This article lists and discusses some of the most difficult hacks ever created by the SM64 community. What was considered the "human limit" has risen over the years as players have improved.
One of the first major hurdles was Crudelo Reds, the hardest Star from Super Mario 74: Extreme Edition. That Star was first beaten without savestates in 2014, and since then many other hacks have had a claim to be the "hardest hack ever beaten", with many individual Stars the end result of hundreds of hours of practice, strat-finding, and attempts.
This continued hardening has also resulted in several TAS-only hacks being made; some are theoretically possible with known strategies made to complete them, some are just outside human reach, and some are so far beyond the realm of human possibility that it can be said with certainty that they will never be beaten. This listing will attempt to categorize most notable examples of beaten, unbeaten, and unbeatable hacks to show the wide breadth of challenges that have been seen over the years of creating and playing SM64 kaizo ROM hacks.
Humanly Infeasible To Beat[]
The following hacks have not yet been beaten, and are noteworthy within the community for being either exceptionally hard or simply impossible to fully complete.
1. Super Mario 64: The Black Virus[]
This hack was released by "NormalX71" in January 2020, has 134 Stars, and is a sequel to Super Mario 76: Nightmare Edition. The hack was released with the intention to be humanly impossible and to compete with Super Mario Treasure World: Dream Edition for the alleged status of the "hardest hack ever". It succeeds in this endeavor, however the design quality of the levels is far below Dream Edition's thanks to repetitive re-climbing, long and boring QSLG chains, and in some places level designs that require over 100 consecutive firsties (the most ever done by humans is 33). Black Virus is notorious for overusing these unfun mechanics, and as a consequence even many of the levels that are not infeasible for human completion can border on unplayable. Vacuum Paradise red coins is by far the hardest Star in this game (and likely in all ROM hacks ever made) taking two hours to collect even with savestates. This Star (along with around 1/3 of the game's Stars) are firmly in the realm of TAS-Only.
2. Treasure World: Dream Edition []
This 182-Star hack was released by "Rambi_Rampage" in July 2019 and is a sequel to Super Mario Treasure World. The first portion of the game ("First Run") contains the first 93 Stars, and while challenging, they're more than doable by a human, with the difficulty topping out around the same level as "Frigid Fragile Fate" from Integration of Fragments. "Rambi's Reverie", a 7-Star bonus level accessible from First Run, is itself a very significant challenge, its red coin Star being in the top 5 of Stars ever completed, however the infeasability comes in with "Second Run", a separate set of levels with 82 Stars that frequently rise way above the difficulty of TsucnenT's Dream reds.
These levels are notorious for being massive, long endurance gauntlets; full of tight jumps, red coins that require whole stage reclimbs, and Star lengths that can easily approach a full hour. The levels themselves are so large that even the game engine itself can not properly handle some enemy/player behaviors within at certain points. Courses 8-14 were eventually proven fully possible thanks to long efforts from the kaizo community (led by Pluto, the first person to get a majority of the Stars), but Course 15's red coin Star has yet to be beaten by anyone due to its extreme challenges presented to the player. The hardest challenge in this level is the "Triple Invis" jump, where Mario has to wallkick up three consecutive sections of narrow wall geometry, the top two of which are completely invisible, making navigating them successfully an absolute nightmare, barely within feasibility.
However, even that level is not the hardest in the game. That lies within Second Run's two secret courses, specifically TsucnenT's Dawn, a brutal collage of many of Second Run's hardest challenges, in the same vein that TsucnenT's Dream was for Treasure World. The Red coins here are the hardest in the game, many times put near the end of Star paths that by themselves would be a major accomplishment for anyone. TWDE's second run (in addition to RR) make up 22 of the 50 hardest Stars collected, and 6 of the top 7. It sits at 180/182 as of March 2024 and the last two Stars are potentially within grasp of a devoted player, but with its inevitable long grind to achieve, extreme difficulty, and Pluto's unofficial retirement from attempts, the chance of them being collected is not very high.
