[NeoLemmix] Casualemmings

[nin10doadict]

I probably will swap out the link, yes. And I suppose that the 'waiting a little while longer before posting' does serve the double purpose of giving more time to anybody who is still working through the current version.

[Nessy]

I started working on the talisman challenges today before the update! I have attached my replies below.

Comments

Hyper 10 - Already got this one during my normal playthrough.

Calm 15 - I'm still working on this one.

Perky 7 - I didn't use any diggers or miners but I still didn't get the talisman. I included a reply of this level to check to see if I did it wrong or if it's the actual talisman

Perky 12 - I completed this level in under one minute instead of the 2:30 the challenge wanted and I still didn't get the talisman. I'm I doing the right one? Perky 12 is the Gone For A Dip level.

[nin10doadict]

I may have failed to update the descriptions for the talismans correctly. Often I will write the description, and then create another level or for some other reason change the location of the level that the description was about so the description then lies to you about what level the challenge is actually on.
I'll be sure to iron that all out for the next release as well as check that the talisman challenges all work like they're supposed to.

[Proxima]

Perky 20 makes the game crash for me, with this error: "ObtainTerrain loop on "cattrap:0"". (An earlier level with the cat traps played fine.) Nepster tells me he can't fix this and I should just notify you

[Nepster]

This error occurs when the game tries to load the first terrain piece (with index 0) of the cattrap style, but this piece doesn't exist.
Try to load your level in the editor and click on "Tools->Validate Level" and if issues are listed, then click "Fix all". This should (hopefully) take care of the error.

[nin10doadict]

Odd. Opening up said level in the editor and pressing 'Validate level' shows no errors... I think I might know the problem though. I probably added the cattrap style to the level pack so I could use the cat traps (as the style was originally just that object) and then later changed it by adding the terrain pieces in for Perky 20, but forgot to add the updated version of the style into the pack. I'll be sure to fix this before the next release.

[nin10doadict]

Version 1.1 is out now!
Check the first post in the topic for the updated .nxp and music pack.
I said I would add 5 levels, but I ended up adding 15. Also fixed some backroutes, shuffled levels around, and more.

[nin10doadict]

I've already made some changes to Power Core, but I'll wait to update this level pack until I get feedback on all of the new levels. I'd rather release a fix to all the broken parts at the same time.

[Strato Incendus]

I had played through the first rank of the original version when you uploaded the update, so I did the first rank again. With a few exceptions (one of them being the "Strato style"-level , and of course "Look at them shimmy!" ), I've made it through the first two ranks thus far.

Spoiler

Sewer Rodents. Is it really intended that you can just build over the entire pool of water and fence towards the exit (see my replay in case it isn't clear what I'm referring to)? In my first solution, I sent a swimmer ahead, past the crocodiles, to build a bridge across the last gap, then sent a second lemming over the top and dug at the end. So I needed the bridge to be there first for the lemmings passing through the digger hole to fall upon, otherwise they would have drowned. But on my second playthrough, I found out it is equally possible to just fence through on the right side without reaching splat height next to the exit. In that solution, which is the one in my replay, I thereby just bypassed all the crocodiles, which felt like a backroute.
Super Mecha Death Gators. Couldn't solve this one. The low saving requirement made it appear like one has to use a high release rate and sacrifice some lemmings, but since each crocodile is a multi-trap, a single one of them can snatch all lemmings even at release rate 99. I also considered creating a route over the "Strato was here" letters, but the skills don't seem to suffice for that .
Serve with a smile. Really cool idea, there's just a bit of pixel-precision involved with making sure neither of the platformers nor the builder turns around.
If only they could dig. I get the premise that digging shouldn't be possible, but getting inside a chamber of terrain without any destructive skills at all, without access by water or through a teleporter just leaves me guessing on how this is supposed to work.

Btw, I noticed we tend to give our levels the same names occasionally!

[nin10doadict]

'Sewer rodents' is a very open ended and easy level. Pretty much any route works, and the one you found is pretty close to the talisman solution.
'Super Mecha Death Gators' indeed has some trickery. You will have to sack a bunch of Lemmings, but if 99 RR isn't tight enough to get them through, then that means...?
'Service with a smile' does have some pixel precision, but I don't really see how to work that out. I could just turn down the release rate to take off some pressure, but I think that makes things a little too simple.
'If only they could dig' has a solution that should be evident quickly if you've played this type of level before. If you haven't, then it's easy to forget about a certain tool you have at your disposal that generally isn't useful.

[Wafflem]

I will be streaming Casualemmings tomorrow at 7:30PM EST on Twitch (and the link to my channel is in in my signature). Hope to see you all there!

