Web Video / Limited Life SMP

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.

Limited Life was the 4th season of the Life SMP.

In comparison with previous seasons, Limited Life changes things drastically. Instead of having a limited number of lives, players had 24 hours to live. Killing another player adds half an hour, while dying subtracts an hour. Additionally, Reds are no longer the only ones allowed to initiate PvP, as the rules are changed to allow Yellows to attack Greens.^note However, due to this restriction, killing someone on the same colour level does not grant extra time to the killer unless they're both Red.

The Boogeyman mechanic is also returned to the server, where the penalty for not killing by the end of the day is dropping a colour level in hearts (i.e. losing up to 8 hours of their life); anyone who gets killed by them will lose two hours of life as opposed to the standard one, and the Boogeyman will gain one extra hour of time as opposed to 30 minutes.^note Yes, this does mean that a Boogeyman kill within the first hour can result in a player having over 24 hours to live. And for the first time in the series, keepInventory is enabled.

Limited Life started on March 3rd, 2023 and ended on April 21st.

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

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The Limited Life SMP provides examples of:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: The Bad Boys often make references to having items and builds of a similar naming scheme, like the Bread Bridge and bamboo. They also create Potato Pier.
• Amnesia Episode: Day 6 has Cleo and Pearl mysteriously coming down with an "amnesia-cold" for the duration of the session, and the two are briefly Put on a Bus while GeminiTay and Lizzie substitute in for them temporarily. While the out-of-universe explanation is due to content creator unavailability (Pearl) or technical difficulties (Cleo), the in-universe explanation Martyn gives for his "Eyes and Ears" continuity is that their emotional states are still fractured from the events of Double Life and need more time to heal, so that the Watchers can have a more continuous source of snacks.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Bad Boys' Skynet 2.0, a version of Skynet constructed after the destruction of Bread Bridge, is located at almost build limit and is used for espionage and TNT minecart dropping. Due to it being so high up, it's impossible to see where a person is on the map accurately (unless you massively boost your draw distance), and players can only tell where their targets are via their silhouettes or, at times, other signs of 'human life' like campfires. Alternatively, they may choose to target the people on the T.I.E.S' original Skynet, which consists of a network of narrow walkways and sky-bridges and thus are difficult to aim for accurately. Nevertheless, when the TNT minecarts hit, they hit powerfully with a massive blast radius, and the Bad Boys have pulled off numerous kills using it.
• Birthday Episode: Downplayed. Since the Day 6 episode was released on Martyn's birthday, he spends the session building a birthday party and inviting others on the server to said party… which is rigged with TNT so that he can try to get some life-time back. In the end, no one gets any life-time after the Bad Boys crash the party by attempting to rain Death from Above, and by some miracle, no one dies from this.
• Blow That Horn: A Horns of Destruction variation where no goat horns are actually present; the sound of the "Dream" goat horn is used to signify the beginning of the 24-hour time limit at the start of Day 1.
• Breather Episode: Zig-zagged. A lot of players believed that Day 5 would be a calmer day focused on building and preparation since everyone were all Yellow Names and had no reason to kill each other, creating a moment of peace. That peace doesn't last long, as the Bread Bridge is destroyed by the T.I.E.S, the Clocker sons are accidentally blown up by Etho, and Scar and Skizzleman become the first Red Names on the server. However, Day 5 does have the fewest deaths in the season — at 5 deaths in total (1 Boogeyman kill and 4 accidents), in contrast to the days preceding and following it, which have drastically higher death tolls than it, even setting new records for the number of deaths in the series as a whole^note Day 4 has 16 deaths (the previous record was 17 in the Season 1 finale), Day 6 has 27 deaths, and Day 7 has 45 deaths.
• Call-Back:
  • On Day 1, Scott winds up scooping up a "Pufferish of Peace" to give (back) to Jimmy.
  • Near the end of Day 1, the Bad Boys get into a Hurricane of Puns based on their team name, swapping in words that rhyme with 'bad'. Grian compares it to Last Life's 'aha' shenanigans.
