What are Xbox achievements? A beginner's guide to Gamerscore

Put simply, an Xbox achievement is an indicator that you have completed a specific action, or series of actions, while playing an Xbox game. There is usually a list of achievements attached to any game in its final release on an Xbox platform, but that isn't always the case.

Games that are in beta or early access typically don’t have achievements until they reach their full release, although this again doesn't always apply. Achievements can be added after a game's launch, but the maximum score a single achievement can have is 200 Gamerscore.

If you are signed in to Xbox Live and you meet the requirements for an achievement, you will get a notification. That achievement is now permanently "unlocked" on your profile. On Xbox, it'll appear as an expanding pill-shaped box, usually at the bottom of the screen and coloured with whatever colour you've picked for your dashboard. You will see the name of the achievement, the Gamerscore, and the description provided by the publisher, along with that iconic diamond-tinkly sound if you unlock a rare one.

When you unlock an achievement, you earn Gamerscore. The most common Gamerscore values are 5, 10, 15, 20, 50, and 100, but publishers can assign whatever Gamerscore they want — as long as the main list (excluding DLC) adds up to 1,000G overall at launch.

Microsoft totals up your overall Gamerscore and displays it under your gamertag in a number of places — on your friends list, on your smartphone app, on your dashboard, and so on.

The achievement lists for modern Xbox games will add up to at least 1000G. They can have more than 1000G, and games often expand their achievement lists over time when new content is added, either as DLC or free updates, but 1000G is the minimum.

Older games from the Xbox 360 era can have less than 1000G — Xbox live arcade games from back then can often have 200 or 400G, but by the time the Xbox One rolled around, every game was given an equal footing.

Xbox achievements and Gamerscore are mainly there to give you a record of your gaming achievements to share with your friends — there is no direct use for Gamerscore except bragging rights.

However, if you are subscribed to Game Pass (here's our guide to Xbox Game Pass if you want to know more), you can engage in Game Pass Quests. You can earn Microsoft Rewards points by completing Xbox Game Pass Quests, the majority of which are related to unlocking one or more achievements in specific Xbox Game Pass games. These reward points can be redeemed against future months of Xbox Game Pass, other e-vouchers, sweepstakes entries, or donations to selected charities.

If you see a diamond, and hear a slightly different notification sound than usual, that means you’ve unlocked a rare achievement. Microsoft defines rare achievements as those that have been unlocked by fewer than 10% of people who own that game on Xbox.

Where can I see the achievements for the game I'm currently playing?

While playing a game on Xbox, you can see the achievements for that game by hitting the guide button (the Xbox logo) on your controller. Tab over to the controller icon to see the achievements for your current game in progress.

From there, you can see your "Locked" achievements (ones you have yet to complete for the game) or your "Unlocked" achievements (ones you have already completed). You can select individual achievements to see a larger version of the related achievement image, plus a more detailed view of the achievement's stats.

If you have our TrueAchievements app installed, you'll even see a search icon on this achievement page, which will take you straight to any available solutions submitted by the community for that achievement. Neat!

Some developers make use of Xbox's achievement progression feature. Let's say an achievement requires you to smash all the boards in Forza Horizon 3 or discover 17 different biomes in Minecraft. If you make progress in that achievement, the achievement panel in your guide will show how far you've gotten.

You can select the achievement itself for more details. Sadly not every developer makes use of this tool, so for some cumulative requirements you might just have to keep your own count or keep repeating the task and hope for the best.

How can I delete achievements from my gamer profile?

Sorry, you can't delete achievements from your record. Your Gamerscore is a permanent record of your achievement hunting history, so unless you're planning on removing your Microsoft account entirely, those achievements are there to stay.

Some of our achievement-hunting faithful aim to retain a high or total completion percentage on their record — in other words, they have unlocked most or all achievements in every game that they have played. For this reason we monitor achievements that are broken — "unobtainable" — or no longer available — "discontinued" — so that these players know which games to avoid starting altogether.

It may just be that the game itself or Xbox's servers are slow to respond — give it a few minutes and see if the achievement pop appears. Sometimes, an achievement will pop without the notification appearing over the top of your game in progress — so hit the Xbox Guide button and tab to the controller icon. Open up the list for the game in progress and you will see a list of everything you have unlocked in the current game.

