I've been making some progress and having lots of fun. I've forced myself to stop playing to post here. Having the entire hold on one level is nice because there's a big choice of rooms, not just at the beginning, but also three quarters of the way through. A minor drawback is having to move to the edge of the level to be able to view the entire minimap.
As expected for a BoyBlue hold, there's a mixture of tough lynchpin rooms where the player needs an expert understanding of specific DROD elements and horde rooms which each require a different strategy.
I'm not sure how to organize all these comments on specific rooms, so I'll just write them in the order that I solved them.
×Entrance - Some patience gave me the one extra turn I needed to get to the second orb.
1E - I made a concave mud shape.
2S4E - An original idea for a maze. I found a path such that the fegundo didn't explode.
3S4E - Those orthosquares made it easy to park wubbas on the pressure plates.
3S2E - Reminds me of an adder manipulation room in Gigantic Jewel Lost. I fed the wraithwing to the correct adder. Neat.
1N3E - I ran through the guards and killed most of them as they came around the corner outside the box.
2N4E - Got everything off the pressure plate just in time. I found it helpful to use one mirror to block the formation of tar babies.
1N4E - Very clever mirror and guard manipulation.
3N3E - I was thinking this might have the same trick as that tar and gel room on the seventh level of Madness in the Spring, but it wasn't really the same. I used the movement order of the mothers to make a mud baby.
4N2E - Interesting. When solving a certain evil postmastery room in Complex Complex, I wasn't thinking about the fact that two hasted clones on hot tiles have a sort of parity, but of course they do. I had to use the correct clones to manipulate and block the snake.
4N1E - Great guard turning room. Both methods - clone switching, and dancing back and forth across the 22.5-degree line were needed.
5N1E - I like this room, and can't quite see where it's broken. While it's a pain to use the secret passage before this room is conquered, I can't conquer it from the secret passage. I used two swords to keep the mimic in place while the clones moved to safely.
5N4E - An interesting room about brained waterskipper paths. It's weird how they count their paths differently depending on whether Beethro is standing next to the water.
5N2E - Has previously mentioned US.
5N3E - That lazy guard let the adder do most of the work in killing itself.
4N4E - I arranged the snake so the silly stalwart would try to cut the tail first.
3N4E - I couldn't get the stalwart to kill all the mothers before the spawn, so by trial and error I arranged for the tar to grow such that he could clear it without getting killed by a baby.
2N2E - It was pretty easy to get the guards to let themselves out.
2E - As required, I stepped on the arrow turner only twice. The tricky part was getting all the queens out in a narrow enough time window so I didn't meet spawned roaches on the oremites.
1N2E - I couldn't do this until I thought to go into the maze to help the guard find his way out.
1N1W - With so many snakes, it wasn't hard to keep the pressure plate down until after I was back from killing the waterskippers.
2N1W - With the help of some babies, I grew a concave mud shape that didn't trap me.
3N2W - The convenient ormites and power token made it easy to keep the mud babies in the center near the fegundo.
4N4W - A very short snake took a ride on the platforms. He needed to progress west to new platforms with vertical preference.
5N3W - I was careful not to synchronize the fegundos.
5N4W - With some trial and error, killed all the seep.
2N3W - Shut out the roach with the snake.
1W - Used a wraithwing to space out the roaches.
1S1W - It was easy to arrange the roaches so they could get out. Unexpectedly hard to survive after freeing them.
1S - A large circular path with sideswiping worked here.
2S1W - Killed most of the goblins in the northern entrance. The mimic potions were an obstacle that helped me escape the rest. I didn't need to drink any, but it was faster to kill the remaining goblins with a mimic.
3S1W - Very clever room. There are so many things that almost work here. I finally arranged a way to use the same arrow turner twice.
3S - I arranged for snake body to be on the pressure plate when the bombs exploded.
4S1W - The aumtlich was doing his best to stop me, but I opened all the doors and killed the roaches anyway.
5S - I almost synchronized the aumtliches. Because monsters move before pressure plates pop up, I was able to get away with one aumtlich being one turn off.
5S1W - Neat room. Saving one skipper after killing the nest was not easy!
5S2W - Hmmm... it seems I've entered hack-and-slash territory. I went round and round in circles picking off roaches and goblins.
4S2W - More hordes of roaches. The "
door function"
of the gel babies is interesting.
