How It Works

Last updated: September 2026

TarkovRaidCompass runs entirely outside Escape from Tarkov. It reads the screenshots the game itself saves and the log files Tarkov writes to your disk. It does not read the game's memory, inject anything into it, or attach to its process in any way.

You do not have to take that on trust. Every claim on this page is something you can confirm yourself with free tools, and the last section explains how.

1. It never touches the game

This is the part that matters most, so it is worth being precise about. The app contains:

No memory reading. Nothing calls ReadProcessMemory or anything like it.
No injection. No DLL is loaded into the game, no hooks are installed, no code runs inside Tarkov's process.
No driver and no kernel component. Nothing is installed at system level.
No handle to the game at all. The app never opens EscapeFromTarkov.exe. It does not need to, and it does not know or care whether the game is running.

Everything the app knows about your raid, it learned from files Tarkov had already written to your own hard drive. That is the whole mechanism.

2. What it reads from your PC

Three things, and nothing else:

What	Exactly what is read	What happens next
Your Screenshots folder	The filename only. Tarkov puts your coordinates and facing direction in the name of every screenshot it saves. The app reads that text. It never opens the image.	0 deletes processed captures immediately; 1 to 1000 keeps the newest captures. Applies when the next screenshot is processed, including recognized captures found at startup. Unrecognized files, subfolders and links are never deleted.
Your Tarkov Logs folder	The game's own log lines, for raid start and end and, if you switch on automatic quest tracking, quest status changes.	Used to record which map you are on and to keep your quest list current.
A small area of your screen	Only when you press the item lookup hotkey. A box around your mouse cursor is captured so the item tooltip under it can be read.	Text recognition runs on your own machine. The recognised item name is used to look up prices.

That third one is the only time the app looks at your screen, and it only happens on that keypress. There is no continuous screen capture, no recording, and no keylogging. The only keys the app listens for are the handful of hotkeys you configure yourself in Settings.

It reads nothing else on your computer. Not your browser data, not your documents, not your other games, not your saved passwords.

3. What leaves your PC

Your position, your quest and raid progress, your item lookups and your account login go to tarkovraidcompass.com and nowhere else. That is what makes the live map and your synced progress work.

There are exactly two other pieces of network traffic, and it would be dishonest to leave them out of a page like this:

The update check. The app asks tarkovraidcompass.com whether a newer version exists. If there is one it downloads in the background, but it is never installed until you click Restart, so an update cannot interrupt a raid.
The text recognition language file. Downloads the selected language model from TarkovRaidCompass on first use. Models are cached on this device. Captures are processed locally and are never uploaded. Without permission, only a previously cached model can be used.

No analytics, telemetry, advertising or third-party tracking is built into the desktop app. (The website you are reading right now does use Google Analytics, which the cookie notice covers. The desktop app does not.)

4. What it changes on your system

Screenshot retention
0 deletes processed captures immediately; 1 to 1000 keeps the newest captures. Applies when the next screenshot is processed, including recognized captures found at startup. Unrecognized files, subfolders and links are never deleted.
It writes two files next to itself: a small config.env holding your settings and API token, and a plain-text log you can read at any time.
An optional brightness feature, off unless you turn it on, adjusts your primary display's gamma using Windows' own built-in display setting, the same mechanism as Night Light or your monitor's brightness control. It affects your whole screen at the operating system level and does not touch the game or any other program. It returns to normal when you close the app.

It installs no services, adds no startup entries you did not ask for, and changes no system or security settings.

5. Check all of it yourself

Everything above is externally observable, which means you never have to believe it on my say-so. These are the standard free tools, and none of them need any cooperation from me:

Process Explorer (Microsoft Sysinternals) shows every handle and loaded module a program has. Look for any reference to EscapeFromTarkov.exe. You will not find one.
Process Monitor (also Sysinternals) logs every single file the app touches. Compare it against section 2. That is the complete list.
Wireshark or Fiddler shows every host the app talks to. Compare it against section 3.
VirusTotal scans the installer against around seventy antivirus engines. You can upload the file yourself rather than trusting a link from me.

If you run any of these and something does not match what this page says, please tell me, publicly. I would rather be corrected than trusted.

6. Verifying the installer you downloaded

If you want to be sure the file you have is the file I published, and that nothing altered it in between, check its SHA-256 fingerprint. In PowerShell:

Get-FileHash .\TarkovRaidCompass-Setup.exe -Algorithm SHA256

For the current release, version 0.2.38, that should print:

8128b67a3d603d0c4f73b30c66a7b2f1524fbe4674d8fec506a496d24c9e9ae4

If it does not match, do not run it, and please let me know.

7. Why Windows shows a warning when you install it

The installer is not yet code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen shows an "unrecognized app" warning the first time you run it. That warning means Microsoft has not seen this file often enough to vouch for it. It does not mean anything was detected in it.

A signing certificate is a real cost for a free tool, and it is on the list. Until then, the fingerprint check above is the stronger guarantee anyway: a signature proves who published a file, and the hash proves the file is byte-for-byte the one they published.

8. Why the source code is not public

Fair question, and it gets asked, so here is the straight answer. This is a project I intend to keep building on, and possibly to earn something from one day. The client code is closed for that reason, not to hide what it does.

I would rather that cost me nothing in trust, which is the entire reason this page exists: every claim on it is checkable from the outside, without reading a line of my code.

9. Questions

If something here is unclear, or you checked something and it does not add up, come and say so in the Discord. Corrections to this page are genuinely welcome.