How Zetera became a Medal Hunter

Join us for a history lesson, a story about an elusive medal and one man's journey to unravel its secret!

Before we begin with this story, we first must learn about the history of medals.

Medals were first introduced in early August 2008, with their original goal being to serve as an achievement system linked to a now-abandoned "story mode" for osu!, similar to the original Elite Beat Agents campaign. The first ever medals to be added were the play count medals, and since they were retroactively given to all users who already fulfilled the requirements, some users like Echo and Saturos acquired them pretty much on release.

Soon after the play count medals came the first batch of beatmap pack medals, and while some do not exist any more, there are still some that you can acquire! Some examples would be the Internet Pack vol.1, Anime Pack vol.1, Video Game Pack vol.1 and Rhythm Game Pack vol.1 medals.

As development of the game continued, medals eventually became more than just a way to keep track of your beatmap pack completion with a new set of challenges titled as "Hush-Hush" medals. What are these Hush-Hush medals you might ask? Well, the osu! wiki defines them as the following:

Hush-Hush medals are "secret" medals awarded for pulling off very specific feats, which are not explicitly told to the player (hence the name). These feats can range anywhere from completing a beatmap under peculiar circumstances to setting a score with an unusual mod combination.

In the years after their release, very few new Hush-Hush medals were added, and it was only in late 2016 that new ones started being released in batches as announced in this news post. Since then, new medals have trickled in sporadically, sometimes released alongside other announcements or have simply been added entirely without warning.

This brings us to the main character of this story: Zetera. Zetera is a 24-year-old osu! player from Germany, and according to him osu! has been a part of almost half of his life, and his join date certainly backs that up. In that time, he has done quite a lot for the community and described in his words as such:

I am an ex-moderator, on-and-off contest judge, world cup commentator and a huge beatmapping nerd. And, I suppose, also a medal hunter.

So how did he get into medal hunting? It was quite simple actually — he just didn't like the look of unobtained medals on the old website. He described them as "huge boxes with a question mark", and would rather have had those boxes show the actual hand-drawn designs than just a question mark. Older players might remember them looking like this:

Every time new ones were added, he'd try and find the meaning behind them and eventually found himself building a habit out of it. Discord and the likes did not exist back in those days, so a lot of time was spent hanging out on the forums, #osu and in-game DMs, with lots of players often coming together and collaborating to work out the solutions together.

In October of 2017, a new Halloween-themed update was released for osu!, bringing with it a total of 9 new Hush-Hush medals. It had been a year since the last batch of Hush-Hush medals at that point and finally, the community had more cryptic puzzles (in the form of medal flair texts and icons) to chew on.

Since getting batches of medals was still new, there wasn't a lot of knowledge behind what made the medal system tick, especially since the whole thing was rewritten back in 2016. Nowadays, the community knows exactly what to look for and how extensive the system is, but back then the community's ideas were much more abstract than what was actually possible, simply because it was really hard to gauge just how precise requirements were for any given medal.

Figuring out how to solve a medal is often a complicated process, as the only real hints provided are the medal's name, icon and some mouse-over text known internally as a flair. At times, even these are not enough, and some medals have even had all three of these things changed over the years.

Despite these challenges, the community managed to figure out the solutions to all of 2017's new medals save for one: "The Girl in the Forest". The community first deduced that the relevant map was Takuya's set of Pika Girl by S3RL after linking the hints and flair text back to it. Zetera then immediately went and SS'd the map, but that didn't work. Maybe a mod was required, or the map needed to be FC'd in all game modes consecutively to get the medal, but that didn't work either. Maybe it had to be an SS on all game modes?

The limits of the medal system needed to be examined more closely, albeit with educated guesswork and deduction. Surely it can't check when you lost your full combo or when an SS was lost, so the only things left would be the miss count, max combo, counts of 300s, 100s, 50s and misses, playing in different modes and a couple of other things, such as at what time was the score submitted. At the time, the flair text read as "First Generation in more than one ways", which lead Zetera to think that it might be related to Pokémon or perhaps the first generation of influential mappers, but in the end, he found himself stumped.

