Celeste Mods: Crystal Garden 1.6 Golden

CRYSTAL GARDEN 1.6 GOLDEN, a high tier 1 modded celeste golden.

First i'll clear up confusion:

The difference between Crystal Garden 1.4 and 1.6 is that 1.6 has a significantly harder room 1 and room 3, now ofcourse if you just simplify the map to just be that, you may think this only makes the map slightly harder to golden, but you would be DEAD WRONG.

This map is HARD and there is no way for me to exaggerate this, in 1.4 r2 was the main difficulty of the map, but here all of the rooms are HARD. In terms of golden consistency, r1 is way harder than r2, and r3 is around as hard as r2, and ofcourse r4 is super chokeable and has the dumbest cornerjump at the end.

This map is NOT COMPARABLE to 1.4 at all. It is not even close.

I think to explain the difficulty of this map, there are 3 different ways to evaluate it:

-- Firstly, the stats and the numbers --

This map has a really hard first room, out of my 15000 golden attempts, only ~300 of them passed the first room (2% pass rate). For r2, i died to the 25% chance at the final input 14 times. For r3 i died to the room a total of 22 times, and for r4 i died to the room 9 times.

Then you have the time stats:
cg1.4: 43h clear, 62h golden
cg1.6: 7h clear, 138h golden

Now, if you take this data by itself, it may look like 1.6 was a 2x time investment compared to 1.4 (counting only golden times). Again, you would be DEAD WRONG.

That does NOT consider the fact that half the rooms across the maps are identical. It also does not account for the amount i have improved since 1.4.

If we try to account for r2 and r4 being identical and try to combine everything into a single time stat, we get this:

cg1.6 + 1.4 r2 and r4 stats: ~47h clear, ~180h golden

So it is actually closer to a 3 TIMES OR 4 TIMES time investment accounting for all of this.

But ofcourse, PLEASE do not just try to think of the map or the golden as a list of numbers, do not try to just understand difficulty from numbers, as i will explain later, this map is an EXPERIENCE, and only taking information from the stats is disregarding all of that. Please.

-- Secondly, the map itself --

This map is made of some of the most jank mechanics and jank gameplay mathematically possible, i strat-finded as much as i possibly could and it was still bad.

r1: The room in general is inconsistent, there is a frame perfect demo, a really tight and annoying down dash on a kevin in the second half of the room, and a super inconsistent ending.

r2) The reverse ultra into the feather is inconsistent, the kevin hit is kinda inconsistent, the ultra after that is also inconsistent, and then the worst offender. The ending to this map is very hard to control as it is dependent on the pixel you hit the final kevin at 2:08, depending on that you have a 25% chance of dying.

r3: There is a frame perfect slow falling demo, and an inconsistent start

r4: Super chokeable and inconsistent room in general, and it ends off with the Hardest series of inputs in the entire map, the final corner jump. It may as well be RNG.

-- Thirdly, the human element --

This is an unfun map to golden, for 99% of the time you are doing golden attempts, you will be looking at the same screen. Every death past that screen will be saddening, everytime you die to something unfair you will feel bad.

This is a Mentally Taxing map, and easily one of the most mentally taxing ones. This adds to the difficulty as well, the fact that you basically have to force yourself to play it to do anything.

This was worse than spending 111k atts on a 15 second gd challenge in a month

The map will feel unfair most of the time, you will mindblock things often, that is just how the map is, there is nothing you can do about it besides using the power of determination and spite.

----

Anyways, thank you for reading this, i wish i could really put all my thoughts on the map itself into words, but i really just cant.

The best way to say this is that the map is an Experience, it is NOT about the numbers, it is NOT about stats or anything similar, it is the experience itself that you must have to go through to understand the map.

You have to play and golden the map yourself to have understanding its difficulty in any capacity, i tried my best to quantify it here but it is still very unreasonable to do so.

I would HIGHLY encourage that you try out the map in some capacity, whether it is just clearing the map, or even doing it deathless!

I still absolutely LOVE this map to death, it has history, it has significance, the map itself has a lot of interesting quirks, it is a puzzle.

I also cant say if this a tier 0, or a very high tier 1.

Crystal Garden - https://gamebanana.com/mods/150652

Golden List - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

Discord tag - seazeiscool
GD name - Shaurya
Twitter - SeazeGD

#celeste