By the nature of the series, all spoilers except those relating to the series' backstory in the "Eyes and Ears" continuity are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

The Life SMP, or the Life Series, is a hardcore Minecraft survival series started by Grian. It features YouTubers such as InTheLittleWood, SolidarityGaming, Smajor, LDShadowLady, and several members of Hermitcraft, like Rendog, GoodTimesWithScar, ZombieCleo, TangoTek, Etho, and impulseSV.

Each season of the Life SMP has a different name, and comes with a different twist, but the concept is always the same. Each server member has a set number of lives, indicated by the color of their name, and once they run out of lives, they are out of the series. Players on their final lives gain a red name, and their goal changes from just surviving to killing as many people as they can.

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The Life SMP is taped in three-hour recording sessions early in a given week, and each person's perspective is uploaded to YouTube somewhere around the following Friday. To date, seven seasons and three one-off specials have been released.

Despite its name and creator overlap between the series, the New Life SMP is not a season of the Life SMP, due to its drastically different premise and modded nature.

Note: Unless otherwise specified, all tropes pertain to the characters, not the content creators that play them.

List of seasons of the Life SMP:

Seasons:

1. 3rd Life (2021^note April 20th to June 8th)
2. Last Life (2021^note September 21st to November 16th)
3. Double Life (2022^note June 17th to July 22nd)
4. Limited Life (2023^note March 3rd to April 21st)
5. Secret Life (2023^note October 20th to December 15th)
6. Wild Life (2024^note October 19th to December 7th)
7. Past Life (2025^note July 11th to August 29th)

Specials:

• Real Life (2024^note April 1st)
• Simple Life (2025^note April 1st)
• Nice Life (2025^note December 5th to December 19th)

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The Life SMP in general provides examples of:

• Aerith and Bob: Some members of the server go by their real-life first names, while others go by their internet nicknames, resulting in a sharp contrast between names like Scott, Jimmy and Joel, and names like Grian, Scar and Tango.
• Anyone Can Die: A given due to the fact that it's a non-scripted Hardcore series. Whether you died in a heroic battle, or by accidentally falling off a cliff, lose all your lives and you're out of the game.
• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: While there's technically nothing in the rules against it, Reds typically refrain from killing other Reds until the whole server is on Red. The few times it's happened before that point, it's typically been due either to the factional politics of the server or Accidental Murder. In many cases, this is Pragmatic Villainy: if all the Reds unite against the remaining Yellows and Greens, they can focus on taking them down, meaning that when the server inevitably descends into all-out conflict, they're only facing other Reds who don't have a leg up thanks to having Extra Lives. Similarly, Nice Life's Purples are technically allowed to kill each other, but (aside from one case of Accidental Murder on Jimmy's part) they instead stick together to try and get strength in numbers.
• Apologetic Attacker: Happens (most of the time) when a Boogeyman kills one of their allies, or even a non-ally server-member whom they have no beef with.
• April Fools' Day: The April Fools' specials are one-shots that are far Lighter and Softer than a normal season and involve silly gimmicks.
• Big "NO!": A very common set of last words for any death in the series is to just scream "NO!".
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: By the Deadly Game nature of the series, as well as everyone being a POV character (depending on which perspectives the viewers watch), this is a given.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Player names are displayed in different colours depending on how many lives they have, and some also choose to change their skins to reflect their life count. Green indicates three lives, yellow is two, and red is one. In Last Life, Wild Life and Past Life, players can have four or more lives, which is indicated by dark green. In Limited Life, the colours indicate the time range a player has left.
  • In the Nice Life Christmas Special, players who are on Santa Bot's Naughty List are given purple names and glow purple, making them easier for other players to recognize and hunt down, while the players that are on the Nice List are given pink names instead.
• Construction Is Awesome: With a good portion of the players being good builders, it's unsurprising to see beautiful buildings in the server, even with its constricting border and destructive premise.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • On Day 3 of 3rd Life, Bdubs and Martyn (among others) decide to play Tango's minigame, Dare to Flare. After carefully reading the rules and seeing that they prohibit all fire resistance potions, Bdubs uses a golden apple to minimise damage from the lava and Martyn uses Ender pearls to jump straight to the reward chest and back out again. Tango lets both keep the prize but bans consumables and Ender pearls from that point forward.
  • On Day 6 of Last Life, Grian and Impulse resolve to gather the three Wither skeleton skulls scattered across the server. After two successful heists at the Shadow Fort and the Snow Fort, they are unable to find the one at the Scottage and eventually conclude that it's inside their Ender chest, meaning that they could never retrieve it. Rather than throw in the towel, Impulse heads to the Nether fortress and grinds Wither skeletons until he finally gets a new skull, which he presents to Grian at the end of the day.
