×Enter facing southwest and step onto the northern part of the door. Now stay standing on the door and wait until your sword kills the snakes. Then proceed to the land Brain, killing the waterskippers on the way. There's enough time for you to kill the Brain just before the character Stalwart steps onto the force arrows.

×Lava Land 2S2E:

Enter from the bottom left, kill the rock golem, then kill the mud baby with the mimic. Bizarrely easy.

Goblin Woods, 4N1E

I saw in the architecture forum that the intended solution was to trap the adder in the decoy potions, and to prevent using a corner, the arrows were added at the bottom (the top being too far away). Well, the top isn't too far away. See demo.

×A level based off 3 green TCB elements, gel, briar and adders, which I am less familiar with than JTRH elements made this level difficult for me and took around 4 or 5 days to beat rather than the few days spent on the other levels. I really liked the secret rooms, how they were hidden, the side-quest of getting to that crazy citizen from Zch and Kallor's previous hold, and of course, the puzzles which are always great. I learnt a lot from this level that I didn't know about until I played this hold.

6N 3W: Simple room, trap 3 mimics under decoys and get yourself and 2 other mimics to cut the other corners. Looks tricky at first if you don't realize the use of decoys.
5N 2W: A room that seems easy to do, but turns out to have a nasty trick. This is one of the many rooms that make this level great. If you don't think outside the box and question the use of the adder, this room will definitely confuse and trick some people who may assume too soon.
5N 1W: Simple efficiency room, the trick is not to do things in order, but rather to do multiple things at once.
5N: Simple room to figure out and solve, but the whole idea of shuffling a goblin around to keep it alive in a boxed room with an adder seems new and interesting (and sorta funny).
5N 1E: I never did get these rooms with multiple solutions. Maybe I'm just always picking the easy one. Here, it's a simple task of being efficient. Not too difficult, but I guess that's the easy solution.
5N 2E: Simple-ish Beethro and mimic puzzle with the gel (it's all a matter of exhausting possible ways to cut the gel). The adder bit is new to me, but it is this room and its counterpart that has taught me new, efficient ways to cut down adder, which is hopefully used in other holds.
4N 3W: I didn't get the math here, but I just counted how many turns it would take for the snakes to line up, and the LCM of their cycle to find out which trapdoors to drop.
4N 2W: The goblin part is easy to do with just Beethro. I reckon the stalwart is just a trick placed in the room as it makes the goblin part harder to manage. Gel part is also easy.
4N 1W: A simple room once you get the trick. No need to be efficient since adder eats gel no matter where it attempts to eat at it.
4N: Another simple room where you make gel babies in order to lead the stalwart onto the pressure plate.
4N 1E: Knowing the purpose of the adder, it's a simple task of finding a way to reduce its length to the desired amount. This room is a good display of how useful potions are even if you don't use them.
4N 2E: Simple room to figure out, harder to execute what you want. For me, it was trial and error of restarting every time something didn't work out.
3N 3W: Again, didn't quite get the mathematics here, the solution is easy to see when you see it, which I couldn't at first.
3N 2W: One of the last rooms I did cause I thought it was impossible to cut the gel. Turns out I moved too soon and didn't look properly.
3N 1W: Simple room to figure out and execute. Used adders to eat as well as to use as walls.
3N: I guess this is one of those "cool" displays you see in this hold, and it really is cool. Killing a 6-length adder in one strike? Wow.
3N 1E: Easy to figure out, hard to execute room again. This time, it's all about seeing which parts can be done no matter whether its the first or not, and seeing which part needed to be done last, etc. Deduction = win.
3N 2E: Ah, I do remember the sewers from DEWMC very clearly, and this is one of those easy rooms that lets you reminisce. Easy room overall.
3N 3E: I found these set of rooms to be easy using deduction and questioning. Here, you can tell mud can be cut no matter what. Then you have to find a structure that allows you to cut it as tar or gel. Questioning the yellow door allows more room for possibilities.
2N 2W: Easy to do the lower part of snakes, for the top I learnt something new about adders, that is, it doesn't matter what state the adder body is in that it is eating. Fun room, just because of that unique lesson.
2N 1W: Goblin manipulation room. Easy once you figure out a good safe spot.
2N: This was definitely a fun room to figure out. The main goal is simple (release both adders), it was the question: how? that made it more difficult. I tried many things before I came to the solution and many realizations (like stopping it an odd number of turns).
2N 1E: I like the solution of this room. It's definitely another one of those unique rooms that sets this hold apart from other difficult ones.
2N 2E: Figuring out where to position the decoy and what position to position it in was the main problem of this room. After many failed attempts at trying to lure all goblins away from me, I had to settle for a positioning that led only 1 goblin towards me.
2N 3E: Not much to say here. It's easy, but a nice demonstration of finding a tarstuff shape cuttable no matter what tarstuff it is made of.
1N 2W: Similar to its counterpart room, it's easy to know what to do, but the execution allowed me to learn more about efficiency.
1N 1W: Simple linear room. Not much to say here.
1N: I am disappointed that this puzzle wasn't used a lot in this hold. They are fun finding solutions to and optimizing. Definitely made this hold a ton more fun.
1N 1E: Unlocking the secret room made this extremely difficult. I needed help in this room. In order to find a solution, I had to think outside the box and stop limiting myself to diagonal swords.
1N 3E: Interesting fact about gel that I can't believe I didn't notice sooner! Simple experimentation got this one for me.
3W: Efficiency puzzle! Since I'm not much of an optimizer, I found this really difficult, but experimentation once again, helped me get through this room.
2W: Another efficiency puzzle, though this one is easier than the previous one. These 2 rooms did bring about some interesting facts about gel that'll allow other hold creators to easily find tarstuff shapes that can be fully cleaned as gel.
3E: One of the 3 skulls in this hold. I think they are used to show how there are 3 elementals in this hold.

