Super Mario 64 100 Coin Stars: Every Course Ranked by Margin

Fifteen of Super Mario 64's 120 Power Stars are just "get 100 coins." That sounds like the filler objective of the game, and in Tiny-Huge Island it basically is — the course contains 192 coins, so you can ignore a third of them and still clear it.

Then you load Jolly Roger Bay, which contains 104 coins total. Four spare. Miss one blue coin and the run is dead, and the game will not tell you. You will finish the sweep at 97, stare at the counter, and start over.

That gap is the whole story of the 100 Coin Star. It is trivial in nine courses, annoying in four, and a genuine routing problem in two. Here is where every course actually sits.

How the 100 Coin Star actually works

The mechanics are simpler than most guides make them, with two details that matter a lot.

The counter is per entry, not cumulative. Coins reset when you enter a course. Die, and you are ejected to the castle and start from zero. There is no partial credit and no saving your progress at 70.

The star does not eject you. This is the one people get wrong. Every other Power Star in Super Mario 64 completes the level and dumps you back in the castle the moment you touch it. Per the Super Mario Wiki, collecting the 100 Coin Star lets Mario stay on the map. So the optimal play is: sweep 100 coins, grab the star it spawns, then keep going and pick up a mission star in the same trip. Two stars, one entry. Routing your 120-star run around that is worth several minutes on its own.

Coin values, because the arithmetic is the entire skill here:

Eight red coins is 16, which is why the red coin mission is almost always the star you pair with the coin sweep. A single blue coin is worth five yellows — the equivalent of five separate pickups scattered across a mountain.

One more thing worth knowing: the save file's per-course coin record caps at 255. Collect more than that in a single entry and the number stored is 255 or lower. Nobody does this by accident, but it is a real ceiling.

Every course ranked by how much slack you get

Coin totals below are the Super Mario Wiki figures for the N64 original, sorted by how many coins you can afford to miss. The right-hand column is a curiosity: the game never names these stars — the Wiki notes they are not tied to a mission at all — but Nintendo's own Super Mario 64 Player's Guide gave every one of them a title anyway.

That is 2,092 coins across the 15 courses. Worth flagging: Nintendo's own printed count came in lower — the Player's Guide lists 2,068 — because a handful of coins in Hazy Maze Cave, Wet-Dry World, Tiny-Huge Island and Snowman's Land were missed or considered unreachable at the time. Counts still differ by a coin or two between sources on those specific courses, so if your total is off by one somewhere, you are probably not going mad.

The four courses that will actually stop you

Nine of the fifteen give you 39 or more spare coins. You can wander those, miss things, and still trip over 100. These four you have to think about.

Jolly Roger Bay: 104 coins, 4 to spare

The hardest 100 Coin Star in the game, and it is not close. With 104 coins in the course you get a four-coin error budget for a level that is mostly underwater, mostly dark, and full of things that kill you instantly.

Rules for surviving it:

• Every blue coin is mandatory. Blue coins are worth five each, so dropping a single one costs more than your entire margin.
• Do not fight the eel. Unagi does not drop coins. He drops your air meter.
• Clear the cave. The ocean cave to the west has coins and the falling triangular columns that squash you. Take it slowly and early, while you still have full health.
• Coins double as your air supply. Underwater, coins restore health, which underwater is oxygen. In a course this tight you are collecting them anyway, but sequence them so you are never far from the next one.

If you are at 96 with nothing left in the water, the run is over. Pause, exit, restart. That is not a failure state you can grind past.

Dire, Dire Docks: 106 coins, 6 to spare

Six coins of margin, and the same underwater problem. The saving grace is that Dire, Dire Docks is small — two areas connected by a tunnel with an air pocket in the middle — so a full sweep is quick. The whirlpool in the first area is the main way this run ends badly; it will drag you in and cost you a life, and a life costs you the entry.

Do this one after you have cleared "Board Bowser's Sub." The submarine becomes inaccessible once Bowser in the Fire Sea is done, and having the room laid out in its final state means one less variable.

Snowman's Land: 127 coins, and you must go inside

127 coins looks comfortable until you see the split: 89 outside the igloo, 38 inside it. You cannot reach 100 on the exterior alone. The igloo is not optional flavour, it is 38 coins you are required to bank, and it is easy to forget it exists.

Tick Tock Clock: 128 coins and a clock hand decision

Tick Tock Clock is the only course whose physics change depending on how you enter it. The clock hand position when you jump into the painting sets the speed of every moving part, rounded to the nearest quarter hour: 12 stops all mechanisms, 3 runs them slowly, 6 makes them random, 9 makes them fast.

For a coin sweep, entering at 12 is the obvious call — frozen platforms, frozen pendulums, no randomised conveyor. The trade-off is that a few coins sit on things that only move if the clock is running, so you may need a second, slower entry rather than a frozen one. With 28 spare coins you have room to choose.

Blue coins are the whole ballgame

If you take one habit from this post: hunt blue coins first, yellow coins never. A blue coin is five coins. Five yellows are five separate trips.

Blue coins come from two places.

Blue Coin Blocks. Ground pound the block and a set of blue coins pops out. Whomp's Fortress has one in the small area at the bottom of the downward ramp from the upper fortress. The Player's Guide naming three of the fifteen stars "Blue Coins in the Haze," "Blue Coin Collecting" and "Blue Coins atop the Maze" tells you how central Nintendo considered them in Hazy Maze Cave, Wet-Dry World and Rainbow Ride.

