Methodology
House Quest is a visual tool for exploring traditional Feng Shui frameworks on your own floor plan. This page explains exactly which methods we use, how the numbers are calculated, and where the limits are.
Principles
- Deterministic rules first. Every finding comes from geometry (your rooms, doors and furniture) + orientation + a named method + a published rule. The same layout always produces the same findings.
- Methods stay separate. Form School, Bagua, Eight Mansions, Five Elements and Flying Stars appear on separate layers. We never merge them into a single “Feng Shui score”.
- Review, not verdict. Findings are phrased as “commonly reviewed” or “traditionally considered”. Progress measures how many checks you have looked at, not how lucky a home is.
- Commerce never changes rules. Product suggestions are chosen after the rules have run, from a read-only summary of the room. They cannot alter a finding.
Methods used
Spatial · 21 rules
Form School (Luan Tou) placement principles: support behind beds, desks and sofas; the commanding position relative to doors; mirrors; sharp corners; entry openness; circulation. These are evaluated purely from your geometry.
Bagua · 4 rules
The nine-area Bagua map in two schools. Compass School uses the Later Heaven trigram arrangement by compass direction. BTB (Black Hat) aligns a 3×3 grid to the front-door wall. Also used to detect missing areas and describe what the centre of the home contains.
Eight Mansions · 2 rules
Eight Mansions (Ba Zhai) derives a Kua number from the solar birth year and one of two traditional formulas, giving four favourable and four less favourable directions. We apply them to sleeping and desk facing directions.
Five Elements · 2 rules
The Wu Xing productive and controlling cycles, applied to the element of each Bagua sector and the traditional element of furniture (by function or material) — for example the stove (Fire) against a Water or Metal sector, or a stove beside a sink.
Flying Stars · 1 rules
Xuan Kong Flying Stars, annual chart. The nine stars and annual afflictions (Tai Sui, Sui Po, San Sha) move every year at Li Chun; rooms visited by traditionally challenging stars are flagged for a yearly re-review.
How the calculations work
Orientation
You set which compass bearing the top of your plan faces (or which way the front door faces). Every direction in the app — room locations, bed and desk facings, Bagua sectors — is derived from that single value. Eight directions are 45° each (North = 337.5°–22.5°); the 24 Mountains used by Flying Stars are 15° each.
Home centre and sectors
The home outline is the union of all rooms. Its area-weighted centroid is the centre (Tai Chi). For the 9-grid, the outline’s bounding box is split into thirds and each outer cell takes the direction of its position around the centre. For 8 wedges, 45° slices radiate from the centre with a small central core. A room’s Bagua area is the sector it overlaps most by area.
Kua number
The solar year begins at Li Chun, the moment the Sun reaches 315° ecliptic longitude (around 3–5 February, China Standard Time), computed with a standard astronomical formula. Male formula: (11 − year mod 9) mod 9; female formula: (year mod 9 + 4) mod 9, with 0 → 9, and 5 → 2 (male) or 8 (female).
Annual Flying Stars
The annual centre star is 9 − ((year − 2000) mod 9): 2026 → 1, 2027 → 9, 2028 → 8. Stars fly forward along the Luo Shu path: Centre → NW → W → NE → S → N → SW → E → SE. Tai Sui sits in the year’s earthly-branch mountain, Sui Po opposite it, and San Sha opposite the year’s three-harmony frame. Readings of each star follow common Period 9 (2024–2043) practice.
Placement geometry
“In the door line” means a strip as wide as the door, projected into the room. “Backed by a wall” means both corners of the headboard (or chair back) within about 20 cm of the same wall. Circulation uses a 10 cm grid and a path-finding search that keeps about 30 cm clear of furniture on each side. All thresholds are listed in the rule catalogue.
The role of AI
AI does not decide whether a placement is favourable, and it does not calculate directions, sectors or stars. Findings and the report structure are produced by the rules above. Where we use language models (for example to summarise a paid report in plain English), they receive only the structured findings, must cite them, and are checked against a list of prohibited claims before anything is shown.
Limitations
- Feng Shui is a traditional cultural framework, not a science. We make no claims about health, wealth, relationships or any other outcome.
- Schools disagree. Where they do (Compass vs BTB, sleeping direction, missing-area thresholds), we say so and let you choose.
- Accuracy depends on your drawing and on the North you set. Phone compasses can be off by ±10° near metal or electronics.
- Natal (house) Flying Star charts, monthly stars and replacement charts are not yet included; the annual layer is.
Rules engine version 1.0.0. Found something that looks wrong? Contact & rule feedback.