Quagmire

criteria
 Reward
 Goal

*"Travel to an extremely muddy dimension. It's hard to walk out here, making Agility difficult. Your Trimps start each run with 100 stacks of Motivated, increasing all Loot gained by 40% per stack (including Radon). After each Zone, your Trimps gain 1 stack of Exhausted, reducing Trimp damage and breed speed by 10% per stack in the World, and 5% per stack in maps (compounding). For every 10 stacks of Exhausted, your Trimps will also attack 100ms slower. You'll also have access to run a special map called 'The Black Bog', which will always scale to Zone level. Completing 'The Black Bog' will reduce your Trimps' Exhausted by 1 stack, but will also reduce their Motivated by 1 stack. Exhausted stacks can be negative, and will increase damage and breed speed. Completing Z70 or reaching 0 Motivated stacks with this Challenge active will end the Challenge, returning the World to normal. If the Challenge is ended by completing Z70, you will gain an additional 250% of all Radon earned."*

**Quagmire** is a new challenge introduced in the 5.2 update. It's the second challenge that can be ended prematurely without abandoning, if the conditions are right.

## Radon challenge

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

* The Radon reward from this challenge can be obtained repeatedly for multiple challenge completions.
* Completing **Quagmire** will increase all Radon earned until zone 70 (including 70) by 3.5x.
* Radon earned from completing Void maps will also be increased by 3.5x for each Void map completed on zone 70 or below. More information here.

## Rules

Trimps start with 100 stacks of Motivated, increasing all gained loot by 40% (additive) per stack, for a starting bonus of 4000% (41x).
Every time a world zone is cleared, a stack of Exhausted is gained. For every stack of Exhausted, Trimps attack and breed speed is reduced, either by 10% in the world or 5% in maps (compounding). Every 10th stack also reduces attack speed by 100ms. The number of Exhausted stacks can be negative, in which case a bonus is applied following the same formula. Attack speed doesn't seem affected by negative stacks (confirmation required).

For the duration of the challenge, you have access to the special map 'The Black Bog'. This map level is always equal to the current world level, has 150 cells, 1000% loot and 300% difficulty. For every completion, a stack of Exhausted and motivated is lost. Also, the following message is shown:

*"You have completed The Black Bog! 1 stack of Exhausted and Motivated have been removed from your Trimps"*

Reaching 0 stacks of Motivated ends the challenge. No special message is shown for failing the challenge.

Successfully completing the challenge will reward the player with 3.5x the Radon of all zones up to zone 70 (inclusive). Also, the following message is shown:

*"You have completed the Quagmire challenge! You have gained an extra X Radon, and your world has been returned to normal."*

## Strategy

### Partial runs

The initial stacks of Motivated multiply your Radon income by 41. So, even if you cannot complete this challenge, you can still gain a *huge* amount of Radon in a relatively short amount of time, simply by abandoning the run once it becomes too slow for comfort.

For partial **Quagmire** runs, you may start out by doing your Void Maps on zone 40 or 45, without doing any Black Bog maps. Combined with an afterpush of 5 to 10 zones (for Scruffy experience, and to increase the Scruffy Radon multiplier for the next run), this strategy can get you several hundred million Radon per hour.

Doing 10 Black Bog maps may be worthwhile if it lets you do the Void Maps 5 or even 10 zones later.

### Full runs

Full **Quagmire** runs may initially give less Radon per hour than full runs, but they allow for less active play. They also give more Scruffy Exp per hour, at the cost of giving less Nullifium per hour.

With higher perk levels, full runs should give better Rn/hr than partial runs. Tenacity is strongly recommended, as well as a healthy amount of Radon in order to boost it. Attack power is one of the keys to improving Quagmire performance.

The common strategy for full Quagmire runs is to identify the zone where your Hyperspeed ends (typically around 53, if you have pushed to zone 71). That's where you'll want to run your Void Maps, and then the bulk of your Black Bog maps, in order to keep run times relatively short.

In a first full Quagmire run, it's not uncommon to run a total of 90 Black Bog maps -- 30-40 before your Void Maps, and the rest afterward. For example, you might run 10 Black Bog maps on zones 10, 20 and 30, and then do Void Maps + 60 more Black Bog maps (in that order) on the last Hyperspeed zone. Here's an example Map At Zone configuration:

Tweaks will typically involve reducing the total number of Black Bog maps as you grow stronger, or moving Black Bog maps from the early zones to after the VMs.

Pushing forward past the completion of the challenge ("afterpushing"), to increase the Scruffy Radon multiplier, may also be desirable when doing chained Quagmire runs. You'll need to balance the Radon reward against the additional time required.

## Trivia

* It replaced Melt as the highest radon challenge available, in version 5.2.0.
* It was introduced to deal with the growing problem of ultra short "filler runs" of U2 (<15') and the micro-management intensive nature of Melt.
* Starting with version 5.3.0, Black Bog maps can no longer spawn Exotic Imp-orts.
* In version 5.4.0 the completion reward has been increased from +150% to +250%.
* z69.