Terminology

The TETR.IO community, like any community, has several inside phrases other new users may not be informed of. The list that follows can never be completed, but it covers the most common terms you might not otherwise understand. Also see:

• Tenchi's Glossary of most abbreviations
• The Tetris Wiki's universal, if not dated, glossary
• The Tetris Wiki on TETR.IO Trivia
• The Hard Drop Wiki's glossary
• four.lol's search bar (for example, terms such as tki, mko, tst, dpc, and even sd-pc are valid searches in this site)
• TETR.IO itself contains lots of hover text, especially in the CONFIG and the Tetra Channel's various pages

Ingame symbolism

Often times, built right into the game itself, TETR.IO demonstrates forms of nondescriptive symbolism around the UI. Here's some definitions surrounding those.

Zen levelszenlevels

A simple illustration showing the relationship between symbols and arabic numerals.

ZEN levels are usually accompanied by little symbols around TETR.IO. These symbols represent the numerical ZEN level in modified roman numerals. There's a graphic detailing them all to the right.

Once the maximum numeral has been attained, which is unlikely to happen as the closest known player is still many thousands of levels off of that goal, it will loop for infinity.

SOLO optionssolo-options

Shortly before beginning a 40 LINES or BLITZ run, you're presented with a couple extra options to toggle to further customize your experience. These toggles mainly effect the game's visuals mechanically speaking, and there is no recommended default the professional players use. For brevity, the toggles regarding "finesse" have been omitted. Please refer to this FAQ entry from Tenchi for more information regarding finesse.

Hover text goes a long way towards avoiding potential confusion such as this. Please take note of it!

PRO MODEpromode

This toggle is much more noticable and useful in 40L. The "extra info" shown and arranged are as follows:

1. The amount of remaining lines on the board right here. Not shown if playing BLITZ.
2. The total amount of game inputs you've used, as well as inputs per piece.
3. Your finesse combo, a percentage of perfect pieces placed, and total faults.

This toggle was implemented before advanced counter configuration was available, but you can replicate these counters that way instead. For example: if the remaining lines counter on the board is too distracting, but the extra information is helpful, or, if you would like to use these counters in a custom SOLO game, then use this:

• Left counter slot 1: STOPWATCH
• Left counter slot 2: LINES
• Left counter slot 3: PIECES
• Left counter slot 4: KEYS
• Right counter slot: FINESSE

STRIDE MODEstridemode

This toggle impacts many of TETR.IO's animations regarding the game state's beginning, ending, and restarts. Most notable is the inclusion of "tap to retry", making retries near-instant to suit the needs of a "strider".

This toggle also impacts:

• Piece generation.
  • Mainly, the very first piece cannot be one of the S, Z, or O tetrominoes.
• The time it takes for you to forfeit is lowered.
• The countdown uses two shorter steps before beginning, instead of three longer ones.

Network iconsicons

Depending on the active internet connection, several network icons may flash on the left side of the screen indicating various different active issues with the current connection. Here's a chart listing them all and their descriptions:

If you would like to permanently remove these symbols, you may do so by enabling HIDE NETWORK WARNING ICON under VIDEO & INTERFACE in the CONFIG.

Common terms

The TETR.IO community has established several terms to refer to different types of strategies and gameplay, the sort of which can only be sustained in a delayless stacker such as TETR.IO. Here's a jumpstart to some of these terms.

"Plonker"plonk

"Plonking" refers to the act of intentionally tanking garbage lines, sometimes noticeably slowing down or stalling to do so, in order to send reverse-spikes fueled by an enemy's garbage. This garbage abuse is made possible thanks to TETR.IO's "change-on-attack" garbage generation, guaranteeing each line from an individual attack generates in a singular, consistent column, as decided by RNG. A "plonker" may be vaguely defined by a given user's high VS:PPS ratio.(one staple of VS Score involves its factoring of garbage lines cleared - this is why VS score is considered over raw APM) In effect, a plonker is the opposite of a strider: plonkers play matches slowly, pay close attention to incoming garbage, and keep a low field.

"Strider"strider

Originally a Jstris meme requiring an incredibly specific 40 LINES sprint time (one under 26.179 seconds), your inability to "be a pepegon", a versus skill which must be disproportionate to your sprint time, the ability to "hit the stride", and optionally the display of the 🇮🇲 flag on your profile; a strider in today's terminology is used to vaguely define players based on their high PPS:APM ratio. To shorten this down a little: a strider typically plays fast and inefficient, essentially existing only in delayless games such as TETR.IO. "stride" and "strider" are normally used interchangeably, with "striding" usually being the temporal verb to describe any player's gameplay for a given match/round/replay as fast and inefficient.