Web Video / Wild Life SMP

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Wild Life was the 6th season of the Life SMP.

In this season, each player had six lives, following Last Life in denoting four or more lives with dark green names. Every session, a random Wild Card was activated to change various fundamental gameplay mechanisms, resulting in one gimmick per episode as opposed to one or two per season.

Similarly to Limited Life, players on Yellow or Red were allowed to kill Dark Green players to regain a life. As with the past couple of seasons, keepInventory was enabled.

Wild Life started on October 19th, 2024, and ended on December 7th. It is followed by the April Fools special Simple Life SMP. The next official season is Past Life SMP.

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

The Wild Life SMP provides examples of:

• 1-Up: Among the rare items enabled in the season that are otherwise unobtainable in the Life series, there is exactly one Totem of Undying on the server that's dropped from killing the Warden on Day 6. Pearl manages to collect the Totem, before later entrusting it to Impulse, in the hopes that he'd win the season. He ends up using it at the end of Day 7 when Jimmy knocks him off from the Spanners' tower using a Wind Charge.
• All There in the Manual: The Quizbots' full question bank of Day 5 were released shortly after the episodes by the questions' creators, in the form of a Google Form. The full question bank for Day 8 was also released shortly after the finale by the creators.
• Amusement Park of Doom: Scar makes plans to build a miniature theme park with a roller coaster for other players to ride, only to trap it to kill any visitors when he turns Red. He quickly ropes his allies in on the scheme, while several other players also plot to exploit the roller coaster to turn it into a death trap against their enemies as well. This quickly comes true as the Bamboozlers' mountainous base becomes a primary launch point for several TNT minecart fall-traps by Day 4, though Scar ultimately never successfully gets a kill from trapping his actual roller coaster.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: At the start of Day 6, Tango makes plans to discuss three topics at the Tuff Guys' meeting — "The Mace and Pooling" (on the usage of maces, tridents, and other new weapons), "The Yellow Rebound" (to help any fellow alliance-member get a kill if they fall to Yellow), and "Pancakes" (purely to know everyone else's thoughts on them).
• Big Eater: One of the main gimmicks for Day 2 is that players are inflicted with Hunger III for the entire episode, causing their Hunger bars to drain much faster than normal and forcing them to consume much more "food" than normal to survive. This makes a comeback on Day 7 as the main drawback to Tango's power, albeit without the Extreme Omnivore part.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The Bamboozlers alliance — Jimmy has dark blond hair, Scar has brown hair, and Lizzie has pink hair.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • For the first time, Mumbo does not die right after Jimmy, as the former is the one to die first. Also related to this, Jimmy also doesn't get Killed Off for Real on the first episode with a final death.
  • This is the first season with episodes with only one final death.
  • It's also the first season where Scott actually predeceases Joel — which is a fairly significant contributing factor to the latter winning the season overall.
• Brick Joke: For a good chunk of Day 3, Ren manages to dig up half of his and Martyn's base in an attempt to find the horse they hid underground in a previous session, to no avail. Near the end of Day 5, he finally locates it… only for the horse to die anyway at the start of Day 6.
• Bumbling Henchmen Duo: As zombies summoned Back from the Dead temporarily, Mumbo and Skizz spend most of Day 7 being perceived as the bumbling goons acting on orders from their summoner (usually Cleo but occasionally Grian) who often try and fail to kill other players and end up getting killed by them under little to no justification. Cleo has also complained about how her power isn't all it's cracked up to be due to the two being under-equipped "lippy zombies" that keep badgering her for supplies, with Skizz going as far as to joke that they're unionized. That said, they still manage to have a kill count of five players between them for the session.
• Call-Back: The premise of Day 5's Wild Card is a server-wide trivia quiz on past seasons and specials of the Life series, thus requiring players to recall anything from game mechanisms to statistics to events to quotes to in-jokes from past series, both well-known and obscure, to gain an advantage. Their reappearance on Day 8 echoes this, but instead quizzing the surviving players on the past events of Wild Life instead.
• Calling Card: Starting from the tail end of Day 2, the Tuff Guys' is a block of tuff renamed "Life's Tuff", left in an item frame at the scene of the crime.
• Cold Open: Martyn's intro for Day 7 has him start with one. He even name-drops the trope name.
  Martyn: This is what we call a cold open. This is where it starts with no music, no fanfare, just a sick boy with his nasally voice and his prepubescent-sounding self waiting for his compadre to turn up and say, "Martyn, my dude," doing that kind of thing.
