Antarctic Lights

Antarctic Lights

ID

144988390

Creator(s)

⁨declan (host and publisher)

Contributors

SkyJax, Tolstyh, and Arcturus

Verifier(s)

Axinity

Created

Update 2.1

Last updated

Update 2.2

Attributes

Difficulty

Stars

10

Coins

3

Length

1m 0s (Long)

Objects

54,884

Copy type

No password

Statistics

Downloads

265.6K

Likes

5.7K

Rating

Featured

Audio info

Artist(s)

NIGHTkilla (Rukkus)

Music

Fear Me

Music ID

428157

Antarctic Lights is a 2.1/2.2 Extreme Demon collaboration level hosted by ⁨declan, published on 16 July 2026. It is a buffed remake of Arctic Lights.

Despite its short length, Antarctic Lights features a handful of speed changes, complemented by very tight wave gaps, and its raw precision (based on frame windows) towers over Tidal Wave. Antarctic Lights predominantly uses a cold blue colour palette, with the decoration being very similar to Arctic Lights, but with a more polished, refined Nine Circles effect and less stale colour flashes.

After its verification by Axinity on 14 July 2026, Antarctic Lights was rated on 22 July 2026 and placed at #8 on the Demonlist a month later, making it the hardest Nine Circles level in the history of the list.

Verification

Axinity first uploaded his progress of Antarctic Lights on 22 March 2024, where he achieved 49-100%. The level was thought to be harder than Slaughterhouse, which itself was #7 on the Demonlist at the time. Axinity's next progress was posted on 14 February 2025, and he achieved 39%. On 1 October, he got a 39-100% run, beating Antarctic Lights in two runs. Five days later, he got 51%, with 192,204 attempts overall. Axinity got a new best of 63% on 4 November, and 70% on 25 November.

The next year, on 3 February, Axinity achieved a 25-100% run with roughly 300,000 attempts so far. Axinity got a new 73% best on 9 February, 78% on 21 March, 85% on 3 April, 90% on 14 April and 92% on 10 July, amassing 377,075 total attempts.

Axinity finally verified Antarctic Lights on 16 July 2026, after 381,058 attempts.

Description

• 0-14%: Antarctic Lights begins with a cube sequence, the first part of the pre-drop. The music is very calm and melancholic. The decoration is very bright in this section, with glowing obstacles and a background dyed predominantly cold blue, but also orange, mint, and purple. It features gravity and size changes, as well as plenty of orbs. The player must manoeuvre between tightly packed obstacles, requiring precise timing. The sequence ends with a jump into the ball portal.
• 14-25%: The music in this section gets more intense, along with the difficult ball gameplay, requiring near-perfect orb inputs throughout. The level flickers with orange and mint colours. After hitting a blue orb, the player turns into a cube and jumps up into the ship portal.
• 25-37%: The music's beats get louder and louder. This ship sequence is filled with straight-fly and precise inputs and orbs, similar to those in Sakupen Circles. After that comes a brief relief with a cube sequence and memory reminiscent of Sonic Wave Infinity; this section is very dark, and the player is unexpectedly thrown into the drop.
• 37-83%: The drop begins; extremely excruciating wave gameplay is presented to the player at mostly quadruple speed, with sometimes triple- and double-speed gameplay. The level's flashes are as intense as the song. As a wave, the player must perform ultra-precise timings, watch out for near-invisible gravity and size portals, and react fast to everything on the screen. There are no breaks in this section whatsoever, so the player must stay focused all the time.
• 83-100%: It is the end of the drop, and the music and the level calm, but by no means is the gameplay easy. Game-modes alternate between cube, ship, and UFO, which all require extremely good raw skill from the player, as some of the hardest timings are located in this section. After the last ball, as a ship, the player must dodge sawblades and two red orbs, and is thrown through a tight sawblade corridor. The level ends with a Lenny face on the end screen, a reference to Arctic Light's end screen that is visible after activating Low Detail Mode. This time, the player must fly directly through the Lenny face to finish.

