Uploaded April 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Wow, where do I even begin with this.
This is now my hardest Celeste achievement, and gaming achievement in general, surpassing Allegiance in Geometry Dash.
I started playing Celeste at around January 2022, quit for a few months, then really started playing full on in June 2022. I got into modded Celeste after beating Farewell, specifically Spring Collab. I saw the hardest map in it, the New Grandmaster Heartside. I was amazed by how it looked and fell in love with it almost instantly, but of course as a new player, I thought it was impossible and that I'd never do it.
Around that time, I discovered Parrot Dash, one of the top players in the community, and she was grinding NGMHS golden. I watched her streams almost daily, whether live or rewatching the VODs (missed the winning completion live sadly).
Her grind encouraged me to push through SC and not too long after, I beat NGMHS myself. Even then, I thought about wanting to golden it, but I knew it was way too far out of reach, especially because of Flag 2.
My friend Raisha eventually told me something: Flag 2's tornado tech was just 4 backboosts in a row. It's quite obvious in hindsight, but I actually tried F2 way before I reached NGMHS legit (I was in intermediate), so I learned tornado completely wrongly, not realizing they were backboosts. After this newfound knowledge, F2 became much more possible and I could rebeat more reliably.
After completing SJ and doing multiple hard list and golden list maps and playing NGMHS once in a few months, I eventually decided to just go for the golden. This was in mid March 2024. Learning was going well, though F2 still proved to be really difficult, especially tornado and final chain. The rest of the flags felt quite doable, just needed to play them more to get consistent.
When I eventually went for runs, I did quite well. I made it to Flag 5 on my first session, Flag 2 twice on my second session, and then Flag 1 once on my third session. I made it to F1 on my third ever F2 entry (fifth F3 entry), and both my F2 entries died to the first corner boost, before tornado. This meant that I fluked basically everything in F2. This gave me so much confidence that I could do it relatively fast.
Well, it only went downhill from there. A very steep downhill. I started getting extremely unlucky, dying to every flag waaaay too many times. I had 10 deaths to F1, choking every time I got there. My third F1 death wasn't even my fault, I died to the 1/27 chance that you just clip through the jelly. F2 started treating me terribly, especially tornado. It was terribly inconsistent, I had to change the way I did tornado at least 5 times and it still felt completely RNG. The middle (easy) part of F2 also kept killing me, probably due to my nerves. Final chain was surprisingly fine, until it wasn't. It started killing me a lot in the latter half of my grind. The other flags also weren't treating me very well, I kept dying to silly mistakes. F3 in particular had a wall bounce that was quite precise, and I missed it quite often, either going ever slightly too late or early (It was still better than the strat most people used though, for me).
I did so many runs to the end, from F4, F5 and even F6. My F6-end run even ended up becoming a hybrid 0 death.
It felt like a neverending grind. I was starting to lose hope, but luckily I pushed through. On 30 April 2024, I finally got the golden. I ended up having _114_ F3 entries when I finally got it (Reminder that I had _5_ F3 entries when I first got to F1).
Regardless of my astoundingly horrible luck in this golden, I still love this map so much. It's what got me into Celeste, and I'm forever grateful for its existence. I'm so happy I could call this my hardest gaming achievement.
Thanks so much to my friends in The Fridge for pushing me and sticking by my side while I was grinding this. Delta, Raisha, Melted and Bart especially, y'all are awesome! Thanks to Parrot for inspiring me to even get this far, her NGMHSG grind was so fun to follow. And of course, thanks to the Spring Collab team for making such an amazing map to finish off the collab!
Deaths to Flag 5 onwards:
Flag 5 x183 (TH x95, FOTA x88)
Flag 4 x85 (FH x46, AU x39)
Flag 3 x45
Flag 2 x58
Flag 1 x10
Time taken: 114:05:34
----------------------------------------------------------
Pre-flag
0:05 - Intro Room
Flag 8
0:07 - TheHeck90
0:36 - Error 418
Flag 7
0:58 - Tripeak Trail
1:15 - Gem Garden
Intermission
1:37 - Intermission Room
Flag 6
1:44 - Crypt of the Kevins
2:19 - Temporal Tower
Flag 5
2:41 - Theo Hell
3:16 - Forest of the Ancients
Flag 4
3:46 - Fish Hell
4:12 - Aquatic Underground
Flag 3
4:35 - KoKoDoKo?
Flag 2
5:05 - Heart of the Storm
Flag 1
5:50 - Ultra Difficult
Post-flag
6:39 - Outro Room (Flag 0)
7:33 - Fake Heart Room
7:44 - Heart Room
8:05 - Heart collect
Miscellaneous
8:34 - Journal
8:54 - Attempt Count
8:56 - Fun flag 1 deaths!!!
Raw footage: youtu.be/Hr4_yKDWldw?si=NAhLrC0L4zM7A1pM
Wow, where do I even begin with this.
