Wind isn't a number. It's a field.
Most games hand you one wind value for the whole level and call it realistic. Here, the same shot from the same spot can land differently ten metres to the left — because the wind ten metres to the left is a different wind.
It's easy to make "wind" mean one arrow and one number, applied the same way to every shot on the map. It's cheap, it's predictable, and once a player has memorized the one number, the wind stops being a decision. That's the opposite of what this game is trying to be about, so it isn't how the wind works here.
One function, one truth
Every single thing in the game that cares about wind — the bullet in flight, the flags on their poles, drifting dust, the HUD's wind dial, even the audio — asks the exact same function for the wind at a given position and a given moment in time. Nothing is allowed to keep a second, private idea of what the wind is doing. If two systems ever disagreed about the wind, it would mean one of them was lying, and there'd be no way to tell which.
Base wind, plus a gust that moves
The wind a shot feels is two layers stacked together: a base wind that eases in per mode, and a spatial, moving gust on top of it. Because the gust varies with position as well as time, the wind ten metres to your left, right now, is genuinely not the same wind you're standing in — not a random number, a sampled value from the same continuous field, at a different point.
- PVP: roughly ±1.5, calming to ±0.7 as a round settles.
- Zombie Horde: roughly ±1.2 — enough to matter, not enough to fight the horde and the weather at once.
- Contracts: roughly ±1.3 across a run of targets at growing range.
- Tower Duel: the extreme case — ±3.4 easing toward ±2.6, and it re-rolls its direction and strength every 3 to 5 seconds mid-round.
What it means at the trigger
In the scope, a wind hold is a direction, not a warning: if the wind is going to push your bullet left, the reticle's hold shows the target sitting to the right of dead-center — aim there, into the wind, and the bullet arrives where you actually want it. That works because it has time to work: at 600 metres, one of the rifles takes about 0.63 seconds to arrive with no wind at all, and every one of those 0.63 seconds is another moment for a moving gust to keep nudging the round sideways.
That's the whole reason the Tower Duel — kilometres of range, wind that changes its mind every few seconds — is the mode where this stops being a formula you memorize and starts being a read you make shot to shot. The Dope Book keeps every run's accuracy broken out by range, which is the only honest way to find out whether you're actually getting better at reading it, or just getting lucky less often.