wiki

Locus 2025

Locus 2025 is a multi-layered contest launched in early 2025 to bring the creative circles on osu! closer together.

Submissions to this contest include the following elements:

  • An original song of length 1:30–3:00.
  • A full beatmap spread on the osu! game mode that satisfies the ranking criteria.
  • Visual assets (e.g. background/storyboarding/video).

Schedule

Event Date (UTC)
Teaser #1 submission 1 April 2025
Trial voting start 16 March 2025
Teaser #2 submission 1 May 2025
Trial voting end 16 May 2025
Entry submission deadline 30 June 2025 (12:00)
Community voting period July 2025
Results stream Early August 2025

Prizes

The top entries of the contest will earn equal prizes. The number of "top entries" will be influenced by the number of submissions in the contest.

  • The beatmap will be bundled as part of the default osu! installation as "recommended beatmaps" for at least 1 year.
  • Team members will receive a unique profile badge themed around their entry.
  • Team members will be awarded a Locus user title befitting of their role.

For any complete entry that was submitted by the entry submission deadline, team members will be awarded a profile badge if they are able to rank the set before the next iteration of the contest.

Finally, there is a wildcard prize. peppy will pick his favourite entry and that team will earn a separate mystery prize.

Organisation

Locus 2025 is run by various members of the osu! team alongside some prominent members of the community.

Position Member(s)
Manager mangomizer, Matrix
Developers Komm, Venix
Graphic designers Adarin, Tanza
General assistance Doomsday, Ephemeral, Hivie, pishifat, Walavouchey

Teams

To be announced.

Results

To be announced.

Rules

Failure to abide by these rules MAY lead to immediate disqualification.

  • Team composition
    • There can only be a maximum of 5 people per team.
      • An individual can fill in for multiple roles (eg. a mapper can also contribute to some design elements).
      • How teams allocate these roles is entirely up to them.
    • Participants cannot be part of more than one team.
    • Teams must not publicise their entry anywhere outside of the officially sanctioned Teaser #1 and #2, or otherwise identify themselves until the contest results have been announced.
  • Teams must submit their entry as a .osz by the submission deadline. Do not upload your entry to the website via BSS — there will be a separate submission for this.
    • Song requirements
      • Must contain the original song in .mp3 (192 kbps) or .ogg (208 kbps) format.
      • DRAIN TIME SHOULD AIM TO be between 1:30–3:00. Length of song should be reasonably close to this.
      • No restrictions on genre, but must be suitable for all ages (ie. not explicit).
      • Composers must own all the usage rights to samples (so it can be licensed).
    • Spread
      • The .osz should aim to contain an ENHIX spread that satisfies the current ranking criteria for the osu! game mode. Your submission should contain no more than 5 difficulties.
      • Other game modes are not supported.
    • Visual elements
      • Any images, storyboards, or videos produced must be integrated into the .osz on submission.
      • Designers must own all the usage rights for these as well.
    • The entry must abide by the song content rules and visual content considerations.
    • Teams may be asked to email examples of WIPs/assets used throughout to demonstrate ownership of said content. Full spread and graphical design elements are not mandatory requirements. However, the entry will be heavily penalised by the voting process (see below).
  • Teams who submit an entry agree that we have the rights to use that song in anything and everything related to this contest.

Operational procedures

Team registration

Teams must be registered in order to submit an entry. Teams are allowed to choose their own team name on registration, but the osu! team reserves the right to request a change if deemed unsuitable for the event. Team members are to remain anonymous for the duration of the contest — they will be revealed at its conclusion.

Register through this form.

Submission

Visit the contest page and drop your submission as a .osz file. The deadline is 30 June 2025 (12:00 UTC).

Before submitting, please check the following:

  • Ensure that you have successfully registered a team, and that all your team members have confirmed their intent as well (if you have not received an explicit email confirming this, then this has not been done).
    • Your submission will be ignored if you have not successfully registered a team.
  • Please read the rules thoroughly to check that your entry abides by all of them, especially the ones relating to spread and anonymity.
  • It is preferable that the team captain submits. Only one person from each team needs to submit (to prevent any ambiguity or confusion, please do not submit duplicates).
  • Do not submit your entry via BSS.
  • As an optional precaution, please reply to the existing email thread to let us know that you have submitted your entry.

During the week after the submission deadline, entries will be checked to ensure all rules are followed. Any required changes will be communicated via email.

Nexus

We cannot expect every composer and graphic designer who is interested in participating to be familiar with navigating the osu! community, so the Nexus was created as a support system to help those who are looking to form or join viable teams.

  • The Nexus is a website that will allow users to self advertise.
  • Potential participants who are looking to form a team may browse the Nexus to contact someone who they feel is suitable. We expect the majority of interactions to be composers seeking mappers.
  • Once a team has been registered, the team member's bios will be updated to indicate that they are no longer available.

The Nexus is not a compulsory process. It is designed as both a support system as well as an additional avenue to help individuals form teams. Participants are welcome to form teams through their own methods as well, but they must still register their team if they intend to participate.

The Nexus is available on the Mappers' Guild website.