• Continuity Nod:
  • On learning that Jimmy and Scar have teamed up, Scott references how he kept that from happening the previous season.
  • At the start of Day 2, when Skizz has to redo his intro, Martyn tells Mumbo that "now, [he's] on the other side of it", a nod to his own tradition of watching Mumbo do his intro in Last Life.
  • While discussing their team name on Day 2, Grian brings up the other bridges he had built in 3rd Life and especially Limited Life.
  • At the start of Day 4, while discussing trapping the Bamboozlers' base, Lizzie brings up the time in Secret Life where she tried to invite everyone to a party, only for no one to show up.
  • When Mumbo comes around to the Final Girls on Day 4, he questions the tower Pearl is building, bring up the "tower-off" in Secret Life.
  • Also on Day 4, Grian quickly realizes that the copious use of TNT minecart fall-traps by the alliances on the mountain are a mirror to the events of Limited Life.
    Grian: Session 4: a return to Skynet.
  • This trope is exploited as Day 5 and Day 8's trivia quiz gimmick.
  • Due to the mob-spawning mechanism of Day 6, several players waste no time bringing up the Murder Camel from Secret Life.
  • Upon seeing a temperate frog on Day 6, Jimmy refers to it as Judge Judy and Executioner, the same frog he had in Limited Life.
  • Near the end of Day 6, all Etho can say about Skizz after his final death is that once again, that he wished Skizz were better at the game.
• Death from Above: Discussed across multiple episodes, as players recurringly speculate that a possible Wild Card could be Creepers or highly corrosive acid rain falling from the skies. While this never actually happens in that particular form, death does sometimes rain from above through other means, be it parachuting Immortal Snails or falling TNT minecarts.
• Difficulty Spike: In-universe. Day 3's Immortal Snail Wildcard leads to over twenty deaths that can be directly attributed to the Snails, compared to only five that can be directly attributed to Day 2's Hunger gimmick.
• Downer Ending: Everyone dies; you should know this by now. As rotating Wildcards and battles pick off most of the players one by one, the only ones alive for the final battle are Cleo, Pearl, and Ren teamed together, the Tuff Guys somehow still standing, and Grian and Joel aligned again. The Tuff Guys manage to all but take themselves out one by one, resulting in the remainder of the extended Gs having their last fight with the Family on the Bamboozlers' mountain. Grian then attempts to take on Joel when it's just them left, only to be knocked down the mountainous forest instead, and as happy and content Joel is to win the season, it still doesn't change the fact that everyone around him is dead and he still goes off to have a Last Survivor Suicide afterwards.
• Due to the Dead: After Mumbo's final death, Jimmy decides to laugh on top of the grave Grian made for him^note since Mumbo's the first out this season, only to be immediately shot off by Grian.
  Grian: You don't disrespect Mumbo!
• Extreme Omnivore: Enforced. Due to the Hunger gimmick of Day 2, players are able to consume items that they can normally not consume, including blocks, flowers, and tools. Each item restores a different Hunger level and/or grants a certain status effect… and these are re-randomized several times through the session. Actual food items do not restore any Hunger points when consumed, instead granting players Hunger VIII for about 20 seconds instead of the normal Hunger III effect. This causes several players to starve to death throughout the episode due to this gimmick.
  Pearl: Oh, no! I ate my sword as I died!
• Five Stages of Grief: Discussed. On Day 8, when Ren shows up as a "DNA Abomination" of his normal self and Martyn (who's Killed Off for Real by that point), Impulse quips that he doesn't remember that being one of the stages of grief, while Big B replies that it's probably denial.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Played for Laughs. The outro card of Scott's Day 3 episode has two snails with light blue shells added to the corners, with one of the snails growing in size… and the episode's last moment briefly flashes to have the snail facing the audience with a scare chord playing in the background, telling them to subscribe.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral":
  • After Mumbo loses his last life, Grian sets up a funeral for him. Skizz's eulogy is interrupted by the fact that he's running away from the VHSnail his Quizbot had transformed into, Scar almost falls in the open grave, Jimmy laughs in Grian's face over it (which he responds to by chasing Jimmy off with a bow), and Etho tries to say a few words about Mumbo, only to admit he didn't talk to him that much.
  • After Skizz is next to be Killed Off for Real, Grian has to set up another funeral. Etho tries to offer a eulogy again, only to be interrupted by Martyn pointing out that he's standing in front of the wrong gravestone. In the end, Etho's eulogy is also funny in that he's simply still wishing that Skizz were better at the game.
• Fun Size: Since Day 1's Wild Card involves giving players size-shifting powers, players who shrink until they're under a block tall can expect to be cooed over, especially by Gem. Cleo's episode even refers to name-drops the trope.
• Game of Chicken:
  • 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.
  • The Spanners play a game on Day 2 where they will try to get to the ground as close as they can without dying^note via Day 2's Wild Card where you can eat anything and it may give a random effect, one of which can be Levitation. Skizz ends up being less than one tenth of a block away from death due to his own blocks that he placed, due to the 'food' for Levitation at the time being dirt blocks.
  • Near the start of Day 3, Grian initiates a game with Jimmy to see how long they can stay near their snails without running as said snails approach them, because Jimmy heard his snail's voice just before his last death… which is quickly cut short by Jimmy dying to his snail again.
• Gaslighting: Discussed at the start of Day 6 — due to the delayed activation of the session's Wild Card, the Final Girls joke about how the premise of the Wild Card is that nothing happens at all, giving everyone anxiety as a result. They and the Tuff Guys also try to gaslight each other about having experienced the Wild Card already.
• Genre Roulette: Due to the Once per Episode randomly activated Wild Cards that change fundamental gameplay mechanisms, the season can go from Denser and Wackier shenanigans to a Superhero Episode to jumpscare-abundant horror, depending on the episode.
• Glamour Failure: The various disguises used by Jimmy, Ren and Scott as part of their powers on Day 7 deactivate instantly when they take damage.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: From a meta perspective (which is discussed in the episode), Grian knew that Day 3's immortal snail Wild Card would be intense, but thought it would be easy to stay alive throughout. Instead, it turns into one of the deadliest episodes ever outside of a finale or the generally death-heavier Limited Life SMP, with almost everyone taking a death at some point, and several players turning Yellow or even Red during the session^note the server goes from everyone on light or dark Green at the start, to having 4 Yellows and 3 Reds by the end. It turns out that dealing with deadly immortal snails on top of normal Minecraft gameplay (especially on such a chaotic server) is actually quite difficult, and the session actually ended up cut short so that there could still be a series afterwards.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Some of the powers assigned to the players on Day 7 are considered to be more defensive than offensive in nature, but still prove to be very helpful for survival in the Deadly Game.
  • Although his Day 7 episode is titled "I got the LAMEST Super Power!", Scott doesn't actually think it's the case in-series and is very quick to realize that Animorphism allows him to stay Beneath Notice when eavesdropping, in a death game where knowledge and intel for strategizing is just as important as, if not moreso than actual PVP skills.
  • While Tango is discussing the applications of his Super-Speed with Pearl on Day 7, the main boon they can think of is the ability to escape from dangerous situations — which proves to be extremely useful when most of the server ends up trying to hunt him down throughout the session.
• Height Angst: Several different players are left in dismay at Day 1's Wild Card when they start shrinking, particularly those who have previously been teased about their heights.
• History Repeats:
  • Multiple alliances (or attempted alliances) from previous seasons make a return this season.
    • As one would expect with Rendog's return to the series, Martyn immediately decides to team up with him again. Joel even lampshades it on Day 1 in that it's not the first time this alliance has formed.
    • Like in Secret Life, Jimmy and Scar quickly try to team up. Since Scott isn't around to stop them this time and is otherwise content with how the previous season turned out for both of them, the alliance proves to be successful this season.
    • The Three Gs from Last Life quickly end up together again, though they are joined by Impulse this time — whom Scott had teamed with in the previous season. Big B and eventually Etho and Ren are new additions, though.
    • Etho, Bdubs, and Tango reform three-fourths of Team B.E.S.T. in the first episode.
    • Once again, Grian and Joel end up teaming up on their Red Lives to wreak havoc on the rest of the server. Unlike Last Life, however, they come out on top in the end.
  • Scar decides to bring out his Reputation Board from the 3rd Life SMP again after several server-mates start being hostile and distrustful towards him upon arrival, due to lingering memories of his exploits in Secret Life SMP.
  • On the same day as the first perma-death, Etho accuses Scar of setting someone's base on fire, but he denies any involvement despite having a past with arson earlier in the season, while the true perpetrator is a vengeful Scott who just got killed by the base's occupant. It happened on Day 7 of 3rd Life, and now Day 5 of Wild Life.
  • Both Last Life and Wild Life feature an accomplished redstoner losing their final life after their explosive trap backfires on themself (Tango, then Mumbo and Etho, respectively).
