Monthly Beatmapping Contest: February

New month, new mapping contest! Vote on last month's submissions and compete to become the next Elite Mapper!

The Monthly Beatmapping Contest (MBC) is back after a multi-year hiatus. Check out last month's contest announcement if you need to catch up.

January's contest received a massive turnout of over 100 valid submissions! A group of experienced beatmappers narrowed them down to the top 10% — the best 11 entries — so we encourage you to download those and vote for your 3 favourites.

Vote for last month's contest here! Results will be published in 2 weeks.

Now that housekeeping is out of the way, let's talk about this month's contest!

Schedule

As per usual, the timeline for this month's contest is as follows:

• Beatmapping (3 weeks): Contest is announced and beatmappers create their entries.
• Screening (1 week): Entries are evaluated by experienced beatmappers.
• Voting (2 weeks): Top entries from screening are published for the osu! community to vote on. This overlaps with the next month's beatmapping portion.
• Rewards: Winners are announced and prizes are redeemed, including profile badges, osu!supporter, and the Elite Mapper user title!

If you're curious about the details behind any of these, dive into the Monthly Beatmapping Contest wiki article. It answers every question you could ask. Probably.

Beatmapping

Limitation

Each month's contest has its own mapping limitation that participants must design their maps around. For example, last month's limitation was "straight slider shapes only", so sliders in all beatmap submissions were... straight lines. Pretty simple, right?

This month's limitation: star rating cannot exceed 4.00

Just to be clear, we're not requiring you to create a Hard difficulty. We actually recommend an Insane or Expert instead!

Your submission should complement the intensity of the song, only without surpassing 4.00 stars. Given the song choices available in this contest, you'll likely need to handle difficulty in a way that isn't well reflected in star rating. Good luck!

Songs

Each contest provides beatmappers a choice between 5 songs from one of osu!'s Featured Artists.

This month's artist is Voicians, and the following songs are viable for contest submissions:

Closer (172 BPM)

Beatmap template download: Full version (4:00) / Short version (2:20)

Alive (184 BPM)

Beatmap template download: Full version (4:55) / Short version (2:50)

Wolves (175 BPM)

Beatmap template download: Full version (5:28) Short version (2:15)

Survival League (175 BPM)

Beatmap template download: Full version (4:41) / Short version (2:56)

Prayer (152 BPM)

Beatmap template download: Full version (5:08) / Short version (2:32)

All beatmap templates above include shortened versions of songs — mappers are free to map whichever one they prefer!

Rules

So how do you participate? Submissions must...

• follow the month's beatmapping limitation: star rating cannot exceed 4.00
• be in .osz format. This allows your entry to use custom hitsound files and a background of your choice, however storyboarded visuals will be removed from all submissions.
• be a single difficulty for one of the month's selected songs.
• be in the osu! game mode. Other game modes will be considered after trialing this contest with osu! only.
• not be uploaded to the osu! website through the Beatmap Submission System (BSS). All contest submissions are anonymous during the screening/voting phases to avoid bias. DO NOT SHARE YOUR ENTRY!
• be solely created by you. Collaborations are not allowed.
• abide by the ranking criteria. While we can be forgiving for mistakes, submissions that could not be ranked without major changes will be discarded.

Any entries breaking these rules will not be viable for the contest.

And... that's about it! If you're curious what shiny prizes you could get for winning or how winners are selected, be sure to read the Monthly Beatmapping Contest wiki article. There's a few too many details to squish into a post like this!

Head over to the contest listing when you're ready to submit your entry. You have 3 weeks until submissions close (2020-02-24), so launch the editor and get started as soon as you can.

Oh, and don't forget to vote for the best 3 entries from last month's contest here!

Best of luck and have fun mapping!

—pishifat