Voting system

A form of community voting was chosen to determine the ranking of the submissions, as it best reflects the osu! community spirit. To combat bandwagoning, a unique elo voting system was developed:

  • Voting will only be open to osu! accounts that are at least 6 months old.
  • All valid submitted entries will be checked to ensure they are entirely anonymised.
  • Voters will be assigned 5 random entries. They will be prompted to sort the entries under the following judging criteria:
    • Song Quality
    • Beatmap Quality
    • Visual Presentation
  • Voters must submit a score on every entry before they are able to vote. They will be expected to evaluate the entries across a single difficulty of their choice (e.g. Normal).
    • If an entry is missing a specific difficulty or does not have any visual design elements, it automatically scores last place under their respective judging criteria.
  • All votes will be treated as comparisons and fed into an elo system of sorts to determine the overall ranking of all entries.
    • The process is similar to a round-robin tournament where every player is matched against each other multiple times, except the match outcomes are decided by the voters, essentially taken as "wins" or "losses" and fed into an elo-rating system.
    • This is, in spirit, similar to ranking systems used by games like chess or League of Legends, and was constructed to make the voting more accessible to the general community (by not having to go through every single entry to participate in voting), and to help prevent bandwagoning.

Teasers

Teaser #1 and #2 are optional submissions. Registered teams are allowed to freely submit a 5–10 second video clip showcasing their work. These clips will be stitched together to form a "trailer" that will be featured on osu!'s social media.

The osu! team reserves the right to deny any clip if deemed unsuitable for the event.

General enquiries

A Discord channel (#osu-locus) will be created on the osu! server. Announcements will be posted there — it will be up to teams to ensure they are caught up with the latest updates, though we will endeavour to inform registered teams of any updates.

For specific (private) enquiries or disputes, email mangomizer@ppy.sh.

Trial voting

From 16 March to 7 May, a trial voting was conducted to allow people to familiarise themselves with the voting system.

Users were asked "What was the best osu! original tiebreaker from the osu! World Cups?". 378 voters got 5 randomly selected beatmaps to rank across two categories, music and mapping, with the votes being fed into an Elo algorithm. Unlike the actual voting, the resulting leaderboard was visible live on the trial voting website crafted for the event. At the end, the results were calculated as an average of 1,000 random voting runs to account for bias in voting order.

The results were as follows:

# Entry Overall Elo Music Elo Graphic Elo
1 Camellia - Operation: Zenithfall 3389 1622 1767
2 Ludicin - Lost Requiem 3325 1630 1695
3 Release Hallucination - VANITAS 3272 1624 1648
4 Imy feat. Natsume Itsuki - Lies playing Truth 3230 1553 1677
5 Yooh - RPG 3211 1670 1541
6 Umeboshi Chazuke - AJITAMA Adventure OST 3202 1477 1725
7 kanemiko - Ruin in Cascade 3188 1549 1639
8 Kou! - Frost Walker 3166 1516 1650
9 nm-y vs. Kry.exe - Kaiju 3109 1529 1580
10 Minstrel - today is the day 3108 1466 1642
11 seatrus - DiSANiMATE 3079 1514 1565
12 HyuN feat. Sennzai - Duplicity Shade 3046 1546 1500
13 Halv vs. kuro - Evreka 3039 1517 1522
14 Kurokotei feat. Sennzai - escape (the looking-glass, and what alice found there) 3036 1566 1470
14 kanemiko & Kyutatsuki & Aoi - Fractal Vertex 3036 1527 1509
16 D-D-Dice vs. siromaru - Catch the Glory 3032 1613 1419
17 seatrus - EXXTRA JUDGEMENT 3030 1496 1534
18 Akiri - Symphony Of The Lost Souls 3029 1486 1543
19 SOOOO - illloved (osu! Edit) 3019 1405 1614
20 aa...hisuichazuke... - steganography 3016 1604 1412
21 Camellia - OOPARTS 3003 1602 1401
22 polysha - Endverse 2994 1486 1508
23 Cansol - Train of Thought 2991 1452 1539
24 Genkaku Aria feat. KOKOMI - Whiteout 2975 1423 1552
25 Camellia - Parallel Universe Shifter 2920 1523 1397
26 Quarkee & Yuuni - Fabricated Exaltation 2871 1390 1481
27 SUPER MWC KART - Purple Palace 2847 1518 1329
28 Gram - Sigrdrifa 2846 1457 1389
29 Frums - of Ambrosia 2813 1491 1322
30 onumi & Akira Complex - Ethereal Cyber Angel XV 2800 1418 1382
31 Frums - HALL 2799 1475 1324
32 TWC Sound Team "Xurv Stasis Rasufim" - Kaze no Denwa 2787 1322 1465
33 katagiri - Kyuukou 2752 1510 1242
34 Viatores Nebulae (ptar124 & SiLiS) - Ad infinitum ~ein sof~ 2717 1309 1408
35 Yuuni - Frozen Blood 2698 1304 1394
36 TWC Sound Team "Zeroth Powers" - One One 2621 1407 1214
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