Trimps – Early Game Mini Guide (Zone 1 to Zone 60)

So you just completed following your ADVISOR, or perhaps you haven’t yet, but you’re still having some trouble progressing and the game is slowing to a crawl. This guide is aimed at you.

Basic Game Plan

Note: Credit goes to Grabz

Here is an outline of your basic game plan for getting to zone 60 efficiently. This doesn’t have to be strictly followed, nor is it necessarily the very best way of doing things, but it is one that people on Discord have generally settled on as being good.

The Plan

• Portal 0: Complete Dimension of Anger on zone 22, and use the Portal for the first time on zone 23. Start the Discipline challenge.
• Portal 1: Finish the Discipline challenge and reach zone 25. Start the Metal challenge.
• Portal 2: Finish the Metal challenge and reach zone 30. Don’t start any challenge.
• Portal 3: Reach zone 35 to unlock the Size challenge. Start the Size challenge.
• Portal 4: Finish the Size challenge.

From now on, you should Portal whenever things slow down way too much, though you do want to keep progressing for new unlocks. Your continued goals are:

1. Reach zone 40 to unlock two new challenges – Balance and Scientist I.
2. Complete Balance once or twice, then complete the Scientist I challenge.
3. Portal as soon as possible after finishing Scientist I and keep running Balance a few more times.
4. Complete a level 50 (or higher, but 50 is best) Void Map to unlock a powerful automation reward.
5. Reach zone 55 to unlock Decay.
6. Keep running Decay.

Decay

Decay is not a helium challenge (as in, it doesn’t provide a helium boost at the end), but due to its immense speed, it will still vastly increase your helium gains due to how fast you will progress.

You likely will not complete Decay the first few times – when you get stuck, abandon it from the View Perks menu (button in bottom right). Eventually you will be strong enough that Decay will catapult you to zone 60 onwards. Reaching zone 60 is a big helium boost, but it is also going to be a wall that is overcome with more helium.

The basic strategy to Decay is to run a small, mountain map as soon as you enter a new zone after about zone 40, and then farm that map for resources until you reach about 300 stacks of decay, then you exit to world to complete the zone and start again. With each run, you will have to do this less and less, as you gain more helium and become more powerful.

Bones and Exotic Imp-orts

As you play, you will find Skeletimps that drop bones. Bones in Trimps are a premium currency, but the game is balanced around finding them naturally in the world (your support is appreciated though!). In the beginning, from the bones you find, you want to purchase Exotic Imp-orts, which once purchased will permanently show up in your game and give powerful bonuses. The general agreed upon order is as follows:

• 1) Whipimp
• 2) Venimp
• 3) Magnimp
• 4) Jestimp
• 5) Tauntimp
• 6) Chronoimp
• 7) Titimp
• 8) Flutimp / Feyimp / Goblimp

Before zone 60, you will likely only be able to buy 2 or 3 Imp-orts. This is why Venimp is rated 2nd, because it is very important to get right before you start hitting zone 60.

The loot from Jestimp and Chronoimp might sound weak, but this loot type is very strong. It grants you seconds of production, and then that value is additionally multiplied by most of your loot factors (except Heirloom Drop Rate). As time goes on, the result of this “double dip” causes this type of loot to become your primary way of obtaining resources (but that does not happen for some time).

Void Maps

Void Maps are special maps, whose level always equals your current zone, thus they get stronger with you. In this part of the game, they are very tough to beat and provide somewhat weak rewards.

Completing a Void Map will grant you 2x the helium of the current zone’s Blimp (the helium reward from completing the zone). You will also find a Heirloom, which is an item you can equip for additional boosts, though the ones that drop in this part of the game are not super strong.

You want to complete one level 50 Void Map for a special automation reward.

If you are looking for efficiency, it is generally ill-advised to finish them before zone 60 (with the exception of the one level 50 one for a special reward). However, should you find yourself interested in trying anyways, or you can’t play for a while and can afford to farm for a while, it is recommended to complete Void Maps on the same zone that you can find and purchase a Gymystic upgrade in the world. Gymystic upgrades drop every 5 zones starting on zone 25, and Void Maps are recommended to be completed on zone 30, 35, 40… all the way until 55. (25 is not recommended due to the unaffordable cost of the Gymystic upgrade). Gymystic upgrades vastly improve block from gyms, and will help gain a lot more block to help you survive in a Void Map.

