Video Game / Trimps

A green shimmer erupts then disappears, and you hit the ground. You look pretty hungry...

— The first message you see when you open the game.

Trimps is an Idle Game by GreenSatellite. Originally browser-based exclusively, in May 2022 a Steam version alpha was released as well.

You start off alone in the wild on an unfamiliar planet. By building a trap, you catch an impish creature, which you decide to call a Trimp. Catching more of them and putting them to work, you start to build a small society. Soon, you have enough resources to start sending out your Trimps to explore the world.

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Contains examples of:

• Added Alliterative Appeal:
  • The speedrun achievements for Spire II are called Toxic Treader, Toxic Trotter, Toxic Traveller, Toxic Tempo and Toxic Teleporter.
  • A Zone 430 story message goes like this: The Trimps tried tying two Turkimps to this tall tree, then the Turkimps thrashed those three trillion Trimps, throwing the Trimps tumbling towards the tall tree. The Trimps truly tried. Those Turkimps though... they tough.
• Another Dimension: Many worlds can be found in other dimensions, and reached through maps. The planet of the Trimps is in a different dimension than your home planet.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Patch 4.8 added a new Heirloom tier which didn't allow to reroll bonuses, making hunting for the perfect ones a weeks' long quest. Sixteen days later, Patch 4.81 brought up the odds somewhat by giving each Heirloom of that tier a bonus empty slot.
  • As you progress, the early Zones become very easy, but because fighting happens at a certain maximum speed, they take time to go through on every run. To counter that, various speedup perks and Masteries begin appearing in the late game. Clearing the Spire opens up Liquification, a way to beat all enemies in an early Zone at once, letting you breeze through the beginning.
  • The Humane achievements require you to reach a specific zone with no more than 1 battle lost per zone. Starting at Zone 230 and every 5 zones after, the boss of the zone will have the ability Superheated, which will instantly kill your trimps upon killing it, which would normally mean that beating a zone with this ability in play would force you to do the zone with no losses rather than have the safety net of having 1 loss per zone. However, trimps killed this way do not count towards battles lost, meaning that even if you've lost once in a zone, getting killed by Superheated will not invalidate your attempt at the achievement in your current run.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Starting at Zone 60, enemies in the World (not Maps) ignore a portion of your Block stat.
• Beef Gate: If a boss has the go-first skill and does more damage than your Trimp's combined HP and blocking skill, you can't get past him until you increase those two stats. Increasing Trimp damage is only helpful when they have a chance to actually inflict damage.
• Big Bad: Captain Druopitee, who erased your memory, dropped you on the planet, and is creating the corruption.
• Blood Knight: Whatever the Moltimp is, it thanks you for the fight and gives you its loot before dying.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: The Steam and Kongregate versions let you pay to get Bones instantly. The usual method of earning Bones, by defeating the rarely-spawning Skeletimp and Megaskeletimp enemies, is still available.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The Obliterated and Eradicated challenges, which severely increase the Attack and Health of enemies and continue to boost them even further every 10 zones. The Eradicated challenge takes the cake, as it requires a large Challenge² multiplier to unlock instead of reaching a specific Zone.
• Challenge Run: Heavily utilized in-game for optional progression. A variety of different challenges can be run via using the Portal, allowing you to play until clearing a certain zone or map with certain restrictions limiting how you can play. The rewards from these vary from extra resources to new perks or equipment, some of which are very useful.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Heirloom rarities are assigned a specific color to them, which are also seen on the heirloom itself. This allows you to tell what rarity an heirloom is at a glance.
• The Corruption: Called just that, it infects the creatures of the world and makes them more dangerous.
• Critical Hit: Through either a shield heirloom or the Relentlessness perk, your trimps have a chance of dealing an additional 100% of their base damage; though the critical damage can be increased by upgrading the previously-mentioned perk, turning it into a base +500% damage increase. (assuming the perk is maxed out). In addition, managing to go past 100% for your chance to deal a critical attack will cause the excess percent to go towards a chance for your critical attacks to have critical attacks of their own, multiplying the damage dealt by an additional 5x multiplier (up to 8x with further upgrades). As of January 2022, there are six such critical tiers.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: One of the effects of the Ice Empowerment's Chilled debuff is to increase the damage an enemy takes by a set percentage. This effect becomes less effective the more the Chilled status effect is stacked on the enemy and caps at an additional 100% damage dealt.
• Damage Over Time:
  • The Poison Empowerment allows your trimps to deal a status effect that deals additional damage to the enemy based on a percentage of the damage your trimps dealt per turn passed.