• Deadly Game: Essentially. While the series tends to start off calm, with alliances and the bare bones of a society being formed, it's only a matter of time before someone turns Red, either through the Boogeyman, a mistake, or just plain bad luck… and that's when all hell breaks loose. Inevitably, the fragile faction system that always emerges on the server collapses as more and more people turn Red or die, and in the end, only one survivor remains.
• Dramatic Irony: Every perspective will have information that other players don't, so this is a common phenomenon for anyone who watches multiple server members. There's also the fact that starting a new video naturally brings the viewer back to the start of the session with full knowledge of what's going to happen, which of course the players don't have. It's especially prevalent in Secret Life (where players may just be confused by their server-mates' behaviour while viewers know exactly what they're doing) and Wild Life (where the Wild Card may be obvious once you know it, but much harder to guess from a player's perspective).
• Dramatic Thunder: In Last Life as well as Limited Life onward, whenever a player is Killed Off for Real, thunder can be heard in the background as lightning strikes the site of their death. Lizzie's final death in Secret Life plays with this, as thunder can be heard but no lightning strikes, as she dies from falling in the Void in the End dimension.
• The Dreaded:
  • In general, the Reds. While they're not the only ones on the server with the capability to kill, they are the only ones allowed to initiate PVP, and have killing everyone else as their explicit goal. On Limited Life, Yellows also fill this role given that they can kill Greens as well.
  • In Last Life, Limited Life, and Past Life, the Boogeyman also fills this role. At least one player is assigned this role each session, and they have until the end of the day to kill another non-Red player, or face a severe penalty affecting their survival — having all but one of their lives taken away, leaving them on Red (Last and Past Life), or dropping a colour grade and having up to a third of their life-time taken away (Limited Life). It's basically the concept of the Reds but with an extra layer of Paranoia Fuel, as the Boogeyman can be literally anyone, and you won't know who until they cave someone's head in. invoked
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • 3rd Life is a modified hardcore SMP, so a few players at the beginning treated it like a traditional hardcore SMP. They focused on mining and gathered resources instead of socializing and telling a story. Notably, BigB once spent an entire episode in the mines without interacting with anyone. By the time 3rd Life concluded, players realized that alliances and interactions are what makes the series shine, and that seasons are too short and unpredictable for any long-term resource gathering and base-planning to be worthwhile. Future seasons also allow players to mine and farm (and other boring things that would usually be cut out of a video) shortly before a session begins.
  • BigB, Martyn, Cleo, Ren, and Impulse used to split single 3rd Life sessions into multiple episodes, but by Last Life, nearly every member equates one session to one episode and usually uploads them on the same day. BigB is the only exception to this, continuing to split his Last Life sessions but titling them "Episode # (Part 1)" and "Episode # (Part 2)"; he would also upload Part 1 at the same time as everyone else, but then only upload Part 2 a few days later. He stopped doing this from Double Life onward.
  • The first two seasons don't have any real twist beyond how the players themselves behave, meaning that Last Life feels effectively like Third Life+ rather than a more independent entity. It's only from Double Life and onward that each season gets its own unique "thing".
  • In the first three seasons, Yellows were (theoretically) just as peaceful as Greens. It's only from Limited Life on that they get to play a more active role in eliminations (being semi-aggressive in Limited and Wild Life, and having the ability to cause tasks to fail in Secret Life), although this doesn't happen for Past Life or the specials.
  • If people had to miss a session, or part of one, in the first three seasons, they would just get a free pass, resulting most notably in BigB still being Green in the final episode of 3rd Life. Starting in Limited Life, players who were unavailable would either get replaced by a different player using their account (Lizzie and Gem for Pearl and Cleo in Limited Life, Ren for Tango in Secret Life, Mumbo for Tango and then Joel in Past Life) or would go AFK (Grian in Limited Life).
  • Resource loss after death, whether due to theft or the destruction or despawning of items, was common in the first three seasons, requiring everyone to create a backup gear stash early so they could get back in the game proper sooner. From Limited Life on, the KeepInventory rule is set to "true" so this doesn't happen (although it can't be turned on for the early episodes of Past Life as it literally didn't exist until 1.4.2; somehow, they get it to work in 1.1).
  • Similarly, the early seasons had very limited resources due to the finite size of the world. Seasons from Secret Life onward implement ways to get around this, providing extra resources such as diamonds by means other than mining: Secret Life has the Secret Keeper's rewards, Wild Life has the Trivia Bots' rewards, and Past Life has the world being re-generated each session, causing diamonds and other ores to reappear.
• Escort Distraction:
  • On Day 3 of Last Life, Jimmy invites Scott and Pearl to tour the Southlands in order to get them away from their base so Impulse can steal their sugar cane.
