Don & Kat
Note: Not to be confused with Katu judgement.
The rightmost note is a finisher
The Dons & Kats notes are circular hit objects present in osu!taiko beatmaps that are coloured in red and blue respectively. They move from right to left on the conveyer belt towards the stationary judgement circle on the left side.
When the Dons & Kats overlap with this white circle, the player is required to strike the corresponding part of the drum to earn points:
| Note | Colour | Drum input | Sound |
|---|---|---|---|
| Don | Red | Strike the drum's center. | A deep, resonant "don" sound. |
| Kat | Blue | Strike the drum's rim. | A sharp, high-pitched "kat" sound. |
Finishers
Finishers, also known as large notes or strong notes, are enlarged variants of the Dons and Kats, drawn at roughly 1.5 times the size of a regular note.
Similarly to large notes of Taiko no Tatsujin, finishers require striking the matching part of the drum with both of its keys (two centre keys for a big Don, two rim keys for a big Kat) within 30 ms of each other. Finishers can also be hit with a single key, in which case the note is judged normally and combo is kept, but no hit bonus is collected.
Drumrolls can be finishers as well, but their ticks are worth more than regular ones simply for being collected, and hitting them with both keys awards nothing extra.1
The osu!taiko ranking criteria restrict where finishers may be placed, since pressing two keys at once takes longer to recover from than a single hit — for example, lower difficulties outright forbid them in dense patterns.
Judgement
Main page: osu!taiko judgement system
Upon hitting a note, the game awards a judgement based on how accurate the timing is, and the player may receive a small boost to the health bar.
A miss will occur if the player fails to hit the proper colour in a timely manner. Hitting the wrong colour, or both red and blue at the same time, will also be considered a miss.
A series of consecutive successful hits builds a combo, which multiplies the base score of subsequent notes.
A finisher's colour and timing are judged in exactly the same way. Its second keypress is judged on top of that as a separate BONUS, which does not affect accuracy or combo and grants no additional health. Under the osu!(stable) scoring system, a successfully doubled finisher awards double the score of the same regular note. osu!(lazer) uses a different formula, in which the second keypress is a bonus judgement weighted separately from the note itself.
Mapping
In the .osu file format, Dons and Kats are stored as ordinary hit circles, and their colour comes from the hitsounds attached to them: a whistle or a clap makes a Kat, anything else a Don. Finishers have no hit object type of their own either, they are simply objects carrying a finish hitsound. All of this makes osu!taiko the only game mode where hitsounds directly determine gameplay.