This is a mirror of my reddit post, I will try to keep both up-to-date but the reddit post is prioritized higher.
In late November I started playing taiko "seriously", in a month I got to low 5* and top 6k players. In this post I'll try to explain some taiko basics and show why you should give it a try. I think taiko lacks guides so I decided to write my own one. It might have some personal opinions that aren't actually true so feel free to correct me. Also it might be badly structured, you can try to help with that too.
It's fun and really impressive. Opinion ahead: I personally think 4* taiko maps look more impressive then some of the hardest mania maps, mainly because it's harder to read for beginners. As of std, I find it mostly easy to read but I'll never be able to aim that precisely, still, to consider the plays impressive I needed understanding of the game, until recently I didn't even understand why freedom dive is so hard cause it's fairly easy to read. Either way, taiko has one of if not the most impressive gameplay for an unexperienced viewer compared to other modes so you can show off to your friends.
As of fun, when I was an std main I randomly played taiko when my right hand was too tired. Even then I was pretty amazed with it, even though I only got a few C's on converts. I guess just give it a try and if you didn't like it - don't play it.
It's the least popular gamemode. That means the community is pretty small - you can rank up quickly and you might get to know people "at the top" pretty early. Also from my personal experience larger communities tend to have more toxicity (Look at Fortnite or Geometry Dash). Besides that, if you ever want to feel like you're good, you can open a random convert and get into top 50, top 10, top 1 :^).
It's also easy to improve at (that is, as long as you actually play the game). My theory is that there are only two circle types which you can either hit with correct or wrong color. If you hit them with the wrong color, the brain will find it out and "invert" it and try to press the other color next time. Think of it as training a neural network - when there are thousands or inputs it's extremely hard to train and it takes a long time, but when there is only one input it's really fast. It's more than one input in taiko, but you get the idea - the gameplay simplicity makes taiko easy to improve at.
The hitwindows are more strict than in std, so even if you absolutely don't want to learn taiko you can turn relax on (it makes the game not care about circle color) and try to get good accuracy to improve it.
The following doesn't apply to Score V2, they try to make some of the optional gameplay elements mandatory, but it's still in development stage.
Taiko is a drum simulator. There are 4 keys - left rim, left center, right center, right rim.
You start with an empty HP bar. To pass a map, you need to finish it with at least half full HP bar.
The gameplay mostly consists of red circles - dons, and blue circles - katas. They are represented with letters d and k when talking about patterns and playstyles. You need to hit dons with drum center and katas with drum rim. Missing subtracts HP from you, hitting them adds HP depending on how accurately you hit them. Hitting circles also increases your combo, when your combo is big you will get more score per hit (Combo more than 100 is effectively 100).
Sometimes you will see big circles (They are called finishers). They can be hit with both drum sides for double points.
There are also yellow sliders - you can notice white dots on them - hitting the dots gives you extra points. The dot hitwindows are pretty strict. They also give you a tiny amount of HP so use that if you can barely pass some map. Big sliders exist but they are the same as normal sliders, except they give more points (The wiki says otherwise cause it is outdated). They don't have any effect on your combo and can't subtract your HP.
Spinners (Or swells) need to be hit with drum center and rim consecutively (don - kata - don - kata) as fast as possible, if you don't make enough hits until they disappear you lose HP but not combo. They can't give you any HP though.
When there aren't any objects, you can tap as well - it will play the drum sound but won't break your combo or do anything gameplay related.
The difficulties are called kantan - easy (Usually 1*), futsuu - normal (Usually 2*), muzukashii - hard (Usually 3*), oni - demon (Usually 4*+). There are also inner onis and ura onis - they are simply higher oni tiers used when oni difficulty already exists.
There are two main playstyles - kddk and ddkk/kkdd. It refers to your key bindings - for example, by default z is left rim, x is left center, c is right center, v is right rim, the keys are ordered kata don don kata, the playstyle is kddk. I will list benefits of each playstyle below.
kddk:
ddkk:
This only applies to kddk players - you will need to alternate hands at some point because the notes will start coming really fast. Even when there's two or three consecutive 1/4 notes, you need to alternate them to prepare for harder maps, or your playstyle can get very messy. You can singletap slow sections with one hand (semi-alt) or always alternate (full-alt). I recommend full-alt playstyle because it strains your hands equally so they get tired slower (Especially applies to the arcade version), but it's up to you to decide how you play.
