I've split Guigui's post and the ones after it from namida's Lemmings Plus Series topic and merged them with the Lemmings Redux one, since the posts discuss Lemmings Redux instead of Lemmings Plus

Quote from: Proxima on May 19, 2025, 12:21:14 PM

Quote from: kaywhyn on May 19, 2025, 11:10:22 AMFor example, this is what makes it possible to complete the WAFD (We All Fall Down) levels with only two diggers in NL, but if I'm not mistaken, the 2 digger solution on Dos is impossible. Instead, I believe it takes a minimum of 3 diggers to complete IIRC?

3 for Fun, 5 for Tricky, 7 for Taxing, 9 for Mayhem. Because no cancelling is possible, the best solution on DOS is to crowd the lemmings as tightly as possible into each digger's pit, so you need 1 digger per 9 lemmings (rounded up).

Thanks. I thought the dig cancelling is indeed impossible on Dos, just couldn't remember what you had said before on Discord about that mechanic. Thanks for affirming

Quote from: Guigui on May 19, 2025, 10:51:09 PMThank you for dig cancel dig explanations kaywhyn and Proxima. Now for sure I'll clear We All Fall Down's faster.
Certainly this might make it possible to save 100% on I Am A.T., this level caused me the most nightmares back in the Genesis days.

There's an interesting special case here in that on ports where you have the extra splat distance, the Lemmings will survive the fall off the platform on all the WAFD levels. Thus, this makes the WAFD levels completely trivial and hence can be completed with 0 skills! In my case, I had the CD that bundled both L1 and ONML together, which had the extra splat distance. I remember just letting a Lemming fall off the platform and to my surprise seeing that he survived instead of splatting!

QuoteOh I did not notice I Am A.T. had a talisman in Redux.
Now that I saw the actual level again, I am not that confident : forgot the pit near the end of the wall, and you just dont have enough digger to dig-cancel through the whole wall pixel by pixel...
Execution must be hard for sure.

Quote from: namida on May 20, 2025, 09:33:56 AM

Quote from: Guigui on May 19, 2025, 11:20:16 PMOh I did not notice I Am A.T. had a talisman in Redux.
Now that I saw the actual level again, I am not that confident : forgot the pit near the end of the wall, and you just dont have enough digger to dig-cancel through the whole wall pixel by pixel...
Execution must be hard for sure.

I would assume you...

Spoiler

dig-cancel to make a staircase they can ascend (without getting anywhere near the pit)?

Indeed, there's a really good reason why I am A.T is the penultimate level of Lemmings Redux! If not concerned with the talisman, the level is easier but still not a lot easier. I definitely remember this taking me a while before I finally succeeded in getting the execution down when I first played the level on an emulator in the 2010s.

The talisman challenge solution for the I am A.T level is essentially the normal solution to it plus what chrisleec728 and namida described in the spoiler thrown into the mix. It is indeed a very difficult one to execute, especially if you do it on ports where you cannot assign skills while the game is paused. This level comes from the Sunsoft rank of both the Genesis and SNES ports, hence why these are listed in the author field for the level, and I do believe Genesis doesn't allow assigning skills while the game is paused, just like Dos. Luckily, you are given a lot of extra diggers. It is really precise, but there's still some leeway so that the 100% solution doesn't have to be super precise all the way through. In particular,

Spoiler

in NL, using the fact that Lemmings can ascend walls up to a maximum of 6 pixels for the staircase and with how you are given a builder to get the others out in case you mess up the staircase near the crowd trapped at the bottom.

Nice, glad to hear you're finding the list helpful, though really the credit goes to the user who sent me that list Also, congrats on solving all of LPI!  

Quote from: Guigui on May 19, 2025, 10:49:19 AMThen kaywhyn gave this nice list of packs sorted by difficulty in the QFK thread...

Nah, the pack list is in the Holiday Lemmings 2024 topic, not QFK

QuoteTook me a long more time to figure out how to save one digger, and finally understood that the "digger cancels digger" trick only work if second digger is close to the first digger by one pixel at most. Anyone can confirm this ?

Yup, that's how the digger cancelling another digger works, by digging 1 pixel on either side of the first one, or right on top of the first digger.

QuoteI'm also wondering what happens if second digger is at a correct position to cancel first, but happens to start digging on an exact frame where first digger steps down one pixel. Cancel or no cancel ? I could not produce this situation yet to test.