Out of ideas, he reached out to Ephemeral, osu!'s "community manager", and instead of receiving a hint, Ephemeral would go on to create the following thread on the osu! forum:

It's been roughly a week since the Halloween medal release, and just about every medal outside of one has been conclusively claimed and figured out.

Originally, I thought that the Firmament Moves would be the baffler for most people. Apparently not!

So, let's have a little fun with this, and up the ante a little bit.

And "up the ante a little bit" he did. A bounty was set, stating that the first person who unlocks the medal and messages Ephemeral with the correct set of criteria required to unlock it would receive a "Medal Hunter" user title, which would the first of its kind, and to this day, remains as such.

The post also shed some light on how the new medal system works and what the loose criteria would be for not just The Girl in the Forest, but all medals included in the Halloween update and going forward. Following this, Zetera descended into a maddening 5-hour search of trial and error. Maybe the max combo or accuracy needed to match numbers relevant to the first generation of Pokémon games? Maybe the accuracy needed to match the release date of the first game? No, the HP drain was too high to achieve a ~19% accuracy run. "How many Pokémon were in the first game?" he thought, maybe there needs to be a certain amount of 300s, 100s and 50s...

After a gruelling slog of trial and error, he finally found himself staring at the fruits of his labor, and after sending a forum PM to Ephemeral with the correct answer, he was officially dubbed as osu!'s first Medal Hunter. He was really happy about receiving the medal, but he felt like there were other people in the community that deserved this medal more than him, and had to say this during our chat:

User titles and I are a complicated topic. It's not really part of this interview's topic, but I did a lot of different things for the community in the hopes of leaving a mark somewhere [...] because if there was something I wanted more than anything else, it was the Elite Mapper title.

To this day I'm really envious of those that were able to achieve this prestigious title, and it's only become more and more difficult to get there. Resulting from both my efforts in the community and the many failed attempts at getting the elite mapper title, I was happy to get any user title at all. So, of course I felt elated when I actually won, but to be perfectly honest, if I had the choice, I would always elect to be an elite mapper over being a medal hunter.

Besides that, there are people in this community that deserve my user title a lot more than myself, and I strongly hope that staff considers giving out more of my title to those who actually deserve it. Even if it's just through means of competition like it was done with The Girl in the Forest, it would give the title more relevance and prestige. Heck, I keep dropping out of the 90% medals club myself.

Just to provide a bit more context to his comment above, Zetera was a part of the Global Moderation Team (or the GMT), whose goal is to tackle community issues and player moderation. He also contributed to things such as Moddingv2, which was the development name for what is now partly known as beatmap discussions, and was a complete overhaul of the ancient beatmap modding system, which brought things out of the forums and into a dedicated and streamlined space.

Zetera also mentored new mappers via the Mentorship program (and will be returning to it again!), which is a program that puts people who are eager to learn about mapping with experienced mappers who are want to share their knowledge. He later mentioned that he led the modern Beatmap Spotlights team for the osu! game mode, managing the Spotlights playlists in osu!(lazer) for the first two seasons in 2020. These are the playlists that you will find in osu!(lazer) from time to time where you can earn medals if you top the rankings!

While the things listed here are not the full extent of what Zetera has done for the community (you can read more in our full conversation), his efforts have been great and appreciated by the community. As for the "90% medals club", in 2019 the medal hunter community created Osekai, a website made for alternative rankings, in-depth profile information and much more, all based (unsurprisingly) around medals! On their Medal Hunters Discord server, there are "clubs" that people join by receiving a Discord role based on the number of medals they have. The club at the time of writing consists of only 44 people in the entire game!

If you're interested in delving into medal hunting yourself, you'll find that 3 new Hush-Hush medals have just released and are ready to be devoured!

If puzzling over flairs and hints isn't your thing, there are 3 beatmap packs to achieve as well just by finishing the maps in them. Check them out below (and you can even click on an image to be taken to the corresponding pack!):

Don't want to hunt for the medals alone? Join the Medal Hunters Discord server and check out Osekai! (Please note that the website contains solutions to medals, so if you'd rather solve them yourself, the site might not be for you.)

And as for what the answer to the Girl in the Forest medal was, why not try to follow in a Medal Hunter's footsteps and see if you can figure it out yourself?

—0x84f