  • On Day 2 of Double Life, Cleo sends Jimmy and Tango on a wild goose chase to see whatever Scar's doing, allowing Scott to steal their goats while they're gone.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: It's a Foregone Conclusion that all but one of the perspective characters die, by the Deadly Game premise of the series, usually by another player, mobs, by accident, or by mistake. However, there's been a tradition for each season to end on a Last Survivor Suicide (either directly or by proxy), leaving all perspective characters dead; the only season in which this has been averted so far is Secret Life.
• Evil Costume Switch: A good number of players have a separate skin for when they get knocked down to one life left, often being Red and Black and Evil All Over, with grey skin and red eyes. The list of people without a Red Life skin^note Etho, Grian, Lizzie, Mumbo, Tango is smaller than the people who have had one^note Bdubs, Big B, Scar, Martyn, Pearl, Ren, Scott, Skizz, Joel, Jimmy, Cleo, Gem, Impulse.
• Explosive Stupidity: Due to the ubiquity of explosive traps in the Life series, players being blown up as a result of their own traps backfiring or trying to disarm others' traps is a fairly regular occurrence happening at least once per season. On more than one occasion, it has even spelled the end of a player's season.
• External Retcon: Martyn's lore streams for the "Eyes and Ears" continuity, taking place after the end of various seasons, recontextualize certain characters' behaviours, server mechanisms, season gimmicks, and events in the AU/continuity's worldbuilding framework and storylines.
• Fatal Fireworks: While their first major use in combat as explosive projectiles is on Day 6 of 3rd Life, during a skirmish at Dogwarts, it isn't until Last Life when they play a major role in a player's demise.
  • For Last Life, Lizzie fills most of her hot-bar with firework-loaded crossbows and uses several to weaken Big B before killing him. Later on Day 7, she unleashes a fair amount of them onto Bdubs when he betrays her. While Lizzie loses her final life, her firework rockets weaken Bdubs enough that he's killed by his fellow Red Names when he tries to run.
  • On Day 9 of Last Life, Grian and Joel arm themselves with firework rockets for their rampage and end up killing Pearl with them. Joel offhandedly mentions that the plan was made in honour of Lizzie.
  • In the Double Life finale, Joel decides to utilize the same plan to kill Scott for burning the Relation-Ship in the previous episode, only with stronger rockets. He credits Lizzie for the idea from the last season.
  • From Day 6 of Limited Life, the T.I.E.S. use firework-loaded crossbows as weapons in fights alongside normal bows, melee weapons, and End crystals. While other factions like the Bad Boys also use crossbows, the T.I.E.S. are the only ones to use firework rockets as projectiles.
• First-Person Dying Perspective: Excluding the few deaths across the series where the editing cuts away from the scene shortly before the actual death, this trope is standard for the Life series, with the episodes showing each person's death in their own perspective of the series.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • In Last Life, Team B.E.S.T.'s name is an acronym made up of the first letters of its members' names (Bdubs, Etho, Skizz, Tango). Whenever one of their members turns Red, plenty of jokes are made about having to change the acronym.
  • In Limited Life, much like Team B.E.S.T. from Last Life (and including three of its members), a group of players name their faction T.I.E.S. after the names of its members: Tango, Impulse, Etho, and Skizz. More jokes are made about changing the acronym whenever someone proposes the idea of another person joining the faction.
  • The two instances above end up causing a snag in Wild Life as Grian confuses the two alliances for each other, causing him to answer a trivia question incorrectly on Day 5 and having to suffer a penalty as a result.
• Game of Chicken:
  • In Limited Life, the Bad Boys have a game of this on Day 1, where they each set fire to a block on the roof of the very flammable Woodland Mansion they call their base, and the last one to put out their fire wins.
  • In Secret Life, Scar, Impulse, and Bdubs are assigned to play this against each other on Day 6, with success requiring any one individual to win three games. It's initially made a bit complicated by the fact that Scar has no idea what a chicken game is at first, thinking the task is referring to games revolving around chickens. Since the task never said that they couldn't keep playing games until all three of them won three each, they play nine games overall to make sure everyone can succeed at their secret task for the day.
  • In Wild Life, Grian and Mumbo briefly play this on Day 1 with respect to their size-shifting abilities for the episode — being stuck in a one-block tunnel, they were wondering if they'd end up suffocating if they grew in height in the tunnel. They're interrupted by Skizz joining them in the Sub-One Club, though Grian continues to experiment with how size-shifting interacts with the environment after that.
• Geas:
  • The Boogeyman curse of Last Life, Limited Life, and Past Life function along the lines of one: to kill another player by the end of the day, or have their life prematurely shortened, by either being forcibly dropped to their final life (Last Life and Past Life) or have their life-time cut short by up to a third of its original length (Limited Life). Across the seasons, exactly two people have failed — in one case, refused — to commit the mandatory murder and accepted the penalty.
