The osu!catch NAT has been cooking up this for a while, but it is finally time again after 4~ years; another rework is here! (Props to ZiRoX for helping out and Spectator for reviewing as well!)

Goals

1. Rules and guidelines should be clear and to the point. Explanations of why the rule/guideline exists should only be used when adding value.
2. Remove old rules/guidelines that don’t represent the current mapping ecosystem. For example, using the same slider tick rate (STR) for every difficulty, which never really happens nowadays, with Cup-Salad using STR 1 and Platter+ using STR 2.
3. References to catch objects should not use osu naming. For example, circle should be fruit.
4. Difficulty guidelines should align with the commonly used settings to help newer mappers. The current values are very broad but don’t reflect what values you should use for a ~180 BPM song, which is what the RC focuses on.

What is scoped out for this rework

1. Changing rules like higher- and basic-snapped to make them more understandable. While one of the biggest pains catch RC has, changing this could feed a standalone rework.
2. Any change to rules using ms. Previously, there were talks about making them snapping-based.

While those ideas are all interesting to explore, some of them can be pretty significant changes, thus scoped out.

Changes can be found here:

1. Google Doc containing all of this + list of what the rules and guidelines will become.
2. A side-by-side overview of the soon-to-be-applied changes on the wiki can be found here.
   (red = remove, green = addition)

If you have any feedback, please leave it here in the thread or in the Google Doc (preferably Google Docs if it is about minor wording changes).

I'm VERY happy with the droplet tick clarification, good change

cs guideline seems better to be lenient by 0.5 on ENHI imo

Rocma wrote:

cs guideline seems better to be lenient by 0.5 on ENHI imo

The CS guidelines I've changed based on the more commonly used values.
You normally have the following for a typical 180 BPM ENHI spread 2.5 > 3.0 > 3.5 > 4.0
In the end, this value is more of a guideline to give newer mappers some idea of what "okay" values are. In practice, a person can use any values in my eyes, given that the provided CS spread makes some sense.

Helloes!

I didn't get to the end of reading this rework yet, however there is exactly one thing that really struck me.
Something deeply personal - it is 2025. Gosh, we've been mapping osu!catch for a very long time already. And now I genuinely think it's time we get rid of that damned OD guideline that brings so much confusion.

From your RC rework github post:

Overall difficulty should have the same value as the Approach rate. This is just a standardised value, as Overall difficulty only affects the maximum score of a difficulty with scoreV1.
If a difficulty uses a lower Approach rate than any of the difficulty levels below, then its Overall difficulty should match the highest Overall difficulty among those lower difficulties.

Do we really need that? Deif had a very good proposal idea back in the beginning of 2024.
Yes, I've got to agree that his reasoning was mostly due to osu!lazer forcing maximum score to be 1 mil under (almost) any circumstances, but I've got to say that this guideline makes no sense and is outdated nowadays. I can give you plenty of examples where it doesn't work whilst it should be and vice versa.

My proposal:

1. Change the wording and the conditions for the OD requirements.
2. Change it to become a rule instead of a guideline. (Questionable, however it makes more sense with the wording.)

Overall Difficulty should have the same value as the Approach Rate. This is just a standardised value, as Overall Difficulty only affects the maximum score of a difficulty with ScoreV1. In case of score overflow, a lower value must be used.

Underlying issues:
1. Referring back to my point of "changing it to become a rule instead of a guideline". Technically, the only thing that requires such "rule-status" enforcement is the second part that purposefully puts you in a condition of a score overflow. The first part is, at this point in time and mapping, is just common sense.
2. RC might need a dedicated section to explain what "Score overflow" is.

Why is it better?
1. OD becomes a much more standardised value, with no room to debate whether you are supposed to use lower OD if your higher difficulty uses lower AR (as a person, who made some maps/guest difficulties that fall into this niche, I do know that it's annoying).
2. This change gets rid of the annoying 2nd part of the guideline. It has been quite debatable what do these words mean in conjunction. And generally speaking, people simply don't care about it.
3. Overall this "guideline" is simply common sense at this point in time. I don't understand what even made it a guideline in first place.

I'm open for more discussion, because considering what feedback I saw in the osu!catch Mapping & Modding Hub people *do* agree that it's wasteful to keep this guideline going on and on until the end of time. Thank you for reading.

Greaper wrote:

Rocma wrote:

cs guideline seems better to be lenient by 0.5 on ENHI imo

The CS guidelines I've changed based on the more commonly used values.
You normally have the following for a typical 180 BPM ENHI spread 2.5 > 3.0 > 3.5 > 4.0
In the end, this value is more of a guideline to give newer mappers some idea of what "okay" values are. In practice, a person can use any values in my eyes, given that the provided CS spread makes some sense.

yea but new wording can be misread because it offers only lower side of common cs. I hope it highlights 2.5/3/3.5/4 more as the common setting for non-english guys

skill issue lol wrote:

Helloes!

I didn't get to the end of reading this rework yet, however there is exactly one thing that really struck me.
Something deeply personal - it is 2025. Gosh, we've been mapping osu!catch for a very long time already. And now I genuinely think it's time we get rid of that damned OD guideline that brings so much confusion.