[Proxima]

Finished the first three ranks. Mostly these are pretty fun, easy levels, with a few exceptions. Some comments and replays:

Perky 8: Express air-evator: Placing the digger correctly is horrible trial-and-error.
Twitchy 8: A fair trade? Yaaaaaaaaaaaaawn....
Twitchy 10: To each his own: This was far harder than the rest of the rank; and in the end my solution didn't use all the exits.
Twitchy 13: Janky devices: If the last bomber is slightly misplaced, some lemmings get stuck in the mesh. I'm not entirely sure why this happens.
Twitchy 14: Me, myself and Lem: Nice cloner level. However, the splitters seemed to add nothing except making it take longer for the crowd to exit.
Twitchy 15: Mount Lemerest: Really tedious. At least there was a bit of a puzzle in that you had to conserve builders. Then the last builder on the right side turns out to be super-precise, with only one possible starting pixel where he won't hit his head and will be able to get up (which you can't see from the skill shadow because you have to turn him with a blocker that isn't placed yet). And finally, just one walker short of saving 100%
Twitchy 16: Hero's proof: Abuse of NeoLemmix's super-lenient steel detection. Feels backroutish, but I can't see any other way to do it.

[Strato Incendus]

Here are my replays of everything I could solve so far - and I still needed some help from Wafflemm's stream here and there .

One general thing I noticed, which is just a matter of aesthetitcs and personal preference for them, but the dimensions of your level with regard to height and width seem to vary a lot, so oftentimes there are grey edges somewhere and the player has to zoom in pretty closely to remove them. To me this makes the levels look more "casual" than they actually are from a puzzling standpoint ; especially the twitchy and hyper levels are legitimate professional stuff, so making the dimensions of the level at least standard screen size in my view would give this pack a much more fitting, "professional" appearance.

When overhauling PARALEMS, I deliberately went ahead and extended the width of each level which had only had a width of 320 pixels before to at least 400 or so, to make the levels match widescreen formats. Luckily, one can move around the entire level within the margins by holding down STRG and drawing a selection box around everything - took me a while to find that out, I had always tried to draw selection boxes just using the mouse before, and since that didn't work, I ended up counting the number of STRG-leaps or pixels I moved each tile when I had to displace an entire section of a level .