  • The personalized secret tasks in Secret Life must be fulfilled to counter the Anti-Regeneration gimmick of the season. If a player fails their task, they get no hearts at the end of the session. If a player fails a rerolled harder task, they lose 10 hearts.
  • On Day 3 of Past Life, the three members of the secret Society are instructed to collaborate to kill two other players by non-PVP means, or else they will each lose two lives the following session.
• Glass Cannon: Zig-Zagging Trope.
  • Players on their Red Life are the only ones allowed to initiate PVP and directly kill other players, with their explicit goal being to take out everyone else. However, while other players will simply respawn with one life missing, a Red player's death means they're out of the game for good, meaning they have to be extremely careful about how and when they try to kill other people. Downplayed slightly in Season 4, as a player being Red means they have up to 8 hours of life-time left, so while they technically can have more than one life left and likely won't be out for good if they die, they still have to be extremely careful about murder.
  • Averted with the Boogeyman, who is randomly chosen from the pool of Yellow and Green lives, and is granted a temporary buff after making their kill following Day 2 of Last Life to prevent instantly getting revenge-killed afterwards by their target's allies.
• Grand Theft Me: A benign example. From Limited Life onward, players who are unable to make it to a recording session are typically substituted in by an inactive player taking over their account and "possessing their body", with the substitution going unnoticed in-universe by copious use of Suspiciously Specific Denial and everyone else on the server failing a spot check for the most part.
• Healthy Green, Harmful Red: Players are given a certain number of lives, most commonly three. When they have all three lives, it's represented with green, and when they have only one left, it's represented with red. Their nametags reflect this. In Last Life and Wild Life, when a player has more than three lives, the extra lives are represented with a darker green.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic:
  • No one on the server wears a helmet, due to one of the rules of the server specifies that no one is allowed to wear one, presumably so they're more recognizable in others' videos.
  • Tango is executed by firing squad in 3rd Life for violating this rule.
  • Scar makes and puts on a helmet in Secret Life twice in brief failures to remember the rules. No one but the viewers notice it on Day 2, and he burns it at the beginning of Day 3, but then he makes another on Day 4. This time, Martyn and Joel catch him with the helmet on and tell him to "come over here and take that helmet off"; however, the Opposite Day nature of Scar's task that day requires him to run away and keep it on.
  • Joel accidentally crafts a diamond helmet on Day 2 of Wild Life, but he and Gem immediately realize this mistake and Joel quickly disposes of the evidence by literally eating the helmet so that he doesn't accidentally put it on.
  • One of the potential rewards for answering a trivia question correctly on Day 5 of Wild Life is a netherite helmet. Jimmy ends up receiving one and wears it briefly, but since the helmet was already on the verge of breaking when it was given (and due to the minimum armour resource pack), he's not penalised for this.
• History Repeats: Several recurring incidents have occurred without fail in multiple seasons, so much that they have been called "curses", by the fandom and sometimes the content creators themselves.
  • Grian being, in one way or another, responsible for the death of at least one of his allies (or as one may put it, loved ones).
  • Jimmy being the first to be Killed Off for Real for the first four seasons. This tradition is surprisingly broken from the fifth season, Secret Life, and onward.
  • Mumbo being Killed Off for Real shortly after Jimmy gets Killed Off for Real, by the exact same entity (Grian in Last Life, Etho's Warden in Secret Life) in his first two seasons. It's lampshaded in Wild Life in a trivia question, which is quickly followed by Mumbo being the first to be Killed Off for Real later in the session, with Jimmy outliving him.
  • In the first three seasons, Scott building part of his base, especially the defensive walls, out of wood, prompting Joel to burn it down just because he could.
  • Scott and Cleo being allied with each other, whether openly or in secret. While they initially part ways at the start of Secret Life due to being "overpowered" together, they eventually rekindle their "Widows Alliance" when everything hits the fan on Day 7.
  • Tango Dying Alone (for the most part) for his final life, often in a seemingly "meaningless" way or by no fault of his own.
  • Someone inevitably making a wolf army.
• House Fire: Griefing other factions' or players' bases by setting them on fire is a very common occurrence, to the point one of the de facto mottos to live by in the series is "If something can be burnt, it will be burnt."
• Humans Are Bastards: The various alliances formed along with backstabbing have resulted in much drama and many players losing lives. Skizz lampshades this in Nice Life:
  Skizz: It's the Life series, dude! Everybody's a jerk!
• Intimidating Revenue Service: Played for Laughs whenever it is ever mentioned.
  • In Last Life, Lizzie tames three dogs early in the season and names them after things that scare people — 'Dragon', 'Ogre', and 'Taxes'.
  • At the start of the Real Life special, the first thing Martyn does is demand taxes from half the server.