This is now my hardest Celeste achievement, and gaming achievement in general, surpassing Allegiance in Geometry Dash.
I started playing Celeste at around January 2022, quit for a few months, then really started playing full on in June 2022. I got into modded Celeste after beating Farewell, specifically Spring Collab. I saw the hardest map in it, the New Grandmaster Heartside. I was amazed by how it looked and fell in love with it almost instantly, but of course as a new player, I thought it was impossible and that I'd never do it.
Around that time, I discovered Parrot Dash, one of the top players in the community, and she was grinding NGMHS golden. I watched her streams almost daily, whether live or rewatching the VODs (missed the winning completion live sadly).
Her grind encouraged me to push through SC and not too long after, I beat NGMHS myself. Even then, I thought about wanting to golden it, but I knew it was way too far out of reach, especially because of Flag 2.
My friend Raisha eventually told me something: Flag 2's tornado tech was just 4 backboosts in a row. It's quite obvious in hindsight, but I actually tried F2 way before I reached NGMHS legit (I was in intermediate), so I learned tornado completely wrongly, not realizing they were backboosts. After this newfound knowledge, F2 became much more possible and I could rebeat more reliably.
After completing SJ and doing multiple hard list and golden list maps and playing NGMHS once in a few months, I eventually decided to just go for the golden. This was in mid March 2024. Learning was going well, though F2 still proved to be really difficult, especially tornado and final chain. The rest of the flags felt quite doable, just needed to play them more to get consistent.
When I eventually went for runs, I did quite well. I made it to Flag 5 on my first session, Flag 2 twice on my second session, and then Flag 1 once on my third session. I made it to F1 on my third ever F2 entry (fifth F3 entry), and both my F2 entries died to the first corner boost, before tornado. This meant that I fluked basically everything in F2. This gave me so much confidence that I could do it relatively fast.
Well, it only went downhill from there. A very steep downhill. I started getting extremely unlucky, dying to every flag waaaay too many times. I had 10 deaths to F1, choking every time I got there. My third F1 death wasn't even my fault, I died to the 1/27 chance that you just clip through the jelly. F2 started treating me terribly, especially tornado. It was terribly inconsistent, I had to change the way I did tornado at least 5 times and it still felt completely RNG. The middle (easy) part of F2 also kept killing me, probably due to my nerves. Final chain was surprisingly fine, until it wasn't. It started killing me a lot in the latter half of my grind. The other flags also weren't treating me very well, I kept dying to silly mistakes. F3 in particular had a wall bounce that was quite precise, and I missed it quite often, either going ever slightly too late or early (It was still better than the strat most people used though, for me).
I did so many runs to the end, from F4, F5 and even F6. My F6-end run even ended up becoming a hybrid 0 death.
It felt like a neverending grind. I was starting to lose hope, but luckily I pushed through. On 30 April 2024, I finally got the golden. I ended up having _114_ F3 entries when I finally got it (Reminder that I had _5_ F3 entries when I first got to F1).
Regardless of my astoundingly horrible luck in this golden, I still love this map so much. It's what got me into Celeste, and I'm forever grateful for its existence. I'm so happy I could call this my hardest gaming achievement.
Thanks so much to my friends in The Fridge for pushing me and sticking by my side while I was grinding this. Delta, Raisha, Melted and Bart especially, y'all are awesome! Thanks to Parrot for inspiring me to even get this far, her NGMHSG grind was so fun to follow. And of course, thanks to the Spring Collab team for making such an amazing map to finish off the collab!
Deaths to Flag 5 onwards:
Flag 5 x183 (TH x95, FOTA x88)
Flag 4 x85 (FH x46, AU x39)
Flag 3 x45
Flag 2 x58
Flag 1 x10
Time taken: 114:05:34
----------------------------------------------------------
Pre-flag
0:05 - Intro Room
Flag 8
0:07 - TheHeck90
0:36 - Error 418
Flag 7
0:58 - Tripeak Trail
1:15 - Gem Garden
Intermission
1:37 - Intermission Room
Flag 6
1:44 - Crypt of the Kevins
2:19 - Temporal Tower
Flag 5
2:41 - Theo Hell
3:16 - Forest of the Ancients
Flag 4
3:46 - Fish Hell
4:12 - Aquatic Underground
Flag 3
4:35 - KoKoDoKo?
Flag 2
5:05 - Heart of the Storm
Flag 1
5:50 - Ultra Difficult
Post-flag
6:39 - Outro Room (Flag 0)
7:33 - Fake Heart Room
7:44 - Heart Room
8:05 - Heart collect
Miscellaneous
8:34 - Journal
8:54 - Attempt Count
8:56 - Fun flag 1 deaths!!!
Raw footage: youtu.be/Hr4_yKDWldw?si=NAhLrC0L4zM7A1pM
