Tachyon Eta is a footspeed/stream/tech pack by Zaia.
It is a revival of the popular Tachyon footspeed pack series by Mad Matt (2009-2018). This pack focuses on entry/intermediate level footspeed as well as short footspeed bursts alongside technical elements and serves to act as a bridge between bpm tiers.
| Pack Director | Zaia |
| Stepartists | Zaia |
| BPM | 223-280 |
| Songcount | 30 |
| Blocks | 10-22 (12-20 target) |
| Type | Stream/Tech |
| Format | Singles |
| Release Date | Nov 03, 2024 |
¶ Structure
Simfiles are generally structured using the standard stream pack model: Experts are the top difficulty and lowers are stripped down versions of them, but the structure of the music facilitated more diversity with rhythms and many charts stripped down into sections of bursts rather than the generic 16th-to-8th conversions.
With the simfiles that feature charts with techs, there are two types: one is a type that retains techs through all difficulties; these are generally targeted towards the tech/FA type player and are designed like a chart you might find in ITL or another H2H event. Lowers for these focus difficulty around the burst usage. The other is a simfile that can target both stream-type players as well as tech-type players - these are more similar to what might be found in the Stamina RPG DPRT faction. Typically, these simfiles will have charts in the Edit slot, which are identical to another chart in the simfile just with any technical elements stripped out. Lowers for these focus around the tech usage.
In terms of patterning types, I have taken a fairly intermediate approach. There is nothing in this pack that is truly slide-heavy, and likewise, there is nothing that is overtly steppy or designed in the retro style. For players that are breaking into a new speed tier, I have opted to provide this middle approach to allow players to feel out what they like for themselves, so that they can specialize in their pattern skillsets using existing content (or create their own). For slide-exclusive players, given the smaller volumes and lower densities of streams, this pack could serve as an opportunity to practice patterning harder than they are used to and transitions that are no longer seen in the meta.
¶ Development
There has existed a growing content gap in the 13-18 block spread for charts in the 230-280bpm range. Historically, this gap was serviced by the Tachyon series, which enabled players to access higher bpms with gradual difficulty progressions. However, the generation of players that grew up with these packs either never progressed beyond it or progressed so far beyond it that content in the series' scope was no longer relevant for them. New players, particularly those with slide-based forms, grow into new speeds through stream-heavy stamina content, adopting a volume-based approach, and these players bypass the types of charts that Tachyon traditionally provided. Players who are best-situated to produce lower volume, lower density but high speed content and be able to immediately consume it, are generally lacking in the requisite experience (and perhaps even interest) in writing this type of content, and their results may be suboptimal. The net result is a growing void of content being produced - in short, the people who are able to write this content well are writing content far above the difficulty level, and the people who are most suited to play this content are writing tech. This gap has been steadily growing for some years now, and it has become very noticeable by 2024.
Mad Matt's Tachyon series existed to facilitate speed growth. The series is named after the hypothetical Tachyon subatomic particle, and individual packs are named after the Greek alphabet. Starting with Tachyon Alpha in 2009, then Tachyon Beta (2010), Tachyon Gamma (2011), Tachyon Delta (2012), Tachyon Epsilon (2014) and concluding with Tachyon Zeta (2018), each pack was progressively more difficult than the last, allowing players to grow with them. In the contemporary era, these packs are still being recommended to novice footspeed players who are seeking growth in this area, as well as spinoffs of the main series that used the same songs extended the longevity of the series via packs such as Tachyon Spectrum (2013), Tachyon Rebirth (2019) and Content Cop - Tachyon Epsilon (2019).
Tachyon Eta, the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, is a revival of the Tachyon series and a return to form through means of a “soft reset”, by refocusing on the core values for a new generation. Introducing new songs and a modernized design rhetoric, the project's ambition is to reinvigorate a chart type that has fallen out of the metagame for a number of years and to build new bridges between the speeds.
In my internal spreadsheet I had been keeping a tab with a list of songs suitable for a footspeed project. I'd had it for about six months before deciding to move the pack into active development. This pack was in production for two weeks, and then went into alpha testing, lasting for three weeks.
¶ Artistic Influences and Chart Design
Tachyon Eta is directly influenced by the original series of packs - specifically Tachyons Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, and some aspects of Epsilon. These packs featured a mix of charts that featured short bursts, long bursts and unbroken streams, though they trended towards unbroken blocks of streams as Matt improved as a player, which heavily influenced the structure of the chart types being written and included in the packs. Two pack series' with softer but nonetheless non-negligible influence were the SPEEEDCOOOORE and Sexuality Violation series, which featured a lot of bursty charts in the 240-260bpm range, which is a core range for footspeed training. All three were prominent community staple packs during the early 2010s.
