Hello! I'm here today to provide the information and tools necessary for you to begin improving your accuracy as a whole in osu!mania!

Some of the things you can do to prepare yourself to train for accuracy (whether it be better "ratio" or better "PA Spread") is to follow the steps below:

1. Get yourself a good skin you are comfortable with
2. Fine-tune and tweak the skin to how you play
3. Make sure your hardware and software are running optimally

Section 1: Skins

Whether you make your own or find them on the forums or from your peers, it is imperative to get yourself a comfortable skin. There are various styles of skin, such as notes and receptors being arrows, circles, bars, diamonds, or any other shape imaginable. I personally use arrows and circles and have made my own skins using elements from several other skins. A simple google search for osu!mania skins will provide you with a few sites that you can find some skins on and feel free to test them out if you like the way they look or play, and alternatively you can ask players you know for their skins or some of the well-known skins for each respective note style. Typically, the less flashy skins are better for training accuracy as you do not want to allow yourself to be distracted by any outside influence.


Section 2: Fine-tuning/Adjustments/Offsets


Here's where we buckle down and get into the finer details of setting yourself up to train efficiently. Number 2. DURING THIS PROCESS, DO NOT FORGET TO CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + S to update your skin in-game when you make changes!

Every skin has its own skin.ini file that is within your skin folder. If you don't know how to access your skin folder, go to file explorer, type in the address bar: %appdata% and hit enter. Go to Local and find your osu! folder, and then you will see all the game files, including the skins folder. You can also go in-game and in the options menu will be a Skin Folder option, simply clicking that will bring you right to it!




Playfield


One of the first things you can adjust is ColumnStart. This influences where your playfield is during a song.


The lower the number, the more to the left of your screen your playfield will be. The higher the number, the more to the right of your screen your playfield will be. The number I have highlighted there is what I use and is a close approximation to the center of the screen.


Focal Point


Next will be your focal point on your playfield. You should generally be looking at one place on the screen during play and not have your eyes drift. To help with this, follow below:

I personally use my judgement indicator text and my combo numbers as my focal point (my eyes are always on my judgement text though). You can find them in the skin.ini file as: ScorePosition and ComboPosition.



The higher the number, the lower it will be on your screen. The lower the number, the higher it will be on your screen. I keep mine roughly around the middle of my screen, as shown below:



This next step is very important so please pay close attention!


Offsets


This next step will be detailing offsets. There are 3 different kinds of offsets you can utilize to fine-tune your gameplay. The first is Audio Offset, which you can change by hitting + or - during a map. By default, it goes up +5 / -5 MS, but if you hold ALT while pressing those, it will go +1 / -1. This is local offset which only applies to the map itself, not every map. Audio Offset influences the music in relativity to notes. If you feel this is off such as asking yourself "This sounds not synced", you can tinker around with the numbers and see what is right for you. This severely helps auditory players who base their accuracy potential on sound, which includes the sounds of your taps. A tip to help you tweak this is to play a map on like 25% volume and listen to your taps alongside the beat and rhythm.

The next kind is Global Offset which is displayed here:



This offset affects the entire client and it affects both visuals and audio, so be very careful when adjusting this. In most cases, you should only touch this if you are running on a lower-end PC or Laptop, most Current-5 year old gaming PCs have virtually non-existent issues with this offset.

The final offset, is HitPosition which is found in the skin.ini file. Below is where you can find it:



This offset only affects visuals and is the most influential offset to adjust if your timing feels off. The number varies from skin to skin, so this is where you need to test play as you change so that you can find the right number for you. The bigger the number, the later the timing windows will be in relativity to your receptors. The lower the number, the earlier the timing windows will be in relativity to your receptors. Be wary, hitposition has a limit of 480 so anything beyond that will not change anything (thank you to Evening for this!).

This kind of segues into understanding the Hit Error Bar which looks like this:



You've probably noticed this, and this will be your best friend when training for accuracy because it provides direct feedback of how you are hitting during play.

If your bar looks like this while you play:



You need to make your HitPosition number lower.

If your bar looks like this while you play:



You need to make your HitPosition number higher.

If your taps are hitting to the left of the center white node of the bar, that is hitting too early. If your taps are hitting to the right of the center white node of the bar, that is hitting too late. You will need to understand this for when you start to hit perfects/300s so you can compensate and speed up if you're hitting late or slow down if you're hitting early. Eventually with time and effort, you will be able to know when you are doing one or the other as you play, but for now your main goal while reading this guide is to make the majority of your taps land as close to the white as you humanly can.


