Life

criteria
 Reward
 Goal

*"Explore a dimension that is normally populated by the Undead, but is currently plagued by a quickly moving virus that can bring things back to life. All enemies in this dimension have 500% extra attack and 1000% extra health. Attacking a normal undead enemy gives your Trimps 1 stack of Unliving, which increases Trimp attack and health by 10% (additive) per stack. Trimps can have a maximum of 150 stacks of Unliving, and attacking a Living enemy will remove 5 stacks of Unliving. Completing **Zone 110** will reward you with an additional 400% of all helium earned up to that point. This is repeatable!"*

## Helium challenge

**Life** 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 **Life** will increase all Helium earned until zone 110 (including 110) by 5x.
* Helium earned from completing Void maps will also be increased by 5x for each Void map completed on zone 110 or below. More information here.

## Rules

The world is now populated by the Undead, but is currently plagued by a quickly moving virus that can bring things back to life.

The virus will alter the world every two seconds, changing some enemies to Living enemies. The initial alteration is seeded (changes are the same for every zone for each Life run), and subsequent alterations follow the rules of Conway's Game of Life - a cell becomes dead if there's less than 2 or more than three adjacent living cells, and a cell becomes living when there's exactly three adjacent cells. When all cells die, or if it reaches a duplicate state or stable state, it reverts back to the original layout.

All enemies in this dimension have 6x attack and 11x health. Attacking a normal undead enemy gives your Trimps 1 stack of Unliving, which increases Trimp attack and health by 10% (additive) per stack. Maximum of 150 stacks of Unliving. Living enemies are shown with a black cell color, and attacking a Living enemy will remove 5 stacks of Unliving.

Below is a table showing Trimp buffs for certain numbers of Unliving stacks:

Once the challenge is completed, the world returns to normal (all buffs and Living enemies are removed).

## Strategy

This challenge generally makes a run easier, faster, and more interesting than if you don't have the challenge enabled. Despite being labeled as a "challenge", it is overall a buff and a speedup compared to not running a challenge. You can ignore the mechanic for passive play; your stacks will mostly take care of themselves, and, unlike Decay, you can easily recover if you do get stuck with 0 stacks. For active play, you have an additional move you can take, namely pausing the fighting to wait for the pattern of life and death to change. This additional move is especially valuable when preparing to run void maps, because it will give you a buff and allow you to run void maps at a higher zone than normal.

Given the large helium bonus, this challenge is very valuable to enable whenever your HZE is a little above 110. It far surpasses Electricity and daily challenges at that point, but is eventually surpassed by Crushed and Nom.

### How to pause fighting

The main new thing you can do in this challenge is to pause fighting. Under the right conditions, you can improve your trimps' progress by removing them from battle, waiting for the pattern of dark cells to change, and then sending them back into the fray when the timing is right.

It's best for this challenge to adjust your settings to specify Auto Abandon rather than Waiting to Travel. That way, you can press the M button one time to make your trimps stop fighting. If you have Waiting to Travel enabled, then it might need one button or two buttons, depending on if you currently have an active trimp army that is fighting or not. If you press one M when two Ms were needed, your trimps will keep fighting until they die; if you press two Ms when one M was needed, you will go to the map chamber and back, and your trimps will start fighting again. Auto Abandon avoids these problems.

Given that setup, you pause fighting by spelling out MAMA. That's easy to remember, because if you see a heap of dark cells coming up, you might well say that same word in a panic. The keypresses go in three phases, like this:

1. Press M. This is your panic button. It will immediately stop zone progress and drop you to the map screen. Phew. At this point you can stop and think, as long as you want. The one keystroke is all you need.
2. Press AM. This will turn off auto-attack and then go back to the world screen. Now you can watch the dark cells move around, and your stacks counter will stay still. So everything is still paused, but now you can watch what's going on.
3. Press A. This will turn on auto-attack and let your trimps start making progress again.

### What happens by default

To understand when to pause fighting, it's important to consider what happens if you don't.