  • Once again, Grian is part of an alliance of three who build bridges as part of their base and use TNT minecarts as weapons. He then dissolves his initial faction as its last survivor after his two initial allies are among the first to die in the season, with one of his allies getting Killed Off for Real before anyone else from trying to kill someone with a TNT minecart (Jimmy and Mumbo on Limited Life and Wild Life respectively), and joins up with a different faction soon afterwards.
  • Much like Secret Life SMP, after not being the first to be eliminated, Jimmy makes the unwise decision to laugh off the victims in close proximity to their loved ones (Lizzie to Joel in Secret Life, Mumbo to Grian in Wild Life).
  • Both Secret Life and Wild Life feature dead/eliminated players returning as part of the session's gimmick (Jimmy for Grian's task in Secret Life, Mumbo and Skizz as Cleo's lackeys in Wild Life).
  • It's not the first time Martyn loses his final life from trying to use an explosive device to kill a player hunting him down (an End crystal on Scott in Last Life, a spawned-in Creeper on Scar in Wild Life), only for it to backfire on himself instead.
  • It's also not the first time Joel has tried to kill Scott and Pearl with a TNT minecart, though unlike his last attempt in Last Life, he executes it successfully this time.
• Inconsistent Spelling:
  • Is the series mechanism a Wild Card or a Wildcard? The latter is used in the in-game mechanism announcement, but some of the creators spell it as the former in their video descriptions.
  • The in-game spelling for the Quizbots' true name on Day 5 is "Trivia Bot", with a space, but TheOrionSound's "behind the scenes" video spells it as "TriviaBot".
• Irony:
  • Near the start of Day 4, Skizz chats with Big B and Cleo about the Time Dilation gimmick of the episode, to which Cleo suggests that Skizz should start digging holes under people's bases to trap and kill them. Meanwhile, Grian and Mumbo are right beneath them, staring at each other as they have just dug a stalagmite pit under the Final Girls' base to trap and kill one of the residents.
  • For much of Day 5, many of the players end up answering some of the questions wrong despite participating in the series and being there for the events that occurred — to the point several of the players forgot if they even participated in some of the seasons. It's healthily lampshaded across the board.
    Scar: Man, you guys' remembrance of this series is an embarrassment.
  • Mumbo forgets what season he first joined in (thinking that he joined in 3rd Life when it's Last Life). This might had being part of the above, if only for his intro for Day 3.
    Mumbo: Welcome back to Last Life– (cut with the text 'How did that happen. It was over 3 years ago') Welcome back to Wild Life.
• Killer Rabbit: While Day 3's Immortal Snails are deadly, several players also find them very cute, as they're all effectively cosplaying as their assigned target. Pearl even states that she'll sort of miss them in the next session, and calls her episode "If Not Friend, Why Friend Shaped?"
• Last Disrespects: After Mumbo loses all his lives, Jimmy (gleeful that once again, someone perma-died before him) shows up at his funeral to laugh in Grian's face. Grian responds by chasing him off with a bow and arrow.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: While shields are normally vital equipment for protection in the Life series in general, this is subverted on Day 2, as the keybind to using a shield is the same as the one for eating. As a result, several players find out the hard way that trying to block with a shield only results in them chowing down on their own weapon if they're not full, rendering shields effectively useless for the session — though Martyn eventually finds a complicated workaround for it.
• Misplaced Wildlife: Day 6's mob-spawning gimmick doesn't account for where the mobs originate from or belong before spawning them in. This has resulted in dolphins and Elder Guardians spawning on dry land, Piglins, Wither skeletons and ghasts spawning in the Overworld, Wardens spawning at the world's surface, mooshrooms spawning in non-mushroom biomes, etc.
• Mood Whiplash: Gem and Joel's perspectives (especially Gem's) have so often been the calmer viewpoint as both teammates handle the Wildcards with ease, leading to a lot of jokes from fans over the sheer difference between everyone else's panic and mishandling of events vs "the Family" practically making normal SMP episodes. Gem's episode with her murderous snail on Day 3 especially stands out as she talks to it much the same as she does her audience while she runs around their base doing regular clean-up and building jobs.
• Mythology Gag: Several to the Empires SMP and Hermitcraft:
  • Jimmy mentions having "flashbacks" when he initially starts shrinking, and Joel explicitly name-drops Empires Season 2 in reaction to seeing that.
  • In a later conversation, Joel discusses how with himself being tiny at the time and Lizzie being about the tallest height one can be, they've pretty much recreated their Tiny Guy, Huge Girl dynamic in Empires Season 1.