×A level used to connect the 3 elemental levels as well as the city together. There are some really unique and clever evil eye puzzles. Seems like Zch and Kallor are masters of every game element!

2N 1W: Can't believe I found this difficult. I shoulda questioned the purpose of the mirror sooner *facepalm*
2N 2E: Easy find-the-spider puzzle. It's partner room however was difficult.
1N: Simple kill-all-spiders-then-blow-up-evil-eyes puzzle. However, a good demonstration of how to make a remote manipulation room without the walls and boundaries.
1N 2E: Evil room. I don't know how long it took me to find an entrance and sword position that allowed me to reach both spiders. There was also dealing with moving one spider around.
1W: Another room demonstrating how to use evil eyes to make puzzle not normally involving evil eyes. This time, the evil eyes made this room sorta like a bomb room. Avoiding contact with the eyes to blow 'em all up.
1E: Yes!! Decoy Sliders, my favourite. Not much to say about these variations, just that I like that they are in this hold.
1S 1W: A room based on "which order to do things". It was a ton of fun experimenting here, because it wasn't so tedious that I got frustrated.
1S 1E: A nice ordering room as well. Had trouble with the top few, but eventually got it down. Nice little backstabbing trick in this room.
1S 2E: Extremely difficult room. Had to H&S this one, but if I didn't, the room would be solved by analyzing which arrows to turn to get to certain fuses and how to minimizing travelling between tokens and fuses.

×This level was the most interesting of all levels. It had a different player role in it (that helped explain the connection between this hold and DEWMC), it had a "Stalwart run", and it had many puzzle rooms (secreted).

