celeste difficulty is silly. the main game is hard; and the mods get ridiculous
there are 7 primary difficulty levels: beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert, grandmaster, virtuoso, and celestial.
base game ranges from low beginner to high intermediate, so you know the higher difficulties get effed.
representative maps for each difficulty:
beginner - summit a-side, from vanilla. if you know anything about Celeste, you know it's a hard game, and it only get's harder from here on out.
intermediate - farewell, also from vanilla. most people, upon being told that 9a is intermediate, ask how. the answer is there's so much room for difficulty not explored in vanilla.
advanced - glyph, a modded campaign of low advanced difficulty. advanced takes the mechanics in vanilla, and takes them to new levels.
expert - monika's d-sides, a modded campaign based on the vanilla levels, but much harder. expert is precise (but there is still a significant amount of leniency left) i reccomend getting this good.
grandmaster - glyph d-side is a good introduction to the difficulty; vivid abyss is a good representation of the difficulty (be warned, vivid abyss's moon berry is virtuoso difficulty) grandmaster can be a time investment
virtuoso - this is where things get mad. Darkmoon ruins is a good introduction to the difficulty (DMR has six checkpoints: three expert, two grandmaster, and one virtuoso); more representative maps are Mauve and MOCE // CPCL
celestial - this difficulty has two good maps: avian ascension and MOCE // LXVI. just watch a clear of LXVI. it's insane
eat my balls i died to basically the FINAL hard input in this screen what
for the non celeste players, this screen is one only cleared by some 150-ish people and has taken me around about 8 hours to get to this point on it, being in one of the top 10 hardest maps in celeste lmaooooo i also fluked this like i should have taken longer to get here than i did
Are there any specific mods for Celeste you'd recommend?
If you want to start getting into celeste modding, Spring Collab 2020 is probably the best place to start, considering its high quality, high map count, and it spanning the entire range of (named) difficulties. Some other very good mods that are in the vanilla difficulty ranges are:
Cat Isle: Very chill map where you pet some cats in a city. No danger in this map, just good vibes.
Glyph: An intermediate map that is a must play. About early farewell difficulty if i remember correcrly, and lots of secrets.
Into The Well: A high quality celeste map inspired by the game Downwell. It naturally involves a lot of falling.
quick drawing i churned out after finally finishing the expert lobby for strawberry jam- and holy shit what a phenomenal heartside. i spent like a week going through it and it absolutely blew me away, especially towards the end. all of it was just extremely good rip madeline celeste 2018-2023 <3
if you don't know what lagrange is, it's a celeste custom map i've been working on. it's high grandmaster to mid virtuoso in difficulty; space horror metroidvania in genre (ish). The horror is in the isolation: madeline is alone on this space station.
this is my first map, so it'll be a little bit before release, lol (i've 1/5 started)