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How To Play Beatsaber

Beat saber is incredibly fascinating.

• General gameplay

• Relax and loosen your body: tightness can help be fast enough for a /very few/ beats, but hurts immediately after and doesn't help with accuracy or /true/ speed.

• Warm up by playing hard songs -- or the song you're currently trying to beat -- at 70% speed; 2-3 songs ~ 15 minutes seems to work out well. Don't have to pass.

  • Do try to hit one new record in every session to guarantee improvement. (This can also simply be failing at a slightly higher score/time position in a hard song; the delta itself doesn't matter as much as the fact that there is forward motion.)

• Feel comfortable tweaking settings: particularly height (by crouching a little and re-recording), and reducing noise from the system (note spawning, distance of note spawning, etc.).

• /Don't/ try to learn patterns quickly; instead learn to respond to the arrows -- ideally independently with both hands. This prevents mistakes around being stuck to patterns that don't exist, and dealing with surprising, non-intuitive notes.

• At the same time, try to envision paths for the sabers to go through instead of single cuts: eg. "cut through this block, rotate the arm and cut through the next". The best players I've seen virtually minimize wasted motion but still get good scores.

• Learn to see the whole screen without actually explicitly focusing on a specific part to be able to get notes without constantly looking at them. /Do/ look at notes that are getting missed carefully to understand why it's being missed.

  • Missing obviously correct strokes

• There's a difference in visual and sensor synchronization; changing settings can also make it worse (particularly the distance notes spawn at).

• With the improved FPS, it's possible to see if the stroke was too soon or too late; calibrate accordingly even if it doesn't feel correct.

  • Being accurate

• Slow cuts can score perfectly as well; don't forcefully do fast strokes.

• Keep wrists flexible, and use them to get the additional angles.

• Score feedback is instantaneous, so make the most of it; figure out where you're most likely to miss and pay more attention to them.

• For /some/ songs, paying visual attention is more important than being /on beat/: particularly /Exit the earth's atmosphere/.

  • Practicing hard songs

• Slow down the song to 50% and play through the tricky part.

  • Speed it up constantly while doing it perfectly correctly.
  • Go beyond 100% -- 110, 120 to make /sure/ you have it.

• Disable sound and try to play it just by looking at it.

• Occasionally, happily play the song to the best of your ability in multiplayer; enjoy the experience. Watch others play it inside and outside VR.

• Switch hands to force yourself to read the notes again from scratch.

• Play the song "for real" with the .7 multiplier.

• I don't have very high opinions of playing with no-fail because it doesn't truly force learning.

  • Mental stuff

• Beat Saber is not a Wicked Problem: the feedback is consistent, and we can train to learn through the system.

• This is an excellent place to apply the growth mindset; I first learned that I /had/ a growth mindset in /some/ areas of my life from DDR; systems with fast feedback are excellent for building the growth mindset.

  • Song specific notes

    • Digital, Imagine Dragons The arrangement feels like someone had a bad acid trip and then immediately codified it into beats.

  • What's not included

• No discussion of custom songs and beatmaps for training because I can't be bothered to install them.

— Kunal