3N 3W: A deceptive introduction to the new player role. I say deceptive because this room is easy whereas the next 2 step up in difficulty a lot!
3N: In this room, I had to use the fact that I can hit the orb whenever combined with the fact that the tar babies can go into another tar baby's path. This room took a long time, hours of experimentation, but isn't hard at all.
3N 1E: I had to program a solution for this one. It's definitely a clever implementation of this kind of puzzle. Most of the difficulty came in trying to debug my program @_@.
3N 2E: I didn't have to make a program for this room, fortunately. It was a simple matter of experimenting and making realizations.
3N 3E: Nice room! I like how only a certain number will kill off a goblin, and that knowing the numbers is one puzzle, making that number in base 2 is another.
2N 3W: The tricky part here is the middle, but once you see how you can take care of one roach at a time, that part becomes easy.
2N 2W: A nice break from the difficult rooms before this. An easy lure-the-stalwart-in-such-a-way-that-it-can-get-to-the-waterskippers room.
2N 1W: Not much to say here apart from the fact that it is easy once you do it the unintended way. Is it even unintended? Why would the stalwart appear in the other entrance otherwise?
2N: A simple experimentation room. The tricky part is dealing with the lower 2 waterskippers I guess, but that is as easy as producing tar babies.
2N 1E: A difficult room making use of the stalwarts attracting ability. I found the top and bottom set of waterskippers easy and the east one hard. Eventually, I had to do this room such that I had the stalwart running all over the place.
2N 2E: God knows how many times I cleared this room trying to find a way to access all secret rooms in one save game. It was actually much easier than I thought. Producing tar babies is the obvious way of "unclearing" a room.
1N 3W: Not really difficult, more like lengthy. Experimentation is necessary, however, to see which queens to deal with first.
1N 2W: One of the rooms testing your cooperation abilities with the stalwart. Once you've got the decoy placement down, this actually turns out to be an easy room.
1N 1W: I spent quite a bit of time here trying to decide which monster to kill first, with my most common (but wrong) assumption being that I kill a skipper first, and quickly move to kill the nest.
1N: Simple efficiency room to kill the mothers in time. If it weren't for those broken walls, I probably would have more trouble clearing this room due to the need to use adders.
1N 1E: Seriously, all the puzzle rooms in this level are great. Here, we try to solve a puzzle involving "combining" (?) 3-digit base 2 numbers.
1N 2E: A relaxing, yet interesting break from the whole stalwart run. The order in which things need to be done was also interesting.
1N 3E: I never did like orb and trapdoor puzzles. Seeing as this one used plates, I was ok with trying to solve it. A lot of trial and error later, I had it solved and left with only a little frustration (or none, I forgot).
3W: Funny room involving a roach chasing another goblin mate.
2W: Difficult to implement, but this room is simply experimentation, figuring out where to cut the broken wall, which ones to cut in order, etc.
1W: Another Decoy Slider puzzle. This one different than the bomb ones in that you use platforms to get rid of the outside 2 columns of decoys.
1E: This room had me experimenting with how to trap a skipper no matter where I am in the area. I didn't really trap it as much as I prevented it from getting at me whether I'm on the left or right side.
2E: The end of the stalwart run. It was a challenging run, but it definitely taught me more about stalwarts.
3E: Another awesome implementation of a different puzzle. This one was easy though as there is a lot of free space here and there.
1S 3W: Once you understand what's going on, programming a solution makes this room very easy. Though it looks similar to its counterpart, it is actually quite different..
1S 2W: An introduction to the future dreaded 2-skippers-blocking-the-path rooms.
1S 1W: The thing that makes this platform puzzle easier than the ones in TCB is that rather than all parts interlocking, here only 2 parts were interlocking in about 3 or 4 different places. Easy to figure out, easy to solve.
1S: Simple room, the tricky part is unlocking the elemental.
1S 1E: The elemental skull room. The art here looks cool, sorta like a wispy version of the Goblin Woods version.
1S 2E: Simple intro to the stalwart run. Very interesting way of hiding secret rooms. As usual Zch and Kallor seem to be good at concealing secrets in interesting ways.
2S 3W: Once again, once you see what is going on and how it differs from its counterpart, it is easy to program a solution for this. Looking at the solution, I feel quite dense that I couldn't solve it through my previous trial-and-error before.
2S 2W: This room looks like it should be swapped with the room 2 east of it. It is also a "lure a stalwart around" kinda room, although more forgiving and easier to solve.
2S 1W: Not much to say here, just avoid the stalwart reaching the adders. I used the fact that adder bodies are obstacles so that the stalwart walked long distances everywhere.
2S: Once you know what part to do last, the hard part was luring the stalwart in such a way that allows you to cut this last part. I spent many turns running around trying to get the stalwart's sword orientation right.
2S 1E: A simple room involving keeping an adder alive.
2S 2E: In here, I found it quite easy to make sure I don't get caught in a position where the babies will kill me.
2S 3E: Disliked this room cause it was really difficult and long. In fact, my move count for this room is 6500 moves >.<
3S: One of my favourite rooms in the hold. The way the pieces fall together and are used makes this simple-looking room difficult. I'm still curious as to how Blondbeard did this using no adders.