  • Doubling as an Ironic Name, Scar's Immortal Snail is called 'eSCARgo'… like the time he made the Pesky Snails on Hermitcraft Season 10 cook their kin.
  • During Day 4, Grian asks Mumbo if the Moon is different. Here, it's fast. On Hermitcraft, it was big. Pearl also refers to the Moon as "a cousin in the sky" while observing it.
  • On Day 5, one of the options for the question "What was the name of the Ravager that killed Jimmy in Limited Life?" is 'Sunday Driver', like in the Hermitcraft Season 10 minigame "Frogger".^note This is not the correct answer; the correct name is 'Grian'.
  • On Day 7, Grian borrows Pearl's power to take Scar high in the sky to "show him the world", a role reversal of Hermitcraft Season 8 after Scar 'bought' an 'AFK' Grian.
  • Day 7 also sees Bdubs try to employ a mace while delivering the same one-liner from Hermitcraft, and just like in Hermitcraft, every single attempt to do so fails.
    Bdubs: Looks like the hammer just found a nail!
  • Martyn's Day 7 episode shows Mumbo's merch ad after his final death, which the merch in question being based around Hermitcraft. Other ads scattered throughout the episode include ones for the Minecraft Championship trading card game and Philly Freezer's Fridge Freezers and Freezing Freezers.
• Our Zombies Are Different: On Day 7, already deceased players can return as "zombies" summoned^note by Cleo, or Grian should he copy her power every five minutes to do the summoner's bidding and kill anyone they come across. Unlike normal players, they only have four hearts but have Resurrective Immortality, so Death Is Cheap for them and they have "negative" lives for however many times they die. When out of commission, Gem can converse with them using her Astral Projection powers of also being in Spectator mode. Their names are denoted on the tab-list (if inactive) and in-game as greyed out, representing their deceased status, and they generally take on a decrepit appearance with grey eyes.
• Personality Powers: The premise of Day 7's Wild Card is to assign the players superpowers. Some are somewhat random (Pearl gets flight, Tango gets Super-Speed and Frost Walker, Jimmy gets Invisibility with Drawbacks, etc.), but several are thematically appropriate. The most blatant ones (some deliberately assigned, some just greatly coincidental) are:
  • Bdubs, infamous for being Really Fond of Sleeping, gets the ability to sleep and skip the night, on a server which normally has vanilla rules for how sleep works.
  • BigB gets to summon a group of Creaking, fitting in with his skin for the season.
  • Grian, as the person who created all the Wild Cards, gets the Meta Power of being able to copy everyone's powers, as well as perfect knowledge of how they work (which technically isn't a Wild Card power, but effectively works as one).
  • Lizzie, whose IGN is LDShadowLady, gets to blind other players in a small area to allow room for a quick escape.
  • Martyn, as someone formerly involved in student radio and affliated with the Listeners in Evo and the "Eyes and Ears" continuity, as well as a nosy player in general, gets the ability to listen from any distance.
  • Ren, being the most theatrical, gets to copy anyone's appearance.
  • ZombieCleo gets to resurrect dead players, who are commonly referred to as zombies.
• Pop Quiz: The premise of Day 5's Wild Card is that a robot will target a player to ask them a question about Life series trivia of all past seasons and specials. If they're correct, they'll be granted rare items which may or may not be obtainable on the map and/or extended status buffs. If they're not, the robot is angered and the consequences are fairly unpleasant and at-times potentially lethal. On Day 8, the Trivia Bots return as part of the rotating Wild Card roster to quiz the players on the ongoings of the current season instead.
• Power Swap: On Day 7, thanks to the Superpower Wildcard being activated for the session, each player is assigned one specific power-set. However, on Day 8, since all the past Wildcards are recycled and periodically activate and fade throughout the session, whenever the Superhero Wildcard is brought back, all the players' initially assigned powers are randomized between each other throughout the episode, resulting in temporary bouts of functional power-swapping.
• Pun-Based Title: Subverted. At the start of Joel's Day 1 episode explaining the gist of the series, he jokes that it's a season where "we pretend to be animals and only make animal noises", only to immediately cut himself off and say that he was just kidding.
• Reading Ahead in the Script:
  • As the person hosting the series, Grian knows what the Wild Card mechanics are each session and sometimes lets others in on the knowledge. Downplayed in that he did not playtest the Wild Cards beyond just ensuring they worked.