In this case, the second digger immediately gets cancelled because the terrain he was going to remove if he had dug was already removed by the first digger. Thus, the second digger falls and gets cancelled, not the first digger. Meaning, in this case you don't see the second Lemming do the digger animation at all and instead he transitions into a faller right away. That being said, digger cancelling does not work for all Lemmings ports or works differently depending on the port. For example, this is what makes it possible to complete the WAFD (We All Fall Down) levels with only two diggers in NL, but if I'm not mistaken, the 2 digger solution on Dos is impossible. Instead, I believe it takes a minimum of 3 diggers to complete IIRC?

@Armani

R1's - As mentioned, your solutions to both of my R1's are acceptable alternatives. Well done, and glad to hear that you enjoyed the "Oh No" level! It's definitely the easier of the two, while my hardest level this time seems to be the "Oh Yes" one, based on the feedback I received from you, Crane, and the user who private streamed my levels.

Spoiler

All 3 of you have said it's due to how there's no floaters/gliders and hence the hardest part is figuring out how to get down safely

@Crane

You didn't have to find another solution for my "Oh Yes" level, since I deem your solution an acceptable alternative, but yes, your latest solution is the intended one for it. Great job! Now that you know what I intended for the level, you can see why your other solution is acceptable  

Also notice that I used a Rainbow Island remix and the ohno5 track by ssam1221 for the Oh Yes and Oh No level, respectively. I knew I wanted to use a remix of an official L1/ONML track for these levels just based on the titles! Also, I think ssam1221's remix is quite nice and soothing and really helps with solving those difficult levels!

---

@Crane & @Armani 

R3 - Those are pretty bad backroutes, though yes, Armani's most recent solution is indeed intended. As such, this was a really difficult brainstorming session on how to fix the backroutes, and after a while, I think I've managed to come up with something that should do it.

V7 is a massive update with the following changes:

• Terrain changes (including more steel)
• -1 jumper, -1 miner, and +1 basher
• RR is now locked and Lemming count increased to 50

Because of the re-design, this does break the intended solution replay of Armani's, and maybe the changes listed in the last bullet point aren't needed at all and that it's not possible to backroute the level under the original 20 Lemming count and the non-locked RR, but well, I've decided to just play it safe and included them in the changelog anyway As a result, the intended solution has become a bit heavier on the precision than I would like it to be, but at the same time it somewhat improves the level IMO. The worry of course is whether the level can still be backrouted! 

@Armani

R1 - For the "Oh Yes" level, it's an acceptable solution, but there was a bit of an oversight on my end, and so for V3 there is a minor shift in the terrain to prevent that sliding to land on the ledge. I haven't verified it, but your heavy timing solution that you used should still work here as well. If it does, that's fine, I'll let it slide and call it an acceptable alternative

edit: Yup, I've confirmed that just a slight tweak is needed to your solution and it still works. So, as mentioned your solution to "Oh Yes" is acceptable. Great job again!

The other change that was made was shifting the fire blowtorch trap at the top to block off your solution for the "Oh No" level. Nice catch there, I didn't account for that!

R2 - Another nice backroute find. For V6, some terrain changes.

R3 - Your solution fails for the V7 of the level Maybe that one is for V6 instead? I uploaded a V7 2 hours ago to fix Cranes' backroutes. 

@Crane

R3 - Ok, your two backroutes weren't as difficult to fix as I thought. For V7, I simply made the wall by the exit thicker.

@Crane

R2 - Ugh, nice find there! Luckily, easy fix with more steel for V5!

R3 - We're nearly there now! V6 is more terrain changes.

@Crane

R2 - Ugh, these pixels that stick out on the pink LPVII Organic pieces have been quite troublesome! Fortunately, for V4 this was an easy fix with a very minor terrain modification.

R3 - This one was a bit more troublesome to fix, but luckily it was easier than I thought. For V5, same as the fix for R2, some terrain modification and along with that the pillars to the right of the exit needed to be shifted further to the right in order to make my intended solution work out again. I did the same with the pillars to the left of the exit in order to keep the symmetry with respect to the exit. Hopefully this will finally stop all cheesy backroutes, but let's see!

Many thanks for all the backroutes you've been finding that I didn't know were possible! That's what I get for having made my levels a few days before the playing phase started and hence not as much extensive testing of my own for backroutes as a result!

Quote from: Guigui on May 02, 2025, 09:55:55 PMThank you for your input Armani. Now your name is definitely associated with tough levels for me.

I could for sure use some recommendations for packs with different levels of difficulty :

* easy and fun : playable for my 10ish years old kids
* moderate difficulty : need to think, but can figure out the solution in a matter of minutes.
* harder : where I begin to struggle, like this Holiday Lemmings 2024.
* too hard for me yet : where I wont find the solution without hints, frustrating.

As promised, here's a list a user was generous enough to send me that has the packs separated into the 3 categories you mentioned, which I pretty much agree with them on where they're listed!

