How pp Actually Works — Performance Points, Demystified

Performance points — pp — are the single number osu! uses to rank players globally, and almost everyone misunderstands them at first. pp is not a measure of how high your score was, and your raw total is not just the sum of every play you have ever passed. It is a weighted, per-play estimate of how impressive a result is, built from the map difficulty and how cleanly you played it.

What earns pp on a single play

Each pass on a ranked map is awarded its own pp value. Three things decide that value: the star rating of the difficulty you played, your accuracy, and your combo relative to the map's max combo. Mods that make the map harder (and the maps themselves) push the star rating up, which is why the same accuracy on a harder map is worth far more.

• Star rating — the headline difficulty number. Higher stars, more potential pp.
• Accuracy — the percentage of perfect hits; high acc is rewarded sharply near the top.
• Max combo — full-combo (FC) runs are worth meaningfully more than dropped-combo passes.
• Mods — difficulty-increasing mods like HR and DT raise the effective star rating.

How your profile total is built

Your overall pp is not the sum of your scores. osu! takes your best play on each map, sorts them all from highest to lowest, and applies a steep weighting curve. Your number-one play counts at 100%, the next at 95%, the next at roughly 90%, and so on — each subsequent play contributes only 0.95 times the previous one's weight.

total_pp ≈ Σ ( play_pp[n] × 0.95^n )   // n = 0 for your top play

The practical consequence is that only your top ~50–100 plays meaningfully move your total. To climb, you do not need to grind hundreds of mediocre maps — you need to replace a play near the top of your sorted list with a better one.

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Your rank is decided by your best day, repeated. The only play that matters is one better than your current top fifty.

The takeaway