Welcome to Etterna Online! This guide will serve as a reference for information regarding StepMania and the much improved community built known as Etterna. Just want to play the game? Head here to grab the installer for Windows and read the Etterna Setup section of the guide to learn how to customize your experience.
StepMania is software that was originally created in 2001 to serve as a Dance Dance Revolution simulator, during its many years of development the software grew to support even more game modes such as Pump It Up and Beatmania. The single most common game type however is the original DDR style, this game mode can be played on a Dance Pad or keyboard (Or anything you can map 4 keys too such as a Guitar Hero controller or Gamepad). Over the years the keyboard community for the game has grown extensively and broken barriers in relation to what Charts are possible to clear; Etterna is a community developed version of StepMania 5 specifically made with keyboard players in mind.
Note:
Once you’ve downloaded Etterna follow the usual steps for installing the software (The installer is very clear). At this point you may wish to make a shortcut to the Etterna executable on your desktop, the executable can be found in the Program folder of your install. The Etterna folder structure should look like the following.
The most important folders to us are
At this point you could simply start the game and be able to play a very limited set of songs that are available by default with the install, most of the charts for these songs are geared towards more advanced players however the song Remembrance has a few easy charts. To get the most out of the game however you will want to add your own songs to the game I will discuss this next.
First take a look at the pack list available on the site, all of these packs are officially supported by the website meaning you will be able to track your scores should you choose to. Packs are simply a collection of songs and their respective chart that are curated or created entirely by one author. A song can have many charts, a chart is the part you play it contains the arrows, for example the song Panda may have an easy chart, hard chart and expert chart. You can learn more about charts in the chart section.
The packs list can be quite intimidating however thanks to Etterna’s difficulty calculator you can get a general idea of how hard the charts are; opening a pack shows the songs it contains and in the last column the difficulty of that file. As a complete beginner ratings of anywhere from 3-10 should be suitable, as you progress to intermediate you would want files in the 13-18 range.
Once you’ve chose and downloaded a pack (I will use the Super MeatBoy Keyboard Pack for this example) you will unzip the file leaving a folder, this folder will be copied to your songs folder in its entirety, ensure that packs have the following structure Songs\packname\{songs}
e.g. Songs\Super Meat Boy! Full-Keyboard Stepmania Pack\{songs}
.
At this point you can start the game and your pack will be available to play, with that said let’s move onto the basic Etterna interface.
Once you hit the Game Start option you will be presented with a page similar to the following.
The only option that will be available at first is the Default Profile, to create your own profile head to Options → Profiles → New Profile. Here you can enter the name for your profile, once created if you hit enter on your newly created name you can choose to move it up the list so it will be the first option you see like theropfather
in the above image.
Now that you have the game loaded I will explain a few of the important user interface elements.
The last thing you need to know is the keys for your arrows.
By default they are set to zx,.and correspond to ←↓↑→
Thanks to Etterna having sane default settings at this point you can start playing to get a feel for the game and have fun! If you want to customize your game play experience even further (which I recommend) see the next section.
When you hit enter to choose a song if you quickly hit the enter key again you will be taken to the options menu, this is where you can customize your gameplay experience I will give a brief description of the most important options.
These are the most important options in the Player Options screen these allow you to fully customize your game play experience to your liking, play about with things and see what they do - for example dizzy and drunk can be very entertaining.