Announcing a Site to Search 26 Million Mario Maker 2 Levels

A demo search engine featuring the most popular 800,000 levels.

Today I would like to formally announce MakerCentral, a website that allows you to search, browse, bookmark, and share Mario Maker 2 levels at a scale never seen before.

Recently, a programmer who goes by the pseudonym TheGreatRambler reached out to me and sent me a hard drive containing 26.6 million of the game’s levels — the vast majority of levels ever uploaded. Thanks to his help, it is now possible to create the world’s first comprehensive Mario Maker 2 search engine and bookmarking site.

Players of the first Mario Maker game may remember that there was an official website that allowed them to browse levels and bookmark them to play later. In contrast, no official bookmark site has been released for Mario Maker 2 since its release in 2019.

The aim of this project is to finally fill that gap. To allow people to browse and bookmark levels on the web at their leisure, while also granting powerful new search tools that Mario Maker 2 doesn’t provide — most notably, text search.

Searching and Bookmarking Levels

Top search results for “spot the difference”.

Finding levels that fit your interests is as simple as typing in what you want to play. Clickable suggestions show up as you’re typing to make searching snappier. Here are some examples of the different types of searches you can make:

• Find levels of a specific genre. The game’s built-in tag system doesn’t account for many of the creative types of levels that the community has come up with, such as one screen puzzles, precision levels, and troll levels. Finding such levels is trivial now; just search the name of the genre or keywords commonly used by them.
• Find levels featuring specific games, songs, etc. Want to play a Mario Maker rendition of Among Us? Or find music levels of some of your favorite music? It’s easier than ever now.
• Find levels made by a specific creator. Instead of having to know the creator’s Maker ID, you can just search for their name directly.
• Find specific levels that you don’t know the Course ID of. It’s far easier to remember keywords in a level’s title or description, so this can be an easy way to find levels that you want to play but don’t know where to find their IDs.
• …and more.

Suggested completions for the phrase “mario goes to”.

You can also filter your results by game style, theme, difficulty, and tag. These can help narrow down your search results to find what you’re looking for. These filters also exist in the original game, but combined with text search, they are more powerful than ever.

The search settings dialog box.

If you see a level you want to play, you can click on it to go to its page. This will expose the Course ID to allow you to play it in-game. If you want to play it later, make sure you’re logged in, then click the bookmark icon to save it to your bookmarks. You can then navigate to your saved bookmarks to find the level there when you want to play it.

The top of a level’s page, which includes a button to bookmark it to revisit later.

Where Can I Try It?

I will be releasing a demo of the search features in the coming days. The features shown earlier are in this demo, which has every level with at least 25 likes as of February 11th, 2022 — just over 800,000 levels. I am doing this to test site performance and to get a good idea of how much the operating costs will be before I run it at full scale. To be the first to know when the demo will become available, you can join my Discord server. More information about the demo will be announced there soon.

The Future

I’ve kept the features shown here pretty simple because I want to see what features the community will suggest. In the future, I plan to implement suggested features that I believe will help MakerCentral become a more useful resource for everyone in the long term.

I am also getting the backend ready to continuously update the database of levels as new ones get uploaded to the game, so the catalog of available levels will continually expand in the final release.

MakerCentral’s end goal is to become the ultimate resource for Mario Maker 2 players. Though not mentioned in this article, Music Level Studio, a music level generator that I’ve built recently, will merge to become part of MakerCentral. I also plan to add forums for people to exchange ideas and resources with one another in a structured manner, and possibly other tools down the line.

This marks an exciting new chapter for the community, and I hope you’re excited for what’s in store for the future!

— UncaughtCursor

Discord: https://discord.gg/KhmXzfp

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MakerCentralApp