Feel free to experiment with them and find out which one you like more, just do the final decision before you start playing onis.
At first you should play... pretty much anything! Play kantans, futsuus, even easy converts (Converts = maps converted from osu!std). When you get the feel of taiko and can generally FC slow maps, you can start playing muzukashiis (Please don't play converts at that point, or do it moderately, because they won't help you improve). That's when things get harder - now you need to alternate because patterns like kkk, ddd, kk, dd, kd, dk start appearing (As I mentioned above, if you're a kddk player, don't try to hit them with one hand, it's a bad habit). They will also get pretty fast, up to ~250bpm 1/2s.
A small note about the pp system - at the start you might feel weird because you can get a 2* C and it will give you 60pp. Just note that everything below 100pp is basically nothing, don't care about pp too much until you start playing onis, like, you should honestly completely ignore it at muzukashii stage. The system is far from perfect - some 7* maps can be actually about 5*, my advice is simply not to care about pp too much and just play the maps you think are hard for you but not impossible, believe me, you will be able to get an A or B on them soon. It's also worth mentioning combo doesn't matter in pp calculation, the only things that are used are miss count, accuracy and SR (star rating), so don't tryhard for an FC, spend that time practicing other maps.
A few words about the mods:
You can see I said "until you are able to play onis" multiple times already. That's because onis is where the game really opens up - and it's probably the hardest skill jump. Don't get discouraged, just play slow onis at first and work your way through it. It's all about learning the patterns and building up muscle memory, and to do it you should play lots of different maps (You can also practice the maps you like a lot of times if you think it helps you). If a map is too fast for you, don't be afraid to use HT. Aim for a pass at first, later it will turn into a B and then an FC. There is also a pattern training beatmap pack, I didn't use it but a lot of people found it useful. I personally recommend this map - it's fairly slow (138bpm) and if that's too fast for you you can play with HT, just play it in HT till you are comfortable with the patterns and then try to pass it nomod.
When you hit 5* you will notice some maps have really long note streams. That's the next thing you need to learn. Some people say you need to split them into patterns, but that can only be done manually with really simple streams (like ddddkkkkddkkdkd - dddd kkkk ddkk dkd). Generally you should trust your brain with this one - play some low bpm streams (Use HT if needed) and practice the parts you are bad at, slowly increase the bpm. Some maps for practice: https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1208864 - this map is almost entirely a 180bpm stream, you can play it with HT. https://osu.ppy.sh/b/899716 (Uta) - has a few long 205 bpm streams, I guess you can play it with HT but the map is already 9m long. Maps for practicing "patternized" streams that can be easily split: https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1183029 (180 bpm) and https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1028486 (195bpm), HT is not recommended here.
In taiko, you can only get 100 or 300 score depending on your accuracy. Hit windows are more strict than in std, so your accuracy being lower is normal.
Don't ignore game mechanics unless you don't want to ever use them. Play the game as you think you will play it in a year or two. That means - try to hit finishers properly, try to hit every drum roll tick unless you don't want to set a high score so you can beat it later. It's pretty painful to change your way of playing if you are at a high skill level. Don't ignore accuracy, in fact, if you simply pay attention to accuracy (Don't retry maps 1000 times for an SS, just pay attention to it), it will improve. Make sure you can easily distinguish a 300 hit from a 100 hit, preferably you should also be able to distinguish a double finisher hit from a normal finisher hit.
Taiko ranked map pack and some famous players' skins. It's more than 2 years old at this point so you will still have to download a bunch of beatmap packs manually, but it's the best option to get a lot of maps fast. You can also use https://osusearch.com as it allows you to list the beatmaps you haven't downloaded yet.
