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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

One thing that’s good to point out to anybody looking to get into VR for fitness is that Beat Saber becomes radically more challenging when playing custom community-made maps instead of the stock/DLC maps. The higher difficulty community maps require a lot of speed, precision, and stamina, and I’m only beginning to be able to play them decently after a few months of practice. It’s almost an entirely different game.

Unfortunately, support for custom maps/mods for the standalone Quest version of the game is not great, so it’s best to play the PC version if the community maps are of interest (which can be done with a Quest via PC link).

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I'm several months into using Beat Saber as an exercise routine. Yes, add-on maps are a necessity, not just for the challenge, but also to keep things interesting.

I don't find high difficulty levels to be great exercise. I can keep up fine, but I get lulled into using little wrist flicks instead of sweeping arcs.

The best tracks for me are ones which aren't technically challenging. Instead, I get my whole body into it - dancing the whole time, stepping to the side so I can take a wide swing, shakin' my butt to the groove... That all gets my heart pounding, and works a much wider range of muscles. I've also turned the HUD off so I don't focus on my score, instead loosening up and having a good time.

The Claws mod also helps me a lot. You only get about half the range of the normal sabers so you have to move your arms farther to reach the blocks. It also makes you use a wider range of muscles, which has stopped some of the RSI I was feeling from too many wrist flicks earlier.

It's not perfect exercise. I could feel my body improve a lot early on, but then it plateaued and I don't see an easy way to push it much farther. However, I'm happy with where it's gotten me, and I intend to keep with it for the foreseeable future. It's fun, and it's convenient so I have no problem doing it for 45 minutes every day, and those are valuable attributes.

Interesting, I felt like the better I got at beat saber the less effort I would make, whereas DDR type of games made me sweat to no end. But I didn’t try to apply myself to easy tracks. I think there’s gotta be a better game than beat saber than can be developed that puts you into weird positions. Playing superhot on the quest was the game that really put me into weird positions.

> The best tracks for me are ones which aren't technically challenging. Instead, I get my whole body into it - dancing the whole time, stepping to the side so I can take a wide swing, shakin' my butt to the groove...

Exactly. Once I could beat everything on expert I ended up losing interesting because expert+ felt like a different game: seemed much more wrist-oriented, which I have zero interest in. I'd like to find more maps that optimize around the criteria you've mentioned, but haven't put effort into it.

I actually prefer expert+ for movement, the cubes are more widely distributed in space and you need to make wider moves. For expert there are many cubes, but too grouped together. But probably depends also on the maps you choose. Anyway, for me only the expert+ maps are fun and challenging physically.

Beat Saber isn’t really designed for exercise but you can raise intensity by keeping your wrists fixed and by imagining you are wielding two really having blades. You have to imagine yourself glaiving the blocks in two rather than simply touching them so they fall apart. The same mental tricks are needed with the more fitness oriented rhythm boxing games.

Where's the best way to get started with these community mods.

I have:

1. A Quest 2

2. A PC with an RTX 20XX graphics card (usually running Linux, but can boot into Windows 10) and USB C port

3. Beat Saber (standalone version)

I guess I need:

4. A long USB C cable (or the official one)?

5. Beat Saber for PC (best to buy on Oculus or Steam?)

6. Some instructions for finding, installing and using these community mods.

Is there a particular place (e.g. Reddit community) that's the best place to find 'getting started' info?

That PC should be more than adequate.

I wouldn’t personally recommend the official link cable — it’s expensive, and in my case it was flaky. I’m currently using a cable made by Cable Matters[0] that works well.

Most people buy the Steam version, though either can work. I personally lean more towards Steam so if I change headsets to something non-Facebook (like Valve’s rumored upcoming quest competitor), I can still play Beat Saber without a second purchase or weird hacks.

For installing mods, ModAssistant[1] has worked well for me. It’s pretty foolproof; the “standard” mods are pre-selected for installation by default, so for a minimal setup just open ModAssistant, point it at your Beat Saber installation, and install the standard mod set. From there you can search and install custom maps in-game.

I don’t have too many other useful links for you, but r/beatsaber on Reddit is pretty active and good for asking questions that haven’t already been covered by that subreddit’s wiki.

[0]: https://www.cablematters.com/blog/Virtual-Reality/oculus-que...

[1]: https://github.com/Assistant/ModAssistant

Perfect. Thanks. I'll try this out on Monday!

I ordered this active USB-C to USB-C cable from Amazon, as it was OOS on the Cable Matters site: 201094-BLK-5m

The Quest 2 works as-is - you can mod it. See these resources:

- Quest dev mode instructions: https://uploadvr.com/sideloading-quest-how-to/

- BeatSaber custom modding instructions: https://bsaber.com/oculus-quest-custom-songs/

- Custom community BeatSaber songs: https://bsaber.com

- AI-generated maps from any uploaded MP3: https://beatsage.com/

BeatSage's results are hit and miss. I've uploaded a dozen of my favorite trance songs - some turned out completely unplayable, several actually worked out pretty well.

> 4. A long USB C cable (or the official one)?

Airlink works surprisingly well and it's so much nicer to play wirelessly. You might need to connect a wireless (AC or better) access point to your computer if your existing wifi AP is in a different room, though.

Thanks for the tip. I'll try it out whilst waiting for the cable.

My computer already has a wired connection to the wifi router (which is a recent AX model), so hopefully it will work well.

I tried Air Link but even with all-wifi-6 hardware and the router sitting 20ft away, the video quality was garbage. I didn’t try to tweak settings too much though, maybe there’s some magic trick.

I started with the official cable, but honestly, it's not teenager proof and it's expensive to replace when the USB-C connector on the end is ripped out vigorously.

I'm now using an active booster one from Amazon that was about £20.

Do you play the PC version via quest link? Wondering how it performs given the unavoidable latency bump.

I use the wired link. Compared to a Rift CV1, latency is a bit higher but not by much, and it’s easily adjusted for in Beat Saber’s settings.

how do you download these custom DLCs for the Oculus?

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