Hardware/Software


The last step of the list at the start of this is to make sure your hardware and software is running optimally. What does this mean? This means to make sure your client isn't lagging or dropping frames and to make sure your keyboard isn't causing you problems such as double-tapping or polling.

For software:
Make SURE you are running the game fullscreen and running the frame limiter at "Optimal".



For hardware:
Please watch this video detailing polling rates and information regarding keyboards if you are noticing your keyboard and inputs have been unexplainable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heZVmr9fyng


Closing Statements


Alright, that's a lot of information to take in, but please take your time and read this guide carefully as this is basically the most you can do from an internal sense of things to improve your accuracy. The rest is up to you. Make sure you do the following:

1. Be patient with results. You do not become an accuracy god in a day; it will take time!
2. Don't get discouraged!
3. Play easier maps so you can develop the muscle memory and the physical ability to start improving accuracy on your current skill difficulty maps
4. HAVE FUN!!!!!

Additional Information/Techniques

There really is no definitive way to tell someone how to play for accuracy as it requires strong focus and an understanding of maximizing your hits within the 16.5ms window, however there are some general playing techniques that may or may not suit you. Some of them include wrists up vs wrists down, which I play wrists up personally but wrists down offers more general control on your hits as well as stamina while sacrificing speed ability. Others are replacing the maximum judgement indicator for a blank .png image, which gives some more space for reading and allows you to mentally try for not seeing your 300 indicator (as opposed to trying to only see your max indicator). You can try adjusting your scroll to give you more time to read so you can accurately plan your taps, or give you more readability on denser patterns. You can use the sound of your taps on the keys to stay in rhythm with the notes (auditory playing).




You can also take a look at Etienne's video to improving your accuracy in rhythm games overall, linked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfOygLRALIo

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to message me on Discord (Zenith#8245) or message me here on osu! If you have any suggestions to add to this guide, please let me know by posting or other means! I will update this whenever necessary and as frequently as I need to! Big thank you for reading and your time.

Aight this will deff help me thx

First off, I'd like to vouch for you on this post, I myself have started to train my accuracy for about a couple of months now, and I can guarantee that all of these steps will boost your accuracy training making it easier and a bit more efficient to those who have a skill barrier block. Love you Zenith, blessed to get this to help others!

Thank you Zenith!

very cool! definitely will follow this guide if i need to acc for a map

chinese acc no more!

That's a really nice guide ! I totally recommend it !
Grats Zenith !!

i mean, this is a nice config guide, but you didnt actually cover anything about playing to improve ones accuracy.

Bro you like just told the basics...

VanillaKeksik wrote:

Bro you like just told the basics...

Not everyone knows how to configure the skin or client to their needs.

Lights wrote:

i mean, this is a nice config guide, but you didnt actually cover anything about playing to improve ones accuracy.

I can't really tell players to hit notes more accurately, the skill itself comes natural and this guide is supposed to cover how to tweak settings to help you achieve that. Every accuracy guide is detailed in a similar manner; providing tools and information for you to improve.

Sorry if it disappoints you.

EDIT: I've added a section discussing possible techniques that may help, but ultimately it is well known that accuracy comes with time, not some concise methodology you can follow for fast results like a recipe.

This actually helped me a lot, thanks!

alright time for a serious comment

ERA Zenith wrote:

The lower the number, the more to the left of your screen your playfield will be. The higher the number, the more to the right of your screen your playfield will be. The number I have highlighted there is what I use and is a close approximation to the center of the screen.

the number you should use for column start seems to be based off of your monitor's aspect ratio more than anything, it's around 293.5 for 16:9 from what im gathering.

i'd also like to add that some people may find it easier to get accuracy by just decreasing the general amount of visual clutter on the screen and remove distractions. a good starting point is just disabling the ui. speaking of decreasing visual clutter,

ERA Zenith wrote:

You should generally be looking at one place on the screen during play and not have your eyes drift.

this is a good tip, and i find that making the judgements smaller helps with my previous point (decreasing visual clutter) and helps with maintaining a focal point in a more concentrated area. how i like to go about doing this is:

1. marvelous judgement is a small white dot only a handful of pixels wide
2. perfect judgement is a larger but still relatively small yellow shape
3. other judgements are whatever
this is just a personal preference, you dont have to do this - 2ky uses some very bright animated judgements and is still one of the best accuracy players, though i strongly urge you to give it a try

Some things that i feel any attempted guide for how to play accuracy should include:

MA and PA ratios are fairly important benchmarks for ones accuracy and can be useful for tracking improvement. MA being ratio of rainbow 300 : 300s and PA being ratio of 300 : 200s. Notably, these ratios tend to represent fine and overall control respectively and are both worth the time to practice (though MA ratio is rewarded significantly less in osu!mania than other VSRGs, PA would definitely be a priority here.)

Technical accuracy and Stamina accuracy are 2 quite different skillsets. being able to hold a marvelous combo on minijacky polystreams with mini LNs doesn't mean you can hold marvelous combo on dense js after 6 minutes and vice versa. The two skillsets do tend rely on eachother and both would be worth some degree of attention- usually any given player is better at one than the other.

Different levels of relative difficulty are useful for different types of practice. For example, if we consider a player that can play 240bpm jumpstreams while just maintaining combo, maybe that player would probably best train their PA on 180-210bpm jumpstreams, and MA more towards 150-180. Its different for any given player as everyone has unique skillsets, but its important to honestly assess what you can play and how well you can play it. This is how selecting charts for accuracy training should be done. (rather than just looking at star ratings)

Lights wrote:

Some things that i feel any attempted guide for how to play accuracy should include:

MA and PA ratios are fairly important benchmarks for ones accuracy and can be useful for tracking improvement. MA being ratio of rainbow 300 : 300s and PA being ratio of 300 : 200s. Notably, these ratios tend to represent fine and overall control respectively and are both worth the time to practice (though MA ratio is rewarded significantly less in osu!mania than other VSRGs, PA would definitely be a priority here.)

This guide targets this directly, so I don't see how the way you worded it is any more useful or better. If you are trying to train accuracy, you are simultaneously working on MA and PA (although many consider training accuracy strictly "MA" here). PA should always be first and is common sense, people want SS scores on harder stuff to maximize their rank gain and overall the scores are more impressive. Let me remind you again that this guide is to provide the tools to allow ones improvement, and if their client or skin is holding them back, those are things they can immediately remedy and see results the fastest. The second half of learning how to improve your accuracy is simply by playing more with your focus on the 320 and 300 windows.

Lights wrote:

Technical accuracy and Stamina accuracy are 2 quite different skillsets. being able to hold a marvelous combo on minijacky polystreams with mini LNs doesn't mean you can hold marvelous combo on dense js after 6 minutes and vice versa. The two skillsets do tend rely on eachother and both would be worth some degree of attention- usually any given player is better at one than the other.

Again, this is pretty common knowledge amongst players who know what patterns are, and nobody would assume that playing two different skills is remotely similar. Like I've already said, there's no recipe way to go about improving your accuracy at certain skills other than just simply playing. For Stamina related accuracy, you need to actually have the physical ability to do it. Many people suggest that you have the potential to SS any given map before working on MA for that map or similar maps. Maps that are designed to test your accuracy are maps with a steady BPM and are consistent throughout the entire chart (Examples such as Anemoi, Dear You, Anemone, etc), or maps that test your ability to be accurate with fluctuating snaps and rhythms, like Niflhiemr or any Tech maps (Ghost of 3.13 comes to mind). Players are likely to stay within the confines of whatever skill they are best at, and they should when focusing on accuracy because many patterns are found in virtually in every map and to help their overall physical ability (to become rounded players, not one trick ponies). I feel like I'm repeated what many know as common knowledge, especially from my interactions in multiplayer lobbies.

Lights wrote:

Different levels of relative difficulty are useful for different types of practice. For example, if we consider a player that can play 240bpm jumpstreams while just maintaining combo, maybe that player would probably best train their PA on 180-210bpm jumpstreams, and MA more towards 150-180. Its different for any given player as everyone has unique skillsets, but its important to honestly assess what you can play and how well you can play it. This is how selecting charts for accuracy training should be done. (rather than just looking at star ratings)

You are essentially creating an echo chamber for something I've already included in the guide. Players should play easier maps to acquaint their muscle memory with any particular pattern or map because it'll help translate into other things and other speeds. The second half of your point here though, is what players needed to access for themselves. How does someone creating a guide know every players needs, or how they play? They need to access what maps they are strong on (maps you can improve 320s and that's it), maps they are weak at (maps you can improve PA before working on ratio), and maps they are prospecting (they would like to have a good score on it, and I'd suggest watching a replay and tapping along with them or simply throwing yourself at it with a few attempts). It's self-analysis, and certainly not something any guide can give you the answers to when what you're seeking here are things the player has to do with everything in mind.