Spoiler

Pickup sticks. Great level, this one had me thinking for a while without ever seeming unsolveable and thereby demotivating at any time!
Express air-evator. This is the kind of pixel precision I would avoid, because even after trying several different places with the digger, the lack of success made me believe my solution was actually wrong, when I probably just would have needed a couple more pixels to the middle. I'd suggest you just make the pickup skills on the left 2-3 diggers instead of a single one. The focus of the level according to title and instruction is on the updraft and the gliders anyway, not on getting the single last digger exactly right .
To those who wait. Like Wafflemm, I had figured out a solution to the level long before the final athlete came out, went into fast-forward mode, and wondered why I lost the level ^^. This is the same punishment principle I used on "The Lempire strikes back" where the zombies actually do become dangerous in the end. I believe that lemming is an athlete by virtue of being a climber and a disarmer, so it could actually fulfil a purpose in this level, rather than being a mere troll move towards the ending. So, if you want people to actually use that late athlete lemming, perhaps you should decrease the total number of lemmings so the player can notice the athlete earlier, while still building the path. As both Wafflemm and I experienced it, that single athlete easily gets lost in the crowd, thereby not actually being useful to the level, but only ruining it in the last seconds for a player who has actually already figured out a fair and fine solution.
Hero's excavation. That was a nice one!
Look at them shimmy! Arrgh, so obvious, hiding in plain sight! Judging from the feedback you've been receiving so far, I believe this one could still go a rank higher.
Tricky triangles. I like the general concept of these levels, however in the second iteration (the "reverse" version, "Taxing triangles"), on that largest triangle there's a point which looks as if it were solid terrain, yet the lemming falls through it from above. While a player should know it's possible to slip through thin terrain lines from below, this drop was totally unexpected. Luckily, there's the basher to get out of that pit again, but still it was really confusing.
Super Mecha Death Gators. And that's another one I needed Wafflemm's stream for. With your hint, I had figured out I would have to mesh the lemmings together between to blockers, but then I focused so much on doing this that I ran out of blockers and had no idea what to do with the builders, who always bump their head on the pipe above the first crocodile. Of course, building over them was the very first thing I tried. But putting puzzlepiece A + B together somehow didn't work for me .
If only they could dig. Okay, now I know the nuclear option is always on the table . Can lemmings doing the bomber animation actually survive lethal falls, like in Lemmings Revolution where there's one level where you have to use that trick? At least it eemed to be the case while playing this level. Normally, this problem doesn't occur in NeoLemmix, because while in the air, regular bombers explode right away without the oh-no, and there is no option of timing them exactly to explode when they hit the ground, in order for them to do the oh-no-animation - because there are no countdowns. With the nuke however, the countdown is still there. And I still couldn't figure out why the nuke doesn't kill all lemmings at once, but rather in such an arbitrary sequence.
A fair trade. Yeah, that was a bit annoying. I actually preferred the "make the miner go through"-trick from a later level, since I like to do the same thing with fencers. But doing this for a basher is a lot easier, since stackers can be placed so easily - thus, this causes a lot of clicking which is in the end kind of pointless .
Sewage shaft. This also gets tedious pretty fast. I love using water lifts, and once I forced myself to use them rather than trying to build stoner staircases, it saved me a lot of skills, which made the level more interesting again. Still, about halfway to the top the player effectively knows the drill and it gets old, and there are still a couple of stoner staircases required here and there (which aren't much better than stacker stairs ^^). I didn't even platform over that last gap, because the crocodile's trigger was so far out to the left that I had to use a bunch of stoners anyway, so I just stoned all the way over the entire thing rather than sending another lemming down there. And although 55 stoners is not even over-generous for this level, I think our rough guideline as far as builders are concerned (15-20) also make sense for other skills - especially for those which create only such tiny steps .
To each his own. Another common level title - and I, too, used the same exit for some lemmings, namely the floater and the glider.
Mount Lemmerest. Not super-annoying, but mainly an exercise in economical use of builders - which often minds "rewind the entire level" if you're a single builder short to victory, because that can mean having to replan the entire route. The difference to the other puzzles is that this route only consists of going up, and ocassionally around the protruding edges of the unfavourably shaped mountain. So I ended up bashing through the entire thing and used a bomber to get through the one-way terrain on the right. I still had to send a lemming over there, though, to blast through the tree from the top rather than from the bottom.
Me, myself and lem. At first, the lemming on the left always was a couple of frames short hitting the button, so I'd always lose the climber on the right to the fire trap. The solution was once again to prevent both lemmings from turning around after they were done clone-building.
Trigger finger. Great level!
Getting there's half the fun. Took some time, but never seemed unsolveable, good job!
Frozen factory. Quite a bit of mining and building around just to collect three platformers, but I guess it's all about efficient resource use again.
Operation: Super rescue. Neat! Here we can see how easily the Purple tileset hides its traps, though. You will face that in Pit Lems as well, unfortunately .
Dangit Harold!. This is a funny idea, although there was not much puzzling going on. Rather a lot of precise clicking and rewinding to make sure "Harold" bumps his head at the right places without running into traps, fire, or an abyss. I'd say we should refer to these single-lem up and down-challenges as "Mario levels" .
Take me to the future. This was a lot of back and forth. If all of that action was intended, this one is a true masterpiece!
The joke's on you. This one was just great! I've been on the verge of solving it for a very long time and always was one walker or blocker short. When I did solve it in the end however, I didn't have to use the basher or blocker at all, which felt kind of backroute-ish. Hence, I actually found my approaches which didn't work more interesting . Like sending a floater down the first pillar, turning him around right away and having him climb, while a faller from above gets blown up to create a hole, in which the climber can slip, turn around and build a (s)platform from there, just in time to save the next lemming falling down. Yet, all that nice action isn't necessary because currently, a single bomber at the top suffices to reduce the height of the pillar below splat height - I don't know whether that's intended?
Thou dost ask to much. This is another level where I would have preferred my non-successful approaches to be the intended solution, but each of them would have required another miner. Now I simply went over the top of the level. Also, I just bypassed the radiation completely as if it were a trap, rather than having to use it in some creative way. But perhaps I'm indeed "asking too much" here...
Diving for treasure. Bombing to set the swimmer free, then blocking there, then setting the blocker free. Nice to have to keep all this in mind!
Water-logged woods. This one was real tough, but boy it felt good when I finally found the place where the crowd could do the last basher! Great re-run!

[Dullstar]

Just did the first rank. Not much special to note about it; fairly easy, as advertised, though the pickup skill level was probably the hardest in the rank (though that may be because I for some reason didn't realize for quite some time what the climber was for).
It also took me a bit to think to backwards framestep on the level where the lemmings die near-instantaneously. If I used the restart button they'd die before I had a chance to pause the game.

You might want to check the level that introduces swimmers, though... I'm assuming you were supposed to use the swimmers in the solution (the rest of the introductory levels seemed to force you to use the skill that was introduced) but I was definitely able to solve it without swimmers. (I also solved it using a swimmer, so there should be two replays for that level).

[nin10doadict]

I've been overhauling some levels to fix more backroutes and redesign some of the weaker levels. "Sewer Rodents" for example will still be solvable without swimmers but harder to do so, and "Sewage Shaft" will be greatly shortened to cut out the pointless fluff. The levels will also be getting reordered again; levels like "Pickup sticks" will be moving closer to the end of their ranks.