The reverse levels challenge thread

[finlay]

Minimac, Mayhem 12 is possible – clam completed it the other day.

Crazy 12 can be completed with +4 – 2 climbers, 1 builder, 1 miner.

[Minim]

I had a go at this recently, and I can confirm that I have improved it to just 2 skills. Here's a replay, using 2 additional builders (And also, a basic example of the slider trick  ). 1 skill may be possible, if we expand on this trick, but I'll see if someone else can do that.

[finlay]

the holiday levels are a lot more difficult because less skills have been provided for each level...

in Frost: 1, 3, 5 are possible, 13 requires no skills, and the others are either impossible with the defaults, or hard enough that I can't be bothered trying.

in Hail: 4, 5, 9 are possible, not sure about the others.
I've been staring at 11 for ages, but I think I can only solve it with at least one more digging skill (any of miner, basher or digger should do, although basher would be easiest). You can get to the lower exit with the two miners by letting the first one take half a swing (this is surprisingly difficult to do btw, considering that you guys seem to do it all the time – i had to use the frame advance feature) to get higher up and then mine down again. But you can't use blockers to contain the crowd because you need 100%, so you need to use a digger – except then you can't get past the pole, hence I think 1 basher would suffice to get past the pole. Strictly speaking, this is theoretical and I haven't tried it, but there you go anyway.

haven't looked through the other ratings yet.

[Clam]

I've had a proper look through Fun and Tricky and found a few improvements:

Fun 2 with 4 added skills (2 builders, 2 bashers)
Fun 3 with 8 added skills (1 climber, 5 builders, 1 basher, 1 digger)
Tricky 18 with 4 added skills (2 builders + 2 bashers, again )

On the other hand, Tricky 15 is listed as needing 3 added skills, which I can't match. The closest I could get was 4 (1 blocker, 2 builders and 1 miner). This level doesn't seem to have been mentioned either here or in the reverse level packs topic. I sure hope this score wasn't copied straight over from Fun 1

[Minim]

Tricky 15 is listed as needing 3 added skills, which I can't match. The closest I could get was 4 (1 blocker, 2 builders and 1 miner). This level doesn't seem to have been mentioned either here or in the reverse level packs topic. I sure hope this score wasn't copied straight over from Fun 1

It wasn't. Although it was a little frustrating trying to get the bomber in the right place, I've managed to solve it with 3 additional skills. Using 2 bashers and a builder, I've attached a replay. Also, the first time I defeated Clam Spammer in a challenge!

[Clam]

Well, so much for my powers of observation . You can have an unappetising blue-green cookie too . Still, it's typically good practice to at least report your results rather than just filling in the table, that way we know for sure that it's been done properly.

[finlay]

Indeed, there's quite a lot of results i'd like to know more about in that table....

[ccexplore]

in Frost: 1, 3, 5 are possible, 13 requires no skills, and the others are either impossible with the defaults, or hard enough that I can't be bothered trying.

Reverse Frost 7, 11, 14 don't look that hard.  Actually I've confirmed 7 and 14.  11 doesn't seem to need confirmation.

I've been staring at 11 for ages

It's fairly easy with a glitch using just the original skillset, not sure about more conventional solutions.

[Clam]

Now to remove doubt about some unreported results by rendering them obsolete

Taxing 6 can be done with 2 builders added.
Taxing 7 is possible with the regular skillset.
Taxing 9 is possible with 4 builders added.

[Minim]

Indeed, there's quite a lot of results i'd like to know more about in that table....

OK then, I will tell about the Holiday results that I've recently done:

I've confirmed so far for Flurry that all but 8, 13 and 16 are possible, and I was going to say 12 as well but according to this challenge thread it claims to be possible. May I see a replay of this just to confirm it?

8 is likely to be possible (not with the default skillset though) considering that you have enough time to save at least a lemming and also the fact that you need Clam Spammer's special reverse Taxing 8 100% steel trick. On 13 I used 2 spare builders and 1 digger. Nothing too chaotic at the start, you just had to dig at the right place. For 16 I used 5 spare builders, and also taken the ceiling route to speed things up a bit.

For Blizzard there were quite a few levels that had to be done with more skills than normal. For 2, I have recently improved my efforts to 1 skill. Using another digger, a replay is attached just to clarify.

[Clam]

I was going to say [Flurry] 12 as well but according to this challenge thread it claims to be possible. May I see a replay of this just to confirm it?

Sure. This is actually one of the tougher pixel-counting puzzles you're likely to see, thanks to the lack of builders

[Minim]

Thanks for that well executed solution.

OK, I've done most of the rest of Blitz, and came up with the following results:

3: 7 skills. Using 5 spare builders, 1 basher and 1 miner I used sliding to get some of the lemmings up to the top, followed by building up to a miner's tunnel.
4: 4 skills. I tried all I could to go for less, but can't seem to get lower than 4, primarily because you need 100%.
8: 6 skills. Replay explains what I did.
10: 3 skills. I used 3 extra builders (And some quite precise builder placement too)
11: 13 skills. This was quite a complicated one, as I needed 10 spare builders, a blocker, an extra digger and a floater. This was much harder than it looked...
12: 11 skills. I'm expecting this one to be improved, as I did poorly at trying to manage the slider trick. May need a change of plan though. I should also mention that the exit is buried, so a bomber or a digger could do that.
13: 5 skills. Managed to do this with 5 more builders, I still can't rule out this being done with fewer than this.
15: 3 skills. Works nicely with 3 added blockers.

The ones I'm stuck on are 14 and 16. Also haven't solved Flurry 8 yet, but I'm going to take a break from the '93 levels and work on Frost and Hail, my two rating preferences in Holiday Lemmings.

[finlay]

Blitz 14, "The Undiscovered Country", can be completed with +2, 1 each of climber + builder (remember when climbers are stuck they will start to climb through the rock). I'm not sure if it can be completed with +1 or with the default set.

Re: ccx's replay of Hail 11: oops, missed that. You know when you're so focussed on one solution and being sure it must work that you forget to check other solutions?

[ccexplore]

I worked on Hail a little bit.  In addition to 4, 5 and 9 that Finlay already mentioned, the following levels have been confirmed possible with original skillset:

1, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15

Also, while I haven't actually confirmed, 3 and 14 looks quite possible to me with their generous original skillsets and time limits.

For 6 (the nuking level), I did it with +7 (1 climber, 1 bomber, 5 builders).  One oddity of note with that level is that the entire area underneath the "white line" terrain is steel area, so thanks to the crappy steel-handling methods, you pretty much have to use the blocker to get steel-canceling so that you can take out terrain on the white line (even as the line itself is outside of steel area).

Selected replays attached.

[Clam]

Add Hail 2 to that list. There's just enough builders available to slide up to the exit.

Blitz 14, "The Undiscovered Country", can be completed with +2, 1 each of climber + builder (remember when climbers are stuck they will start to climb through the rock). I'm not sure if it can be completed with +1 or with the default set.

I managed it with +1 climber, thanks to a trick that I don't think has been mentioned in the glitches/tricks threads (and tbh I don't know which one it belongs in). Depending on the positioning of terrain around the exit's trigger area, it's sometimes possible to mine past the exit, without the miner disappearing into the exit, while still leaving intact one pixel of terrain overlapping the trigger so lemmings can exit later. In this case, it works out nicely .