  • Exaggerated for Day 7 as all of the players know what the Wild Card is ahead of time, as they have to toggle a hotkey to activate their assigned power. It's still downplayed in that none of them know what power they're assigned ahead of time.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: On Day 4, Grian and Mumbo are caught tunnelling under the Four Gs' base due to the session happening on the evening of November 5th UK time — while they stay quiet, the Guy Fawkes Day fireworks sure don't, which blows their cover, since Mumbo didn't mute his mic.
• Replacement Goldfish: Played for Laughs at the end of Day 6; after the other Spanners die, Grian teams up with Gem and Joel and brings them over to the Spanners' base, asking them to sit in Mumbo and Skizz's seats at their meeting platform and saying that this isn't weird at all.
  Grian: So, welcome to– welcome to the Spanners, the three bridges. The two Spanners that I was once spanning — they're now dead, so I'm instantly replacing them with you guys!
• Required Secondary Powers: On Day 7, since Etho, Joel, and Pearl's powers involve leaping to attain extreme heights, their fall damage is also negated as long as their powers are active. Meanwhile, Impulse doesn't take damage from using Ender pearls, as befitting his teleportation power-set.
• Rewatch Bonus: Standard for the Life series, but Day 7 stands out here. Between Gem's astral projection, Jimmy's invisibility, Scott's shapeshifting, and Martyn's super-hearing, there are a lot of conversations in this session that you can come back to after seeing another perspective, realising someone was spying on them, and (aside from Gem) try to spot where they are.
• Running Gag: Everyone just keeps blowing up the Tuff Guys' tower bases. By Day 7, Bdubs has had enough of this.
  Bdubs: WHY?! I KEEP FILLING THIS FREAKING HOLE! I'VE REPAIRED THIS TWENTY TIMES, I'M GONNA LOSE MY MIND!
• Run or Die: Since the Immortal Snails are implacable in pursuit of their respective target players, the main tactic throughout Day 3 is to always stay on the move and never remain in one place for too long, or risk being a One-Hit Kill for a murderous mollusc. This ends up being highly inconvenient for conducting most everyday activities in Minecraft, including building, resource-gathering, or even just organizing one's items, as the players will have to always keep an eye out for any snails on the loose nearby.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The Immortal Snails earn a fair number of their kills this way, between their Cuteness Proximity and the players making multiple attempts to foil the developers which turn out to have been accounted for, often in deadly fashion to the player who tries.
  • The Bam Bunker ends up being this to its own creators: Grian secretly rigs the structure with TNT minecarts off-camera, and uses it to eliminate Jimmy and Lizzie on Day 8 when they attempt to take shelter inside.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: Near the start of Day 5, after Martyn answers his question incorrectly, the Quizbot spawns a Ravager on top of his tower… to which he, Jimmy, and Big B (who are both in the area) react by throwing themselves off the tower and failing to bucket-clutch on the way down. Ren only escapes this fate by Ender-pearling away instead.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Discussed. On Day 2, when Scar starts building his roller coaster and testing out its drops, Tango accuses him of trying to murder him by trying to get him to test it out. At the time, Scar hasn't got to the point of trapping the ride yet, but in light of this false accusation and Grian and Mumbo trying to convince him to actually trap the ride to kill Tango as well, he starts seriously considering trapping the ride early to do exactly that, with Bdubs' approval. However, Tango ends up losing his first life later that session to completely unrelated circumstances, which Grian and Mumbo deem an acceptable consequence.
  Scar: See, I was gonna warn him that they're setting up a trap for him to kill him, then I come over here and he's all like, accusatory of me and now I want to kill him, but I didn't wanna kill him originally but now I do, and I feel like I need an arba– I need an arator in between, or an arborist or whatever^*arbitrator.
  Bdubs: Yeah, I'm big– I'm big on manifestation and he's manifested something that isn't true.
  Scar: […] You think I should just let this happen? Let it play out? What do you think?
  Bdubs: […] He will reap what he sowed. Certainly. Certainly, he will be reaping what he sowed.
• Separated by a Common Language: On Day 2, when coming up with their team name, the British Grian and Mumbo discuss how the word 'spanner' is an insult, which the American Skizz reacts with confusion to.^note A spanner is known as a wrench in American English, and calling someone a "spanner" is akin to calling someone a tool. The former two respond by discussing more about mild British insults.
• Sequel Escalation: While the Life series is generally subjected to wackier and more challenging twists by the season, in Wild Life specifically, Day 8 ends the series by combining all of the past Wild Cards together.
