With the release of Oculus Quest, more and more players are jumping into Beat Saber. And while it’s easy enough to cut cubes to the beat, there’s a trick to achieving the highest score. Here’s how scoring works in Beat Saber.

Beat Saber requires decent timing to slice directional blocks on the beat, but unlike most rhythm games, getting the highest score is about swing technique, not perfect timing. If you’ve found yourself wondering ‘how do I get the highest score in Beat Saber‘, you aren’t alone—the details of the scoring mechanics aren’t well explained in the game itself, but luckily you’ve come to the right place.

This video from developer Beat Games shows that swinging in a wide arc (both before and after your cut) is key to achieving getting the most points out of each cut, while the alignment of your cut also helps to a degree.

While the video is correct in concept (and applies to all versions of the game), the score and angle values have been tweaked slightly; here’s a breakdown of the three factors at play.

Swing angle before cut – 100 degrees ideally

– 100 degrees ideally Swing angle after cut – 60 degrees ideally

– 60 degrees ideally Center cut – closer to center of arrow means earns additional points

Collectively, both the swing angle before and after the cut contribute up to 100 points. The centrality of the cut contribute up to 15, meaning you can get a maximum of 115 point per note.

Of course there’s also the combo counter which you can see in-game on the right which stacks up to 8x for consecutive cuts and multiplies each cut score accordingly but drops back to 1x if you miss a block.

The key to going above A to achieve S and SS ranks is holding a steady combo and having the ideal cut technique.

If you’re hunting to top scores, check out the Practice Mode (activated on any song by tapping the graduation cap icon). With Practice Mode in Beat Saber you can play specific parts of the track and even play in slow motion to learn complex block patterns. While you practice, remember that swing angle contributes much more to your score (up to 100 points per block) than cut centrality (up to 15 points per block), so you’ll want to prioritize accordingly.

Released in May, 2018 for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows VR, Beat Saber quickly became one of the best selling VR games to date, passing one million units sold in less than a year. The game has since become available on both PSVR and Oculus Quest.

The studio is currently planning on bringing multiplayer, custom avatars, and custom sabers to the game, which would certainly add the already massively fun game a new dimension on top of their soon-to-come custom level maker.