I actually do find these information useful to those new to mania, for me too, since I'm tweaking skin often

A quick note to find skin folder would be to go into options and there should be a skin folder button there, it should be easier than doing %appdata%. It should be called "Skin Folder"? I forgot

To add on further, it's important to note that hitposition only goes up (down) to 480, so anything beyond that doesn't affect anything, I used to have a placebo effect for putting hitpositions beyond that haha

Evening wrote:

I actually do find these information useful to those new to mania, for me too, since I'm tweaking skin often

A quick note to find skin folder would be to go into options and there should be a skin folder button there, it should be easier than doing %appdata%. It should be called "Skin Folder"? I forgot

To add on further, it's important to note that hitposition only goes up (down) to 480, so anything beyond that doesn't affect anything, I used to have a placebo effect for putting hitpositions beyond that haha

Thank you for the input! I'll add these in and I didn't know about the hitposition limit at all. I appreciate this

Pretty much sums up what I have been doing to train acc, overall a nice and well written guide.

ERA Zenith wrote:

...

Did you actually read your own guide? You didn't touch any of that, and given your guide is a newby config tutorial, i think its awfully bold of you to assume any of that is common knowledge. You can't just skip most of the nuance to training accuracy and call it a comprehensive accuracy guide.

And those tips weren't directed at you... they're for a would-be player thats trying to learn accuracy... So why are you replying to them as though they were?

3/10 sir, disappointing guide. (great setup tips though, for sure)

Lights wrote:

ERA Zenith wrote:

...

Did you actually read your own guide? You didn't touch any of that, and given your guide is a newby config tutorial, i think its awfully bold of you to assume any of that is common knowledge. You can't just skip most of the nuance to training accuracy and call it a comprehensive accuracy guide.

And those tips weren't directed at you... they're for a would-be player thats trying to learn accuracy... So why are you replying to them as though they were?

3/10 sir, disappointing guide. (great setup tips though, for sure)

You can be upset and pissed off about this all you want, you aren't finding a guide that will teach you how to hit notes or patterns more accurately because it's something you have to do yourself, with practice, with patience. You have seemingly forgot that, or refuse to believe there is some winner's formula to instantly becoming an accuracy player. You are behaving like there is one and that I should have it somewhere in this post when that's such an ignorant and blatantly poor mentality to have over someone attempt to get players on the right path to begin playing with the focus of accuracy.

I'd love for you to tell me how to concisely write out any nuance to improving accuracy that isn't covered here, but I know it's an impossible task because you simply can't. When you try to, anything you say can be paraphrased to "Play more and focus on the 16.5ms timing window".

ERA Zenith wrote:

Lights wrote:

ERA Zenith wrote:

...

Did you actually read your own guide? You didn't touch any of that, and given your guide is a newby config tutorial, i think its awfully bold of you to assume any of that is common knowledge. You can't just skip most of the nuance to training accuracy and call it a comprehensive accuracy guide.

And those tips weren't directed at you... they're for a would-be player thats trying to learn accuracy... So why are you replying to them as though they were?

3/10 sir, disappointing guide. (great setup tips though, for sure)

You can be upset and pissed off about this all you want, you aren't finding a guide that will teach you how to hit notes or patterns more accurately because it's something you have to do yourself, with practice, with patience. You have seemingly forgot that, or refuse to believe there is some winner's formula to instantly becoming an accuracy player. You are behaving like there is one and that I should have it somewhere in this post when that's such an ignorant and blatantly poor mentality to have over someone attempt to get players on the right path to begin playing with the focus of accuracy.

I'd love for you to tell me how to concisely write out any nuance to improving accuracy that isn't covered here, but I know it's an impossible task because you simply can't. When you try to, anything you say can be paraphrased to "Play more and focus on the 16.5ms timing window".