• Kill Tally: The fan wiki keeps track of how many kills/eliminations (and other records) each player has per season via multiple criteria, including and not limited to overall kills, most final kills (having someone Killed Off for Real), most lives lost per session, etc. For relevance to the trope:
  • In terms of overall kills (suicides not included), Grian wins in Season 1 with 8 kills^note Scar #1, Jimmy #2, Ren #1, Skizz #2, Bdubs #2, Skizz #3, BigB #2, and Scar #3, Joel wins in Season 2 with 13, Joel wins again in Season 3 with 3 direct kills^note Pearl #1, Scar #2, and Scott #2; when indirect kills are counted, it's 6 kills with the inclusion of soulmate-induced proxy deaths, Grian wins again in Season 4 with 20 kills, Scar wins in Season 5 with 12 kills, Martyn and Mumbo are tied in Season 6 with 7 kills each^note not including their respective final lives or any undead players, kills committed while undead included, and Grian wins in Season 7 with at least 14 kills^note or up to 23 kills when counting inconclusive trap kills where more than one player contributed.
  • In terms of most non-suicide final kills, Scar wins in Season 1 with 3 eliminations^note Ren, Martyn, and Bdubs and Pearl wins in Season 3 with 2 eliminations^note Bdubs and Cleo; if including soulmate-induced proxy deaths, it's 4 eliminations with the additions of Impulse and Martyn. Season 2 has a three-way tie between Grian^note Jimmy, Mumbo, and Bdubs, Ren^note Skizz, Scar, Pearl, and Scott^note Impulse, Grian, and Joel with 3 eliminations each, though Scott is also credited in-game with Martyn's elimination via backfired End crystal; Season 4 has a two-way tie between Martyn^note Etho, Scott, and Impulse and Scott^note Joel, Big B, and Pearl at 3 eliminations each, Scar gets 6 eliminations in Season 5^note Tango, Etho, Cleo, Impulse, Gem, and Pearl, and Joel reclaims his crown in Season 6 with 4 eliminations^note Tango, Cleo, Ren, and Grian. Season 7, in turn, has Grian return with 5 eliminations^note Ren, Joel, Skizz, Cleo, and Gem.
• Killed Off for Real: Everyone who loses their final life is put into Spectator mode, only able to watch the rest of the game go on. Subverted in the "Eyes and Ears" continuity, where it's clarified in the Past Life lore stream that players are technically plucked out just before they truly die for the Watchers to feed on them — enough for players to feel the despair of dying, but not enough to actually be dead and gone for good.
• Lighter and Softer: In general, the specials, being non-canon, are not taken very seriously by any of the creators, and while betrayals and murders occur like any other season of the Life series, they generally aren't treated with much narrative weight.
• Mad Bomber:
  • Grian is the cause of two of the three deadliest traps in the first six seasons (his triple kill in 3rd Life and quad kill in Limited Life), both of which involve TNT minecarts and are followed by positively unhinged laughter. In particular, TNT traps are his forte while under Scar's employ in 3rd Life, to the point where he even rigs the entire desert to explode in the Battle of the Red Desert. He's killed four people (Scar with a creeper on Day 1 and Ren, Jimmy, and Skizz with a TNT minecart on Day 4) with explosions in that season alone.
  • In Last Life, after going down to his final life, Joel sets multiple explosive traps per day all over the map. Although the traps have only rarely succeeded, this cements Joel's reputation as a Wild Card in the series, especially combined with the fact he has the highest Kill Tally out of everyone in the season. Two seasons later in Limited Life, a vast majority of Joel's kills involve him dropping a TNT minecart on his victims, which is still saying something since everyone else was using TNT minecarts by the dozen that season.
  • Scar and Jimmy both join their ranks in Past Life, with Scar killing 6 players at once by bombing the Pokéball^note which would have broken the record for the biggest multi-kill in the Life series had Grian not achieved an octo-kill the session prior, surprisingly without explosives and Jimmy managing to kill all 3 Villys at once with a well-aimed TNT minecart from that season's Skynet.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Every time someone dies, the server typically erupts into shock and panic, especially when it means they're now on their last, Red life.
• A Molten Date with Death: Often invoked, as other than TNT and other explosives, one of the most common lethal forms of trap used throughout the series is lava.
• Monster of the Week: The Boogeyman, who is randomly selected out of the living non-Red players and must kill someone to cure themselves or face a penalty relating to their lives the next day — being reduced to their final life in Last Life and Past Life, and dropping to the next colour grade in hearts (i.e. losing up to 8 hours of life-time) in Limited Life.
• No Blood for Phlebotinum: Given that the world is only 700 by 700 blocks big, there's bound to be conflicts over resources.
  • In 3rd Life, see Scar and Grian's attempt to create a monopoly over dark oak trees and sand, the server conflict earlier on over villagers, and people begging for and stealing cows.