• Shout-Out:
  • Joel decides to model himself after Dom Toretto this season and be more openly caring towards his "family", which also somehow means having his sleeves removed from his shirt.
  • As there's a pale forest biome on the server map for the season, where Creakings naturally spawn, several of the creators naturally reference the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who due to their similar properties.
    Jimmy: Don't blink.
  • When discussing Day 1's shrinking mechanic, Martyn compares the players to The Borrowers, and then asks if they'd end up in the Quantum Realm if they kept getting smaller.
  • On Day 2, one of the potential food effects is to plays the sound effect from Age of Empires that is otherwise only heard in Minecraft via an obscure illager interaction.
  • The concept of Day 3's Wild Card is based on a Rooster Teeth podcast meme and its subequent popularisation as a Reddit post, where an immortal snail that always knows where you are slowly makes its way towards you for a One-Hit Kill.
  • While most of the Immortal Snails are named after their target players, Grian's is simply named 'Gary'.
  • The Bamboozlers' in-chat signal to return to base is a cry of "CatDog". Scar also sings the theme tune of the series at the start of Day 3.
  • As befitting of his name, Martyn's Day 4 episode is titled "EIGHTY EIGHT MILES PER HOUR!!!" in tribute to the time gimmick of the session, and jokes have been made about remodelling Joel's car base into a DeLorean. His episode thumbnail also depicts him in a Palette Swap version of Marty McFly's outfit.
  • On the flip side, Etho's Day 4 episode is titled "The Three Stooges".
  • Also befitting of his name, Scar declares "Long live the king!" after knocking Etho off a cliff at the start of Day 4.
  • Since the Quizbots of Day 5 parachute into the world on red umbrellas, Scar and Martyn describes them to be like Mary Poppins. Scott compares the robots to be like a Doctor Who episode. Later, Lizzie compares the designs for the Quizbot snails to Thomas the Tank Engine.
  • On Day 6, when he sees a polar bear among the mobs spawned in by the Wild Card, Scar asks if the server has become Lost, "like the TV show".
  • On Day 7, Martyn's perspective is chock-full of My Hero Academia references, from the title card of "My Hero Minecraft" to the character profiles written in Japanese.
  • When hearing that Grian can take other players' powers, Impulse asks "Like Agatha?"^*This comparison was incorrect, since Agatha is a Power Parasite while Grian had Power Copying. Later, Scott also compares Martyn's Super-Hearing abilities to "the girl from Encanto" (Dolores).
  • At the start of Day 8, Jimmy and Lizzie sing the chorus of "The Final Countdown" by Europe due to it being the finale, while Scar riffs off a bit of "Stayin' Alive" by The Bee Gees. Lizzie also fittingly titles her last episode "The FINAL Bamdown".
  • When all the Wild Cards go into effect at once at the end of Day 8, Cleo calls it "Everything Everywhere All at Once".
• Sizeshifter: Day 1's Wild Card is that players shrink when they are crouched and grow in height when they jump.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: One of the penalties for answering the Day 5 quiz robot's questions wrong is to have your voice chat output replaced with robotic bleeps and bloops. This manages to line up neatly with Mumbo's frustration at realising that he'd answered a question wrong, to everyone's amusement (including several people mentioning that it sounded exactly like this trope).^note Mumbo's perspective cuts this conversation out, so we don't know what he actually said either.
  Scar: The question was, "What did Gem and Pearl ride around on killing things in Secret Life?", and I was like, "It's a camel! It's– two people can ride on a camel!"
  Mumbo: [BLEEP]
  [Everyone laughs]
• Stating the Simple Solution: On Day 2, as all the other players are scrambling to determine what is or isn't a viable food source by eating anything and everything they can get their hands on, Mumbo soon finds that he just has to check the food tab of the in-game crafting menu to accomplish that without experimenting. Grian then admits that this is an oversight on his part… but then as the two actually experiment it, it turns out that it counts any edible item as a food, including the ones that grant status effects and not Hunger points.
• Status Effects: The Minecraft status effects are played in full force on Day 2, where players are briefly inflicted with certain effects from eating certain items, from positive ones like Absorption or Water Breathing, to neutral ones like Glowing or Night Vision, to even negative ones like Blindness or Poison. Alternately, eating other items can prompt a sound effect to play, such as Nether portal activation or mob noises.
• Superhero Episode: The Wild Card of Day 7 is that everyone gets a superpower, ranging in usefulness from teleportation to disguising themself as an animal. Because the series is set in a Deadly Game, there is no fighting crime, but there is Avengers-inspired theme music and superpowered battles.