  • Only found in the Electricity and Mapocalypse challenges is the Electric status effect, which deals 10% of your trimps max Hp per turn and is able to stack with itself with no limit, making the status effect extremely dangerous once it manages to hit even as few as 3 stacks of Electric.
• Damage Reduction:
  • Damage Blocking directly reduces the amount of damage that enemies deal to your Trimps by said amount of blocking. This can be reduced below zero, making the enemy unable to harm your trimps for that turn. However, world enemies will eventually gain an Armor-Piercing Attack making the block stat less effective to push forward.
  • Universe 2 has its own equivalent of the Block mechanic known as Prismatic Shield. This acts more like a second health bar that enemies have to take down first before enemy damage starts to affect Trimp HP. How much damage it can soak up is dependent on your Trimp's Max HP and completely regenerates upon an enemy's death.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance:
  • Certain perks that affect the cost of important things in the game by a set percentage, such as Artisanistry, Resourcefulness, and Coordinated, have them affect the current cost rather than the base cost. This allows them to help you out, while preventing them from being too overpowered.
  • One of the upgrades you can get for your Dimensional Generator is Overclocker, which immediately causes the generator to generate housing upon gaining more fuel than you can store, but by a reduced amount as a penalty. You can alleviate this penalty by a percent by upgrading Overclocker even further, but the benefit of doing so quickly starts being reduced as the upgrade compounds with itself; in other words, the penalty decrease becomes lower and lower the more you upgrade, to the point where it starts not being worth its cost.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: A zone 225 story message mentions how your character has dreamt about overheating before dismissing it since "strange dreams and memories haven't really indicated anything important before". This message appears 5 zones before Magma, which inflicts the aforementioned Overheating to your trimps.
• Ear Worm: In one story message, the player is upset about the death of some Trimps... because the Trimps who died composed a catchy battle song, and the player can't remember part of it.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Improbabilities, anomalies in spacetime that start showing up after a certain point, replacing the Blimps as end-zone enemies. Killing your first Improbability breaks the planet.
  • The game shows that the Amalgamators, even if they're a downplayed example, are much more otherworldly when compared to everything in the game's universe. Flavor text regarding them shows them appearing in bizarre ways, such as manifesting from raindrops about a thousand times the usual size and them appearing from black holes in the sky that's also accompanied by a shrill noise, and one of the flavor texts implies that they are not of this dimension. Their powers are also otherworldly; aside from being able to fuse trimps together, it's also mentioned that they can teleport both themselves and others if they wanted to, have telepathy, and that they're a bit of a Reality Warper, what with them being able to replace a part of spacetime with themselves. Even the game themselves mentions that they're barely considered trimps anymore.
• Elemental Powers: Trimps eventually gain the Empowerments of Nature, powers that cycle every 5 Zones between Poison (adds poison stacks to enemies, damaging them whenever they attack), Wind (increases the amount of resources harvested), and Ice (reduces enemy attack and increases the damage they take).
• Elite Mook:
  • Starting from zone 181, select enemies in the zone you're in will become Corrupted, indicated by a cell being purple. These Corrupted enemies not only have an additional attack and health multiplier, therefore making them much more dangerous than the standard enemies, they also have an additional ability that's selected from a pool of abilities that further increases their overall power. They also drop an additional 15% of the helium that you get for beating the zone per Corrupted cell beaten, so they also help boost helium gains.
  • Should you beat Spire II in your current run, Healthy enemies start appearing. Slowly replacing Corrupted enemies and indicated by a grayish-brown color, these effectively act as stronger versions of Corrupted enemies as not only do Healthy enemies have even higher health and damage multipliers than them, but they also have stronger versions of their abilities. Like Corrupted enemies, they also drop a percent of the helium you get from clearing the zone, except they drop 45% instead of a Corrupted enemy's 15%.
  • In Daily Challenges, Mutimps and Hulking Mutimps can appear. Mutimps have triple attack and sextuple health, while Hulking Mutimps deal 5x damage and have 12x health. They don't drop any helium unless they are also Corrupted or Healthy (which grants them those modifiers in addition to their own).
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Every life form except for the Trimps is hostile to you.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Spire from which the corruption originates. It's also where the confrontation with the Big Bad takes place.
• Export Save: This game has a 15KB+ save file (growing to 40KB+ on later stages) that can be copied manually from an in-game window, copied into clipboard or downloaded as a file and imported by pasting it into another window.