Health is an important aspect of playing any game. If your hands hurt - take a break. If your eyes are tired - take a break. If you feel dizzy - take a break (It's called vertigo - you feel like everything around you is spinning). It's caused by your eyes' data mismatching with your balance-sensing system's data - eyes think that everything moves, but your balance-sensing system thinks that you stay still, so you end up feeling dizzy. It will mostly stop once you play more. I heard HD helps minimizing vertigo effects (It makes sense, your eyes won't think everything's moving when only a small part of the screen is dynamic), but you might end up not getting used to nomod in that case so I don't know if you should do it. Don't force yourself to play if it affects your health. A 144hz screen should definitely reduce eyes strain and might reduce vertigo effects, besides that, it will allow you to react to much higher circle amounts and SV, you probably shouldn't get one just for taiko but it helps a lot.
If something isn't clear yet, please ask me in the comments and I will add it to the guide.
In late November I started playing taiko "seriously", in a month I got to low 5* and top 6k players. In this post I'll try to explain some taiko basics and show why you should give it a try. I think taiko lacks guides so I decided to write my own one. It might have some personal opinions that aren't actually true so feel free to correct me. Also it might be badly structured, you can try to help with that too.
Why should you play it?
It's fun and really impressive. Opinion ahead: I personally think 4* taiko maps look more impressive then some of the hardest mania maps, mainly because it's harder to read for beginners. As of std, I find it mostly easy to read but I'll never be able to aim that precisely, still, to consider the plays impressive I needed understanding of the game, until recently I didn't even understand why freedom dive is so hard cause it's fairly easy to read. Either way, taiko has one of if not the most impressive gameplay for an unexperienced viewer compared to other modes so you can show off to your friends.
As of fun, when I was an std main I randomly played taiko when my right hand was too tired. Even then I was pretty amazed with it, even though I only got a few C's on converts. I guess just give it a try and if you didn't like it - don't play it.
It's the least popular gamemode. That means the community is pretty small - you can rank up quickly and you might get to know people "at the top" pretty early. Also from my personal experience larger communities tend to have more toxicity (Look at Fortnite or Geometry Dash). Besides that, if you ever want to feel like you're good, you can open a random convert and get into top 50, top 10, top 1 :^).
It's also easy to improve at (that is, as long as you actually play the game). My theory is that there are only two circle types which you can either hit with correct or wrong color. If you hit them with the wrong color, the brain will find it out and "invert" it and try to press the other color next time. Think of it as training a neural network - when there are thousands or inputs it's extremely hard to train and it takes a long time, but when there is only one input it's really fast. It's more than one input in taiko, but you get the idea - the gameplay simplicity makes taiko easy to improve at.
The hitwindows are more strict than in std, so even if you absolutely don't want to learn taiko you can turn relax on (it makes the game not care about circle color) and try to get good accuracy to improve it.
Gameplay basics
The following doesn't apply to Score V2, they try to make some of the optional gameplay elements mandatory, but it's still in development stage.
Taiko is a drum simulator. There are 4 keys - left rim, left center, right center, right rim.
You start with an empty HP bar. To pass a map, you need to finish it with at least half full HP bar.
The gameplay mostly consists of red circles - dons, and blue circles - katas. They are represented with letters d and k when talking about patterns and playstyles. You need to hit dons with drum center and katas with drum rim. Missing subtracts HP from you, hitting them adds HP depending on how accurately you hit them. Hitting circles also increases your combo, when your combo is big you will get more score per hit (Combo more than 100 is effectively 100).
Sometimes you will see big circles (They are called finishers). They can be hit with both drum sides for double points.
There are also yellow sliders - you can notice white dots on them - hitting the dots gives you extra points. The dot hitwindows are pretty strict. They also give you a tiny amount of HP so use that if you can barely pass some map. Big sliders exist but they are the same as normal sliders, except they give more points (The wiki says otherwise cause it is outdated). They don't have any effect on your combo and can't subtract your HP.
Spinners (Or swells) need to be hit with drum center and rim consecutively (don - kata - don - kata) as fast as possible, if you don't make enough hits until they disappear you lose HP but not combo. They can't give you any HP though.
When there aren't any objects, you can tap as well - it will play the drum sound but won't break your combo or do anything gameplay related.
The difficulties are called kantan - easy (Usually 1*), futsuu - normal (Usually 2*), muzukashii - hard (Usually 3*), oni - demon (Usually 4*+). There are also inner onis and ura onis - they are simply higher oni tiers used when oni difficulty already exists.