  • In Last Life, there's shortages of sugarcane (used in the server-specific TNT recipe) and villagers (as there was no village, making the only way to get them by curing zombie villagers).
  • In Double Life, the sugarcane shortage continues when Grian starts to hoard the server's supply, and when that fails by Day 3, there's a shortage of sand because there isn't a desert on the server and Grian ends up hoarding most of the server supply of that too.
  • In Limited Life, the cow shortage from Season 1 makes a brief comeback when the Bad Boys start murdering them left and right, or get killed in the middle of Boogeyman attacks, but it's not the main resource everyone is after: the very mechanism of the season enforces life-time as the primary, non-renewable resource everyone is fighting over. The hunts which the Yellow and Red Names go on to get some extra life-time back result in tremendous amounts of bloodshed, and serves as the overall motive for any non-environmental deaths across the season. As the season inches toward a close, many players even want to become the Boogeyman just so they can get their hands on more life-time for themselves.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • In 3rd Life, in spite of being nominally Omnicidal Maniacs, all of the pre-Day 7 Red Names stayed allied with their Green (or occasionally Yellow) compatriots from before their deaths, allowing the factions to wage devastation across the server. One season later, a rule against Red Names allying with non-Reds is immediately instated, fracturing many alliances in Last Life. This new rule has been mitigated since Double Life, as the soulmate system practically requires everyone to team up; regardless, the instatement of the rule has given rise to the non-Red hunts for every season since Last Life.
  • The KeepInventory gamerule is enabled starting with Limited Life. This is in reaction to the prevailing strategy of the two previous worlds: building up tons of resources for the sole purpose of respawning well-equipped, which wasn't particularly interesting to watch. There's also the additional justification in Limited Life that everyone can theoretically afford to die dozens of times, and being forced to recover or recreate their gear after every single death would get incredibly tedious and undermine the potential for multiple deaths.
• Omnicidal Maniac: What everyone becomes upon being reduced to their last life (or time equivalent thereof in Limited Life); their ultimate goal is to kill everyone else on the server.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: As the series goes on, several of the players have brought up their fellow server-members' behaviour in past seasons, often as a warning to their potential allies. For instance, upon the Nosy Neighbours' team-up in Limited Life, Cleo warns Pearl about Big B's Boogeyman kill on her in Last Life, while Martyn makes an allusion to 5 AM Pearl's questionable mental stability in Double Life.
• One-Steve Limit: Zig-zagged. Smajor and Impulse are both named Scott in real life, but Smajor is the only one who uses that name in the series. When they team up in Secret Life, their alliance is named Gem and the Scotts as a nod to this.
• Our Souls Are Different: In Martyn's "Eyes and Ears" lore, the soul of every player (other than Grian) gains a "Fragment" during each season, representing their death and trauma from said season, and only by winning the season can their Fragment be "protected" and not form. It is not yet confirmed exactly how many Fragments have to form for a soul to irreversibly break, or what happens if or when a soul is shattered permanently.
  In each peace lies a piece that makes up the whole
  Woven the Fragments that make up a soul
• Precision F-Strike: While the series is mostly PG/PG-13, there are a few moments where the creator-characters curse without it being edited out.
  • On Day 1 of 3rd Life, Martyn drops the F-bomb when a skeleton surprises him in a ravine.
  • On Day 7 of Last Life, Impulse and Skizz attack Ren and damage his tower, prompting him to call them bastards.
  • On Day 1 of Limited Life, Scott casually describes the Woodland Mansion to burn "like a fucking wildfire". Most of the POVs cut this part out, but it is somehow not censored out in Big B's perspective of the conversation… presumably because Scott's accent made it much easier to miss.
  • On Day 7 of Limited Life, Pearl exclaims "Shit!" in a moment when she and Big B suddenly spot a falling TNT minecart directly overhead. Again, it's only heard in Big B's POV (and put in the Cold Open, no less).
• Red Is Violent:
  • Those on their last life (or time equivalent in Limited Life) get a red name, and their goal becomes to take out as many people as they can.
  • On Day 3 of Last Life, Lizzie describes being inflicted with the Boogeyman curse as being overcome with a "murderous red mist".
• Running Gag: Following the massive success of Grian's TNT trap killing three people in 3rd Life, all his subsequent traps aside from the redstone-less bubble elevator trap either fail to work or somehow don't kill anyone when they do work, leading him to be increasingly exasperated at his own lack of redstone expertise. In Last Life, he outright says that it seems to be a running gag for traps to never work, leading to extreme surprise on the rare occasion a trap does work.
• Sequel Escalation: The first season, 3rd Life, lays the bare-bones groundwork for the sequels. The next seasons have twists that make it much harder to survive.