If you have an account with us, you can click on your profile picture in the top corner of our site and click on the looping arrows next to your gamertag — this will kick off a scan of your profile in our servers, picking up any recent achievements you may have unlocked. That menu will refresh with your latest unlock if we've picked up any new ones.

If it really looks like the achievement hasn't unlocked and it's been a while, it might be unobtainable. Your best bet is to search for the achievement directly on our website, using the search feature in the top right of any page. You can either look up the game and see the whole list, or type in the name of the achievement itself to head straight to that specific achievement. As you can see with the Box in a China Shop in Unbox: Newbie's Adventure, if an achievement is unobtainable there will be a little yellow warning flag.

If you think an achievement is unobtainable and it hasn't been flagged, you can contact our hard-working volunteer Game Information team who will attempt to verify and decide whether the achievement needs to be flagged up.

You can compare your achievements with your friends directly on your console. Press the Xbox Guide button and scroll to the people tab, then down to Gamerscore leaderboard.

Xbox ranks everyone in your friends list on their Gamerscore with a rolling month tally. You will see everyone's rolling Gamerscore gain for the month represented by a plus (e.g. +500 means you have added 500 Gamerscore to your total in the last rolling month). You'll also see gold, silver, and bronze awards going to the top three places. You can look at the historic leaderboard among your friends too — press on the current month at the top of the leaderboard and you can select previous months from the list.

Naturally, as soon as you start noticing your friends' scores, you might catch the achievement-hunting bug and want to improve your own. We've got a handy guide to getting the highest Gamerscore among your friends, designed to help out the total beginner.

First off, if you're not signed up with us already, you can register here, for free, in just a couple of clicks. If you register with your Xbox account, you can import any friends from your list that are already registered on site — if they're not here yet, send them the register link above after you've registered and they will be able to add you!

Once you're signed in, you can go to your Gamer Menu by clicking on your gamerpic in the top right corner of any page. Click on the second tab to see all of your friends, their TA Score, and their online status.

If you head back to the first tab and click on your gamertag, you will end up on your personalised home page. One panel on the side of the page shows you your entire friends list, sorted by their TA Score. If you want to take on one of your friends head to head in a race to a Gamerscore total, or to a particular achievement or game completion, you can create achievement hunting goals and choose who you intend to beat.

You can also create your own custom leaderboard — not only can you choose who to invite, but you can choose what everyone is scored by — achievements won, Gamerscore, TA score, whatever you like!

In theory, a game developer assigns Gamerscore to an achievement based on the difficulty of unlocking it. In an ideal world, you'd get 100G for reaching a major game milestone or doing something impressive, and earn 5G for something relatively simple. However, there are no strict rules for this implementation, so it's not always an accurate depiction of difficulty.

Even if a developer sets out to score achievements according to difficulty, they can only assign these values once. Gamerscore is a static value. Yet as games are patched, guides are written, and strategies are discussed, the relative difficulty of an achievement can vary over time. Xbox runs leaderboards between friends based on how much Gamerscore they have unlocked, but with this much randomness and variability in earning Gamerscore, how can it accurately represent how hard a player has worked for an achievement?

That's where we come in. Essentially, TrueAchievements reconfigures Gamerscore into a value called TA Score (TrueAchievements Score), which compares how many people have an achievement to how many people have played a game. This ratio is multiplied by the original Gamerscore value of the achievement to get the TA Score.

Over time this score will change based on the player count and how many of those players manage to unlock the achievement. We add up all of your TA Scores for each achievement you unlock, and that gives you your total TrueAchievements Score — which we also display all over the place on the site if you are registered and logged in.

You can find more detailed info on how and why TrueAchievements was created, and how it works to more accurately measure player success in unlocking achievements, in our article explaining TrueAchievement score.

We recognise that even our more accurate approximation of rarity still doesn't definitively declare an achievement's rarity — some achievements are rare because they are broken, for instance. However, on the whole, we feel our TA Score is a pretty accurate way to measure your Xbox achievement hunting career — which is how we've become the biggest Xbox community site on the planet, with our members competing in leaderboards, setting up personal gamerscore goals, and taking part in site-wide achievement contests.