• Explosive Breeder: Trimps reproduce very quickly. All the better more to send them out to kill monsters and have them die doing it.
• Happiness in Slavery: The Trimps are all too willing to serve, even if that means rushing into combat to get slaughtered.
• Killer Rabbit: Certain otherwise-cutesy mooks (examples are Penguimps, Flowimps, and Squirrimps) tend to hurt a lot more than the other animal-themed mooks in the same area.
• Lethal Lava Land: In Zone 230, after the Spire, there's another anomaly that occurs when the player opens up a locked chest- Magma. This causes your Trimps to suffer overheating, greatly reducing their health and attack every zone, while 10% of Nurseries get closed down each zone.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Empowerments of Nature start off extremely weak, with the benefits that their status effects granted being barely noticeable, if at all, and require a lot of Nature Tokens to upgrade to a point that they're useful. What's more, even if you managed to stack enough of their status effects on an enemy such that they do start being noticeable, the stacks all go away upon the enemy's death unless you upgrade the Empowerment's Stack Transfer Rate, and even then, it's only a +1% increase per level, requiring you to also spend a lot of Nature Tokens on it before it starts transferring a notable amount of stacks from enemy to enemy. Once you manage to do so, the empowerments become powerful as their effects start greatly benefiting you, whether it's Poison greatly enhancing your killing power, Wind giving you a huge boost to your resource and helium gain, or Ice allowing you to both make battles easier and speeding up your progress in Ice zones. This is also before you take their Enlightenments into account, which grant you extremely powerful boosts in your current run.
  • The first time you get him, Fluffy is outright useless, unless you manage to beat Spire II and get the perk that allows him to gain levels. Even then, the perk's cost multiplies by 10x per level, making it hard to increase his level cap, his damage boosts starts off weak, and the Exp needed per level starts becoming a hurdle the more you do level him up. Once you manage to level him up to higher levels, he not only gives you a respectable damage boost that's only going to get higher and higher as you level him up more, but he also starts gaining abilities and bonuses that can greatly help speed up your game progress as a whole.
• Mini-Game: Completing the Spire for the very first time will give you access to your very own Spire, a tower defense-esque mini-game where you build traps and towers to kill the enemies that dare to go inside it. In an interesting twist, the towers you build, depending on their type, can affect your progress in the main game (such as Strength Towers boosting your trimp's attack by a percentage) and additional content for the Spire mini-game, such as new traps and towers, can only be obtained by progressing to a specific world zone; in other words, progressing in the main game is required to progress in this mini-game, which in turn can help you progress in the main game. A later patch made it possible to actually complete the Spire, so another Mini-Game was added, a dueling simulator called Spire Assault. This one both required main game progress (unlocking gear required completing Void Maps of certain level) and helped it (you could buy bonuses to increase Radon amount, combat stats, and later, maximum Trimp number, along with a perk giving boosts depending on level reached).
• New Game Plus: The Time Portal sends you back to the start of the game, resetting everything except for a few stats and special items.
• New Skill as Reward: A number of perks have to be unlocked by completing either a Spire row or a Challenge.
• Not Completely Useless: The "Safe Mapping" Mastery gives your Trimps +100% Health in maps, but by the time you get it, your Block should be high enough that map enemies can never deal any damage (only World enemies can pierce Block), so Health should be irrelevant in maps. Once you reach Universe 2, the Mastery finally gains some use, since there's no Block in that Universe, so dying in maps becomes a possibility once again.
• One-Hit Kill: It happens if a boss can do more damage than your Trimp's combined HP and blocking skill.
• One-Man Army: The Trimp challenge requires the player to forgo the coordinate upgrade, because the trimps are unable to fight in groups - at least until amalgamators arrive.
• Overflow Error: The developer was forced to cap the level number at 810 and add a parallel advancement (Universe 2) because making the game work with the numbers generated would have required rewriting the code in a different system.
• Percent Damage Attack:
  • The Electric ability deals 10% of your trimps max Hp worth of damage every turn.
  • A modifier that can be found on a Daily challenge causes your trimps to take damage every turn equal to a percentage of their max Hp. What this percentage is varies from challenge to challenge.
• Play Everyday: Downplayed with the Daily Challenges. While you can access Daily Challenges from up to a week ago, logging in daily is still encouraged by it as, true to their name, a new one appears everyday and an uncleared Daily Challenge can be overridden by a newer one, thus making you take on that challenge in order to not let its benefits (i.e. multiplying Helium, Nullifium, Dark Essence, and Nature Tokens gained while the challenge is active) go to waste.
• Portmanteau:
  • Trimp = Trap + Imp. Appropriately enough, they're imp-like creatures that you first find in a trap, and hence decide to call them that.
  • Three hybrid Challenge