User coins

At the end of the level, the player can collect all three user coins for free by flying through the Lenny face.

Gameplay

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First 10 victors

Victor #	Player	Date Completed	Total Attempts	Furthest Fail	Video
Verifier	Axinity	14 July 2026	381,058	92%	YouTube
1	Weyolll	20 August 2026	70,904	89%	YouTube
2	Zoink	14 September 2026	~5,400	90%	YouTube

Controversy

After verifying Antarctic Lights, Axinity posted his completion video on 16 July 2026. In the video's description, Axinity wrote 'Showcasers, you suck.' with no explanation whatsoever. Not long after that, Nexus asked his community through a poll whether he should showcase Antarctic Lights (after seeing what Axinity wrote), and over 90% of people in the poll voted 'Sure'. Nexus would then proceed to upload a showcase titled 'ANTARCTIC LIGHTS VERIFIED | TOP 10'. Just a few minutes after he did so, Axinity made a tweet on Twitter that went viral right away, in which he criticised Nexus for showcasing the level, claiming that 'both me [Axinity] and Declan said no :D'. However, there was no proof of that happening.

After the tweet, the community divided into two main camps: those who supported Nexus and those who supported Axinity. People argued against Nexus that, out of basic human respect, he should have honoured the creators' wishes, and they felt he bypassed their boundaries purely to capitalise on the hype and ad revenue of a major new level release. In defence of Nexus, people claimed that Nexus had the right to showcase the level because it was uploaded to a public, open-access server owned by RobTop. Because the level ID is public, anyone has the legal and technical right to play, record, or showcase it. They viewed the creators' request as an unreasonable gatekeeping of public content. They also questioned why Axinity approves of his friend declan showcasing Antarctic Lights, since he hates showcasers. Additionally, Nexus waited for eight days before even making his own showcase.

After all the drama swept through, Nexus made a YouTube community post saying he removed his Antarctic Lights showcase video, as he was truly unaware that both Axinity and declan did not want him to do so. Nexus's poll on whether he should showcase the level happened because of the 'Showcasers, you suck.' message in the description, as he was not aware of what that meant and wanted his viewers to decide.

After all that, Nexus made another community post. He said that he never wanted to take credit for anyone's verification, and putting e.g. 'FLAMEWALL VERIFIED' in the title was just celebratory. However, he said that he will make his showcase titles clearer from now on.

On 5 August 2026, amid the recent drama, zeenoh made a video about the problem with showcasers in the Geometry Dash community, explaining how showcasing has deteriorated over the years. zeenoh brought up the example of Nexus, who used to be a showcase channel for levels he beat himself, but after seeing the success of showcasers like Just a GD player, who started showcasing newly verified Top 1 levels, he decided to do the same. However, he would make his video titles misleading, as if he had verified these levels himself, to gain views, like the earlier-mentioned 'FLAMEWALL VERIFIED'. Also, zeenoh called present-day showcasing one of the laziest things ever, and not only does it take away views from the verifier, but it also gives huge amounts of revenue to showcasers who took 10 minutes, max 1 hour, to bot a level. At the same time, a top player can spend months on one single level. Zoink reacted to the video, agreeing with everything said, and condemning Nexus for his actions.

Trivia

• Antarctic Lights was rated on 23 July 2026 and placed at #8 on the Demonlist on 22 August 2026, above Nullscapes and below ORBIT, effectively becoming the new hardest Nine Circles level on the list.
  • This addition pushed Collapse into the Extended List and NEUTRA into the Legacy List.
• Antarctic Lights is currently the hardest rated level to contain user coins.
• Antarctic Lights is related to Ultra Paracosm by declan directly through Hyper Paracosm, as Arctic Lights is a sequel to Hyper Paracosm, and Ultra Paracosm is a buffed remake of it.

Videos

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Verification