3. Dj0nk's Junk[]
dj0nk's Junk was initially released in 2021 by the SM64 community member dj0nk, but was since updated past its original single-level status into a small hack containing 25 Stars in 2022. Regardless of version, one of the hardest Stars ever created is located within, that Star being the red coins of the main course Strange Sands. This Star is the most well-known example of pure precision, featuring 70 red coins to collect, and frequently requiring the player to make tight jumps off of moving objects, which often change the type of ground Mario stands on without warning.
The 100 coin Star in this level is the only Star in the top 7 that have been obtained not from Dream Edition, but that only requires 45 out of the 70 reds, with most of the hardest coins on moving geometry able to be entirely skipped. This Star doesn't use an excessive amount of firsties or QSLG chains like Black Virus, but the sheer amount of precise jumps required by the player in this 40-minute precision gauntlet push the difficulty of this Star above human reach.
Even if that Star was collected, however, the version 2 update of this hack also adds in many other additional Stars, including a set of several that are almost entirely based around moving level geometry and very precise timing. The hardest of this set takes over an hour and a half, even with extensive savestate usage. This Star is not quite as hard as Strange Sands red coins due to having less jumps, but unlike that Star these jumps are all stacked together in a lineup, leaving the player often with no way to save themselves should they make even the smallest mistake. Although this hack is better designed than many other hard hacks near this difficulty range, savestateless completion is still quite far away from becoming viable.
4. Mario's Trip in China[]
Mario's Trip in China is the second hack released by the small Chinese SM64 hacking community, released in 2022 by co-creators Liu Zijun and 104. The aim of the hack is to show several places from their native China (the success of this concept is debatable at best), but in terms of raw level design this hack shares many similarities with Dj0nk's Junk, that being the large amount of challenges based on precise navigation through moving objects. An additional roadblock to completion, though, is the questionable graphical choices made in many of these levels. Galaxy Road, the Bowser 3 course in this hack, is particularly offensive in terms of color and texture choices, often hindering gameplay even when the design itself is not necessarily massively challenging.
All but two of the 147 Stars have been collected thanks to long grinds from the famous SM64 ROM hack completionist katze789, but the last two remaining, both of which are long red coin Stars in precise, object-heavy levels, will likely remain too much of an annoying challenge to be conquered.
5. SM74EEEEEE[]
Super Mario 74 Extreme Extraordinary Extravaganza Empurpled Eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious Edition (abbreviated as SM74EEEEEE or just 6E) is an object edit of the original hack SM74EEEE released in 2018, itself being a ROM hack of the original Extreme Edition. This takes the level geometry from Extreme Edition and adds obstacles even harder and more obnoxiously than SM74EEEE had done, with several stages spawning you on boxes placed far away from the level itself. This hack in particular overuses boxes for most of its platforming, either big metal boxes placed all around the level, or small ! boxes placed for Mario to make jumps off of. The most significant design element in this hack, though, is the coin placements. Collecting the 100 coin Star in most levels will require the player to go into every nook and cranny of the level, as all coins are single coins sprinkled out to cause maximum suffering.
The sphere levels, as with every Mario 74-related hack, are the hardest in difficulty. The Veneno edit, besides the already mentioned shenanigans, also makes all ground that is not perfectly flat slippery ice, meaning that Mario can not stand or turn around on it whatsoever. This means that around 70% of the level's floors simply can not be traversed. The Crudelo edit, already hard enough with the geometry itself, spreads the coins out to an absurd extent, with coins often high in the air or requiring bounces on several objects just to barely grab. One coin was thought to be TAS-Only, however Iwer proved otherwise by showing a way to collect it (that takes away almost all of your health).
Despite the nightmarish design, all but six of the 175 Stars have been collected, the last remaining being the 100 and red coin Stars from the final three levels. Collecting them would be an endurance nightmare with plenty of chokes to be had, and although they are within the realm of possibility, the mental fortitude needed to push through and obtain them is likely too high for anyone to deal with.
6. SM64 The Lava Hell[]
Also known under its German name Die Lavahölle. This is a one-level hack created by obscure hack creator Marco. It was submitted to a tournament held by SirRouven1003 and then fully released in November 2017. The level has six obtainable Stars, with the seventh (100 coin Star) also theoretically possible with 100 coins existing in the level. However, the 100 coin Star is not viable due to a design oversight: a 10 coin box on one of the rooftops requires the player to climb to the top of the level and longjump down directly onto it. Climbing up said tower, however, takes two lavabounces to reach, which takes 6 HP from your starting 8, and the single red coin on top only gives you two more, leaving 4 HP for the player immediately before the longjump. You are required to land right onto the top of the 10 coin box, and due to the large height drop doing so would cause 4 HP of fall damage and leave you with zero, killing Mario before you could break open the box and collect its coins. This unfortunately leaves the Star seemingly impossible to collect.
A strategy was discovered by Iwer Sonsch, however, that in theory allows the box to be broken without taking any damage at all, but this is still exceptionally difficult due to the multiple precise button inputs and analog stick movements required to just barely make it to the box. The rest of the level, however, is not overtly hard, with the difficulty of the red coin Star here being around the same as Dream Edition's first run; doable for any kaizo player with some effort. If this strategy can be made reasonably consistent or a better one is found to reduce precision, the last remaining Star in this hack could become much more viable than originally thought. This hack is likely the easiest of the ones that are still unbeaten.
Humanly Feasible to Beat[]
Hacks within this list have been completed savestateless. Note that only hacks that have once had a claim to being the hardest ever beaten, or are otherwise at or above the difficulty of TsucnenT's Dream reds (by far the most noteworthy benchmark of Star difficulty) are listed here.
1. Super Mario SezNative Reminiscence[]
Super Mario SezNative Reminiscence is yet another large-scale extreme hack made by the Japanese community, and the second collaboration between those authors. It features many design choices familiar to other hacks of this style: long endurance gauntlets, consistently hard difficulty, and large, spread-out levels.
Somewhat similarly to Dream Edition, the game can be unofficially split into two sections, the first section covering a wide range of difficulty, starting at the casual level and ramping up to the usual kaizo difficulties. This section contains the first 131 out of 182 Stars total, with difficulty that does not peak much higher than First Run.
The second section is where the difficulty escalates further, with the red coin Stars in these levels being right up with the red coin Stars of Second Run. The three hardest Stars in the game (Ascended Symphony 100s, Vanished Wastelanders reds, and Divine Sentence reds), all come from this section, each having been a brutal grind to beat in their own right. Ascended Symphony in particular is notable for its high amount of reclimbs being the main driver of difficulty, this Star having been the last to go down on July 17th, 2022 due to how much less enjoyment was to be had from attempting it despite it being the easiest of the aforementioned hard triad.
Divine Sentence Reds, the hardest in all of SezNative, is as of March 2024 the 8th hardest Star ever beaten, and represents the absolute peak among hacks that have been 100% completed.
2. Night of Doom: The Perfect Run[]
Night of Doom: The Perfect Run is a one-Star hack created by StanSM64, a famous speedrunner of the hack it is based on: Star Revenge 2: Night of Doom. This hack takes 11 sections from the original game's various levels and chains them all together into one long marathon, which the player is required to complete without any checkpoints whatsoever. Taken individually, they are not obscenely hard, but altogether they combine into one mammoth of a Star, ranked almost equal with Divine Sentence as the 9th hardest Star ever beaten. A successful attempt of the Star takes nearly an hour to achieve, this long endurance putting this Star out of reach of all but the most dedicated.
Pluto, a fan of Night of Doom herself, eagerly jumped onto the grind and completed this Star within 6 hours of starting proper attempts, finishing this Star off on October 16, 2021, a bit over one month after the hack's release.
3. Lost Universe 2: Curse of Eternity[]
Lost Universe 2: Curse of Eternity is an unfinished hack created by Bubby64. Intended to have 208 Stars, being the largest extreme hack to have been made, development was eventually stopped with only 130 Stars finished. This hack is most well known for its high difficulty curve: The game starts with the very first challenge Star already harder than anything in the vanilla game, and the level difficulty rises upward quickly, with the first Bowser level already being harder than any stage in Treasure World. The intention was for the hack to contain levels that rival some of the hardest courses from Second Run in Dream Edition, but due to the cancellation of development levels of that extreme difficulty were not successfully made. However, the hack is still quite hard throughout.
