Wither

criteria
 Reward

*"Travel to an ultra scary alternate reality with horrific Bad Guys. Enemies heal for 25% of their maximum health before each attack. If an enemy ever heals itself back to 100% health, your army will fall to despair and instantly wither away. Every enemy slain by your Trimps in the World or World-level Maps grants 1 stack of Hardness to your Trimps (stacking up to 10,000 and increasing Health by 0.1% per stack) and 1 stack of Horror to all enemies (increasing Attack by 0.05% per stack). Whenever a group of Trimps is killed by Wither, Trimps lose half of their stacks of Hardness and block the enemy's ability to heal and Wither for an amount of cells equal to 10% of the Hardness stacks lost. Clearing **Zone 70** will complete this Challenge."*

**Wither** is a new challenge introduced together with the Radon Universe. Completing this challenge unlocks the Tenacity Perk for U2.

## Rules

All enemies heal for 25% of their maximum health before each attack. If an enemy ever heals itself back to 100% health, the current Trimp army will fall to despair and instantly wither away.

Every enemy slain by your Trimps in the World or World-level Maps grants 1 stack of Hardness to your Trimps (stacking up to 10,000 and increasing Health by 0.1% per stack) and 1 stack of Horror to all enemies (increasing Attack by 0.05% per stack).

Whenever a group of Trimps is killed by Wither, Trimps lose half of their stacks of Hardness and block the enemy's ability to heal and Wither for an amount of cells equal to 10% of the Hardness stacks lost.

At maximum (10,000) Hardness stacks:

* Trimps have 11x health
* Enemies have 6x attack

If a Trimp army with 10,000 stacks of Hardness withers, then Hardness stacks are reduced to 5,000, and enemies cannot heal or Wither for 500 cells.

In the Challenge³ version of this challenge, the Plaguebringer modifier is disabled.

## Strategy

This is one of the most difficult challenges, and requires serious planning and strategy. Casual play will not suffice.

Enemy stacks never go away. Yours *do*, when you wither, which happens whenever the RNG decides it hates you enough, unless you jump through every single hoop required to make it literally impossible. If you run out of Hardened stacks near the end of the run, you are screwed, and the run will become impossible to finish, unless you're ridiculously overpowered. You will *not* be able to power your way out of it and get back on track. Save-scumming is recommended.

**Note**: In the base version of this challenge, you **must not** use an Heirloom shield with Plaguebringer. Plaguebringer will, at random intervals, cause an enemy to take a very small amount of damage when you start fighting it. If the enemy heals that small amount of damage, you'll wither. Plaguebringer is disabled in the Challenge³ version of the challenge, but *not* in the original.

### Two-wither strategy

The basic strategy is:

* Golden Battle. Sharp Trimps is advised, but not required.
* Focus on attack, and power through the first part of the run without withering.
* Do not run same-level maps until the endgame. You want to keep the enemy Horror stacks to a minimum.
* Somewhere around zones 59-62, farm heavily (on z-1 maps), and then raid (61, 62, 63, ...) to get the zone 65 prestiges, some equipment levels, and Smithies. Make sure you do not wither.
* Build up 10000 Hardened stacks by running same-level maps.
* Somewhere between zones 63-67, let your Trimps wither, gaining several hundred cells of wither-immunity.
* Your first batch of wither immunity *probably* won't carry you all the way to the end, but a second wither should do so.
* Finish the run with your wither immunity. You may use a Plaguebringer shield during this period. You may run some same-level maps for bonus damage on zone 70, if you have enough remaining cells of wither immunity.

Scruffy level 6 is not strictly required, but is strongly recommended. At least one player has reported success with less than 1 billion Radon, but more realistically, you want at *least* a few billion Radon, as well as a solid C-infinity score.

Reddit posts:

* https://www.reddit.com/r/Trimps/comments/dbmmew/u2\_wither\_some\_notes/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/Trimps/comments/d3tnue/lazy\_wither/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/Trimps/comments/drobsv/when\_do\_you\_know\_youve\_failed\_the\_wither\_challenge/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/Trimps/comments/effnwr/completed\_wither\_challenge\_400m\_radon/

### Three-wither strategy

This runs mostly the same as the two-wither strategy. The difference is that you allow yourself to wither on or around zone 60, and do all your raiding at that point, with wither immunity. After that, the run plays out the same way, but you'll have fewer stacks of wither immunity in the end, and a larger difference between your hardness stacks and the enemy horror stacks.

The three-wither strategy is less reliant on good RNG (and/or save scumming) during the raiding phase, at the cost of being slower at the end of the run.

## Trivia

* In patch version 5.4.0, Plaguebringer was disabled for Wither³. The patch notes *incorrectly* state that this is disabled for Wither.