← osu! guides

osu! bonus pp explained: how play count adds to your total

Bonus pp is a small component of an osu! profile total, awarded for the number of ranked beatmaps a player has set a score on, and it is separate from the weighted sum of the top 100 plays. The osu! wiki gives the bonus as 416.6667 x (1 - 0.995^min(N, 1000)), where N is the number of ranked maps with a score set. The curve rises steeply at first - roughly 137 maps reach half the total - then flattens, and stops entirely at 1,000 maps, where up to 413.894 bonus pp is awarded. Past that point, no amount of further play adds to it.

Where bonus pp sits in your profile total

The pp number on an osu! profile is the sum of two separate things. The large part is the weighted total of your best 100 scores: the osu! wiki gives the weighting as Total pp = p x 0.95^n-1, where p is a score's raw pp value and n is its place in your Best Performance list. The small part is bonus pp, which has nothing to do with how well you played. It is awarded for the number of ranked beatmaps you have set a score on, and it is added on top of the weighted total.

osu! does not display these two components separately. Your profile shows one combined figure, with the bonus already folded in. That single number is what drives your global rank and your country rank, and it is what TrackMyOsu snapshots at the start and end of a session. Any time you read about a player's pp, you are reading a figure that already contains up to roughly 414 points of bonus.

The formula, term by term

The osu! wiki states the bonus as 416.6667 x (1 - 0.995^{min(N, 1000)}), where N is the number of ranked maps with a score set. Each piece does one job.

• 416.6667 is the scale factor - the value the curve would approach if the exponent were allowed to grow without limit.
• 0.995 is the decay base. Each additional map multiplies the remaining gap to the ceiling by 0.995, so every new map is worth very slightly less than the one before it.
• min(N, 1000) is a hard stop. Once N reaches 1,000 the exponent stops rising and the term freezes.

Because the exponent is capped, the real maximum is not 416.6667 but the value at N = 1,000. The wiki states it plainly: up to 413.894 bonus pp is given for setting 1,000 scores. That is the entire budget. Whatever a player does after their thousandth ranked map, this part of their total never changes again.

What counts as N: maps, not plays

This is the point most players get wrong. N is the number of distinct ranked beatmaps you have set a score on. It is not your play count, and the two diverge quickly.

Play count rises on every play you submit, including the fortieth attempt at a map you first cleared months ago. N rises only when you score on a ranked map you have never scored on before, and each map counts exactly once no matter how many times you return to it. A player who farms the same twenty maps for a year can add tens of thousands to their play count while N stays where it started.

The formula also specifies ranked maps. Time spent on unranked or unsubmitted maps builds skill, play time and play count, but contributes nothing to this term. If you want the bonus to move, exactly one action moves it: passing a ranked map that is new to you.

The curve in numbers

Substituting values into the formula shows how heavily front-loaded the bonus is. Figures are bonus pp rounded to two decimal places, with each value's share of the 413.894 ceiling alongside.

The wiki notes the midpoint directly: roughly 137 scores are needed to reach half the maximum bonus. By 500 maps a player already holds 92.5% of everything this term will ever give them, and the remaining 500 maps up to the cap are worth about 31 pp between them.

Read the shape rather than the rows. The bonus is not a reward that scales with dedication; it is a fixed budget of roughly 414 pp handed out fastest to the players who have collected least of it so far. A player at 750 maps and a player at 1,000 maps are separated by under 7 pp.

Why it feels like free pp early on

For a new account the bonus is a large slice of a small total. The first ten ranked maps you pass are worth about 20 pp between them, and each single map in that range adds close to 2 pp. At that stage individual top plays may be worth only a handful of pp before weighting, so one fresh map can be competitive with an actual good score.

Worked example. A beginner who has scored on 40 ranked maps holds about 75.70 bonus pp. If their weighted top-100 total is 250 pp, their profile reads roughly 326 pp, and the bonus is nearly a quarter of it. Clearing 60 more maps they have never played takes them to N = 100 and 164.26 bonus pp - an automatic gain of about 89 pp for nothing harder than passing new maps. This is the mechanical reason early progress feels fast, and why new players are so often told to play a wide variety of maps rather than repeating a favourite.

Why grinding it stops working

The same effort applied later is worth almost nothing. Comparing equal blocks of 100 fresh ranked maps makes the decay obvious.

• Maps 1 to 100: +164.26 bonus pp
• Maps 101 to 200: +99.51 bonus pp
• Maps 401 to 500: +22.12 bonus pp
• Maps 901 to 1,000: +1.80 bonus pp
• Map 1,001 onwards: nothing

The last hundred maps below the cap are worth roughly one ninetieth of the first hundred. Per map, the 11th ranked map you score on is worth about 1.98 pp, the 101st about 1.26 pp, the 401st about 0.28 pp, and the 801st about 0.04 pp. A player sitting at N = 800 would have to pass roughly twenty-six brand-new ranked maps to gain a single point of pp. Deliberately hunting easy unplayed maps is therefore a strategy with a short shelf life: it works for a few hundred maps, then quietly becomes pointless.

Bonus pp against a single new top play

Set the bonus beside the other half of the total. A new best play enters at weight 1.00, but it also pushes every existing score down one place, so each of those keeps only 95% of what it was contributing. The net profile gain is approximately the new play's raw value minus 5% of your previous weighted total.

Worked example. A player whose weighted top-100 total is 12,800 pp sets a new best worth 900 pp. The approximation gives 900 - (0.05 x 12,800) = 260 pp; running the full weighting curve over all 100 scores gives about 257 pp, so the shortcut is close enough to reason with.

That one play is worth roughly eight times the entire bonus still available to a player who has already scored on 500 ranked maps, which is about 31 pp in total. Past a few hundred maps, the bonus term is finished as a source of progress and new top plays are the only thing that moves the number meaningfully.

Reading the bonus in your session history

Because osu! reports one combined pp figure, you cannot query bonus pp directly. You can infer it from what changes during a session. TrackMyOsu snapshots your pp, rank, accuracy and play count when you press Start and again when you press Stop, and it detects new top plays in between.

That combination is a useful diagnostic. If a session ends with a pp gain and no new top plays were detected, the gain did not come from your Best Performance list. On a session spent clearing ranked maps you had never touched, bonus pp is the natural explanation. If the session does show new top plays, the weighted sum is doing the work and the bonus contribution is a rounding error next to it.

Over a long history the pattern the formula predicts becomes visible in your own records: young accounts move on breadth, established accounts move on quality.

By carrot12_. Last updated 2026-08-12.