* easy and fun : playable for my 10ish years old kids
Lemmings New Worlds
Lemmings Faithful
Lemmings Plus I
Holiday Lemmings Plus
Gronkling's Animal Pack (Easy difficulty)
Geofflems
Mazulems

* moderate difficulty : need to think, but can figure out the solution in a matter of minutes.
Lemmings Plus II
Lemmings Plus Omega
Lemmings Plus VI
Sublems
Blizzard of Lemm
Mobilems
Lemmings in Weirdyland
Deceit's Lemmings
DoveLems
PimoLems
Insane Steve's World

* harder : where I begin to struggle, like this Holiday Lemmings 2024.
Fiat Lem
Festival Millas 2023
Festival Millas 2024
Lemmings Cranium
Lemmings Plus III
Lemmings Plus IV
Lemmings Plus V
Lemmings Plus VII
Quest from Kieran
SEB Lems
MegSEGAbytes
Zemmings Complete
Lemmings Migration
Lemmings Destination
Revenge of the Lemmings

* too hard for me yet : where I wont find the solution without hints, frustrating.
Lemmings Uncharted
Lemmings United
Lemmings Reunion
Gronkling's Animal Pack (Hard difficulty)
LemRunner
Lemmings Plus Omega II
Lemmings Plus Alpha
Mike's Lemmings V2
NepsterLems
Clammings
Artlems

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The user who sent me the list hasn't solved all of these packs, while I have played and solved all of the packs listed except for FM2024 (haven't started that one yet), but yea, I think this list is quite accurate! [/list]

Quote from: Guigui on May 08, 2025, 11:10:02 PMFor instance Star Trek was a real road block and I had to watch 56 minutes of kaywhyn trying to get them Lemmings up there to get burned at the correct timing ; this kind of relieved to me to think that if kaywhyn struggles, then I am allowed to get stuck.

Of course you're allowed to get stuck! It will happen, especially with hard level packs, and it happens to everyone at some point or another! Honestly, it amuses me that people are surprised whenever I get stumped on a Lemmings level. I get stumped all the time! Really, me getting stumped on a level is no different anytime someone gets stuck on a level. At least it shows that I'm human and not just someone who possibly (I don't, by the way ) has all the answers/solutions to every Lemmings level.

While people have noted that I have the uncanny ability to solve level packs much faster than the amount of time it takes the author to create the pack, there's still the rare odd Lemmings level here and there that I get stuck on for a really long time. This of course is very rare for me, but there are those levels out there that I found difficult but some others didn't and are able to figure out faster than me. For example, NepsterLems, one of the hardest level packs available that sticks to just the classic 8 skills, still took me 3 years before I finally beat all of it, all courtesy of Black Hole 1. Yet, there are packs far harder than it which didn't take me anywhere near that long (Lemmings United, Lemmings Uncharted, DavidLems, etc.) to solve. Back then, when I was pretty new to NL, I generally switched between packs, but I always eventually kept coming back to the levels that stopped me dead in my tracks and kept trying until I finally succeeded in solving them. Sometimes it still takes me a while, yet other times sometimes a brilliant idea comes to my mind while I've been away which I hadn't tried before that might help. Sometimes getting away and putting a level aside can help spark that aha moment! At least for me a lot of the time that has been true.

Another thing I sometimes do is save an image of the level to my phone and then sometimes staring at the level that way helps me figure out the level. 

I just happen to be one of those people who's possibly way more enthusiastic about the game of Lemmings than most here. As Icho mentioned in the NL Intro Pack topic, the best way to get better with solving levels is to just play a lot of packs. For example, back when I was a high schooler, I played a lot of Dos 10-level Lemming packs in order to gain some experience so that eventually I could make my way up to later playing custom level packs on other engines (Lemmini, SuperLemmini, NL, etc.). Solving all of those Dos packs definitely helped me a lot here IMO! Especially as I saw and learned a lot of tricks that I had never seen before and would be able to apply when solving bigger custom level packs.

Does learning these tricks make them automatic? Not necessarily! Knowing them is often just half the battle. One still needs to be able to spot their potential usage when solving, and that's not always easy to see depending on the level. The hardest custom levels generally hide the solutions really well.

In the time you've been here, you might have noticed that custom level packs generally tend to be far harder than the official Lemmings games. Not all of them, of course. There's still some easy packs available that stay close to the difficulty of L1/ONML, but there currently aren't many that do. I'll post a list that a user was generous enough to send me separated into the 3 categories you listed in the HL2024 topic    

Well, this is very awkward. I committed a foul with my R2! My R2 was ineligible due to it having a laser skill, and I didn't catch myself! And I came up with the R2 ruleset too! Wow, my age is definitely showing. I apparently can't remember my own ruleset! Guess I was too excited about getting my intended solution to work with the level idea I had in mind for my R2 that I didn't realize I was using a skill that's not allowed for R2!

