Cow Hunter

How a round goes

You pick a vehicle and a colour, drive into a fenced pen in Grapeseed and score as much as you can before the clock runs out. A round is ninety seconds by default. Clock pickups add ten seconds each, so a good run lasts longer than the round it started as.

The round is run by the service, not by the page: the page sends what you pressed, the service replays it and decides the score. A round cannot be filed without one, which is why the game refuses to start when the table is unreachable.

The vehicles

Three, in six colours each.

• Bison, a pickup. Heavy and solid, takes a bull better than anything else.
• Viper, a muscle car. Fastest of the three, slides easily, breaks just as easily.
• Cricket, a buggy. Light and nimble, fills its nitro fastest.

The price list

What the field is worth, and what it costs you.

• Holstein cow: $100.
• Brown cow: $150.
• Gold cow: $1000 if you catch it.
• Dynamite cow: $300, and it explodes.
• Bull: $800, and it hunts you back.
• Toxic cow: minus $500 and 35 hit points.
• Nitro pickup: a full nitro tank.
• Repair pickup: 35 hit points back.
• Clock pickup: ten more seconds.
• Double pickup: everything counts twice for ten seconds.

Controls

Keyboard or gamepad; the pad is laid out as GTA 5 lays it out.

• WASD or the arrow keys: forward, back, steer.
• Space: handbrake and drift.
• Shift: nitro.
• C: camera. M: sound. F: fullscreen. Esc: pause.

The shared table

Every finished round is filed in one table that the whole site reads, and the top ten are shown in the menu with the name, the vehicle and the country the run was filed from. The same table is readable as JSON without a key; see the endpoints below.

About

Cow Hunter was written by Sergei Vorniches, software engineer and product maker. The country theme over the menu came from Pixabay; the rest of the music was written by the author.

The game is free and there is nothing to buy in it. No account exists, so there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to sign in to.

Privacy

Four things are counted, by a counter running on this site’s own server: the page opened, a round started, a round ended, a score was filed. No analytics service, no advertising pixel, no third-party script of any kind.

Your address, your browser’s user agent and today’s date are hashed together with a secret salt. The hash is kept, the address is thrown away, and only a country is taken from it. The hash changes at midnight, so joining the same person across two days is not something anyone can do, whoever holds the database included. Raw rows are dropped after thirty days.

No cookies at all. Local storage keeps your settings and your name, so the field is already filled in next time; nothing is ever read out of it and uploaded. The name leaves your machine once, with a run you file, alongside the vehicle you drove and the round itself. The fonts ship with the page, so your browser is sent to no other host.

Questions

Is Cow Hunter free?

Yes. The game is free, there is nothing to buy in it and it carries no advertising.

Do I need an account or an install?

Neither. It opens in a browser and no account exists to create.

How long is a round?

Ninety seconds by default. Each clock pickup adds ten seconds.

Can I play with a gamepad?

Yes. A connected pad is picked up automatically and is laid out as GTA 5 lays it out.

What does the site keep about me?

No cookies and no third-party scripts. A daily hash of your address, user agent and the date, the country taken from that address, and the runs you file. Raw rows are dropped after thirty days.

Can the scores be read programmatically?

Yes. GET https://cowhunter.lol/api/runs returns the table as JSON, with no key and no account. It is described in /openapi.json.