Three relatively important artistic aspects that factored into my curation of the songlist was that new music was featured. Since the last Tachyon pack, the same songs would often be recycled with new charts - I myself did this extensively with unreleased packs like Tachyon All-Stars and Tachyon Multiverse, and indirectly by featuring songs associated with the Tachyon series in other packs, such as fof (unreleased), Saitama's Ultimate Weapon (2021) and Tachyon Conent - The Next Quantization (unreleased). Eta features songs that have been featured in prior events (Booyah, Hyperdance Rising, My Humps, Starflight, and to a lesser extent, Leave Me Alone), and this pack serves as their official home. The second aspect is that many different varieties of music are used - the Tachyon packs didn't focus on one type of music and offered a broad range; from chiptunes to speedcore to video game metal and beyond, and I believe that this helped contribute to the series' timelessness. I wanted to homage to the musical diversity by including those same genres, whilst adding some fresh modern ones. This pack is a little bit Tachyon, a little bit SPEEEDCOOOORE, a little bit Sexuality Violation and a little bit ITL and ECS and with charts that were quintessentially of their genres. For players who remember those old packs, it is by design that some of the charts in Tachyon Eta may evoke memories of specific charts from its lineage. The third aspect is that I primarily wanted to feature songs that were in the 16th quantization for their streams. Only 4 of the 30 songs had 24ths instead of 16ths as their primary stream quantization. This was important to me because I wanted the songlist to primarily be filled with songs that sounded their speed, though I wasn't intentionally rejecting songs with 24ths purely on those grounds. If they sounded good enough, I'd use them, but I was preferring 16ths where I could.
As for the chart writing itself, I adapted parts of my tech-type footspeed writing and my stamina-type footspeed writing and moved them both towards each other slightly so that there was some overlap. There are still charts that I would classify as being in either category to maintain writing style diversity, but nothing to the slidey nor steppy extreme. I made the patterning reasonably accessible to both slidey and steppy playstyles, though it shouldn't feel “free” for either.
¶ Graphics
The artistic theming of this pack is drawn from the same sources of the original series. Graphics are generally science-inspired, alluding to themes of outer space and astrophysics. Tachyon Beta, as an example, uses the Hubble Deep Field image from 1995. Text uses typefaces that have futuristic or science fiction qualities, and some had been edited to give the text some horizontal blur to make them look like they're in motion. Tachyon Alpha's mathematical formulas in the background were a highlight of that pack's art, and is my favorite of the six mainline packs. Tachyon Rebirth felt similarly.
Originally, I experimented with some artistic depictions of tachyons, and for a long time I was working with one, but I found it difficult to compose text that was easy to read without significant blend layers doing the heavy lifting. As much as I liked this image artistically, I felt it wasn't as theme-appropriate as it could have been.
The image I ultimately went with was a James Webb photograph of the Carina Nebula, an absolutely breathtaking image of gases against a backdrop of bright, glittering stars. These gases form part of the star-forming region from which stars are born, which I felt was an appropriate to signal the “birth” of a new Tachyon.
I experimented fairly extensively with some graphical flairs to make the image more interesting. One such idea was to include the Greek letter Eta itself: η, but I couldn't get it to fit into the background smoothly. I made the text appear to shine like the stars in the background, or give the appearance that it was holographic. Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! holo rares helped inform the look. The mathematics
I had a concept for graphics that would use the same title text and styling but the background image would change for every song. This ended up not working because the style of the text had no synergy with the styling of my chosen images, so I opted to go for a universal fallback.
This pack features animated cdtitles - a first for me. In Tachyon Eta, every cdtitle is unique and also animated. I learned this was possible after reviewing a simfile in Stamina Nation, and realized during the review process that the stepartist's cdtitle happened to animate. After some investigation, I quickly learned how this was possible and capitalized on its potential. Cdtitles were curated to match their paired songs in some way.
¶ Songlist
Tachyon Eta contains 30 songs.