• Theme Initials: As a carry-over from Last Life, the Final Girls alliance makes extensive use of code-names that start with the letter 'G' — Gaslight (Cleo), Gatekeep (Scott), Girlboss (Pearl), Girldad (Impulse), etc. It starts reaching hilarity levels by Day 7 when the team expands to encompass up to 8–9 players (i.e. literally about half the server), by which point the team starts struggling to come up with new nicknames for everyone.
• Time Dilation: The primary gimmick for Day 4 plays with this: at first, players experience everything as if they're in Bullet Time, then time starts to speed up; it comes back on a lesser scale in the form of Bdubs' power for Day 7.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Every single day has its own unique gimmick to spice things up in some way.
  • Day 1 turns everyone into Sizeshifters, with them shrinking while crouching and growing while jumping.
  • Day 2 makes everyone Extreme Omnivores, with everyone needing to eat lots of random items to keep themselves from starving.
  • Day 3 doesn't change regular gameplay in any way, but all the players are constantly pursued by indestructible snails that will instantly kill them upon contact.
  • Day 4 brings a Time Crash to the server, at first slowing everything to an absolute crawl and gradually increases the speed over the course of the session.
  • Day 5 has trivia robots who will give players random loot and status buffs if they answer their questions right, but a random punishment if they answer their questions wrong.
  • Day 6 has mobs regularly drop dead, to be replaced and swapped in by random other mobs (often hostile or neutral ones) or the occasional End crystal, and then the cycle continues. Name-tagged mobs don't get swapped.
  • Day 7 has players get one or two unique superpowers that they can use via a hotkey. Mumbo and Skizz return as part of this as well, being "zombies" that Cleo can summon.
  • Day 8 doesn't quite have a unique gimmick in itself, but instead recycles all of the past Wild Cards (if tweaked slightly to be less extreme) and having them activate and fade periodically throughout the session… until the end, where all of them are briefly active at the same time, before fading with the instruction, "The ending is yours… Make it WILD".
• The Unintelligible: One of the potential consequences of answering a Quizbot question wrong on Days 5 and 8 is to have a voice-changer automatically applied to oneself so that they are unable to speak in anything but distorted robot noises until their next Quizbot spawns. The Life series being a social game, the resultant Poor Communication Kills can lead to serious issues, especially when it comes to talking to one's team-mates or trying to help a fellow server-mate answer a question.
• Verbal Tic: Due to the alliance being founded on a quickly-failed monopoly on bamboo, the Bamboozlers (mainly Scar) tend to say "Bam" a lot, often using it as a verb, a Pun, or as a Hyperaffixation (e.g. their bunker being called the "Bam-bunker").
  Scar: You saved my bam-life!
• Vitriolic Best Buds: The Tuff Guys faction, as decided at the start of Day 2, are nominally only united if they can benefit each other. Thus, the faction's members spend much of their time bickering with each other over trivial matters, Etho strikes out on a side alliance/friendship with the Fast and Furious "family" and later the Gs, and Bdubs has no problem with other factions having Tango killed for antagonizing them or otherwise eggs on the conflicts, as opposed to standing with his own team-mate. By Day 4, Gem is actively wondering how their alliance is still standing. However, they ultimately still depend much on each other for support and manage to make it to the final battle royale as the last complete alliance standing.
• Wham Episode:
  • Day 3. The session's gimmick ends up turning it into one of the deadliest non-finale episodes the series has ever seen. By the end, four players are on Yellow, three are on Red, nearly everyone has lost at least one life, and Grian ends up having to cut the session short to ensure there aren't any more deaths or even a final death on Day 3.
  • Day 7. With the gimmick being everyone gets a Personality Power, and Mumbo and Skizz coming Back from the Dead, the slaughter skyrockets from a combination of everyone using their powers against each other and the two revived players racking up a ton of kills, to the point that no one's a Green Name by the session's end, with a majority of the server's population having fallen to Red.
• Wildlife Commentary Spoof: Lizzie's Day 1 episode opens with one of herself at Spawn and at the beginning of her journey in the series, and she continues to narrate her actions in this voice between clips throughout the episode.
  Lizzie: (in a fake David Attenborough voice) Spawn, where all players begin their perilous journey. A moment of calm before the chaos. And perched on an azalea bush, the LDShadowLady. Easy to spot with her vibrant pink plumage, the LDShadowLady is an interesting creature. (record scratch sound effect as the gameplay begins)