[Blacksheep101]

Val jungle for the win ! Hah. Can you do a full round of testing to see where you’re at now ?
If you’ve not been doing water changes and now do a large one the danio might not adjust so well, so go slowly. Although that’s a very low stock and lots of plants I’m thinking tds may be high. No snails is a little telling.

If it’s not really high that’s good news and makes thing easier in the sense of re scaping. You could pull all the plants and do a good gravel vac and plant and scape as you like. Personally I’d go with that as it’s well established, keep all filter material wet and running if possible. Or pull everything , start again and acclimate the danio .

 

[Johntheskier]

I recently went through the same thing with several tanks. I basically did many water changes over the course of a couple weeks and with each one manually removed as much algae, decaying plant material and detritus as I could with out destroying good plants or killing my fish. Only difference was my tank looked waaaay worse than yours. Little by little it just started looking better. That was a couple of months ago. Now it looks pretty good.

I bet if you test you get 0 ammonia 0 nitrite and 0 nitrate.

 

[leaf]

Vals will always win! It wouldn't be too tough to bring that tank back without much effort.
If you want to keep vals but have an ez restart I'd...

1. pull out all the plants and runners, drain to substrate
2. add/mix a half inch of fresh substrate in and add some hard elements where vals can't grow
3. Fill up and stick healthy vals back, add some low light foreground or mid plants.


Less than 1 hour of work to turn that tank around. I guess step #4 would be select some fish after a short cycle.
Good luck!