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osu! game modes compared: standard, taiko, catch and mania

osu! ships four game modes in one client: osu!, osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania. They share a beatmap library, a mod set and a single account, and very little else. Each mode has its own difficulty algorithm, its own performance points calculation, its own accuracy formula, its own grade thresholds and its own global ranking, so one player can sit near the top of one mode's ranking and hold no rank at all in another. Switching mode deletes nothing and costs nothing, but the new mode begins from an empty top 100 and builds its pp from zero.

The four modes at a glance

All four modes read the same beatmaps and are played in the same client. What differs is the interface between the music and your hands.

The modes are drawn from different arcade lineages — osu! from Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, osu!taiko from the Taiko no Tatsujin series, osu!catch from EZ2CATCH-style catchers, and osu!mania from vertical scrolling rhythm games — which is why the skills transfer so poorly between them.

osu!: cursor movement plus tapping

The default mode presents three object types: hit circles to tap, sliders to hold and follow, and spinners to rotate. Difficulty comes from doing two things at once — putting the cursor in the right place and tapping at the right time — which is why it is the mode most sensitive to hardware and playstyle choices.

The difficulty calculator in osu!(lazer) reflects that split directly. It builds star rating from an Aim skill (evaluated both with and without sliders), a Speed skill, a Reading skill, and a Flashlight skill that is only instantiated when the Flashlight mod is active. The osu! wiki describes the pp model in the same terms: aim, speed, accuracy and strain combined in varying proportions — the osu! wiki's summary; the current calculator splits the same ground into aim, speed, accuracy and a cognition value built from reading and flashlight difficulty. Maps with very large jumps score highly on aim; dense streams score highly on speed and strain. Two 6-star maps can therefore demand almost unrelated abilities.

osu!taiko: two colours on one conveyor

osu!taiko reduces the playfield to a single horizontal lane. Red notes (don) are hit with the drum centre, blue notes (kat) with the rim, large notes ask for both inputs together, and drum rolls and swells are filler objects rather than judged hits. Because there is no cursor, difficulty is carried by pattern reading and endurance.

The lazer difficulty calculator builds taiko star rating from Rhythm, Reading, Colour and two Stamina skills, one of which is evaluated for single-colour patterns. The colour skill is the mode's signature: alternating don/kat sequences are far harder than long runs of one colour at the same speed, so difficulty is not a simple function of note density. The calculator also tracks whether the map is a convert from osu!, because converted patterns behave differently from patterns written for taiko.

osu!catch: positioning in place of timing

osu!catch removes tapping almost entirely. A catcher moves left and right under objects falling from the top of the screen, and the only extra input is a dash. Fruits and drops break combo when missed; droplets, the small objects that trace slider bodies, do not break combo but still count against accuracy. Bananas from spinners are excluded from accuracy altogether.

Its difficulty calculator is the simplest of the four: a single Movement skill. Everything the mode measures is positional. The pp side is the least forgiving, though — the osu!catch performance calculator multiplies its value by accuracy raised to the power of 5.5. Slipping from 99% to 97% therefore cuts the accuracy term to roughly nine-tenths of its previous value on its own, before any other factor is applied. A handful of dropped droplets that never showed up as a combo break can cost a noticeable slice of a play's pp.

osu!mania: columns, chords and hold notes

osu!mania is a vertical scrolling rhythm game with one key per column. Beatmaps use anywhere from 1 to 9 columns, and Co-op play extends that to 18. There are two object types: regular notes and hold notes, which occupy the role sliders and spinners play elsewhere.

Its difficulty calculator uses a single Strain skill, but passes the map's total column count into it, because a pattern that is trivial on 4 keys can be brutal on 7. Converted maps are handled specially: a convert can be played under any key mod, so the calculator produces difficulty values for a range of column counts from 1 to 9, including dual-stage layouts, whereas a map authored for osu!mania is rated only at its native key count. osu!mania is also the only mode with additional ranking variants — 4K and 7K are ranked separately from the combined mode ranking.

Accuracy is calculated differently in every mode

Accuracy percentages are not comparable across modes. Each mode weights its judgements differently and excludes different objects.

The practical difference is how much one imperfect hit costs. In osu! a 100 is worth a third of a 300, so it costs two-thirds of one object. In osu!taiko a GOOD is worth exactly half. In osu!catch every object counts equally, so one missed droplet costs as much as one missed fruit. The same physical standard of play produces different numbers in each mode.

Grades follow different rules per mode — and per client

Grade thresholds vary by mode in osu! stable. osu! and osu!taiko judge on the proportion of perfect judgements plus miss count, while osu!catch and osu!mania judge on the accuracy percentage.

osu!(lazer) simplifies this: its score processor grades on accuracy alone at 100%, 95%, 90%, 80% and 70%, with the osu! ruleset additionally downgrading an S or SS to an A when the play contains any miss. Silver S and SS grades come from Hidden, Flashlight or Fade In.

pp, ranks and statistics are separate per mode

Every mode maintains its own set of numbers. Profile pp, global rank, country rank, hit accuracy, grade counts, play count, ranked score and level are all tracked independently per mode, which is why the osu! website makes you pick a mode before it shows you a profile or a ranking table.

The separation is not cosmetic. As the osu! wiki puts it, pp is based on beatmap difficulty determined by a unique algorithm built for each individual game mode — the four calculators described above are genuinely different programs producing numbers on different scales. A 5-star osu!mania map and a 5-star osu! map are not claims about equal difficulty. What the modes do share is the aggregation rule: each one weights its own top 100 by 0.95⁽ⁿ⁻¹⁾, and each carries its own map-coverage bonus.

What switching modes actually involves

Mechanically, switching is a menu choice with no cost and no penalty. Your existing mode keeps its pp, rank and history untouched while you play another. There is no shared pool to dilute and no transfer to arrange.

What is worth expecting is the shape of early progress. An empty top 100 means the weighting curve works in your favour: every early play lands high in the list and counts at or near full value, and the map-coverage bonus climbs fastest over the first hundred or so ranked scores. Rank in the new mode therefore moves dramatically at first and slows sharply. You will also find plenty to play immediately — osu! converts standard beatmaps into osu!taiko, osu!catch and osu!mania automatically, using hitsounds and slider velocity for taiko, horizontal placement for catch, and rhythm for mania.

One practical note: TrackMyOsu tracks osu! standard statistics, so sessions and profiles on this site describe your standard play.

By carrot12_. Last updated 2026-08-12.