Playstyles
There are two main playstyles - kddk and ddkk/kkdd. It refers to your key bindings - for example, by default z is left rim, x is left center, c is right center, v is right rim, the keys are ordered kata don don kata, the playstyle is kddk. I will list benefits of each playstyle below.
kddk:
- + Closer to "original experience" on the arcade taiko, you won't have a hard time getting used to it. If you want to get even closer to "real" taiko you can play with 2 index fingers (Don't worry about it limiting you, current #2 global (shinchikuhome) played like that for a long time and switched only a few months ago, and he isn't #1 anymore just because he doesn't play HD at all, and current #18 global (Jaye) still plays with just 2 fingers).
- + You can easily hit spinners by hitting the keys with 2 hands consecutively: left center - left rim - right center - right rim, someone can probably explain it better. It also allows "TL Beating" but it's such a niche skill I won't cover it.
- + Easier to hit monocolor streams (kkkkkk/dddddd) - you hit any stream with 2 hands.
- + Looks like the in-game HUD drum
- - Harder to learn, especially for patterns like kkkdddkkkddd or kddkddkddkdd.
- - Harder to learn finishers because syncing your hands is pretty hard to learn
ddkk:
- + Much easier to learn, and you won't have any problems with patterns where 3-6-9-... circles repeat.
- + Easier to hit finishers as you don't need any hand synchronization for them
- - Monocolor streams strain your hands
- - You won't be able to switch to arcade taiko easily.
- - It's harder to get good accuracy
- - High ranked players (Top 500 - 100) usually complain about it with a few exceptions (Most notably applerss)
This only applies to kddk players - you will need to alternate hands at some point because the notes will start coming really fast. Even when there's two or three consecutive 1/4 notes, you need to alternate them to prepare for harder maps, or your playstyle can get very messy. You can singletap slow sections with one hand (semi-alt) or always alternate (full-alt). I recommend full-alt playstyle because it strains your hands equally so they get tired slower (Especially applies to the arcade version), but it's up to you to decide how you play.
Feel free to experiment with them and find out which one you like more, just do the final decision before you start playing onis.
Progressing in the game
At first you should play... pretty much anything! Play kantans, futsuus, even easy converts (Converts = maps converted from osu!std). When you get the feel of taiko and can generally FC slow maps, you can start playing muzukashiis (Please don't play converts at that point, or do it moderately, because they won't help you improve). That's when things get harder - now you need to alternate because patterns like kkk, ddd, kk, dd, kd, dk start appearing (As I mentioned above, if you're a kddk player, don't try to hit them with one hand, it's a bad habit). They will also get pretty fast, up to ~250bpm 1/2s.
A small note about the pp system - at the start you might feel weird because you can get a 2* C and it will give you 60pp. Just note that everything below 100pp is basically nothing, don't care about pp too much until you start playing onis, like, you should honestly completely ignore it at muzukashii stage. The system is far from perfect - some 7* maps can be actually about 5*, my advice is simply not to care about pp too much and just play the maps you think are hard for you but not impossible, believe me, you will be able to get an A or B on them soon. It's also worth mentioning combo doesn't matter in pp calculation, the only things that are used are miss count, accuracy and SR (star rating), so don't tryhard for an FC, spend that time practicing other maps.
A few words about the mods:
- HD - I think it's pretty useful to learn early on. Some players only play with HD, but not because they can't play without HD, but because if you learnt it, you can play with HD at nearly the same level as nomod. Besides that, the "correct" way to play taiko is to look at the middle or the right side of the screen - if you will look at the left side, it will limit your reading ability and make you unable to play HR and HD, so if you have trouble with looking at the right, you should consider playing some HD.
- HR - don't use it at the beginning. It increases the OD (Overall difficulty, or accuracy), but it also increases SV (Slider velocity - used to determine note speed in taiko). High SV is really uncommon in taiko and if you play HR too much you can get used to high SV and not be able to play nomod. You will find some players who only play HR, usually it's simply because they can't read nomod. Someone suggested switching to 4:3 resolution can help you to switch from HR to nomod.
- EZ - use it only if you get like 80% accuracy without the mod and you are confident it's not an offset problem (press + to increase song offset by 5ms, press - to decrease it by 5ms, holding alt at the same time will only change it by 1ms).