4S3W - This would have been a tougher room if you had forced me to enter in the NW corner. Then I'd have had to use giants to keep all the adders from coming at me at once.
5S3W - The orthogonal movement of brained monsters made the potentially troublesome aumtlich very manageable.
5S4W - It was helpful to enter such that I could kill one goblin right away. Saved one wraithwing to kill the serpent.
4S4W - Entered in such a way that all the aumtlich got frozen. The couple steps needed to freeze the NW aumtlich were a nice touch.
3S4W - It appears I found the secret before I found the regular version of the room. Avoided wubbas until I'd killed the brain. It helped to break as few walls as possible.
3S2W - It was easier without those annoying wubbas there.
3S3W - As stated earlier, US in this room.
2S2W - A room for expert gardeners. The door helped me grow enough immature briar so the fegundo could progress.
4S1E - Not as easy as it looks, but finally dropped all the pieces of the giant down the central "
garbage shute"
.
2S - This room had me stumped for a while. It finally dawned on me that I needed to change the parity of the adder, which I did by shortening it.
1S2W - I made the longest possible path through the snake tails.
2W - I set up a retractable dead end on the east side of the room.
3N - Babies prevented tar from growing in the wrong places.
4N - I used exactly six different sword positions.
4N1W - While I appreciate the concept that I can't let any blob grow all the way across, as I'll have to reach its mother as mud, it was really tedious carrying out the solution.
2N2W - After having problems with roaches trapped behind force arrows, I solved this room by killing a brain last.
2N4W - I used its preference of N over W to get the brained rattler stuck in an appropriate spot.
1N2W - This time, I needed a roach on one of the pressure plates.
3N4W - I suppose I could have figured this out logically with a pen and paper... but it was easy enough to experiment with this room.
5N2W - The two mimics helped mme kill all the golems.
3N2E - Uses the fact that guards can step on potions but giants and golems can't. Thank you for the trapdoor in the center of the bridge.
3N1E Another very cool guard room. I had made one experimental path, but then the guard accidentally blocked his own progress by moving a mirror. That showed me what I needed to do.
2N1E - Trial and error. I finally hit on a roach queen configuration that produced only 14 roaches per spawn.
2N3E - I got lucky and found a path through the mimics without too much planning. Reminded me of some more difficult rooms from El Dorado.
1S3E - Tough. I finally found a way to turn my sword without killing either myself or the wubba.
1S2E - It seems that the key is in starting this room correctly. I found it impossible to correct a single queen in the wrong spot.
3S3E - I thought this would be more difficult or complicated than it actually was. I only needed to get the wraithwing stuck once when I got him out at the end.
4S3E - A wraithwing spaced out the western roaches so I could turn my sword and deal with both hordes at once.
4S4E - I convinced one wraithwing to come in by the arrows.
5S4E - I left 2x2 blobs on the pressure plates. Lucky thing I could exit the way I came in, as gel blocked the west side when I was done.
5S2E - Got the queen to the hot tiles a few turns before the second spawn.
5S3E - I successfully made three trips across the room.
1S4E - Dragged all the wubbas off the pressure plate. Doesn't look like the fegundos add anything to the puzzle.
4E - Very tough for Rabbits, but not sure why. Finally with the help of a wraithwing and reverse move order, Beethro just reached the orb.
3E - It looks like there should be a way to encase the wubba in mirrors, but I got tired of trying. Instead, I made a complicated contraption such that Beethro was encased in mirrors all the way to the brain.
4S2E - Finally did this one too, stepping on an arrow rotator only once. A tricky counting problem. Needs a checkpoint.
2S1E - I had been putting this one off because fuse counting can be a pain. But in just a 13x13 square, with symmetry, it wasn't so bad at all.
2S2E - This one was similarly accessible. Thanks for the chairs.
1S1E - I'd been having trouble with this one because I was trying to send the queen vertically across the room. So then I tried another way, and it worked!
1N1E - This room needs more/better checkpoints. Finally got the two queens in the snake boxes. This is such an obviously classic puzzle, I wonder why no one did it before.
1N3W - Now my hand hurts and a tendon in my forearm is twitching, which hurts too. At least I knew exactly how to do it, having played the Lone Soldier challenge and the 144-eyed mud mother from outer space room in Madness in the Spring. You could have made the same kind of variation on those rooms with a smaller room and fewer clones.