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osu! mods explained: what HD, HR, DT and FL do to your score and pp

osu! mods change three separate things at once: how the map plays, how much raw score it awards, and how much pp the play is worth. The three do not move together. Hidden multiplies score by 1.06x in osu!(stable), but its pp effect now comes from the map's measured reading difficulty rather than a flat bonus. Easy and Half Time make a map easier and cut both score and pp. Relax, Autopilot and Auto award no pp at all. Knowing which of the three layers a given mod touches is the difference between choosing mods that move your rank and grinding score that does not.

The three layers a mod changes

A mod does up to three independent things, and conflating them is the most common source of bad mod advice.

• Gameplay — it changes the map itself: circle size, approach rate, overall difficulty, HP drain, playback rate, or what you are allowed to see.
• Score multiplier — it scales the raw score shown on the beatmap leaderboard. In osu!(stable) this is a fixed figure per mod and per game mode.
• pp — it changes what the play is worth toward your pp total, either by changing the map's difficulty as the calculator sees it, or by applying an explicit penalty on top.

These are separate systems. Half Time carries a 0.30x score multiplier in osu!, but that number tells you nothing about pp; pp falls because slowing a map down genuinely lowers its measured difficulty. Sudden Death carries a 1.00x multiplier and has no pp effect whatsoever — it changes only the risk you accept. Read every mod on all three axes before deciding it is worth using.

Difficulty reduction: Easy, No Fail and Half Time

Three mods make a map easier, and all three cost you score.

Easy (EZ) halves circle size, approach rate, overall difficulty and HP drain, and grants two extra lives. Stable score multiplier: 0.50x in every mode.

No Fail (NF) stops you failing when the health bar empties. You still fail if you score nothing at all across the entire map. Stable score multiplier: 0.50x in every mode.

Half Time (HT) drops playback to 75% of the original speed — three-quarters, not half, despite the name. Stable score multiplier: 0.30x in osu!, osu!taiko and osu!catch; 0.50x in osu!mania.

All three are ranked, so plays using them still submit and can still enter your top plays. They simply produce much smaller numbers. EZ and HT reduce pp because they reduce the map's star rating; No Fail works differently, applying a direct pp penalty that scales with your miss count.

Difficulty increase: Hard Rock, Double Time, Hidden and Flashlight

Hard Rock (HR) raises the circle size (CS) value by 30%, which makes the circles smaller, and raises approach rate, overall difficulty and HP drain by 40% each, subject to the game's stat ceilings, and flips the playfield along the X-axis. Stable multiplier: 1.06x in osu! and osu!taiko, 1.12x in osu!catch, 1.00x in osu!mania, where it is unranked.

Double Time (DT) raises playback to 1.5x, cutting the song's length by about a third and raising the effective approach rate, overall difficulty and HP drain. Nightcore (NC) is Double Time with added percussion and pitch shift, and is treated identically for scoring. Stable multiplier: 1.12x in osu! and osu!taiko, 1.06x in osu!catch.

Hidden (HD) removes approach circles and fades hit objects out shortly after they appear. Stable multiplier: 1.06x outside osu!mania.

Flashlight (FL) restricts your view to a lit circle around the cursor. It shrinks at 100x and 200x combo and resets when you break. Stable multiplier: 1.12x outside osu!mania.

Sudden Death (SD) fails you on a miss and Perfect (PF) retries instantly; both are 1.00x and pp-neutral.

Stable score multipliers, mode by mode

The figures below are the osu!(stable) score multipliers as documented in the osu! wiki. They apply to the raw score on the beatmap leaderboard, not to pp. osu!(lazer) uses a different scoring system and does not always use the same multipliers, so treat this table as stable-specific.

A 1.00x entry means the mod is available but leaves score untouched. Relax at 0.00x is the game stating plainly that the play does not count.

How mods actually feed into pp

pp is calculated from the beatmap as the mods leave it, not from the unmodded original. For most mods that is the entire mechanism. Double Time is worth more pp because a map played at 1.5x speed genuinely measures as harder; Hard Rock is worth more because smaller circles and a harsher hit window raise measured difficulty; Easy and Half Time are worth less for the mirror-image reason. None of these are bonuses bolted on afterwards.

Flashlight is the exception that adds something new: the calculator only creates a flashlight difficulty component when the mod is active, which is why Flashlight pp scales strongly with map length.

Hidden changed in the star rating and performance points update of 3 July 2026. It previously applied a static bonus. It now feeds the Reading skill — a dynamic component that scales with note density — so Hidden is worth more on dense maps and less on sparse ones, and it now moves the map's star rating rather than only the pp figure.

Which mods reduce pp, and which void it entirely

pp losses come from four distinct causes, and it is worth keeping them apart.

• Mods that lower measured difficulty. Easy and Half Time. This is not a penalty — the map is simply easier, so it is worth less.
• Mods with an explicit pp penalty. No Fail multiplies your pp by 1 − 0.02 per miss, with a floor of 0.90, so the worst case is a 10% loss and a clean No Fail play loses nothing. Spun Out multiplies pp by 1 − (spinner count ÷ total hit objects) raised to the power 0.85, so it costs almost nothing on a map with a single spinner and a great deal on a spinner-heavy one.
• Unranked mods. Relax, Autopilot, Auto and Cinema submit no ranked score and earn no pp at all.
• Settings that unrank an otherwise ranked mod. In osu!(lazer), Double Time is only ranked at its default 1.5x rate; choose a custom rate and the score stops counting. The Classic mod is unranked outright.

Common stacks: HDHR, HDDT and the rest

Stacked mods multiply their score multipliers together. The stable osu! products work out as follows.

The pp side does not follow these products. HDHR is popular because Hard Rock's tighter circles and faster approach rate raise measured difficulty while Hidden adds reading load on top. HDDT is the higher-ceiling stack, since the rate change affects every interval in the map. NFDT is a common safety net: you keep Double Time's difficulty gain and accept at most a 10% pp reduction from No Fail.

Silver grades and what mods do to your grade counts

Mods change which grade icon a play earns. Hidden, Flashlight and Fade In (osu!mania) produce silver S and SS grades rather than gold ones. The accuracy requirements are unchanged — the silver colour marks the mod, not a stricter standard.

The thresholds themselves do not move with mods. In osu!: SS requires 100% accuracy; S requires over 90% 300s with at most 1% 50s and no misses; A requires over 80% 300s with no misses, or over 90% 300s; B requires over 70% 300s with no misses, or over 80% 300s; C requires over 60% 300s; D is everything else. See grades for the full breakdown and accuracy for how the percentage itself is derived.

Silver and gold grades are counted separately on your profile, so a player who uses Hidden constantly will show a visibly different grade profile from one who never touches it, at identical skill. Grade counts describe habits as much as ability.

Testing a mod choice session by session

Mod choice is really a hypothesis about where your pp comes from, and the way to test a hypothesis is to measure it. Start a TrackMyOsu session before a run of HDDT attempts and stop it when you finish. The saved session holds your pp, global rank and country rank at both ends, every top play that entered your top 100 while it was running, and every medal you picked up. Run a second session on Hard Rock alone and compare the two records.

Because sessions are stored permanently, a month of this gives you an answer for your own account rather than general advice. The dashboard refreshes every 60 seconds while a session is live, so new top plays appear without a reload, and your public profile at /u/<username> carries the same history for anyone you want to show it to.

By carrot12_. Last updated 2026-08-12.