Esporada: magic mushroom guide

Pevgrow

About this app

Esporada is a guide to magic mushrooms: which species exist, how much they actually contain, when they come up, and how to work out a dose without kidding yourself.

The app itself is in Spanish and French. This listing is in English so you know what you are downloading.

MILLIGRAMS, NOT GRAMS BY EYE

The gram is the unit of the scale. The milligram is the unit of the effect. Esporada works out how many milligrams of psilocybin you are aiming for and only then converts that into grams, using the real potency of the species in front of you and its water content. Two grams of one thing and two grams of another are not the same dose, and this is the part almost no calculator gets right.

IT DOES NOT ASK YOUR BODY WEIGHT

Every other calculator asks for it. The evidence does not back it up: a Johns Hopkins study of 405 participants weighing 49 to 113 kilos found no relationship between body weight and the effects, and later work at Imperial College reached the same conclusion using body mass index. That is why clinical trials stopped dosing per kilo. We do not do it either, and the app explains why.

A RANGE, NOT A FALSE NUMBER

The potency of the same mushroom varies enormously between specimens: in Psilocybe semilanceata, differences of fourteen times have been measured. Saying "3.4 grams" to one decimal place is faking a precision that does not exist. Esporada gives you the likely range and tells you how reliable it is.

AND IT TELLS YOU TO WAIT

Tolerance to psilocybin builds fast and takes about two weeks to fade. If you took some recently, the raw arithmetic would tell you to triple the dose. Esporada refuses: it caps the figure and tells you the sensible thing is to wait. A calculator gives you the number; a harm reduction tool knows when the number is not the answer.

WHAT LOOKS LIKE THEM AND CAN KILL YOU

Galerina marginata contains the same amatoxins as the death cap and grows in the same places. Pholiotina comes up in the same lawns as liberty caps. Esporada includes a guide to ruling them out, with the rule that actually decides it — the colour of the spore print — and what to do if you suspect you ate the wrong one, poison control number included.

This is not a guide for going out foraging. It is a guide for throwing away what you should not eat. That is also why we do not identify mushrooms from photographs: it is the fastest way for someone to end up in hospital.

YOUR HERBARIUM, ON YOUR PHONE

Note down which species you have met, where and when. It lives on your phone: no account, no sign-up, and nobody else sees it. We do not collect any data about you: the only thing the app asks the internet for is its own notices, the same ones for everyone, and nothing of yours travels in that download.

ONE THING A DAY

Why mushrooms turn blue when you bruise them, why you are more closely related to a fungus than to an oak tree, when the liberty cap season starts, or who first isolated psilocybin and in which laboratory.

WHAT IS IN IT

- Species entries for Psilocybe cubensis, semilanceata, azurescens, Panaeolus cyanescens and magic truffles, each with its documented potency and its source
- A calculator in psilocybin equivalents, for fresh or dried material
- Automatic tolerance adjustment based on your last dose
- A guide to the deadly species that get confused with these
- A personal herbarium, on your device only
- Works offline

WE DO NOT ENCOURAGE USE

Esporada is an educational and harm reduction tool. Psilocybin is regulated differently in every country and it is each person's responsibility to know the law where they live. These mushrooms can be very potent and are not for everyone: they can cause serious problems for some people, especially anyone taking antidepressants or with a psychiatric history. The information in this app is not a substitute for a healthcare professional.

An app by Pevgrow.

Ratings and reviews

Not sure if it's a bug or not but for me the weight scale only went to 180 pounds, but the lowest was like 50? I wasn't able to input my weight so this app is pretty useless for me sadly. EDIT: Upon looking at another app the weight scale is in kilograms not pounds. I assumed pounds because the info page mentions user's weight in pounds not kilograms. Will bump to 4 stars for now being usable, but I would love to see dosage amount for different types of mushrooms. Though that is asking a lot.

This app is not accurate for microdosing. it calculated that I should take 1.94 grams for a microdose. That's a normal dose. I want to be less aggrivated, not be tripping balls on my way to or at work. The correct dosage would be more like .2 for a microdose.. I just read a comment that the weight is supposed to in Kg. However, the description mentions lbs and does not stipulate KG. My recommendation for the creators is to make this more clear in the description or instructions.

For this app I don't know the measurements for weight on the app but looking further it's in kg so if you don't look at the apps description you might be confused Overall great app once you know how to use it

What’s new

New app icon: a mushroom with its gills, which is what you actually recognise at a glance among other icons — the old abstract spore did not read at small sizes.

The link to leave a review now meets Android's minimum touch size, so it no longer gets mis-tapped.