With any twitch-based online game, be it a shooter, fighting game, or whatever, consistency is more important than speed nine times out of ten. As such, it is important to connect to your router via an ethernet cable. Wireless connections unfortunately introduce much more jitter than a hard connection, and it is impossible to eliminate all of it. Transient jitter will cause the game to slow, causing dropped combos, eaten inputs, and much swearing at the screen from both you and your opponent.

If you're playing wireless, your opponent will notice and will be far less likely to rematch with you. Nobody wants to play in a stuttery connection, so do everyone a favor and wire up. If you need a long ethernet cable on the cheap, check out Monoprice.

Under Night has a lot of great stages, but unfortunately, most of them introduce unreasonable amounts of lag into online play. There are only two stages that have proven to be viable for netplay: Park and Training Room. To choose your stage for ranked mode, first navigate to Network > Start Ranked Match, where you'll come to the character select screen. On this screen, hit the "Stage Select" button. By default, this is U on keyboard, X on an Xbox controller, or □ (square) on a Playstation controller. The marquee at the bottom of the screen will display this, cycling between the keyboard info and your controller info (if a controller is connected):


Stage is set to random select by default; Training Room is up one from random, and Park is down three:


You can also press left and right on the stage select screen to change the music selection for ranked matches.

If you have a friend to play with or find an opponent in ranked who wants to player match, you can open up a room to play as much as you want without having to hunt each other down in ranked mode. However, the default room settings are less than ideal, kicking you back to the room after every match. When choosing "Start Player Match" from the Network menu, you'll be greeted with the following screen:


Here, you can change settings such as password and total players allowed per room, but the more important settings are on page 2:


"Rematch Limit" is the big one, allowing you to change the number of sets you play before you are returned to the room. UNLIMITED, shown in the screenshot above, allows you to continually rematch until one person decides to return to the room or the character select screen.

Additionally, you are able to modify room settings after a room has been created; this is especially useful when matching with opponents from Ranked mode. To modify the room settings, press the J key or your controller's equivalent of the Start button (the marquee at the bottom will show you what to press) to bring up the room settings menu:


"Change Room Settings" (highlighted above) will bring up a condensed version of the "Start Player Match" menu that will allow you to change most room settings.

It can be a crapshoot trying to find matches with random people in ranked mode. Fortunately, there are plenty of Discord communities out there you can use to link up with players in your region. There is also a general Under Night Discord that is highly active, serving as a hub for the greater player base and making it easy to find matches and ask questions. Someone will also be able to point you to a regional server should you ask.

You can join the primary server here: https://discord.com/invite/xF5MFcU

Under Night is a complex game with lots of mechanics an extremely high skill ceiling. On top of that, much of the active player base is experienced and quite strong. If you jump straight into online play with no understanding of your character or even the system mechanics, you're not going to understand what happened when you inevitably get destroyed. There is no shame in losing, but establishing some basic knowledge of the game is key to learning from those defeats. This game has an extensive tutorial and actually useful combo trials. Use them. You don't need to complete everything to have fun, but taking the time to learn a basic combo or two and how your character works will go a long way. Running through Arcade or Survival mode to get a feel for fighting against a moving opponent can be useful as well; just don't expect a real opponent to be as dumb as a CPU.

If you want more in-depth explanations of how the game and the characters work, there is a community-run wiki that will give you pretty much everything you need. As of this writing, there are some pages that are more complete than others, but it is constantly being updated and improved.

You can find the wiki here: https://wiki.gbl.gg/w/Under_Night_In-Birth/UNICLR