Removing Too Much Stepping Stones is fine. Derailed Level kinda does this kind of route better, anyways.
Thanks for the opinion! I'd leave it to you whether to keep or remove Too Much Stepping Stones.
As I wrote above, the considerations to cut levels are mainly to improve how level authors appear in Lix. If we cut Too Much Stepping Stones, lemforum will still have many excellent puzzles by you across all difficulty levels.
I personally think Derailed Level is late-Daunting to mid-Vicious, but yea this type of solution is odd and plays well with the way my mind thinks as a player.
100 % agree that the fundamental idea isn't too unnatural, and would fit well into late-Daunting to Vicious. My reason for late-Vicious to early Hopeless: Even if you know the main idea of Derailed, it's
still hard to make it work and tie all ends together. Last week, it took me a few evenings to re-solve it after ~6 years even though I remembered the main trick. The skillset is scarce.
PS: Ferry Tale is way too hard for Lovely. I'd put it in Cunning before Lovely, but late Quirky feels right?
Quirky or Cunning is conceivable, yeah. I've just made Ferry Tale even harder than it had been: I've fixed the cluster-then-bat backroute. See attachment: Now, we must save 5/5 (was 5/10) with 0 blockers, 0 batters (were 1 and 1) and instead builders 2 -> 3. Terrain is identical to how it always has been since 2012.
This is now in Lix 0.10.2. It still sits in Lovely. We'll uprank it within the next few weeks, as soon as we have a plan for it.
From the start, build towards the crane, with the aim of containg the crowd here. The bridge takes a while, and some lix will slip by.
The 2nd-to-last lix that slips over the unfinished bridge will bash, hit steel, and turn. The last lix that slips over the unfinished bridge will be the worker.
At the end, bash the initial bridge to free the crowd.
-- Simon