Void Maps require that you farm resources for some time before attempting them, so that you get stronger and overpower them. See the Farming maps section for assistance on that.

Void Maps start becoming truly powerful at zone 60, which is where you will eventually start wanting to run them for the helium and heirloom rewards. Later on, you will want to run your Void Maps at the end of each helium challenge.

Note: For helium challenges that are completed by finishing a map, the last zone where Void Map helium is increased by the challenge reward is that map’s level minus 1. For example, if a hypothetical helium challenge is completed by finishing a hypothetical level 80 unique map, the last zone to complete Void Maps so their reward is amplified is 79.

Farming Maps

When your world progress is stalling to a crawl, it is worth it to farm some maps. Repeating the same map over and over will boost your resource gain (most importantly Metal) which allows you to get stronger and progress zones faster.

In this section of the game, it is recommended to farm highest level maps where you can kill enemies in one hit. This will give you the most loot per time spent. You get a loot penalty for each map level below your current zone, but killing enemies in one strike is fast, and grants the most resources despite that penalty.

When farming maps for anything – be it Map Bonus, items, or resources, maxing the Size slider is very important. Smaller maps have multiple benefits – quicker runs for items/Map Bonus, and lower overall difficulty due to the scaling being “cut off” at the top. As such, you always want to max the Size slider:

The other sliders can be increased too of course, but that depends on how many fragments you have and how much you’re willing to spend on the map.

To gauge how low you have to go in map level, usually it’ll be about 3 levels below your current zone, but not always. There is a user tool zFarm that, based on your current attack, can tell you what map level to farm.

Wormholes

When you complete a map of level 37 or higher, you will unlock a new housing structure – Wormholes. These can be a bit intimidating due to the fact they cost Helium.

The main idea is that the return on investment in Wormholes needs to come back to you, so it is unwise to buy them without a plan.

• If you’re pushing to zone 40 to unlock the Balance challenge, it can be worth it to buy around 5 Wormholes.
• You can keep buying them when doing Balance until you feel like you don’t need them anymore, so you don’t spend the helium.
• You can up the amount to around 10 Wormholes if you’re breaching zone 50-55, once again lowering the amount/not buying at all once you think you’re fine without them.
• If you want to unlock Decay early, it can be worth to buy 20-25 Wormholes for a push to 55 (and completion of level 50 Void Map for a special reward). Of course you should still get a few Balance runs under your belt before even attempting this.

My Game Is Still Very Slow to Progress, Help

If you’re having trouble progressing, there are a few things you can try to do to remedy that.

Helium

Firstly, your helium perk distribution might need some work. Here are some rules of thumb:

• You more-or-less want to level most of the perks equally, such as Agility, Pheromones, Motivation, Power, Toughness, Looting. Looting should be a fair bit more (around ~6 levels more) due to it increasing your Helium.
• Invest in Bait, Trumps and Packrat sparingly due to their limited use.
• If you’ve unlocked Carpentry, about 30% of your total Helium should go into it, slowly increasing that amount to be 50% over time. Carpentry is love, Carpentry is life.

This is a general outline, and if you’ve progressed a bit already you’ll notice I haven’t gone over every perk that you unlock at this stage of the game. If you want an optimised perk setup for most efficiency, there is a user tool called Perky that you can use to help distribute your helium.

Equipment

Knowing how to upgrade and level your equipment can make or break how fast you progress.

The general rule of thumb is that you always want to be focusing on purchasing equipment prestige upgrades over levels, because levels are lost on upgrade, and upgrades are your key to progress. As such, with each equipment tier that you upgrade to, you want to level less and less, until you keep your equipment at level 1 without leveling it at all. You should only level equipment very early in the run, and after that, only when it’s still cheap.

Block

You may remember that the level 11 unique map The Block gives you an upgrade called Shieldblock that modifies your shield to give block. This shield will be infinitely better than buying gyms until around zone 25-30, so you should focus solely on leveling and upgrading your shield for block until then.

Once you hit around zones 25-30, you will start finding Gymystic upgrades in the world. Those upgrades will vastly improve your gyms and, while block from your shield will still compete, you should mainly focus on buying gyms from then on.