From your RC rework github post:

Overall difficulty should have the same value as the Approach rate. This is just a standardised value, as Overall difficulty only affects the maximum score of a difficulty with scoreV1.
If a difficulty uses a lower Approach rate than any of the difficulty levels below, then its Overall difficulty should match the highest Overall difficulty among those lower difficulties.

Do we really need that? Deif had a very good proposal idea back in the beginning of 2024.
Yes, I've got to agree that his reasoning was mostly due to osu!lazer forcing maximum score to be 1 mil under (almost) any circumstances, but I've got to say that this guideline makes no sense and is outdated nowadays. I can give you plenty of examples where it doesn't work whilst it should be and vice versa.

My proposal:

1. Change the wording and the conditions for the OD requirements.
2. Change it to become a rule instead of a guideline. (Questionable, however it makes more sense with the wording.)

Overall Difficulty should have the same value as the Approach Rate. This is just a standardised value, as Overall Difficulty only affects the maximum score of a difficulty with ScoreV1. In case of score overflow, a lower value must be used.

Underlying issues:
1. Referring back to my point of "changing it to become a rule instead of a guideline". Technically, the only thing that requires such "rule-status" enforcement is the second part that purposefully puts you in a condition of a score overflow. The first part is, at this point in time and mapping, is just common sense.
2. RC might need a dedicated section to explain what "Score overflow" is.

Why is it better?
1. OD becomes a much more standardised value, with no room to debate whether you are supposed to use lower OD if your higher difficulty uses lower AR (as a person, who made some maps/guest difficulties that fall into this niche, I do know that it's annoying).
2. This change gets rid of the annoying 2nd part of the guideline. It has been quite debatable what do these words mean in conjunction. And generally speaking, people simply don't care about it.
3. Overall this "guideline" is simply common sense at this point in time. I don't understand what even made it a guideline in first place.

I'm open for more discussion, because considering what feedback I saw in the osu!catch Mapping & Modding Hub people *do* agree that it's wasteful to keep this guideline going on and on until the end of time. Thank you for reading.

Think this probably needs its own post

noticed that the guideline for platter "Strong hyperdashes should not be used. For basic-snapped hyperdashes, a limit of 1.5 times the trigger distance is recommended. For higher-snapped hyperdashes, a limit of 1.3 times the trigger distance is recommended instead." got replaced by "Strong hyperdashes should not be used."

new wording is really vague about what a strong hyperdash is? i get the sentiment behind removing values to encourage more creativity and whatnot but without any numbers or explanation a "strong hyperdash" doesnt really mean anything

The main reason behind removing the value is because people who read it as-written tend to hyperfocus on it when honestly the rule isn’t massively impactful in today’s game. I agree that “strong hyperdashes” isn’t perfect but we need a replacement that isn’t overly granular or restrictive because then we might as well have kept it. Suggestions are welcomed

Chatie wrote:

new wording is really vague about what a strong hyperdash is? i get the sentiment behind removing values to encourage more creativity and whatnot but without any numbers or explanation a "strong hyperdash" doesnt really mean anything

This is done intentionally. As Ascendance already mentions, people shouldn't blindly stare at the RC and take that as the "truth" without using common sense in judging "Strong" hypers. Besides this, using a large distance isn't the sole reason why a hyper can be seen as strong. For example, the flow used in said pattern or AR can increase the harshness of a hyperdash.

Rocma wrote:

yea but new wording can be misread because it offers only lower side of common cs. I hope it highlights 2.5/3/3.5/4 more as the common setting for non-english guys

I think I'm missunderstanding what you refer to if this isn't clear enough.

Cup 2.5 or lower, meaning the max value typically is 2.5 but anything lower should be fine.
Salad 3 or lower, same here 3.0 is a typical value but lower is fine as well.
Platter 3.5 or lower, 3.5 is the typical value, lower is also fine.
Rain 4.0 or lower, 4.0 is the typical value, lower is alos fine.

If you expected support for 3.0 / 3.5 / 4.0 / 4.5 for a ENHI spread then I wouldn't agree with you to add support for that, as those values aren't very typical.
If you meant a more forgiving CS spread of 2.0 / 2.5 / 3.0 / 3.5 for a ENHI, then I would say the "or lower" part already covers this. Yes it isn't clear from the get go what value you should use, but with the new approach I took the values are just a singular value and not a range which it was before.

If we take the old guideline "Circle Size should be between 2 and 3" this would hint to me to either go for a Cup with a CS of 2 or 3. 2.0 isn't used that often in common spreads, and 3.0 is not encouraged at all, while the more common number is 2.5.

Imo we should rename "juice-stream" to 2slider/sliders" and "banana shower/bananas" to "spinner" since from what ive seen 95% of the community uses these terms and "banana shower" could be interpreted as something entirely different.

Daletto wrote:

Imo we should rename "juice-stream" to 2slider/sliders" and "banana shower/bananas" to "spinner" since from what ive seen 95% of the community uses these terms and "banana shower" could be interpreted as something entirely different.

gl arguing this with peppy just sayin

Since no new feedback came, reverted back wording to be again slider and spinner.
I suppose I will follow up on the wiki side of things to change this to match the names used in the community.

Will create a PR to the wiki and whatnot.