are also named by combining parts of two words: Nometal (Nom + Metal), Waze (Watch + Size), and Toxad (Toxic + Lead).

• Pun: There are two modifiers that can only be found on a Daily Challenge. One makes it so that your trimps deal less damage on odd-numbered zones, the other makes them deal more damage on even-numbered zones. In game, when checking out the calculations for your damage, the names of the modifiers are known as Oddly Weak and Even Stronger respectively.
• Reality-Breaking Paradox: There's a special interaction in-game that occurs should you manage to get an Amalgamator in the Trimp challenge. The Trimp challenge disables Coordination upgrades, thus forcing you to fight using only one trimp, while one of the effects of an Amalgamator is to increase the amount of trimps required for battle by 1000x. Since you can get Amalgamators during this challenge, this means that you end up with a trimp that both satisfies the challenge's rules (since the extra trimps that the Amalgamator uses are fused into your soldiers, meaning that technically, there's still only one trimp fighting) and breaks it (since that's still technically more that one trimp used for fighting). End result? While the dimension doesn't implode on itself, it does start to break apart at the metaphorical seams.
  The (Amalgamator is/Amalgamators are) starting to rapidly switch between different colors. It would be slightly entertaining if the fabric of existence wasn't falling apart around (it/them).
• Rhymes on a Dime: Captain Druopitee's dialogue is all delivered in rhyme.
• Running Gag: Some automation features are unlocked by getting an "Auspicious Presence" from a Void Map, which offers to fulfill any wish you want. You always pick an annoying thing to be automated for you (such as storage upgrades) and immediately regret not asking to go home. Each time after the first, you also get the feeling this has happened before.
• A Storm Is Coming: As you get closer to the first Improbability, the sky gets darker and stormier.
• Shout-Out: The HeMergency achievement requires you to get an amount of Helium from a Bone Portal equal to or greater than a weird amount, which turns out to be the convoluted emergency number from The IT Crowd.
  • When playing the Quagmire challenge, the story message for Zone 69 is changed to "Giggity".
• Surplus Damage Bonus: The Overkill perk allows a percentage of surplus damage to be transferred to the next enemy. Should this damage be enough to kill them, then both they and the enemy you killed before them will be killed at the same time, allowing you to progress faster than normal.
• Taking You with Me: In the daily challenge, the enemy's Explosive ability attempts to inflict a large amount of damage, although it's possible to survive this attack. Outside of the challenge, the Superheated ability is given periodically to bosses of a World zone, and will activate on the death of the boss to automatically kill your trimps regardless of remaining health.
• Tastes Like Purple: The corruption smells "purple."
• Tempting Fate: After you beat the Spire (and shortly before Magma appears):
  There's still Corruption, but it feels less threatening. You feel more at peace with the planet and feel like you're on track to repairing it. Surely nothing else terrible will happen any time soon.
• Theme Naming: With the exception of yourself, the Warden, and Captain Druopitee, pretty much every sentient being you encounter has the word "Imp" in its name.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Magma has this effect. You get Fuel by progressing through zones, but lose it at a constant rate as your Dimensional Generator uses it to produce population. The faster you progress, the more Fuel in storage you have, the more efficient it is, the more Trimps it produces, the more Coordinations you can buy and the faster you can progress. Magma also causes some status debuffs, so initially it's a wall, but as you portal, it eventually starts helping you.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Advancing through the world requires sending your Trimps to battle, which inevitably results in their deaths. But you'll just breed new ones, anyway.
  You look behind and see your kingdom. You have gems, a colony, and territory. You wonder if enough Trimps have already fallen in battle. After contemplation, one word falls out of your mouth as you begin to move forward. 'Nah'
• Whatevermancy: Magmamancers have the ability to craft specialized pickaxes that significantly boost your mining efficiency, but only work in a single zone.
• You Wake Up in a Room: You wake up on an alien planet with no memory of how you got there. As you progress through the game, you'll start to remember bits of your life prior to your arrival.
• Zerg Rush: Basic Trimp strategy is to overwhelm their opponents with numbers, heedless of how many fall along the way. It helps that they're much stronger in numbers.

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