15 Mods
General rule: ease in with simpler maps before stepping up, and never add a mod to make a map easier to read (Ch. 8).
- Hidden: circles fade out instead of showing approach circles, so rhythm matters more, though some players find the cleaner screen easier. Learn it (or learn nomod, if you only play Hidden) on low-star maps first, and at lower AR let your cursor trail further behind than feels natural. Treat it as its own reading style rather than a harder version of nomod.
- Easy: halves CS, AR, OD, and HP. The big AR drop crowds the screen, so chunking patterns becomes essential, and bright, distinct combo colors help. Useful for pattern processing, but not required.
- Double Time: runs the game clock at 1.5×, not 2×, raising the demand on reading, tapping, and aim speed. Which one dominates depends on the map.
- Hard Rock: raises CS, AR, OD, and HP. The real demands are precision, reading speed, and accuracy. Find which is weakest and train each separately before combining them, since a weakness in one can pass for another (for example, "bad accuracy" that's really discomfort with the AR). Once two feel fine, use Hard Rock itself to train the third.
- No Fail, Relax, Autopilot: No Fail lets you finish maps above your level; Relax taps for you and Autopilot aims for you, so neither trains the skill it replaces (Ch. 7, Ch. 12).
Fact check
- Confirmed. Easy halves CS, AR, OD, and HP. Double Time speeds play up by 50% without changing the listed AR or OD, which shrinks hit windows and visible time by a third; Half Time does the reverse. 46,47,48
- Adds detail. Hard Rock's exact changes are CS × 1.3 and AR, OD, and HP × 1.4, each capped at 10, and it mirrors the map top to bottom, which can break patterns you had memorized. 46,47,48,49
- Confirmed. The wiki notes that top players often consider Hidden the easiest difficulty-increasing mod, because objects fade on a consistent schedule and you can time hits off the fade itself. 50
- Research. People synchronize much better with moving visual cues than with flashes. Approach circles are a moving cue; Hidden takes it away, which is why rhythm carries more weight. 95
- Confirmed. In stable, Hidden and Hard Rock multiply score by 1.06 and Double Time by 1.12; Easy and No Fail halve it. Lazer uses different multipliers. 62
Tonehh’s take
- Learn Hidden once mid to high 4 stars are comfortable, and Hard Rock or Double Time once you're comfortable across a variety of mid 5 star maps. Experience-based. He calls that point the sweet spot: you've finished the game's long tutorial and can branch out without bottlenecking yourself. Korilak waited even longer, until about 4,500 pp. 13,31
- Hidden is the one mod you can one-trick without paying for it later. Partly supported. It changes how the map is shown, not its difficulty settings, and the wiki notes top players often call it the easiest difficulty mod. But it's a distinct reading style, and nomod still dominates tournaments. 13,50
- A Hard Rock one-trick only learns AR 10: any map from AR 7.2 up becomes AR 10. Confirmed. The arithmetic holds (7.2 × 1.4 = 10.08, capped at 10); the reading risk is experience-based. 13,49
- Learn Hard Rock about one star below your comfortable nomod range, where accuracy, not aim, is the problem to solve. Experience-based. He says players ranked around 2,000 to 3,000 fixed their Hard Rock accuracy this way.
- Start Double Time on DT farm maps that are high 3 stars without mods, about low 5 with DT. Experience-based. He means maps built around basic bursts and jumps above 200 BPM, not the jump-only farm maps of Ch. 32.
Korilak’s take
- Learn Hard Rock before Double Time, so AR 8 maps with DT (effectively AR 9.67) are easier than the AR 10 you already know. Confirmed. AR 8's 750 ms of visibility becomes 500 ms with DT, which sits two-thirds of the way from AR 9 to AR 10. 31,47
- Double Time is the best way to get faster. Experience-based. Everything becomes high BPM and high AR, and you're forced to keep up.
- Both DT and HR improve overall skill; his nomod got better after he learned mods. Experience-based. It agrees with Tonehh, whose speed stalled until he trained streams, stamina, and finger control (Ch. 22). 11
- Hidden adds 8% pp. Dated. pp bonuses have been reworked many times since 2016. 59,79
- No Fail costs 10% of your pp. Dated. That was true until January 2021. Now each miss on a No Fail play trims pp by 2%, capped at 10%, so a No Fail full combo loses nothing. BTMC's comment that No Fail no longer affects pp is right only for full combos. 32,60,74
Take: Top players
- Relax is a poor way to improve, even though a few strong players used it. Supported. Relax taps for you, so half the game goes untrained, and its leniency lets a cursor reach a circle by any route; a nomod player has to be on the note at the moment they tap. Their conclusion, that players who improved with it would have improved more without it, is experience-based, but the mechanism is straightforward. 40,62,143
- It matters less what you play than how you play it. Agrees with the chart. Their phrasing for what the chart calls deliberate practice, and the reason a No Fail score above your level isn't automatically a waste: one of them keeps a speed collection full of D and C rank No Fail attempts, and the point is that each attempt improves on the last. Setting one such score and never returning is what teaches nothing. 40
- A C rank on a map far above you, chased for validation, is different. Supported. They compare it to loading a bar you can't lift with bad form: nothing is trained, and the same player usually can't S rank something two stars easier. That's the challenge point argument for practising just above your level rather than far above it. 108
Drill: Isolate the mod before you use it
- Pick the mod you want to learn, then train its ingredients separately on nomod maps or with lazer's difficulty adjustment: higher CS for Hard Rock's circles, higher OD for its timing, higher AR for its reading; higher BPM for Double Time's speed.
- Whichever ingredient fails first is the one to train. Only then put the mod on, starting about one star below your comfortable nomod range.
- Learn one reading style at a time: nomod players learn Hard Rock without Hidden (Ch. 31). 1,13,31,56
Train this with your own data
This chapter trains reading. Numbers come from your real top plays (see how on your profile).
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