As a player, you'll see that some of the cells on the map are colored dark, and all the rest look normal. The dark cells are the "living" cells, which for this challenge are a bad thing. Every few seconds, some new cells will turn dark, always within 1 cell of an existing dark cell. This spread can happen in any cardinal direction and does not have to honor the normal 1 to 100 cell ordering that your trimps will follow. Dark cells will also sometimes turn light. The overall density of dark cells can vary tremendously over time, with sometimes nearly half the screen dark, and sometimes every single cell going light. In the Game of Life, this last scenario corresponds to total extinction; in Trimps, the game will automatically reset and, in the spirit of Jurassic Park, bring a few cells back to life. Life finds a way, especially if the programmer says so.

If you leave your trimps alone and play passively, then normally their stacks will stay pretty high without you needing to do anything. Even with a 5x larger penalty than bonus on the different-colored cells, there are so many more undead cells that most of the time your stacks will stay high all by themselves. Also, even if you hit a string of bad luck, the worst that can happen is for stacks to go to 0. They cannot go below zero, and if you leave them fighting, eventually they will get a string of good luck. The overall process is a bounded random walk that is skewed towards its maximum value. It will cover the full range of possible values, but it will spend quite a lot of time at the high end of the possible range.

### When to pause fighting

By default, you can play the Life challenge much like you'd play with no challenge enabled. Passive play will tend to move along until the enemimps overpower you and you get stuck. Then you can switch to active play, unlock some new prestiges and buy some new housing, after which you can possively watch your trimps take off again, if you want to. You can also continue to play actively, in which case you can do some fine tuning by judiciously pausing the fighting.

Don't do it too much, though. It's better to leave your trimps unpaused so long as they are making reasonable zone progress. If your stacks are high, it's usually better to power through a few dark cells than to pause and hold your stacks. If they have low stacks, then even then it can be better to let them keep going, if they're overpowered enough to make progress even without any stacks. The stacks are essentially a fighting resource of their own. They're only worth accumulating if you need their advantage, and having accumulated them, they're only useful if you unpause and fight.

The time to pause is therefore highly specific. Only pause if your stacks are low, say less than 100. Also, only pause if the zone number is high enough--say over 80--that you benefit from the extra fighting power. Each time you play the challenge, this zone level will be higher, because you'll have more helium and thus can overwhelm the mechanic up to a higher zone. If your stacks are low, and your zone level high, then pause whenever your trimps are fighting in dark cells.

### Void maps

For void maps, you can additionally take advantage of the fact that your stack count never changes while in a map. Thus, you can probably run void maps as high as zone 110 during this challenge, even if you normally run them much lower. The trick is to get your stacks count to the maximum before running void maps.

While trying to increase your stack count, ignore all the text above about maximizing zone progress. In this situation, you should pause fighting whenever you are at a dark cell or are at risk of moving into one. Your zone progress will suffer, but it's just for a little while. Once you get your stacks to 150, or close enough that you don't want to bother any longer, switch to maps and start building up your trimp army that way. So long as you're off of the world map, you'll retain the 150 stacks and can use them to farm maps for prestiges and materials. This is also an excellent time to use bone shrine charges.

Be careful to run void maps at zone 110 or lower. If you wait too long and your trimps overshoot zone 110, the challenge will end, and you won't be able to get the 5x helium bonus for the void maps. If you have unlocked Map at Zone, you can trivially prevent this overshoot from happening, and therefore reliably run void maps at exactly zone 110. If you don't have Map at Zone, then you need to be careful each time you switch from active to passive play. Stop and consider if you will still be below 110 when you come back. If you think you might overshoot, it's better to go ahead and run void maps now rather than to wait until your next active session.

### Geneticists

During active play, you will be killing your whole army to pause fighting. Thus, you probably want to set geneticists to less than the full 30 seconds you may sometimes otherwise use. You can still set it to 5 or 10 seconds and not be slowed down too much by waiting for armies to spawn.

## Trivia

* The challenge mechanic was taken from Conway's Game of Life.
* This challenge was added in patch v4.6.
* The Unliving message gets changed at certain stacks. (0-30: Your Trimps look perfectly normal and healthy now, which is not what you want in this dimension.) (31-75: The Bad Guys in this dimension seem to be way more dead than your Trimps!) (76-130: Your Trimps are starting to look more lively and slow down, but at least they're still fairly pale.) (131+: Your Trimps are looking quite dead, which is very healthy in this dimension. You're doing a great job!)