- HT - it's extremely easy to get high accuracy with HT as the hitwindows are way less strict, so don't play it too much. I'd say it's pretty useful to learn patterns you aren't good at though.
- DT/NC - on the other hand, it's way harder to get good accuracy in DT, and you shouldn't play it until you are good at onis anyway. (There are people who are in top 5k simply by playing futsuus with DTHR and that's pretty sad imo as they didn't actually learn to play the game).
- FL - rarely used by anyone (Unless SV is very low or the map is short), usually only used if pp given by HD is not enough and you want to memorize the entire map for more pp. HDFL makes every note invisible, it can be bypassed by writing the notes down or using 2 monitors but if you ever get asked to proof you did it legit you can get banned - so don't do it.
- Auto - you can use it if you aren't sure about the rhythm of some song parts.
- NF - just like in std, you probably shouldn't ever use it - playing maps that are too hard for you can get you used to playing "bad" or something like that.
You can see I said "until you are able to play onis" multiple times already. That's because onis is where the game really opens up - and it's probably the hardest skill jump. Don't get discouraged, just play slow onis at first and work your way through it. It's all about learning the patterns and building up muscle memory, and to do it you should play lots of different maps (You can also practice the maps you like a lot of times if you think it helps you). If a map is too fast for you, don't be afraid to use HT. Aim for a pass at first, later it will turn into a B and then an FC. There is also a pattern training beatmap pack, I didn't use it but a lot of people found it useful. I personally recommend this map - it's fairly slow (138bpm) and if that's too fast for you you can play with HT, just play it in HT till you are comfortable with the patterns and then try to pass it nomod.
When you hit 5* you will notice some maps have really long note streams. That's the next thing you need to learn. Some people say you need to split them into patterns, but that can only be done manually with really simple streams (like ddddkkkkddkkdkd - dddd kkkk ddkk dkd). Generally you should trust your brain with this one - play some low bpm streams (Use HT if needed) and practice the parts you are bad at, slowly increase the bpm. Some maps for practice: https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1208864 - this map is almost entirely a 180bpm stream, you can play it with HT. https://osu.ppy.sh/b/899716 (Uta) - has a few long 205 bpm streams, I guess you can play it with HT but the map is already 9m long. Maps for practicing "patternized" streams that can be easily split: https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1183029 (180 bpm) and https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1028486 (195bpm), HT is not recommended here.
In taiko, you can only get 100 or 300 score depending on your accuracy. Hit windows are more strict than in std, so your accuracy being lower is normal.
Don't ignore game mechanics unless you don't want to ever use them. Play the game as you think you will play it in a year or two. That means - try to hit finishers properly, try to hit every drum roll tick unless you don't want to set a high score so you can beat it later. It's pretty painful to change your way of playing if you are at a high skill level. Don't ignore accuracy, in fact, if you simply pay attention to accuracy (Don't retry maps 1000 times for an SS, just pay attention to it), it will improve. Make sure you can easily distinguish a 300 hit from a 100 hit, preferably you should also be able to distinguish a double finisher hit from a normal finisher hit.
Taiko ranked map pack and some famous players' skins. It's more than 2 years old at this point so you will still have to download a bunch of beatmap packs manually, but it's the best option to get a lot of maps fast. You can also use https://osusearch.com as it allows you to list the beatmaps you haven't downloaded yet.
Health
Health is an important aspect of playing any game. If your hands hurt - take a break. If your eyes are tired - take a break. If you feel dizzy - take a break (It's called vertigo - you feel like everything around you is spinning). It's caused by your eyes' data mismatching with your balance-sensing system's data - eyes think that everything moves, but your balance-sensing system thinks that you stay still, so you end up feeling dizzy. It will mostly stop once you play more. I heard HD helps minimizing vertigo effects (It makes sense, your eyes won't think everything's moving when only a small part of the screen is dynamic), but you might end up not getting used to nomod in that case so I don't know if you should do it. Don't force yourself to play if it affects your health. A 144hz screen should definitely reduce eyes strain and might reduce vertigo effects, besides that, it will allow you to react to much higher circle amounts and SV, you probably shouldn't get one just for taiko but it helps a lot.
If something isn't clear yet, please ask me in the comments and I will add it to the guide.
