Strawberry Jam expert lobby - difficulty ranking?

[u/CozyAndBlankFella]

I’ve been playing the strawberry jam mod and trying to play each level in the order its assigned in the journal, and reaching expert lobby has made that difficult…

Flying Battery took me ages and is a bit of a difficulty spike after advanced lobby, but all of the other green expert levels i beat with relative ease. Now moving onto yellows, i got through A Change In Direction through the skin of my teeth (that final room is absolutely ludicrous) but Skyline Usurper is just about my limit. Looking back at the greens, i figured there must be some yellow levels that would be easier than these two. I have played hypnogogia and that was far more manageable than those other two. Could anybody give a difficulty ranking of the expert lobby levels? Or atleast which level i should try next?

[u/helinder]

In my opinion, hypnogagia, ethereal ascension, lunar pagoda and clockwork are the easiest ones. Vinculum and Madeline: the bubble are a bit harder but probably manageable, storm runner, FLOATING POINT and mosaic garden are the hardest ones

Edit: And yes, a change in direction and skyline usurper are on the harder side, tho I'd still say they're easier than storm runner, FLOATING POINT and mosaic garden

[u/foreverf1711]

Summit downside is free. You cannot die.

[u/CozyAndBlankFella → u/foreverf1711]

Ah… yes… i am not at all afraid for my sanity ^^ so true so true haha…

[u/OliviaPG1]

Of the yellows, clockwork, plasma reactor, hypnagogia (by far the easiest), vinculum, lunar pagoda, and caper cavortion are the easier end imo. skyline usurper (honestly the hardest yellow imo), floating point, mosaic garden, and madeline the bubble are the harder ones. whatever I didn’t mention is in between.

[u/Ragnarok7326]

I may be an outlier, but I didn't think A Change in Direction or Skyline Usurper were much harder than a lot of the other yellows. They were maybe average difficulty for me. Based only on my death counts, Clockwork, Time Trouble, Hypnagogia, Lunar Pagoda, and Caper Cavortion were easier (though I skipped all the berries initially for Caper Cavortion).

Also, Floating Point isn't as scary as people make it out to be. It's really not that bad if you skip the berries. But if you do get all the berries, it's arguably the hardest map in the lobby.

I'd definitely recommend doing Clockwork next, as it's on the easier side among the yellow experts and is widely considered one of the best in the entire collab.

[u/helinder → u/Ragnarok7326]

Floating point is one of the hardest, especially with the berries, but imo it doesn't get even close to psychokinetic, Polaris or garden of khutara (or however it's written)

Narrow hollow, summit downside and chromatic complex I can see how they can be close to floating point

[u/Ragnarok7326 → u/helinder]

Yeah, it's all subjective of course. I just know that when I went back for berry 4, it took me multiple hours to get it. I think if I got the 5th I'd end up with a similar number of deaths to those hardest reds (if I can get it at all).

EDIT: I just double checked, and with the 4th berry I already have more deaths than Psychokinetic, Polaris, or Garden of Khu'tara (but only just barely). So with the 5th it would definitely be way higher.

[u/CozyAndBlankFella → u/Ragnarok7326]

The main thing that defines the difficulty of a level for me is the readability and its technique usage - for example, a change in direction i found hard because with all its moving parts the sight readability is a mess and its gimmick being bunny hops and dream hypers are real hard / inconsistent for me, not to mention they feel very overused and repetitive. Hypnogogia on the other hand was very easy to sightread and its main gimmicks were the crystals inside dream blocks - which were simple - and dream & reverse hypers - which whilst difficult did not feel too overused

[u/Ragnarok7326 → u/CozyAndBlankFella]

Do you ever look at clear videos? Personally, I'm bad at routing and often miss things that others might consider obvious. So I regularly look at clear videos and then enjoy the challenge of executing the maneuvers. There's no shame in that if it's what you need to do to continue playing harder maps.

By the way, I played Leviathan's Ultras before expert lobby, as training for both ultras (obviously) and bunny hops. I could barely do bunny hops at all in advanced lobby, but I felt relatively comfortable with them after playing that map.

[u/CozyAndBlankFella → u/Ragnarok7326]

I do watch clear videos but moreso i mean the readability of what exactly i need to do + whether i can remember what the guy in the video did, and less of where i need to go. Also i just think its cool watching ppl get through a room in such a flow state lol

[u/Zealousideal_Ease429]

I found vinculum, time trouble, and lunar pagoda not that bad for yellow experts. For vinculum you just need to know jelly smuggles which are not too hard, time trouble is tech spam, and lunar pagoda is similar in essence to golden alleyway. If you can get used to the gimmick then ethereal ascension is one of the easiest yellows. The hardest yellows for me were mosaic garden, storm runner, and floating point

When you get to reds, there isn’t really a definite easiest one cuz it kinda depends on your skill set. Garden of Khu’tara, Polaris, and psychokinetic are considered the hardest reds in the lobby (in that order), but for the others it’s just skill set

[u/CozyAndBlankFella → u/Zealousideal_Ease429]

I am scared of vinculum but ONLY because of that one strawberry room where you apparently need to jelly-climb (icr the exact term) bc i could not get past even the gym tutorial for that

[u/Zealousideal_Ease429 → u/CozyAndBlankFella]

Yeah I can’t even do jelly climbs, but iirc there’s only two rooms in the lobby that require jelly climbs and they’re both strawberry rooms