A comparison of the BLOCK, HOLD and CC methods on integrating an softened 1024-body Plummer sphere: conservation of the integrals of motion (top two rows), evolution of the mass distribution of the solution (middle row) and performance metrics (two bottom rows). Lagrangian radii are plotted for 90%, 50%, 10% and 1% of the system mass. The performance metrics are normalised to the CC method at the start of the simulation. The CC method performs 1.1 × 10⁹ kick, 6.6 × 10⁸ time step, and 5.0 × 10⁶ drift evaluations, taking 62 s for the first global time step (1/512-th of the simulation) on a laptop with a 1.3 GHz Intel Core i5 processor.