How to play beat saber
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.
- Slow down the song to 50% and play through the tricky part.
- 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
- What's not included
- No discussion of custom songs and beatmaps for training because I can't be bothered to install them.