Almost all levels are large platforming challenges that test even the most determined of players, but the hardest level in the game is Course 12, Lost Shrine. The reds here are a pure 30 coin gauntlet, the 18th hardest Star ever beaten, and were first taken down by Rhymew at the end of November 2021.
4. Super Mario Integration of Fragments[]
Super Mario Integration of Fragments is a large-scale extreme hack, the first collaboration between the various members of the Japanese community. This hack has 196 Stars in total (at first with 14 split off into an "Append" version, but newer versions have all 196 in one ROM), and they follow the usual gradual difficulty curve that the previously made Treasure World hacks follow, with the first few stages casual, and difficulty ramping up well into Kaizo territory as the game progresses.
Three stages have red coin Stars that are considered more difficult than Tsucnent's Dream reds, those being HIbaNYA's Final Memory, Fragments of Treasure (a level collage consisting of many pieces from 2nd Run), and The Gate of the Evil, all three of which are the usual long gauntlet-style stages common to Japanese-made kaizo levels. Gate of the Evil is the hardest of these, the 26th hardest ever beaten, with it and the hack itself first being completed by (unsurprisingly) Pluto on August 31, 2021.
5. Super Mario Invasion of Chuckya[]
Super Mario Invasion of Chuckya is a major extreme hack created by Kougahei Honmono, another of the many members of the Japanese hacking community. The difficulty scale and general style of this hack is similar to most other Japanese kaizos, starting at a casual level and working its way up to being hard, long gauntlet challenges towards the end of the game.
The two hardest levels in the game are "Tampering Distortion", a significant edit to one of Lugmillord's Spheres that features 33 reds and difficulty around the level of Tsucnent's Dream reds, and "Invasion Of Chaos", the hardest level, which involves going through a whole variety gauntlet of jumps to collect. The red coins within are the 19th hardest Star ever beaten, with that Star and full completion first accomplished by MorningStormSM64 on April 19, 2023.
6. Lost Universe 1.5: Kappowser's Legacy[]
This hack has 170 Stars and was co-created by ShiN3 and Bubby64, released in January 2020. This hack is most notable for featuring many remakes/edits of past ROM hack levels (similarly to what Dream Edition does with many Treasure World levels), including many of Bubby64's previous stages, a few levels from the Star Revenge series, and two rotations of Lugmillord's famous Sphere levels.
The hack is divided into five parts, each with large variance in difficulty. Parts One and Two are not overly challenging, but starting with Part 3 many levels become hard to complete, Courses 9 and 15 in particular standing out as significant hurdles to overcome. Part 5 holds the last level in the game, "Trials of Faith", being the hardest level in the hack. Although this level was originally thought to be hard enough to be at the fringes of human viability at one point, several cheeses were discovered to avoid or make easier many sections of the Star, and with those cheeses this Star, the 28th hardest ever beaten, was eventually vanquished by the Japanese player Rhymew on May 28, 2021.
7. Twisted Adventures: Intense Challenge[]
Twisted Adventures: Intense Challenge is a hack that was originally started by SomeRussianMarioDude, with a demo released in 2013. His intention was to release a full revamp of his original hack, SM64 Twisted Adventures in an extreme style similarly to 74EE and Night of Doom, but he ended up not able to complete doing so, releasing a 33-Star demo with three main courses, one Bowser level, and a couple of other extras. The hardest of these Stars within the demo are the reds/100s of Slippery Toxic Castle, a stage featuring several tight jumps with uncooperative camera angles, along with having exactly 100 coins to collect (thus both Stars are almost always done together). This Star was the first notable step up in terms of difficulty since Crudelo Sphere was beaten, and this stood as the hardest Star from late 2015 until Treasure World was finally taken down two years later.
In September 2019, TomatoBird8 decided to revive this hack from cancellation, picking up where SRMD left off and turning this small half-finished demo into a full extreme hack, complete with 151 Stars across the usual 15 main and additional secret courses. He kept the original 2013-era design philosophy all the way through the rest of the hack, with many courses still following the tradition of containing lots of quicksand, troll-ish enemy placements, and general obvious difficulty. Many stages towards the end of the game are difficult, but the hardest one is Sudden Death Cave, the final main course that not only is tight on coins like Slippery Toxic Castle before it, but also includes toxic gas, forcing the player to hurry through the level and platform from heart to heart, refilling health while collecting 32 red coins and narrowly avoiding death.