Anyway, I've now uploaded V3 for my R2 that fixes the issue that made it ineligible and makes it now eligible. Luckily, it only needed a slight reworking which still somewhat retains the spirit of the original solution I had in mind. I can't say the same about whether I've succeeded on blocking off all the backroutes yet, though one solution I've been sent about two hours ago was the intended way for the original ineligible level. Let's see, though!

In any case, thank you very much to the user who notified me of the ineligibility of my original R2 level!

edit: In my excitement to get out a fixed version of my R2 to fix the ineligibility issue of the level, I forgot that my R3 needed a backroute fix as well as a solution I was PMed is a slight backroute. So, V4 of my R3 has been uploaded now in the update topic! For V4, the only change is more green square blocks added.     

@Crane

Nice backroute finds with my R2 and R3!

R2 - More steel for V2! The rest of it was some tidying up I decided to do to make the level look better!

R3 - For V3, extended the steel structure and shifted the platforms several pixels up.

@Crane

Acceptable solutions to my R1's! Nice job! More technically, for the "Oh Yes!" level, some of the skills are used differently from the intended one and is probably just slightly more complicated than the intended way, while for the Oh No! one, that's essentially the intended solution, you simply managed to do it more efficiently than mine. As such, if I wanted to, in an update I could simply cull the leftover skill you spared in the latter, but for now I'm just going to leave it in as long as no new backroutes show up for it!  

Quote from: Crane on May 12, 2025, 01:02:48 AMHehe, happens to the best of us.  But you know I want to see you on YouTube playing through my levels now!

Sorry, I'm way past the point of playing contest levels on video in real time now. I can certainly understand your want of people doing this for your levels because of the thrill of playing levels where one doesn't know the solution ahead of time and playing them in real time, though! Even though I don't have that much experience of being in the position of the author watching people stream my levels, I have seen people play them in real time, and hence I have done some of the things people do while watching one's levels get played on video. For example, I've reacted with surprise when people get stumped on my levels because I didn't expect them to, chuckling here and there and being touched by some of the commentary/remarks the LPer says about my levels while trying to figure them out, etc.

I of course still LP custom Lemmings level packs!    

QuoteBy the way, you might have accidentally put in a random panel of rock in the bottom left corner of your Rule 1 pair of levels - it looks very out of place.

Thanks, I've fixed that now and have reuploaded the correct files in the update topic. I honestly don't know why or how that happened. There have been times when I'm sure I've clicked on a piece in the editor only to not see it appear in the visible portion of my screen at times, so that's likely what happened here.

Updated the pack to include V2's for my R1's and R3.

@Crane

All backroutes as you might have guessed.

R1 - Man, apparently sometimes I really go overboard with the decoration and it ends up doing me in because they can be used to backroute my levels! For V2, added traps.

R3 - This is what I get for changing my mind at the last second to not leave an open wall, but only because I later decided that the way I had the level designed I thought it didn't look good! Well, to compensate, for V2 luckily I can add a trap behind the crowd at the start!

Once more, no new levels/additions yet, but another update just to say now that all rank names of the pack have been decided, I've that finally allows me to move all the levels I've made for the pack into rank folders! Of course, as it's still very early in development, I've put them roughly based on my own judgment of how difficult I think they are. I've attached a screenshot of how my level pack currently looks in the NL player I'm simply one of those who likes taking baby steps!  

I've heavily modified the OP with the following:

- Changed the topic title to now indicate how many levels have been completed for the pack (12/125)

- Along with the above, I've included the number of levels completed per rank. Check the OP, but I can also reproduce here:

                Rank 1 - Vague - 0/25
                Rank 2 - Hazy - 5/25
                Rank 3 - Clear - 4/25
                Rank 4 - Lucid - 1/25
                Rank 5 - Vivid - 2/25

- The Sega special level is now in the 5th rank, similar to what Lemmings Redux did with having a Sega level as the special graphics level for the 5th and final rank. I have Proxima's blessing to use his Cheapo AWESOME set to make an AWESOME special graphics level for Lemmings Memories' 3rd rank. Thank you!

- Side-by-side comparison of the first draft of Bubble Trouble and its improved version. Not sure why I didn't do this before, when I did so on Discord!

I'm hoping to make more progress on this soon-ish, especially as I've gotten some more level ideas lately from having played through L2. Perhaps the same will happen when I play through L3!