I already gave you 3 brief examples of things you should have included- I'm not writing your guide for you though. Nor am I upset about your guide. All in all I'd definitely say the title of your thread is misleading. You could accurately call it a comprehensive client setup guide, but as far as getting a player started on accuracy play, you missed the mark entirely. Which is a shame too, because it's a good config guide. If that same level of effort went to giving relevant advice for what you promise in the thread title, you'd have a really nice thread here. I certainly hope you consider improving upon it- if you neglect to do so, then maybe I'd elect to write one. I am quite interested in seeing a good guide centered on training accuracy.

the most relevant thing you mention about accuracy play is linking Etienne's video on it.

That all the feedback i've got for you, anyway. Take it or leave it. I hope you aren't taking these comments as a personal attack or anything.

I'll try to do some in-depth pattern and technique talks and add it into the guide with your input in mind. After taking some time to think I might have misunderstood some of what you were saying.

Thank you so much Zenith!

ERA Zenith wrote:

I'll try to do some in-depth pattern and technique talks and add it into the guide with your input in mind. After taking some time to think I might have misunderstood some of what you were saying.

I appreciate that you were able to recognize the deficiencies he pointed out in your guide. Lights is correct here. There was a disconnect between who your guide targets, and how you discussed the technique elements. You approach the techniques/training techniques more as an afterthought.

On top of that, by shunting most of the actual technique related stuff down to the bottom, and linking the video without even embedding in in the forum using the [ youtube] tag, you've effectively relegated the most important information to the section of the guide people are least likely to see.

In my opinion, all of the setup stuff (while certainly useful, and well explained) is the least important element to how to actually improve your accuracy. I would say that getting comfortable with your setup is a prerequisite, but I would also say that hitposition, skin, and offset don't strictly need to be tuned in order to practice accuracy. It's entirely possible to have say 30ms offset from correct timing and learn to play with that offset (assuming it's a stable offset) without changing global offset or hit position. Skin is entirely personal preference, and while the right skin will make a difference, it's up to the individual player to find what actually works well for them, so there's not a whole lot to say about that.

What players really need in order to truly understand how to improve their accuracy is understanding how to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and how to pick practice maps that will help them practice effectively. In this case, picking practice maps is not particularly difficult because you should really be practicing every kind of map (with an emphasis on maps involving patterns you are weak at) in order to ensure you're getting practice with every kind of pattern. Assuming that they are already picking maps that they can get reasonably good scores on to begin with.

Moving forward with this, I think the right thing to do is to split this guide as a whole into two parts: Setup and Accuracy.

I'll try my best to include the points and suggestions you and Lights have laid out, and I want to thank you both for your input. I think I know how to start it but I find it difficult to explain even while using examples and suggesting training maps and such to detail how to exactly increase your accuracy potential, but as with everything it'll be a work-in-progress.

i'm gonna bookmark this owo

since i'm suck on accuracy for around a week :')

What skin are you using?

For those who are still reading this, it hasn't been updated but an update is in the works as I compile information and maps for training your accuracy. I didn't want to seem like I let this die in the water so I wanted to be transparent with this.

Very cool, really improved my jumpstreams MA from 4/5:1 to 8:1, might be a little but still an improvement lol

As a complete novice on this game, the skin setting part really helped me a lot
I'll also try the things mentioned on the video you linked and looking forward for this guide's update.

me? unranked for half a year=inteliser acc

tysm!

[LS]PositoniX wrote:

haha yes

thx you

Is there anything I can do about how the skin.ini for my note skin doesn't have hit position?

How do you move the accuracy pie chart thing. I am always having to drift my eyes away from my lane and sometimes it results in some silly misses.

Md_Haneef wrote:

How do you move the accuracy pie chart thing. I am always having to drift my eyes away from my lane and sometimes it results in some silly misses.

find score-percent.png in your skin folder and use a photo editor to enlarge that image by 400px to the right (or more if you are using a monitor thats higher than 1080p). You can play around with how much you enlarge that image by until you get the desired position. Personally, mines like this after increasing the width by 1200px and having the percentage sign on the very left of the image.

thank you. I might try it but it sounds like a lot of work.

thx

thank you so much !

okay now do a version for osu! standart

thanks a lot for this !!

another thing I found on another understanding of the terms and stuff note this is not mine!!:

cool guide~

thx a lot! this will definitely help me a lot