  • The first season, 3rd Life, is hard on its own; a small hardcore world with limited resources where you're given three lives. If you aren't the first one to become a Red Life, then you'll have Red Lives at your throat trying to kill you. When you become Red, then you'll have to balance trying to kill people while also surviving yourself.
  • The second season, Last Life, has every player randomly generate with 2–6 lives, meaning some players are given a vast disadvantage from the start. Lives can be given, meaning that they're the most valuable — but severely finite — currency on the server. Then there's the Boogeyman mechanic. Each session, at least one non-Red Life is randomly cursed to be a Boogeyman and must kill someone or else they automatically become a Red Life next session. There's also the new rules surrounding the enchanting table. There is one enchanting table set at spawn and players are unable to make any. The table is constantly stolen, traded, held hostage, or profited off of, consequently making enchanting gear and tools a hard task.
  • The third season, Double Life, adds the soulmate mechanic. Although the randomly assigned lives, life transfer, and Boogeyman are absent from this season, the new twist ensures that people are twice as likely to die and twice as quick to become Red Lives. Players are randomly assigned a soulmate and the two must share a health bar. It's possible to suddenly die if your soulmate happens to brush too close to a Creeper, but in the case of both soulmates being attacked, the health bar depletes so fast that they're given little time to fight back. The Enchanting Table is given a invokedDifficulty Spike. Like the last season, there's only one, but it's located deep underground in the Ancient City. Not only must players find it, they also must evade the strongest mob in the game, the Warden, or at least make as little sound as possible to not spawn it in (made even more difficult by an addition to Proximity Chat allowing sculk sensors to detect speech when players aren't sneaking). The first session having 4× as many deaths than Last Life's first session (4 vs. 1) is a testament to its difficulty^note Even if half of the deaths involved are proxy deaths via the soulmate system, as is the fact that it's the shortest season as of Past Life, with a total of 6 sessions.
  • The fourth season, Limited Life, shakes things up greatly. Everyone has at most 24 hours to live, they lose an hour's worth of life if they die, and they gain half an hour's worth if they kill someone. That much is simple, including the fact that Yellow Lives can kill Green Lives legally now. And then the Boogeyman system makes a return, with a twist: every Boogeyman kill is worth double the usual amount of life (victim loses 2 hours, killer gains 1), and they drop an entire colour (i.e. up to eight hours' worth of life-time) if they fail to kill someone by the end of the day. By the time the season is over, it has racked up a total death toll of more than the past three seasons combined, which ultimately serves as a testament to its difficulty.
  • The fifth season, Secret Life, makes things interesting by giving everyone 30 hearts, but also removes any normal means of healing, meaning any damage taken is permanent. The only way to get health back, aside from receiving a single gifted heart from another player, is to successfully complete the secret task each player gets assigned to them at the start of each session by the Secret Keeper. Some of these tasks are simple and relatively safe to perform, but others are extremely difficult and incredibly likely to force the players to put themselves in danger, with some tasks even requiring players to sabotage or harm other players, regardless of whether they are Red or not. Failing to complete a task results in the player receiving no hearts, but succeeding results in gaining 10 hearts. Players also have the option to re-roll their task in an effort to gain more hearts, but failing a re-rolled task, which is much harder and challenging than a normal task (at times bordering on impossible), will result in the Secret Keeper taking 10 hearts. Add in the fact that Yellows can make Greens fail their tasks simply by correctly guessing them and that Reds, who regularly receive tasks that are meant to harm others, can get multiple tasks in a single session, it's little to no surprise that most of the players learn to be extremely careful with whatever they're doing, as one wrong move, one tiny little mistake such as jumping off a small ledge or not paying attention to their surroundings, could leave them dangerously close to death, with little hope of recovering.
  • The sixth season, Wild Life, shakes up the formula by changing the gimmick of the season every session. While each player starts off with double the normal life count, the randomness of the gimmicks makes the game far more unpredictable than past seasons, and have been the cause of death for multiple players, be it through a gameplay glitches or by mechanism design. Each gimmick also comes with its own perks and drawbacks, with some even having lethal consequences, making it far more complex than the average season. That's hard enough on its own, but then comes the fact that Yellow Names are hostile towards Greens again, with the added factor that any Yellow or Red that successfully kills a Dark Green name gains a life back, turning what had once been Last Life's most valuable currency into a reason for being targeted by a good chunk of the server.
  • The seventh season, Past Life, seemingly brings things back to basics by simply updating the server through the "evolution" of Minecraft every session. However, due to the Early-Installment Weirdness of Minecraft itself, the early game is challenging and buggy enough for players who may not have played through the beta versions themselves (and even those who have may find that Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be), and many commonplace items or mechanisms in previous seasons like shields, enchantments, keepInventory, and the recipe book for crafting recipes are downright unobtainable or nonexistent until later in the season. Additionally, since the server is regenerated every session as it's updated, generated structures like dungeons and villages or even entire biomes could be there one session and gone the next, meaning long-term mob farms, monopolies, and even established mines and secret tunnels are unfeasible. Throw in the Boogeyman starting from Day 2 (or the Society on Day 3) on top of all that, and it's a recipe for in-game disaster.
