Tell me EXACTLY what you did what made you good at Touhou

TD, IN, UFO

credit fed until the lunatic 1ccs, but when it came to lnbs, i spent probably over 80% of my time in practice

(3 months )TD lunatic ->(2 weeks break + 1 week of credits) IN lunatic -> (2 weeks break + 2-3 weeks of credits) UFO lunatic -> (2 weeks break+ 1 month of practice + 1 week of credits) UFO lnb -> ecc.......

watched some strategies for td,but did IN and UFO on my own. Used riri patch for ufo lnb

planned some bombs for a few patterns in TD, went with border team deathbomb window in IN,planned some bombs in UFO for bs patterns and for some spam sections to summon UFOs more easily

In my opinion the single best way to git gud at Touhou, or anything tbh, is to constantly do stuff that is your skill level +1. I started playing Touhou at a level where I definitely should've been playing easy, but stuck with normal (that one was kinda bad though, and I regret it, blame the easy modo meme). Once I beat normal I immediately attacked an extra stage. Then I did a harder one. Then I tried to 1CC SA normal, which felt like the most impossible task in the world. After that was done I tried no-bombing an extra. Got that relatively quick. Then tried perfecting said extra (EoSD). Took quite long but that's due to bad mentality and low overall playtime (45 hours in 3 months isn't much). Then I did a bunch more, got my first lunatic 1CC extremely fast (about 6 attempts and 4 or so hours of practice). Did my first LNB. Also took long because of bad mentality and low playtime (something like 50-60 hours, 3 months too). When that was finished I was in a weird spot since most goals that were interesting seemed either too hard or too easy. If you ever hit a skill wall like that the best thing to do is either grind out patterns for fun for a while, it'll give you a small enough improvement to maybe be able to do some stuff, or try and break a hard achievement that may be your skill +2 into smaller your skill +1 sections. When I did NMNB Junko (had ran out of proper achievements after doing NMNB Byakuren pretty easily), goal that was like +3 above me lol, I went and split that into multiple goals: get familiar with lolk, get good at the rest of junko, try and cap pdh a bunch of times and get a good miss pb on NB phase 3 timeout etc... Micromanage a goal if needed. Another thing I wanna add is that scoring when done at the correct moment is a great tool to improve since most of the game will become tough and require some attention put into it, instead of the usual difficulty of survival. It is a very tough discipline though, only tackle it when ready.

About bombs: I played as the master spark shot types so I used them a lot. That made most of my 1CCs very easy. The only one I had difficulty with was SA normal, and that was because I used Marisa C who's a pure dodge shot and not a ressource management bomb shot, unlike Marisa A. Didn't know about the fact the dolls did good melee damage. I firmly believe all games can be 1CCed with absolutely no trouble provided you do the bare minimum and know how to make the game your little bitch. The only games that can't be abused too bad are EoSD and IN, but for those games all it takes is planning out bombs and routing stuff that's easily routable.

About practice tools: Started using them for EoSD ExNB and ExNN, have used them for everything since. They make everything really fast and efficient. Skips pointless stuff and gets you right to where you need to practice your shortcomings for a specific goal.

All games
First unlock all stages by using credirts then practice + 1cc attempts
Since I've cleared Hard on all Touhou games (except PC-98), now I'm attempting Lunatic.
No, in my opinion, TAS just makes the game from Lunatic -> Hard
First I'll try not to use bomb, where I die most I'll bomb there (unless there's a
trick), but mostly I'll try to deathbomb.