Enemies. Plenty of Super Mario 64 enemies drop a blue coin on death — Koopa Troopas, Piranha Plants, Boos, Mr. Is, Bookends, Pokeys and the small Koopa Troopas among them. Grand Goombas drop one when you ground pound them. In Big Boo's Haunt, clearing the Boos on the way through is worth a huge chunk of the 151 total, which is exactly why the Player's Guide called that star "Beat the Boos!"

The nasty exception: in the N64 original, Cool, Cool Mountain and Tall, Tall Mountain contain blue coins that slide away from Mario as he approaches. They are individually programmed to run. Approach them from downhill or cut them off against terrain rather than walking straight at them. (The DS remake keeps only the Cool, Cool Mountain version.)

The courses where 100 coins is basically free

Tiny-Huge Island (192). The most coin-dense course in the game by a wide margin. The split is 158 on Huge Island and 34 on Tiny Island, which means Huge Island alone contains 58 more coins than you need. Enter through the huge pipe, never shrink, and sweep. Wiggler's cave adds red coins on top.

Cool, Cool Mountain (154) and Wet-Dry World (152). Wet-Dry World is 107 in the main course and 45 in the town, so the main area alone gets you there — with the water level raised, the coins on the high ledges become walkable pickups instead of platforming challenges.

Big Boo's Haunt (151). Coins come to you here, because the enemies are the coin source. Kill everything.

Bob-omb Battlefield (146) and Rainbow Ride (146). Bob-omb Battlefield is dense enough that it usually falls out of a red coin run plus a lap of the mountain.

Lethal Lava Land (133) deserves a footnote: 107 of its coins are outside and 26 are in the volcano interior. The exterior technically clears the bar with seven to spare, but seven coins of margin on a lava course is not margin. Go inside.

When the star spawns somewhere you cannot reach

Here is a real failure case that catches people. When you collect the 100th coin, the Power Star spawns a fixed distance directly above Mario, with no exceptions — the game does not check whether anything is in the way.

Hit 100 in a low-ceilinged room and the star materialises inside the ceiling, where it can sit permanently out of reach. The Super Mario Wiki documents this as a known glitch, not a rumour. Practical fix: when your counter is at 95 or higher, get outdoors or under open sky before you take the coin that tips you over. In Hazy Maze Cave and the Wet-Dry World town, that is a genuine planning constraint rather than a curiosity.

The 192nd coin nobody could get

Tiny-Huge Island has 192 coins on paper. For most of the game's life it had 191 in practice.

One coin in the Tiny Island area sits just below the floor geometry — a placement error, almost certainly a coin the developers meant to put above ground. It was catalogued for years as the Impossible Coin, and per sm64.com it was not obtained until a tool-assisted attempt on 23 July 2014, using a jump timed immediately out of the water. Eighteen years after release, one coin.

It changes nothing about your 100 Coin Star. It is just the most Super Mario 64 fact in Super Mario 64: a game whose community counted every coin in every course and then spent a decade arguing about one of them.

Super Mario 64 DS changes the math

None of the numbers above transfer to the remake. Three concrete differences:

• The 100 Coin Star is a separate eighth star. On N64 it occupies one of the seven star slots per course. On DS each course has seven mission stars plus a 100 Coin Star, which is a chunk of why the total goes from 120 to 150. The full version breakdown is here.
• Coin totals went up, sometimes enormously. Whomp's Fortress goes from 141 coins to 213 thanks to the new platforms circling the base of the fortress. Jolly Roger Bay goes from 104 to 128, which single-handedly defuses the hardest 100 Coin Star in the original. Big Boo's Haunt goes from 151 to 160.
• Some coin behaviour was removed. The sliding blue coins in Tall, Tall Mountain are gone in the remake; only Cool, Cool Mountain keeps them.

The figures in this post are the N64 original, which is also what you are playing in Super Mario 3D All-Stars and in the Nintendo Switch Online N64 app.

If you are still working out which courses are even open to you, start with the Super Mario 64 beginner guide. If the underwater sections are where these runs keep dying, the movement guide covers swimming and the dive cancels that make Jolly Roger Bay survivable, and the secret stars guide covers the 15 castle stars that have no coin requirement at all.

Quick Action Checklist

• Remember the counter resets on every entry and on every death — 100 coins has to happen in one life.
• Grab the 100 Coin Star and keep playing. It does not eject you, so bank a mission star in the same entry.
• Pair the sweep with the red coin mission whenever you can: eight red coins is 16 of your 100.
• Prioritise blue coins (5 each) and the enemies that drop them over chasing loose yellows.
• Ground pound every Blue Coin Block you find, especially in Hazy Maze Cave, Wet-Dry World and Rainbow Ride.
• Treat Jolly Roger Bay (104) and Dire, Dire Docks (106) as no-mistake runs; every blue coin in Jolly Roger Bay is mandatory.
• Go inside the Snowman's Land igloo — 38 of its 127 coins are in there and you cannot hit 100 without them.
• Enter Tick Tock Clock with the hand at 12 to freeze the mechanisms for a safer sweep.
• On Tiny-Huge Island, stay huge: Huge Island alone holds 158 coins.
• Above 95 coins, get under open sky before taking the next coin — the star spawns a fixed distance above you and can lodge in a ceiling.
• Do not use these totals on Super Mario 64 DS; the remake adds coins and makes the 100 Coin Star a separate eighth star.