×This level uses game elements I'm unfamiliar with: hot tiles and rock giants. Perhaps it is because hot tiles are used early in TCB and other holds and the puzzles didn't really show much about the game element. As for Rock Giants, they're obviously a lot more different than Aumtliches with the space they take up. Most difficult level in the hold for me due to these elements, but the hold art makes it look like the most attractive. Also, there were a lot of rooms here especially on the outside that seemed like filler since there was nothing in them. I find this ok since there were too many difficult puzzles in this level anyway and the hold art makes up for it.

2W: This room looks easy, but has a rather devious solution. My mistake was in not ruling out the impossibility of golems not moving with nothing to block them from moving. There was also a problem with having mud babies trapped, but this is easy to figure out early if you're analytical enough.
1W: Since this room had limited possibilities in regard to which tokens to press, and which tokens to press after that, "restting and using the next token" proved to be a valuabel trick here. I also like how tight the mimic part had to be.
1E: Maybe I'm just not accustomed to puzzles involving the actual movement order of monsters that made this difficult for me. I didn't actually make use of the hint given to me since the invisibility potion helped me the most here.
2E: First time to see this, so I found this amusing.
1S 2W: Very evil trick with that door there. Reminds me of the Cheap Trick Contest. The room is easy after this realization, but manipulating the giants was still a challenge for me.
1S 1W: I found this easy since it was very similar to brained golem, tight-path rooms in DEWMC.
1S: One of the last rooms I solved cause it looked tedious. It's not as bad as it looks and because of brained golem movement patterns, it isn't too hard to kill them on hot tiles.
1S 1E: I learnt something new here and that is the fact that giants pathfind with the square closest to you. Making a path for it that it cannot follow allowed me to keep it in a necessary spot.
1S 2E: A lot of trial and error here, but again, all these rooms helped improve my rock giant manipulation.
1S 3E: Evil variation of the room below it. I liked how you use the sword to protect you while you lure it out as opposed to a mud baby.
2S 2W: I learnt yet another thing about giants here (this hold has seriously taught me a lot of advanced concepts). It is the fact that I can control giants easily on the tip of my sword.
2S 1W: Fire elemental room with an interesting twist. This time you're killing golems on hot tiles with no sword. Finding this room would be tricky had I not owned a transparent tar mod.
2S: Ah, back in the day when there were a lot of puzzles based on not moving your sword. This one was fun to try out given the movement pattern of giants (obviously with a movement pattern like roaches, this room would be less interesting and less challenging).
2S 1E: I like how the room is made much harder with the inclusion of an obstacle. I had help with a mud baby (I'm sure this is intended).
2S 2E: Amazingly easy, I guess this was a break from the harder rooms on this level? Or is it supposed to be tricky in that you assume you're supposed to do it one way when really there is an easier way?
2S 3E: Interesting use of movement orders which I'm not yet accustomed to. I found the use of the mud baby interesting (you're using it as a shield from the side, definitely new).
3S 3W: Another variation of the Decoy Slider puzzles. What makes this new is that it uses 3x7 grid rather than the common 5x5.
3S 3W: This room teaches you to be careful with what you do. Do something unnecessary too early and it will show itself to be the opposite of helpful. Nice concept, but it could have been used a bit more somehow.
3S 1W: The only room in this whole hold (not counting Rorrim Rorrim) that makes use of vertical preference. Knowing you have to take advantage of this movement preference makes this room that much easier.
3S: I spent a lot of time in this room trying new ways to make walls to stop golems and giants from escaping their plates, but allowing them to escape after a certain amount of time. In the end, I used 2 giants and had to rush since a golem stepped on a plate soon after the previous golem left it.
3S 1E: There are 2 rooms in this level I enjoy since they make use of being extremely efficient to reach the mother. In both rooms, I made it just in time, which shows how great it is how they really restrict you in these puzzles.
3S 2E: An easier version of 3S 2W. Not much to say here.
3S 3E: An easy puzzle, though minimal space puzzles was something better done in 1W. The use of a speed potion does show how much more minimal you can make the provided space.
4S 2W: Once you know how much babies must be made after 3 cycles, the trick is not only to use golem corpses to make that amount (easy division by 2), but also to make corpses to help you bring the mud babies in the desired area in little time and no backtracking.
4S: Once I saw the main problem here, the rest of the room was easy to solve. Once again, another room showing how a mud baby can be substituted for a golem.
4S 1E: The most interesting of the Decoy Slider variants (and the last...). This one provided you with a hefty amount of potions, 22 to be exact. Although you only really need 18, 22 was to allow more room for error. These rooms were difficult to solve without programming a solution.
5S: I found it really cool how I had 4 mimics one turn away from destroying the giant in one strike. Making that final strike was very satisfying. The trick to getting the 4 mimics in the desired position was also clever.