This challenge is unique among most other kaizo Stars, and this Star, one of many around the same difficulty as TsucnenT's Dream reds, was first beaten by Katze789 near the end of 2019.
8. Super Mario 74 EEEE[]
Super Mario 74 Extreme Empurpled Eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious Edition (abbreviated as SM74EEEE or just 4E) is an object edit of Extreme Edition made by CartoonBuffoon that is more challenging than the original game. The troll-ish level design is ramped up to 11 in this ROM hack of a ROM hack, with collectibles often put on the very edges of the map or requiring the player to take an obtuse route to reach many of the Stars. The spheres again have the highest difficulty, with "Eyeball" from Crudely being the most notable indivudial Star (requiring precise longjumps and two consecutive firsties at the ending), but the 100s/reds from Venina are the hardest Star this time around. This edit of Veneno Sphere replaces the warp to the stage's second half with a bunch of sloped boxes, forces a precise speedkick strategy at the start of every attempt, and ups the red coin count from 14 to 33, placed all over the stage to collect.
Venina's coin Stars were a roadblock to finishing the hack for some time, but this Star and hack ended up becoming one of the many that were taken down first by Pluto in May 2020.
9. Stars of the Beast 2: The Legend of the Crystal Stars[]
Stars of the Beast 2: The Legend of the Crystal Stars is a 68-Star hack released by Milgram355 in December 2019, the direct sequel to Stars of the Beast. While the hack is much shorter than usual kaizo hacks, with the aforementioned 68 Stars being spread only through six main courses and a few side levels, despite this it still contains Stars that are quite difficult to achieve. The hardest Star in this stage by far is Heaven of Faith red coins, a Star most famous for its relatively unique pastel color scheme, and precise triple-jumping sections between small platforms. Those jumps along with a formidable count of 20 red coins to collect contribute heavily to its difficulty.
Hack speedrunner Mopplop was the first player to finish this hack on January 25, 2020, and in his completion he claimed that Heaven of Faith reds was the hardest Star he'd ever beaten. (Having also beaten TsucnenT's Dream reds earlier on, a Star also at pretty much the same difficulty)
10. Super Mario Treasure World[]
Super Mario Treasure World is a hack released by Rambi_Rampage in December 2016, being one of the first ROM hacks from the Japanese community. This hack is particularly famous within the community, introducing an entirely new design language to Kaizo levels, breaking away from the smaller, more dense levels of earlier hacks and instead making levels that are more spread out, with many more flat landscapes to traverse and expanded Star lengths.
This new design also came with a unique difficulty curve. The early levels are not hard once figured out by the player, but Course 8 is the first level to present a formidable challenge for one trying for completion. This level is full of quicksand and relatively precise jumps, with obstacles placed to constantly give the player pause as they make their way around the stage. Past that level, the game lets up for a while until the final three courses, Course 15, Bowser 3, and the most famous of all, Tsucnent's Dream. Course 15 is a gauntlet of precise platforming, Bowser 3 is a long, spread out level with the first appearance of the QSLG mechanic at the very end, and Tsucnent's Dream is a collage of parts from every other stage in the game, all put in at once for the player to traverse.
TD Reds is one of the most famous Stars in all of SM64 ROM hacking. This Star is the clear hardest Star in all of Treasure World, and was the first Star to be considered a significant step up from Crudelo Reds, seemingly almost impossible at first glance. Many jumps within this stage had not yet been seen before at the time, including the most famous jump in the level: the thin wallkicks section. This jump requires the player to wallkick a series of walls thinner than even Mario himself, needing to precisely move the analog stick to bend around sections of wall to continue progressing.
This Star was one that several people in the community were hoping to see fall, with the grind to first obtain it having taken over 100 hours just by itself. The person to finally beat this Star was Mopplop, grabbing the final Star of this massive journey of a hack on June 23, 2017. Since that day, this Star has become something of a benchmark within the community. This Star has 65 completions as of March 2024, by far the most within its difficulty range, and second only to Crudelo for raw completion numbers. Although it has been dropped far below its former place as the hardest Star ever obtained since the release of Dream Edition[1], an argument can easily be made that no matter its position, this Star and the hack its contained in is still the most important Star in the entire realm of Kaizo hacks.
