Locus 2025

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

Submissions to this contest included 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

Prizes

The top 5 entries of the contest earned equal prizes. This number was decided based on the number of entries (42).

• The beatmap is bundled as part of the default osu! installation as "recommended beatmaps" for at least 1 year.
• Team members received a unique profile badge themed around their entry.
• Team members were awarded an Architect user title befitting of their role, i.e. one of Visual Architect, Musical Architect, or Mapping Architect.

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

Additionally, the player with the highest score on this osu!(lazer) playlist of all the entries received a "Locus playlist winner" badge.

Finally, there was a wildcard prize. peppy, the game's creator, picked his favourite entry and that team earned a separate mystery prize, revealed to be the following:

• The entry also got bundled with new installations of the game.
• The entry got a favourite from peppy.

Organisation

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

Links

• Contest listing
• Contest announcement
• Contest update #1
• Contest update #2
• Voting announcement
• Voting announcement VOD at COE
• Results announcement

Podium

Community picks

This contest has come to an end and resulted in the following podium:

peppy's pick

peppy also picked an entry to receive the additional mystery prize:

Playlist winner

Wispy won the Locus 2025 osu!(lazer) playlist and received a badge:

Locus playlist leader

Statistics

Results

Graphics category results

Music category results

Mapping category results

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: