The 0.6-second tick: how input queueing actually works

If you play Old School RuneScape you will hear "tick" constantly: tick-perfect, 1-tick flicks, 3-ticking. It all comes back to one idea. The game world does not update continuously. It moves forward in fixed steps, and everything you do is fitted into those steps. Once the step is clear, most "tick-perfect" techniques stop being mysterious and become a matter of counting.

What is a game tick?

A tick is one step of the game's clock. The OSRS Wiki gives the standard length as 0.6 seconds, and describes actions you make during a tick as starting by the beginning of the next one (Game tick, OSRS Wiki). Between two ticks the game state stays put, however fast you click; only purely client-side things, such as moving the camera, update in between.

Microgrind's drills run on the same step: one tick every 600 ms. Every rule in the drills (when a strike counts, when a ward blocks, when a monster swings back) is decided tick by tick by one deterministic simulation, which is what the rest of this page is built on.

How many ticks per second?

One tick every 0.6 seconds is 1.67 ticks per second, or exactly 5 ticks every 3 seconds. A minute holds 100 ticks, which makes conversions easy: ticks per minute is just 100.

Going the other way is often more useful, because attack speeds and skilling cycles are counted in ticks:

Which tick does a click land on?

This is the part that trips people up. A click does not take effect when you make it. It waits in a queue, and the whole queue is handled at the next tick. In Microgrind the rule is exact: if tick k happens at t0 + k × 600 ms, an input made at time ts is applied on tick

floor((ts − t0) / 600) + 1

In words: the next tick boundary after the click, never the current one. Every click inside the same 600 ms window lands on the same tick, whether it came early in the window or a moment before the end.

Some worked examples, computed with the same function the drills use (times are milliseconds after tick 0):

Two things stand out. A click can wait anywhere from a hair over nothing to a full 600 ms, depending only on where in the window it fell. And a click exactly on a boundary (600 ms) does not make that tick: it is queued for the one after.

In Tick Sense, two strikes inside one window are still a single strike, because the drill only asks whether you struck on that tick.

Aim for the window, not the beat

Because of that rule, clicking exactly on the beat is the riskiest moment. A click 1190 ms after tick 0 lands on tick 2; one at 1210 ms waits for tick 3. Twenty milliseconds of difference cost a whole tick.

So the habit to build is to click comfortably inside the window before the tick you want, not to chase the beat itself. Try it: start the metronome and click, tap or press Space along with it. Each click shows the tick it lands on and how long before that tick it was made.

After every Tick Sense or Ward Flicking run, Microgrind's results screen draws the same thing for your whole run: where in the tick your inputs fell, and the median time before the tick. That sub-tick timing is feedback only. It never changes a score, because only the tick an input landed on is part of the result.

How Tick Sense grades a strike

Tick Sense turns the rule into a drill. A target on tick T needs a strike applied on T, which means a strike made at some point during the 600 ms before it. These grades come from running the drill's own code on its first level:

In the rhythm levels (5 and 6) an early or late strike scores nothing but costs nothing either, and the count restarts from where you actually struck, so one slip does not ruin the rest of the run. Medals ask for 95%, 80% and 60% of the maximum score.

What happens inside one tick

When a tick is processed, Microgrind works through it in a fixed order: first the queued inputs, then every enemy (timers, incoming hits, movement, attacks), then the player's own movement and attacks. One visible result: your melee hit lands on an enemy one tick after your swing. This order is part of the simulation and its tests; the drills that depend on it (flinching especially) are built around it.

How to train it

1. Tick Sense 1: First Beat shows a beat track. Strike while the line is inside a gold box and watch where the strike lands.
2. Tick Sense 2: Back to Back puts targets on back-to-back ticks: one strike per window, every window.
3. Tick Sense 3: Count It takes the track away. Targets are called out as beat numbers and you count the metronome.
4. Levels 4 to 6 fade the metronome out until you keep the tempo, or a 3-tick or 2-tick rhythm, in your head.

If 0.6 seconds feels too quick at first, each level's practice aids can slow the tick to 0.9 or 1.2 seconds. Slowed runs are for practice and do not count for the leaderboards.

Quick answers

How long is a tick in OSRS?

0.6 seconds (600 milliseconds) is the standard length, though busy worlds can run very slightly longer.

How many ticks are there per second?

1.67: five ticks every three seconds, or 100 per minute.

Does a click happen the moment I make it?

No. It waits for the next tick, which can be almost no time at all or a full 0.6 seconds, depending on when in the tick you clicked.