[Hard-Very Hard][Challenge/Playground][KS+] Azure Serenity: The Salty Seas

Hello Shreeps,
After several weeks of break, I came back to your level to try to finish it
First I want to tell you that I am a fan of your levels and that I have finished all the others that you have done. I like everything about your levels in general, the intelligence of the level design, the giant maps, the visual beauty of the levels and the music you associate with them
But in this one the joy turned into frustration. I already found the fight against the silver priestess to be lunatic, but then after... impossible for me unfortunately to continue. And it's a real shame because I would have liked to discover more, so really it is frustrating for me 
I'm an average player and I can't stay an hour to go through a screen (it's stupefying) knowing that there are still 10 screens like that behind...
Sorry to send you this negative review, but I'm really disappointed that I can't finish a level because of the difficulty, especially when it's a level that I love. In any case, congratulations for the titanic work you put into creating it. Thank you and I hope I wasn't too harsh with you 
To conclude: excellent level but to be reserved for very strong players

Out of curiosity, where did you get stuck? After clearing Chapter 1, it should be mostly open world stuff. Not much that really has an insane level of difficulty like the Silver Priestess. Unless you actually made it to the final part of A Midnight's Wander, but it's almost impossible to get there without external help.

Hello kilicool64 
I'm in a secret room that I discovered while exploring the vagabond pad, after knytt nightmarre. There is a first passage on the left ceiling, visible with the eye. While exploring the right ceiling I found a second one; it leads into a cave, it's Shreeps' forge. The level is so gigantic that by taking breaks I don't even know what I did before and what I still have to do. Moreover I was too lazy to take notes... In short, this is where I gave up
For the moment I'm leaving it on pause and maybe I'll start again later, or I'll start it again from the beginning by taking notes, but for the moment I don't have the courage and the time lol. I prefer to do smaller levels for the moment, which doesn't prevent me from being stuck in some of them because of a jump that I have difficulty to do  (Adam C- Nexus, Trey Azur - find the treasure, ect...) 
Indeed, thanks for your help 

Hello kilicool64 
I'm in a secret room that I discovered while exploring the vagabond pad, after knytt nightmarre. There is a first passage on the left ceiling, visible with the eye. While exploring the right ceiling I found a second one; it leads into a cave, it's Shreeps' forge. The level is so gigantic that by taking breaks I don't even know what I did before and what I still have to do. Moreover I was too lazy to take notes... In short, this is where I gave up
For the moment I'm leaving it on pause and maybe I'll start again later, or I'll start it again from the beginning by taking notes, but for the moment I don't have the courage and the time lol. I prefer to do smaller levels for the moment, which doesn't prevent me from being stuck in some of them because of a jump that I have difficulty to do  (Adam C- Nexus, Trey Azur - find the treasure, ect...) 
Indeed, thanks for your help 

I assume you're talking about Shreep's Fungeon? That's a bit surprising. It's a relatively linear place that mostly focuses on challenge. But if it helps, I went through it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBqhIKMxwTY
But yeah, if you feel like doing smaller levels for the time being, then it definitely makes sense to put this on hold, since it's as far away from those as it gets.

Yes that's it. My last save is just before "Shreep's Fungeon". I saw in your video that there are still a lot of things to discover and places to go
I'm putting it on hold for now, keeping my backup and coming back to it a little later
No need to lie to myself, my capitulation with the level is also due to general fatigue in my real life.
Thank you for your help and encouragement ;-)

A few days ago, I asked Shreeps if he still had that ancient beta version of Azure Serenity that he uploaded in 2008. He didn't have that particular version, but he gave me the oldest one he could find. I had permission to share it, so I uploaded it here: https://knyttlevels.com/levels/Shreeps%20-%20AncientAzure%20Serenity%20BETA.knytt.bin I also did a playthrough of it, though only the first part is really worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgelo2d1gFQ&list=PLPY6G2hmt_KpcG4bg_1HZ02bPiL0aWVov&index=1

It's apparently somewhat older than that beta, but it gives the impression that Shreeps was getting ready for a release. Although many screens are quite obviously unfinished, exits that lead to unimplemented parts of the level are usually sealed off, with exception of those in the Valley of the Frozen Moon. There's also a part where the level basically sends you on a tour through all the zones whose placement was not yet decided before ending. So it's actually relatively playable despite its roughness. There's plenty of interesting stuff in there for those curious about the history of this level.

One thing Shreeps remembered that set the version he released apart from this earlier one is that it had a zone that used an edited version of the Honeycomb tileset. He wasn't able to contact the author, Karl-Johan Nilsson, for permission to edit it, so he later scrapped that zone. But he sent me two videos from a later version that show how far along it got before that. I don't really want YouTube to butcher them, so I uploaded them here instead: https://www.mediafire.com/file/hl09xdpwau4bgmc/7fe3a9ca8544423c626ecebce24a7cf2.mp4/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/rpy1x0zyfntlgrf/12332b5e06d37919cf9f5a0645182c4e.mp4/file

If anyone still has the version Shreeps uploaded in 2008, it would be great if you could share it. This is not to be confused with the versions from 2014, which are actually finished and were made for KS+.