Combo

Combo in osu! is the number of hit objects struck consecutively without a break. Every scoring object adds one to the streak, and a break resets it to zero — including a slider break, which records no miss judgement of its own. A play's max combo is the highest streak reached during that play; the maximum combo shown on an osu! profile is the highest such figure the player has reached. Combo is the single largest driver of score in osu! and osu!catch, and losing it reduces a play's pp even when accuracy is barely touched.

What builds a combo and what breaks it

In osu!standard the wiki lists five actions that each add one to the combo: a successful tap on a hit circle, a successful tap at the start of a slider, the slider ball collecting a slider tick, the slider ball touching a slider's end or reverse arrow, and a completed or semi-completed spinner. Four actions reset it to zero: missing a hit circle, tapping a slider start early, missing a slider start or a slider tick, and failing to expand the spinner circle far enough. One case does neither — missing a slider end, which lowers the judgement but leaves the streak intact.

The other modes are simpler. osu!taiko builds combo on GREAT and GOOD hits on small and large notes and breaks on a MISS, with drum rolls and shakers neutral either way. osu!catch counts caught fruits and juice drops, while droplets and bananas neither add nor break. osu!mania adds on each note completed with the correct key and each hold note held correctly, and breaks when a note is not completed or a hold is released during the hold period.

Combo and score on the stable client

Under ScoreV1, the default scoring system on stable, combo is not a small bonus — it is most of the score. Each osu!standard hit circle is worth:

Score = hit value × (1 + (combo multiplier × difficulty multiplier × mod multiplier ÷ 25))

The combo multiplier is the combo before that hit minus one, floored at zero. The difficulty multiplier is a per-beatmap constant derived from HP drain, circle size, overall difficulty and object density. Worked example: on a map with a difficulty multiplier of 5, played with no mods, a 300 landed at the very start with no combo built is worth 300 points. The same 300 landed when the combo before the hit is already 101 is worth 300 × (1 + (100 × 5 × 1 ÷ 25)) = 6,300 points — twenty-one times more for an identical tap. That is why a full combo usually outscores a more accurate play with a break in it, and why ScoreV1 totals on long maps run into the tens or hundreds of millions.

Combo and score in osu!(lazer)

Lazer standardises every mode to a maximum of 1,000,000 points at a 1.00× mod multiplier, split between a combo portion and an accuracy portion. In the osu! ruleset the split is even: 500,000 points scale with combo progress and 500,000 with accuracy progress, and both halves are additionally multiplied by accuracy — gently on the combo half, steeply on the accuracy half. The other rulesets weight it differently: osu!taiko allocates 250,000 to combo and 750,000 to accuracy, osu!mania 150,000 and 850,000, while osu!catch puts nearly everything into the combo portion, reserving a share of up to 400,000 for tiny droplets on maps that contain them.

Within the combo portion, an object's contribution scales with the square root of the combo it is hit at in the osu! ruleset, and logarithmically in taiko, catch and mania. That is a deliberate softening of ScoreV1's linear multiplier: late combo is still worth more than early combo, but nothing like the runaway factor stable applies.

Combo and pp

Combo affects pp indirectly but firmly. The osu!standard performance calculator does not simply read the miss counter; it compares the play's max combo against the beatmap's maximum achievable combo and infers an effective number of combo breaks from the gap, then adjusts for how many slider ends were likely dropped. A slider break records no miss judgement and costs almost no accuracy, yet it appears in that comparison and reduces the play's pp.

The exact penalty is part of the performance-points algorithm, which is revised periodically, so it is not a fixed constant worth memorising. The direction, however, is stable and worth internalising: for two plays on the same map with the same accuracy and the same mods, the one that holds combo is worth more pp, and the gap widens with how much combo was lost.

Full combo, perfect full combo and choke

A full combo (FC) is a play that reaches the maximum possible combo on a beatmap: passing with no misses, no slider breaks and no dropped slider ends. The osu! wiki notes a community convention that diverges from the software here — scores that lost combo only to dropped slider ends are widely called full combos even though the client and the website do not display them as such. The term perfect full combo (PFC) exists to mark a play with genuinely no dropped ends, and is not the same thing as an SS.

An SS is necessarily a full combo: reaching the top grade means every object was hit for a top judgement, which leaves nothing that could have broken the streak. A full combo is not necessarily an SS, because 100s and 50s lower accuracy without resetting combo. A play that holds combo almost to the end and then breaks is called a choke; breaking early and holding the rest is a reverse choke.

Combo in a tracked session

When TrackMyOsu detects a new top play during a session, it stores that play's max combo alongside its pp, accuracy, grade and mods, and keeps the record permanently in the session history. That makes it possible to open a session from months ago and see not just that a play was worth a certain number of pp, but whether it was a full combo or a break partway through a long map.

That distinction is often the most actionable thing in a session log. A run of high-accuracy plays with broken combos points at a different problem — nerves, stamina, or one specific pattern — than a run of full combos with mediocre accuracy. Neither pattern is visible from a single number on a profile page; both are visible when the plays are grouped by the session they were set in.

Related guides

Longer explainers that use this term: browse all osu! guides, or start with Understanding osu! pp, How to read your osu! stats and Star rating explained.

Sources

Definitions follow the official osu! wiki and the ppy/osu source. Session figures come from TrackMyOsu's own tracked-session database.

By carrot12_. Last updated 2026-08-13.

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