| Song | Artist | BPM | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Armageddon (House Remix by Daehyun_) | aespa | 127 (254) | Tech in all difficulties |
| Booyah | CCIVORY | 150 (225) | SX used in StaminaRPG 8 2024 |
| Breaker A Movement 01 | Dubmood | 242 | |
| Crimson Emperor | REDALiCE | 230 | |
| Cursed Metamorph | Sot-C | 280 | REQUIRES OPENGL VIDEO RENDERER. Will show white screen if Direct3D. Change and restart your game Heavy visual effects use. Has Edit chart Tech in some difficulties only The warps have affected the density graph appearance Simfile folder has a backup .ssc under /Saved |
| DOOMED | BxCx | 240 | |
| EON BREAK | Virtual Self | 178 (267) | Uses the DDR cut but the BPMs have been normalized |
| ✿ᵒᶠ🜍(flores sulphuris) | Seluekos | 250 | Features two .ogg files The symbols in the name do not appear on the songwheel but will appear as xxxx whilst in-game |
| Grains | Sephra's Paradox | 235 | |
| Hymn of Golden Glory | Essbee | 244 | |
| Hyperdance Rising | DJKurara | 240 | Different cut from the ECS9/SRPG5 version |
| ICHIBANBOSHI☆ROCKET | 梅干茶漬け(Umeboshi Chazuke) | 234 | |
| Kizuato (傷跡) (Scar) | you | 250 | Features two .ogg files |
| Leave me Alone | NieN | 236 | |
| My Humps | The Black Eyed Peas | 248 | Edit chart used in StaminaRPG 6 DPRT2022 Tech in some difficulties only |
| Nebula | Supire | 250 | |
| Palace of Melancholia | katagiri | 227 | |
| Phi (Φ) (takehirotei ''epimorphism'' remix) | Street | 264 | |
| Rebel Of Wilderness | Essbee | 166 (249) | “Like Ordeal” refers to The Ordeal Becomes Great, a 172bpm 4-minute Tachyon Beta 17 with many broken 24th streams |
| Rush | Troye Sivan | 252 | |
| Sea of Stars | Kyutatsuki | 256 | |
| Sentinel | BilliumMoto | 231 | |
| Solar Strike | MetaHumanBoi | 260 | |
| Starflight | Aquellex | 255 | |
| Stellar:Dream | EmoCosine + Synthion | 250 | |
| STRIKE FIRST | Zeroth | 140 (280) | Tech in all difficulties |
| Synthesized Fortress | M | 172 (258) | |
| tachypsychia | katagiri | 223 | |
| ultimer | ikaruga_nex | 230-260 | |
| Unlimited Hyperlink | Kobaryo | 230 |
¶ Reception and Retrospect
Tachyon Eta released on Nov 03, 2024 to high critical praise and player adoption. It was notably popular in the tech community, in which players could train their burst footspeed in preparation for events in 2025 like ITL.
A number of the charts in the pack have been deemed overrated. There isn't yet a definitive list of which, but the data can be used to better define the future ratings for these types of charts.
¶ Trivia
- This pack went by the working title “Cirque du Jesko” in my internal spreadsheet. It was likely never destined to be a Cirque pack.
- There was a much much older conceptual project that I had a folder for, simply titled “Tachyon 6”. It was originally a folder of submission material for Tachyon Zeta, dated around 2015, but it became a place to store any potential assets for a potential footspeed project. There is a songlist text document with some songs that I'll display when I can access it.
- It included songs like Blueshift Galaxy, long before I discovered Redshift Galaxy
- There was a much much older conceptual project that I had a folder for, simply titled “Tachyon 6”. It was originally a folder of submission material for Tachyon Zeta, dated around 2015, but it became a place to store any potential assets for a potential footspeed project. There is a songlist text document with some songs that I'll display when I can access it.
- Nearly 60 songs were screened for inclusion but the 30 size limit was strictly enforced.
- I looked really hard for a song that sounded like Comet Casting Capsule, and couldn't find anything I liked. What the heck
- Within the Carina Nebula resides a very bright star named Eta Carinae
- There is a song in the pack titled Nebula, but this is purely coincidental
- On The Cobbles of Hell was going to go into this pack, including a techless stream-only version, but I pulled it because I didn't really like the song and already had a Dubmood song of similar bpm.
- Some songs I had been holding onto for a long time before they found a home
- Cursed Metamorph Hard was written in 2021 and even showcased in dimo's Discord server at that time
- Hyperdance Rising was first stepped in 2019 and used in ECS 8
- ICHIBANBOSHI☆ROCKET is a song I'd been holding onto for a project like this since 2017
- Starflight was also a song I found in 2017 and stepped that year for Armajejjon
- Kizuato (傷跡) (Scar) was a song I considered submitting to Tachyon Zeta in 2015, before finding out it was 250bpm and not 300bpm like I'd hoped it would be
- Synthesized Fortress I first stepped in 2013 (the version in the pack is not that chart)
- Grains was composed for the FFR 17th Official Tournament
- Stellar:Dream's Zaia cdtitle feature Inugami Korone and Nakiri Ayame pictures. They are the avatars for my personal profiles on my ITGMania (Player 1, Zaia, is Korone, and player 2, Zaib, is Ayame). They specifically come from this video. There are more cdtitles that feature them.
- I intend to continue the Tachyon series with new packs in the future. The next iteration in the series, Tachyon Theta, will be opened to public submission, just like how Matt invited submissions to the original series.