×This level is filled with evil aumtlich-wraithwing manipulation rooms. Nevertheless, the small number of these puzzles made this a relaxing, but still challengin break from Lava Land.

1S 1W: An introduction of sorts into the whole level. This room was simply using wraithwings as shields.
1S 1E: This room is easy once you get the trick down, which involves use of the orhto square and the wraithwing. I got it in around 100 moves which shows how much more simple it was than the other rooms in this level.
2S 1W: This one took a LOT of experiementation to get that last wraithwing down. Eventually, I found a way so that it flees above a decoy sword.
2S 1E: The fact that you are not the only one to activate pressure plates certainly made this room have an interesting solution. Trial and error allowed me to change what moves I kept on doing until I had gotten rid of the troubling 4 aumtliches up top. The restriction puzzle was also well implemented.
3S 1W: The use of aumtlich movement patterns when it comes to turning is definitely something I need practice on (especially since there are rooms in Elusive Exhibitions that use this movement pattern). This room was great practice. I would make it a feature request to click aumtliches and guards to see what region in front of it will keep it looking in the same direction.
3S 1E: The tricky part here is cutting down 6 aumtliches coming directly at you while making sure the wraithwings don't kill you from behind.

×The last set of rooms proved to be more difficult, more interesting, and more of a learning experience than the previous levels. For example, the slayer rooms taught me more about the interactions of aumtliches, mirrors, trapdoors and the slayer and also taught me more about manipulating the slayer. Bandit Lair taught me well in the ways of efficiently killing guards. The pool, a short level, didn't teach me anything more about brain pathmaps, but put my knowledge of them to the test, Robolab didn't teach me much (I really need to play more Light-Bot -.-) and the diner didn't teach me anything either, but it was a relaxing break from the other rooms in this level and I think is a tribute to the old school puzzles back in JTRH (it uses the same sorta format even though it has TCB elements in them). Because of the largeness of this hold, I'll be commenting on each part separately and I'll be referring to the rooms as NW, N, NE, W, Center, E, SW, S and SE to make it easier to see.

Slayer's:


Bandit Lair:


Pool:


Diner:


Robolab:


Bank:

×
Overall:
Dialog, cutscenes are very well made. This could easily be an official hold. The hold layout encourages you to explore with lots of interconnected bonus areas, which I liked a lot. You keep getting sneak peeks of the next inaccessible location in the Tunnel Network.

Goblin Woods:
A very solid start to the hold. Almost all the rooms are very well made. Some filler rooms (3N1W), but nothing too serious. The room art and how well the rooms fit together is some of the best ever seen.
1N1E - A scroll in the master area mentioned this secret as a particularly difficult one to get into. Hilarious! I only now see that there was a much easier solution that doesn't go into the secret room.
2N1E - As I've previously posted on the challenge board, you can solve this room in a completely different way.
3N2W - One of the weakest rooms in the entire hold. Hiding tools necessary for the puzzle is never cool, and the ideas in this room are better shown in other rooms on the same level.
3N3W - Amusingly I solved this one by accident without doing any math after trying out random symmetrical trapdoor shapes.
4N1E - Only needed three decoys. I can't even imagine what you're supposed to do.

