the photo, never from picking — you can score a perfect hunt without touching a single mushroom.

No. Scoring is based entirely on the photograph and where and when it was taken. Leaving a rare or protected species standing costs you nothing — a red-listed species photographed in place is worth more than anything you could carry home.

Location is optional — a photo without it still gets identified and still scores. It just adds to the picture: the hunt map, the place name, the weather and season behind the find, and part of the discovery rating. Two things strip it: the camera had location tagging off when you shot, or your phone's photo picker removed it on the way in. The reliable fix on a phone is to zip your photos in your file manager (Internal storage → DCIM → Camera, select, More → Compress) and choose “Upload ZIP” — the originals come through untouched. On a computer, dragging the files in straight from the folder works too.

Every find scores on how precisely it was identified: 3 points for a class, 5 for an order, 8 for a family, 12 for a genus and 25 for a named species, with the species tier scaled by how rare that species is. On top of that come one-off bonuses per species per hunt: +15 for a prize edible and +40 for a red-listed species. Repeats of the same species in the same hunt are worth less, so breadth beats stacking the same chanterelle patch.

Edibility says what the species is in general — from choice to deadly. Culinary rates how good it is to eat. Rarity places it on a scale from common to legendary, judged for the country the photo was taken in, so the same species can read differently in Estonia and in Britain. Specimen judges the individual mushroom in your photo: fresh, intact and well-shown scores high, mouldy or half-eaten scores low. Discovery is about the find itself, not how far you walked — half of it is the setting in the picture (a beautiful, fitting spot with the mushroom clearly shown) and half is finding it against the odds, such as an unusual species for the place, or one turning up outside its normal season or in poor conditions. The headline Find Index weights rarity 35%, specimen 30%, discovery 20% and culinary 15%.

Not for eating. Edibility notes describe the species in general, not the mushroom in your hand, and identification from a photo is never certain. Never eat anything on the strength of this app. Treat every rating as a learning aid and confirm with an expert before any mushroom reaches a kitchen.

ShroomShroom is open by default. Every signed-in forager is effectively a friend: your scores, hunts and records are visible to other players, and anyone can send you a direct message. Direct messages are one-to-one and readable only by sender and recipient.

Two switches. "Private forager card" in Profile → Privacy leaves only your name on the leaderboard and hides your hunts, records and species from everyone else. "Private hunt", on any hunt report, hides that hunt's photos, species and map while its points still count on every leaderboard.

Your account details, your photos and the location and time attached to them, the identification results, and your scores and hunt history. Location and time are what make scoring, maps and phenology work; photos are sent to the identification service to get a species name back. Face verification results are stored as a match outcome, not as a browsable gallery. Data is never sold, and you can delete your account and its content at any time from Profile.

Full detail lives in the Privacy Policy and the Retention Schedule.

Yes — that's the Window page. Search any place and it scores today and the next two days from 0 to 100 for how good the mushroom conditions are, mixing season, rain, soil moisture and temperature. A map shades the area around you so you can see which patches of forest look best, and below it you get a three-month day-by-day season curve for the common edibles there, with the date their season actually peaks.

Yes. The app is free to use — hunts, identifications, cards, leaderboards and messages. Paid upgrades may come along later, but the game as you see it now stays free.