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Offset Calibration

Games, devices and maps aren't perfect, so the music played in a map may not exactly coincide with the inputs received by your PC from your mouse or tablet. That's a huge issue for rhythm games, where every millisecond counts, so offset changes how early or late a song is played to match the song with the inputs. Other maps are hard to calibrate your offset with because the creators of them may not place down notes on the exact milliseconds as in the song, which would lead to varying results across maps. This song is perfectly synced with the map at 180 BPM, so it can be used to calibrate your offset with you being sure that it'll be correct.

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Difficulty descriptions

Simple - These difficulties have you just hitting notes at 180 BPM
Advanced - These difficulties have some varying rhythms to check if the offset is appropriate for the real game

One lane - This category has all notes in just one lane
Switches - This category has you switching lanes after every note*
Mixed - This category has normal gameplay made for the rhythm in the calibration

* - Since switching lanes by itself takes some time to move the cursor over to another lane, all hits done on a lane switch will usually be a bit late. There may or may not be a separate offset for lane switches added into the game in the future, but for now, keep in mind that this will happen.

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Calibration process

While playing a map, take note of the line at the bottom of the screen. The vertical lines on it show how early or late you hit a note. If it appears to the left of the centre - means you're hitting early, if it appears to the right - you're hitting late. How far the vertical line is from the centre shows how far your hit was from the very perfect timing.
You'll notice that most lines consistently fall at about the same spot either to the left or to the right of the centre. When you finish the map, open the settings (either press Ctrl + O or click the button at the bottom of the screen). In there, you'll find a setting called "Chart Offset". If your hits are late, increase that value, if your hits are early, decrease it. Then play again to see if you got it right.
In the previous segment it was mentioned that on the Switches maps you'll always hit later than on One lane maps. There are two ways to compensate for it:
1. Set your offset a bit earlier to have it so on One lane maps you hit a tiny bit early, and on Switches maps you hit the same tiny bit late.
2. Change your cursor sensitivity and keep the cursor near the centre of the screen. This is more inconsistent, but makes hitting consecutive notes in one lane easier, at the expense of making it way harder to hit switches and potentially switching lanes on accident.
You will likely hit a lot of non-perfect judgements, and that's alright, this map's AP value (that determines how strict the timing windows are) is set to 8, which is very high, it is that way to make it easier to see if your offset is way off at a glance without looking at the line at the bottom, though it's still required to do that for more precise offset changing.

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Dealing with other maps' imperfections

Most maps you'll see in this game aren't perfectly timed, and that's normal, it's very hard for mappers to get it right if they're not the creator of the song or they're not told by the creator which milliseconds the notes are at, which is how it is for the vast majority of cases. Which is why on some maps you'll consistently hit notes a bit later, and on others, a bit earlier. But you don't need to change your offset a tiny bit for every different map, you have "local offsets" for that.
After calibrating your global offset with the Offset Calibration map, when playing another map, you'll go through a similar process. Look at the line at the bottom, if you're consistently hitting too late, press + (plus) a few times, if you're hitting too early, press - (minus) a few times. Currently this can only be changed by 5ms intervals, in the future a feature might be added to let it be changed by more precise intervals, but that's not confirmed.

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End

If you're confused about anything, feel free to ask in the comments here, I'll be sure to answer.

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Credits

The calibration song is made by HEXAGON as a custom calibration map for K-Shoot MANIA, you can find its page here: https://ksm.dev/songs/f5fcee60-a31a-11ea-9b78-9b4b93aa67f5



Note: All keybinds in this description are for QWERTY. If you're using an alternate layout (Dvorak, Colemak, Workman, etc), the keybinds may vary depending on your OS and desktop environment if using Linux.