Peaks of Yore - The Solemn Tempest (Itemless)

I cannot believe I have done this, this has been one of the most intimidating and mentally taxxing things I've done in any videogame, The Solemn Tempest is by far and beyond the tallest mountain in this game, and like the highest detailed mountain in any climbing game probably, it is extremely massive and a successful climb of it at a normal pace can take hours, especially if you use ropes. This mountain is designed with the idea of using crampons in mind, an item that is pretty integral to the movement in this game allowing you to get extreme vertical speeds by getting a jump boost when pressing Ctrl on the keyboard or whatever your key is. For some reason when I really like a game I tend to play it with the most difficult challenges I can imagine onto it to spice up my play-through, and Peaks of Yore was no different, the game rewards you for climbing mountains without the use of rope by giving you a free solo stamp, this is recognised by the game and plenty of people have played the game where they only climb mountains without rope, this is what I did for my entire playthrough, except I also excluded using any item, no Coffee, no Rope, no Chalk, no Bird Seeds, no Smoking Pipe, and most importantly, no Crampons, the game is not really meant to be played with the crampons, everything else is still understandable, but due to this, I don't think Andos really thought it was possible probably, but it makes for such a ludicrous and interesting challenge, the mountain has dozens of jumps that are brutal to make without the use of crampons, and many of which have major consequences for failing, sometimes being entirely fatal, all the way back to 0 meters, the ingame height for this mountain is at 7454 meters, however this is only due to the game multiplying the height ingame on this mountain, and the great bulwark, the real height of this mountain when compared to the ones in the advanced book video is around 2300 meters, whereas ymirs shadow is around 500, meaning it is almost 5 times as tall as ymirs shadow, it is colossal, and the cost of a fall is one of most gut wrenching things I've experienced, perhaps its my lack of experience in very lengthy endurance challenges but I was seriously struggling to cope with falling at the last 1000 or so meters of the mountain. I first climbed this mountain around 2 months ago, my first completion of it was with no ropes, and only the use of 6 point crampons, which are weaker than the 10 point crampons the game provides you with when you reach the northern range, because of this however my first climb of this mountain still took me around 40 hours, as I had no practice for the mountain, this was already brutal and accomplishing it was an incredible feeling, but upon doing this you unlock the routing flag, which can be used to practice segments of the mountain, this is what I needed to do to be able to do this itemless, up to the solemn tempest, and for all of the DLC minus the last 3 mountains, I still played the game ENTIRELY itemless, no crampons even on any of my first climbs, and this was brutal for some of the DLC mountains that I will upload later now that I finished this one, but the tempest was just too much, and I finally reluctantly yielded and climbed it with ONLY allowing myself to use 6 point crampons, but I knew this was only to bridge my return for itemless tempest, seriously I first reached the tempest on my first playthrough which was also itemless in october of 2024, it has been on my mind as a challenge to try since then, sitting in the back, feeling completely impossible, there was many jumps of this mountain even early on, that i was really struggling to perform without items and it made it too intimidating to even try for months. Once I finally got the routing flag I just started practicing, and I got so much better eventually at the really difficult ice jumps on this mountain, the main difficulty for itemless tempest comes from the fact a lot of jumps are only possible with this additional spin tech you can do on the ice holds, it is quite nuanced and took me a lot of time to get down and understand how it works, and that training arc will help prepare me for everything that is to come at the end of the DLC. As for the difficulty balance itself, the mountain has a hard and costly jump at around 1000 meters, its relatively fine with some hard but retryable jumps until 3500 where there is a pretty nasty one, but I found a good skip for it that made it more consistent, you mostly have some hard jumps but safety nets all the way up to 5800, where the final stretch begins, 5800 to the end is the hardest part of the mountain, as if you fall, on almost all the jumps, you lose everything, 1.5+ hours into the run. I can't believe I did it, my worst fall was at 6700 meters. This took me around 80 hours in total maybe since I started playing this mountain for the first time, just brutal. also thanks to nipplenick for helping me on this with strats.