11. Star Revenge 2: Night of Doom[]
Star Revenge 2: Night of Doom is the second kaizo hack to be released, with BroDute taking inspiration from SM74EE to remake his own Star Revenge hack into this much harder rendition released in 2013. Most levels are edited versions of the levels from the original Star Revenge, with a few levels added in to round out the main 15 courses, with 152 Stars in total. Like Lugmillord's hack, this kaizo is well known for having troll-like design choices, difficult navigation, and, most importantly for Night of Doom's case, an abundance of quicksand to restrict the player.
The hardest level in this hack is subject to some debate, with Courses 3, 12 (uncheesed), and 15's red coin Stars all having arguments, but the most popular choice is Course 15, "Discolored Madness", a level that asks the player to navigate a large landscape full of quicksand, with 20 reds scattered all around the level. This hack was first completed in 2015 by the older-era completionist Fritfrat.
Although nowadays this hack is not considered to be overtly challenging[2] thanks in part to how many exploits have been found to lower its difficulty, this hack is still quite well known even outside the community, this along with 74EE having been widely played by many, including some Super Mario 64 speedrunners.
12. Super Mario 74: Extreme Edition[]
Super Mario 74: Extreme Edition was the first proper "Kaizo" SM64 ROM hack, released on Christmas 2012 by Lugmillord, also the creator of the original Super Mario 74. It is a complete revamp of Super Mario 74, with levels entirely retextured, many pieces of ground replaced with lava and quicksand, and the level geometry itself subtly changed in places to remove standable ground and make navigation harder. The difficulty often comes from simple troll-ish Star designs, obviously devilish enemy placements, and bad camera that can make seeing a frustrating challenge.
The first notable spike in difficulty comes within Bowser's Quicksand Pit, the second Bowser level within the game. To get the red coin Star requires four firsties, two to get the the coins and two on the way back. Otherwise, the Star is not difficult, and it is only within the third overworld that Stars turn into proper gauntlets. This is highlighted by the two sphere levels, Veneno and Crudelo, containing the two hardest Stars in the game. These levels ask for the player to run around most of the level, collecting many more than the usual 8 red coins. Crudelo is the harder and more menacing of the two, with Crudelo's 20 red coins being the hardest Star in the game, and the first proper hardest Star ever beaten until the TA:IC demo was completed in 2015.
Although it has since been surpassed by several other hacks, 74EE is still the most prominent example of Kaizo in the SM64 community by a good margin, often the first hack any kaizo player will play, and obtaining Crudelo Reds is still considered a proud achievement even now.
- ↑ Yes, according to the list TA:IC was near the same difficulty and many other stars mentioned are technically slightly higher than this one and came before DE, but going off pure numbers is not the point of this page. The kaizo hacking community can be pretty cleanly divided into three eras: The original era with NoD/EE/TA:IC demo, the revamped era led by Treasure World and hacks like SotB2 and MC, and the modern era ushered in with TW:DE, Japanese Kaizo collabs, and the general wave of long grinds being streamed on Twitch. This page is meant to be a history of the scene as much as it is a list of hacks, and these hack summaries are written with that in mind. Not referencing the list directly and only occasionally alluding to it with star rankings regarding the top stars of recent-ish hacks is a very deliberate choice. This is also why hacks like TA:IC and SotB2 are present: they are important to how the community grew and how star difficulty was measured or lack thereof over time. Sorry to rant but I hope this gives insight into why this is written the way it is. It's trying to be more than a pure difficulty ranking.
- ↑ If you look at the list of hardest stars here you will notice that Night of Doom does not have any stars that are close to Crudelo Sphere, meaning that this hack technically was never the hardest ever beaten. But, not including this hack within this list would be an unwise idea due to its notoriety, this hack probably being the second or third most well-known behind 74EE and maybe TW. When this hack was beaten the concept of a "hardest stars list" was not a thing either, and considering that both NoD and EE were considered near the limit of human viability at the time, there was not much separation between the two realistically. It's better to include the hack here like so and avoid any potential questions and arguments and whatever.