Bloodbath vs Bloodlust

Bloodlust exists because of Bloodbath. The idea took shape shortly after Riot began work on Sonic Wave Infinity, a 2.0 remake of his own legendary level. Manix648 ran with the same concept for Bloodbath: take the most iconic hell demon in the game and rebuild it for the modern engine, harder and more detailed than the original.

The result keeps Bloodbath's skeleton: the same song, the same red-and-black hell identity, and recognizable echoes of the original layout. It reworks almost everything on top of that skeleton. It even opens with a nod to its own brutality: a Terraria-style Blood Moon greeting the player with "Welcome back... To Hell." The Korean community nicknamed it the Curse of the Red Moon.

If you want the original's full story first, see the history of Bloodbath. Both levels are part of the wider Bloodbath legacy that reshaped what Extreme Demons could be.

There is a human story connecting the two levels. Quasar was the first player ever to beat Bloodbath. When the Bloodlust project needed a verifier, he was the one originally set to do it: the natural choice, the player who had conquered the original.

But in August 2016 Quasar stepped away from the game, citing schoolwork and the finger pain that came with grinding demons. The verification passed through turbulence before landing with knobbelboy, who finished the job in 2018. The player who beat the original never verified its remake, a small but fitting piece of irony in the levels' shared history.

Length and density

Bloodbath runs about 1 minute 52 seconds. Bloodlust stretches to roughly 2 minutes 50. The extended part of "buffed and extended remake" is literal. It is not just harder per second; there is simply more of it to survive, with heavier visual effects and object density throughout.

Difficulty and Demonlist history

The two levels rhyme in a satisfying way. Bloodbath was the first level to hold the #1 Demonlist spot for over a year. Bloodlust became the second to do the same, debuting at #1 on release after surpassing Plasma Pulse Finale and reigning for more than a year before Zodiac took the top spot.

The difference is when they ruled. Bloodbath's reign was the 2015 era, when 25,000 attempts felt superhuman. Bloodlust's was 2018 onward, when the bar for hardest in the game had already moved far past anything Bloodbath demanded.

The verification gap

Riot's roughly 25,000 attempts on Bloodbath, capped by a heartbreaking 94% fail, was one of the defining grinds of its era. knobbelboy's 121,296 attempts on Bloodlust, with fails at 97% and 98% along the way, is in a different universe entirely. Nearly five times the attempts, on a level explicitly designed to out-punish the one that inspired it.

Play Bloodbath first, and honestly, most players will only ever play Bloodbath. It is a genuine milestone, a rite of passage that thousands have completed.

Bloodlust is the next tier up: the challenge reserved for players who have already conquered the original and want something built specifically to break them. It assumes Bloodbath-level skill as the starting point. If Bloodbath is the exam, Bloodlust is the postgraduate thesis nobody asked you to write.

Bloodlust is clearly the harder level: longer, denser, and built from the ground up to surpass its predecessor. But Bloodbath is the reason it exists at all.

One is the icon; the other is the monster that icon inspired. They share a song, a look, and a lineage, separated by two and a half years and about 96,000 attempts.

Related: The History of Bloodbath, Bloodbath vs Cataclysm, and The Apocalyptic Trilogy.