Underground Lake:
This level I'm the most mixed about. Mostly because of the stalwart rooms. I honestly can't say I enjoyed a single one of them on this level. In Goblin Woods they were fine because the manipulation was much more controlled. But here you get this extremely long chain of rooms that are 10% about finding the solution and 90% about micromanaging a stalwart. Rooms without stalwarts were much better though.
1W - Interestingly this slider puzzle took me the longest in the entire hold. It's not the most complicated one, maybe I just wasn't fully used to them yet.
1N - Seems like this was the hardest level overall. This room took a long time as well. There are a few ways to think about the room that just won't work (killing a mother with an adder early, that kind of things).
1N2E - This was my favourite of the stalwart rooms for the concept, but even this one is plagued by stalwart movement priority related issues.
2N2W - I read this was made easier by removing some bombs. It does feel a bit trivial now. Only hit two blobs myself.
2S1E - Trivialized this one by using the southern entrance. Which was interesting to get to by the way.
2S3E - Why. So simple puzzle yet so incredibly tedious to execute.
3S - The only solution I could find was Blondbeard's unintended one where you don't use the disarm token... it certainly took a while to setup. Also I only used three mimics.
Other secret rooms - Interesting adaptations of external puzzles, similar to Pelcho's Puzzles and The Palace of Puzzles

Lava Land:
I like how there are no more stalwarts in the rest of the hold. Anyway, this level is much like the first one. Looks great. Most puzzles are very solid. There were more fillers than on earlier levels (everything where you hit an orb and kill all golems), but again nothing very serious.
1S2W - Shame about that one door. Otherwise a good room.
2S2E - Is the idea that you kill golems on pressure plates? Using the mimic instead is so easy it just might be unintended. Or maybe getting the giant out isn't even possible, didn't really experiment with this.
4S - This was one of my favourite rooms in the entire hold the way I did it (using a golem to get the mimic to NW-corner to drop the black door without annoying find-the-right-mimic-dance). Many other people solved it in boring more efficient ways though

Tunnel Network:
A centerpiece in the layout of the hold. Pretty.
1S1E - Much trickier than it looks. Surprisingly fun to solve too, as it's easy to see when you're making progress. I liked this a lot more than the similar 1S1W.

Long Path:
Fairly straightforward level (ha ha). Finding areas like this makes exploring just that much more rewarding.

Molten Core:
Looked much worse than it turned out to be. Thankfully most of the rooms had some tricks and weren't just movement pattern searches.

Indoors:
This level is weird. The rooms kinda feel like they belong in bonus areas or in different hold(s) completely. Some of the minilevels are a bit filler-ish (diner, bandit lair), while others (slayers, pool) have just as hard puzzles as the main levels.
3N1W - Meh. At least this room is just 2% off my explored percentage until I *maybe* someday have time to play the other hold too.
4N4W - Very easily solved by tricking the Slayer into the top path. This isn't even hard to do if you have some experience manipulating them.
5N2E - While I don't agree with the mastery scroll that this is one of the hardest rooms in the hold (too short for that and you only need to manipulate one guard), it's definitely much trickier than the other rooms around it.
5N5E - This room is epic and very rewarding to get right. Even if tricking a brained roach on an arrow is a little bit unintuitive if you're not familiar with specific movement rules.
Slayer's - For a Slayer centric level this had surprisingly many puzzles where the Slayer wasn't very important (4N2W, 5N2W).
Robolab - Yeah. I don't need to say how awesomely scripted this is. Somewhat interesting to compare solutions too.

F ...
Not the most imaginative way to make similar rooms with subtle differences play out completely differently, but as I understand 100% copypaste was more important here.
1W to 4W - Used the exact same solution for all of these. Likely a small oversight.

R ...
I had a *lot* of trouble finding this level. I already had found every other secret in the hold, and had 100% explored everywhere except for the vaults. I missed the entrance because of the theme of the previous level after using two of the stairs. This made the hunt for the final secrets a little bit disappointing. These were fun, easy-ish rooms, I'm sure they would've been good for the pacing if I found them at the proper time.

I've only commented on a very small portion of the rooms. These are just the ones I wanted to say something about. If I didn't mention a room specifically as filler, it was probably good. The standards were quite high after all.

×I didn't even find the unintended solution. :p

×Of course, once I finished the Molten Core, I rushed to the oremite repellant without caring in the slightest for the lightning. Go find this one when you've missed it the first time... :p