• Shout-Out: Anytime someone descends from a high place using slow falling or a boat, you can expect a comparison to Mary Poppins, which more often than not is a declaration of "I'm Mary Poppins, y'all!"
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Joel has a knack for antagonising Scott just about every season, which often results in Scott unleashing hell back when given the chance.
  • Wild Life plays with it by reversing the two's placements and roles in the dynamic, as Joel plays a more calm and defensive game for the season.
  • It's also exploited and lampshaded by Scott and Cleo in Past Life when Mumbo subs in for Joel during one session and is tricked into agreeing to participate in a Duel to the Death to "bury the hatchet", something actual-Joel is not happy to learn.
  • The main exceptions to this are the end of 3rd Life when they team up against Dogwarts (and get killed in the process); Real Life, where Joel invokes a truce in honour of their real-life friendship; and Nice Life, where they start a Holiday Ceasefire halfway through the special and end up with a Rivals Team Up that ends far better than in 3rd Life.
• The Smurfette Principle: Cleo was the only feminine-leaning member of the server during 3rd Life. Later averted with the addition of Pearl and Lizzie in Last Life, and then Gem in Secret Life.
• Sole Survivor: By the Deadly Game premise of the series, the winner of each season is supposed to be the last one standing out of over a dozen server-members. However, the seasons generally play with this:
  • 3rd Life ends with Grian pulling a Last Survivor Suicide by jumping off a cliff, with Martyn following suit in Past Life. Zig-zagged in Wild Life: Joel attempts to kill himself by triggering a trap he set earlier… only for it to fail; he ends up spamming Ender Pearls until the recoil takes him out instead.
  • Last Life ends with Scott being killed by supernatural means^note the /kill command shortly after his victory and before he can commit a Last Survivor Suicide.
  • Double Life, being built on a Can't Live Without You soulmate gimmick, means it's impossible for one member of a soulmate pair to live without the other, resulting in this trope being functionally impossible. In the end, Scott decides to blow himself up to give Pearl the win, resulting in Pearl dying a split-second after Scott's self-detonation.
  • Limited Life plays on a Death's Hourglass mechanism, resulting in an inevitable "Everybody Dies" Ending and making Martyn's status as this temporary.
  • Secret Life is the only season to play this trope fully straight without an "Everybody Dies" Ending.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • Throughout Day 6 of Limited Life, "Cleo" and "Pearl" repeatedly assert they're respectively British and Australian, and that they remember the alliances and events of the series. In actuality, their content creator counterparts couldn't make it to the session and had to be subbed in by the Canadian GeminiTay and the British Lizzie… who are both very, very confused about what's going on.
  • On Day 6 of Secret Life, "Tango" also repeatedly asserts he remembers how his alliance, the Heart Foundation, works and the events of past sessions. Once again, he's actually subbed in by Ren and equally confused about what's going on.
  • On Days 2 and 4 respectively of Past Life, "Tango" and "Joel" once again repeatedly assert they remember how their respective alliances, the Gluten Guys and the Rejects, work and the events of the past session(s). Once again, they are actually subbed in by Mumbo, who's only slightly less confused about what's going on than the previous instances — by virtue of how early his substitution is into the season in Tango's case, or by falling back on slightly outdated experiences in Joel's case.
• Switching P.O.V.: Every player in the series has uploaded their perspective of the events that unfolded to YouTube, allowing viewers to watch the series from whichever perspective they like.
• Trapped the Wrong Target: As this is a Deadly Game, traps are often utilized by various players to kill each other, but sometimes, the person that dies from the trap isn't the intended target.
• Video-Game Lives: The core concept of the series. In 3rd Life, Double Life and Secret Life, everyone has 3 lives, and in Last Life, Wild Life, and Past Life, everyone has up to 6. Once you have one life left, your name turns red and your primary goal is now to kill everyone else. If you die one more time? You're permanently dead, and are now out of the series.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: Because the server is on hardcore, there are plenty of people who die to very stupid and preventable means. For example, Scar became a Red Life in 3rd Life because he sprint-jumped blindly off a cliff, Scott dropped to Yellow in Last Life because he accidentally threw an Ender pearl instead of eating food, soulmate duo Etho and Joel were knocked down to Yellow in Double Life because Joel broke the boat that caged an enderman when he tried to kill it, Jimmy got Killed Off for Real in Limited Life because he fell off the edge of Skynet trying to push a TNT minecart, and Mumbo became a Yellow Life in Secret Life by walking off the left side of Gem's diving board and dying from fall damage.

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