Nom

criteria
 Reward
 Goal

*"Travel to a dimension where Bad Guys enjoy the taste of Trimp. Whenever a group of Trimps dies, the Bad Guy will eat them, gaining 25% (compounding) more attack damage and healing for 5% of their maximum health. The methane-rich atmosphere causes your Trimps to lose 5% of their total health after each attack, but the Bad Guys are too big and slow to attack first. Clearing **Zone 145** will reward you with an additional 450% of all helium earned up to that point. This is repeatable!"*

## Helium challenge

**Nom** is a Helium challenge. There are a few rules which are followed by each one of them:

* The Helium reward from this challenge can be obtained repeatedly for multiple challenge completions.
* Completing **Nom** will increase all Helium earned until zone 145 (including 145) by 5.5x.
* Helium earned from completing Void maps will also be increased by 5.5x for each Void map completed on zone 145 or below. More information here.

## Rules

Following things happen during fights:

**When a friendly fighting group attacks**, they lose 5% of their total health each time.

**When a friendly fighting group dies**:

* Current enemy gains one stack, which gives him 25% more attack damage from current damage (compounding), up to 100 stacks.
* Current enemy heals 5% of their maximum health

What this means is:

* Unless HP is increased (due to equipment purchase+battle victory, formation switch, coordination upgrade bought, or seasoned helium spent to upgrade an HP perk), each fighting group can only live for a maximum of 20 turns.
* If the game is left alone at an unbeatable enemy, they can gain up to ~5 billion times more attack with 100 stacks (1.25 ^ 100). That is not an impassable wall however, as in this challenge enemies never attack first. As long as you're able to do more than 5% damage on average, you will eventually win.

## Strategy

The strategy of this challenge revolves around a certain wall
that your trimps will periodically run into.
Whenever you leave them progressing, your
trimps will eventually reach an enemy
whose health is 20x more than your trimps' level of attack.
Once this happens, the enemy will heal itself faster than you do damage to it,
making it impossible for you to make any progress.
Making matters worse, the enemy's attack will increase each time
it kills you, quickly reaching maximum stacks and starting
to one-shot you.

Whenever you hit a wall this way,
you need to raise your damage high enough to do at least 5% of damage per hit.
To do this, leave the world screen and start running maps. This will do two things.
It will get you weapon prestiges, and it will get you a Map bonus of up to 200%.
With those two effects combined, you should be able to push through the current
enemy and start making progress again.
The very next enemy will already be back to 0 stacks of damage increase.

Map At Zone unlocks 5 zones after this challenge, so it is probably worth trying to
get at about the time you start running Nom challenges.
Aside from the general benefits of Map At Zone, on this
challenge you can use it to prevent enemies from gaining stacks,
but it takes very precise play.
What you do is set Map At Zone at just before the place where you will
still beat enemies.
That way, you avoid hitting the wall where you can't even do 5% of
damage, and so you avoid enemies ever getting very many damage stacks.

This technique is a net speedup with perfect play, but can be
a slowdown if you make mistakes.
The primary challenge is that you might set Map At Zone too low.
In that case, your trimps will stop making progress far sooner than they
need to.
Some players opt to not use Map At Zone in this way for this reason,
because getting your trimps unstuck is not difficult, and it's hard to
predict what zone level to set it at.

Some players use the "Weapons First" setting in AutoPrestige during this challenge.
Whether this is a net speedup for you will depend on how long you leave the game
idle.
For the longest periods of idle play, you'll auto-purchase all prestiges anyway,
so the setting won't matter.
For shorter periods of idle play, you'll reach more ultimate progress this way,
but it will take longer, so it depends on how long you leave it idle whether
this is a net benefit.
To see why you reach more ultimate progress, consider that you'll
have somewhat more attack if you prioritize the weapon prestiges,
thus delaying the point where you hit a wall.
On the flip side, the reason you'll make slower progress is because
your trimps spend a lot of time dead, due to the lack of health.

Breed time should typically be shorter than during a normal run, but it depends
on how long you tend to idle.
Because the enemies take a percentage of your health each time you attack, longer breed
increase your health and thus cause enemies to do more damage to you, ultimately
counter-acting one of the main advantages of a longer breed time.
In particular, a breed time of more than 10 seconds will make progress very slow,
because your trimps always die within 10 seconds anyway during this challenge.
You still get the Anticipation bonus, though, so some level of breed time
is valuable in order to speed up progress as well as to make further progress
before reaching an unbeatable enemy.
In fact, for the longest amounts of idle time, getting the full 30 seconds of
Anticipation will lead to the furthest possible progress.
It will just take a really long time to get there due to all the time
the trimps are dead.

### Alternative strategy

*According to some players who have tried it, this Alternative Strategy is not as easy as it seems and they wish they had used the normal strategy instead [as of version 4.611].*

In Nom, enemies never attack first. We can exploit this into a strategy that doesn't use Health, which as a result cuts the grinding for prestige upgrades by half.

Respec out of the majority of Toughness, Resilience and Pheromones. We don't need any of those. Make sure to have at least 1 point in Siphonology.

When starting out, make sure to not neglect block by buying Gyms and Trainers. This early you play the run as you normally would.

Once you start reaching the point where buying prestige upgrades gets expensive, buy only the attack ones and forget about health. Make sure to keep getting the most recent attack prestige upgrades.

Your plan for surviving in the World zones is to make sure your attack is always higher than the health of enemies. Because no enemy attacks first, enemies will never get to hit you when you're one-shotting them, meaning you do not need any defense. When you start dying in zones, switch to maps to get the most recent attack prestige upgrades.

Your worker distribution ratio should be somewhere around 1:1:10. You want the majority of your workers to be in Metal.

When getting prestige upgrades from maps, this is where having block comes in. Later on (when being around 10 zones away from the goal) it would be fairly difficult to ensure you can get the most recent attack prestige upgrades as it gets harder to have higher attack than the enemies' health. Block will make it so that you don't die to hits in maps, which will make getting prestiges much faster.

Along with prestige upgrades, you also want to be getting the full benefit of the Map Bonus in the double digit zones. The closer to the goal you are, the more helpful the Map Bonus is. This is where having a higher level of Siphonology can be helpful, although just one level should be good enough.

When farming maps for metal, you want to make sure to do the highest level map that you can one-shot enemies in. Now while this rule applies to any run, not just Nom, it is especially required to follow this rule here as if you happen to not have enough block, if you don't one-shot an enemy you will instantly die.

You want to upkeep 10 seconds of breeding time throughout the entire run, making use of Anticipation. This is why dying is especially bad, as each death has you waiting for a long time. You might need to use 30 seconds for the last handful of zones to get past the Improbabilities.

As we do not care about defense in the World zone, it doesn't matter how many Nom stacks the enemy Improbabilities get, as an Improbability has too much health to be one-shot, so you just have to brute force it. This strategy effectively bypasses the need to be active when progressing world.

Once you reach a point where making maps with highest properties (all three sliders to maximum and Mountain biome) costs less than somewhere around 4 times your current fragment storage, you should be making best Mountain maps every zone. This usually starts occuring around zone 130 when just starting out with Nom. When lower, you might end up having to lower the Size property a bit to conserve fragments.