• Character Catchphrase: The Nosy Neighbours sign off their episodes with "Always watching" as their creed.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Early in Day 1, Etho discusses digging holes throughout the server with Martyn, and brings up how many people fall down these holes in other series. Naturally, near the end of the day, Martyn falls to his death in the very hole the discussion was held in. Martyn, being Martyn, takes the time to lampshade it.
  • On Day 2, Grian and Joel exploit a mechanism that allows them to go beyond the map border, which they initially use for trolling the rest of the server. By Day 5, the Bad Boys jointly use the same mechanism to sneak to the T.I.E.S. base to disable their mob farm in revenge for them blowing up Bread Bridge. And the reason Bread Bridge gets blown up? Joel killed their cow on Day 1.
    This eventually becomes a Chekhov's Boomerang on Day 8 when the Nosy Neighbours, with Grian now among their ranks, decide to attempt the coward's way out and sneak outside the world border so that no one can hurt them. Unfortunately for them, it backfires and the Mean Gills and the remainder of T.I.E.S. (or rather, I.E.) are suddenly able to attack and kill them from inside the border.
• Death from Above: Happens frequently this season in the form of dropped TNT minecarts. The T.I.E.S' Skynet, a chaotic network of floating walkways, is the source of many of those.
• Death Is Cheap: Cheaper, at least. Although death is still penalized and undesirable, everyone starts out with the rough equivalent of twenty-four lives and keepInventory is enabled, so it's significantly less painful.
  Grian: This mechanic doesn't work; it's given people way too much freedom to die.
• Disproportionate Retribution: T.I.E.S. carpet-bombs Bread Bridge on Day 5 to strike back against the Bad Boys for being the bullies of the server. However, after Day 1, where their behaviour was mostly in Poke the Poodle territory, the Bad Boys had mainly kept to themselves — apart from Joel's stint as the Boogeyman on Day 2, any antagonistic behavior was either in response to provocation from other factions, or simply Yellow-on-Green violence as intended by the season's premise. Ultimately, the whole attack is an act of revenge for Joel killing one of their cows on Day 1 (although this may be more of a convenient excuse to cause chaos).
• Downer Ending: As expected by both the season's mechanism and the nature of the series, everyone dies. After hours of battles and fluctuating alliances, the final battle comes down to the remaining members of T.I.E.S. (Impulse and Etho) and the Nosy Neighbours (Pearl) fighting against the Mean Gills (Scott and Martyn), who are still going strong at this point and have managed to decimate the competition. With Impulse left under 10 minutes left by the end, the three negotiate to have a three-way, fair play Duel to the Death on roughly even time... which ends with Martyn going full-on Combat Pragmatist before the duel even starts under the Watchers' influence, killing both his Day 1 ally and their former enemy, then waits one last hour and a half for his life-timer to tick down.^note Out-of-universe, Scott has Grian /kill Martyn after everything is said and done, but it's not present in Martyn's perspective of events.
• Death's Hourglass: Every player has a timer on their screen showing how much life-time they have left, which is also Colour-Coded for Your Convenience. It is technically of the Fatalistic variety, since it's impossible to stop the timer, but most if not all players interpret it as a Jump to Action to regain life-time by any means possible so they can delay the inevitable enough to win the season. Fan interpretation on how the timer manifests in-universe may vary.
• Duel to the Death: Subverted. The final three discuss having a fair fist-fight like the ending of 3rd Life, only for the Watchers to drive Martyn to pull out a sword and kill both Scott and Impulse in about ten seconds.
  Martyn: Nah, I don't wanna play this silly game. (kills Scott) I wanna do it this way.
  Impulse: (overlapping) WHOA! Whoa! Whoa, whoa! What?! (places down a lava bucket) No!
  Martyn: (overlapping) I wanna do it exactly this way. It doesn't matter if you're a Mean Gill or a Bad Boy or a-a Neighbour– (kills Impulse) –or a Clocker! You're all going down, none of these niceties, this is a death match for a reason. (voice deepens) OOH, THAT FEELS GOOD! TIME IS DELICIOUS! (Evil Laugh)
• Emergency Food Supply Animal: Discussed on Day 3. When Cleo announces she plans to go feral, Scar "fears" for her safety because if she dies, he and Bdubs would "starve". Cleo replies that she would have a dispenser system set up... then Scar argues that the dispenser might run out of food, to which Cleo half-jokingly says that the two could eat their dogs to survive. Of course, since this takes place in Minecraft, it's physically impossible for a player to eat their dogs anyway.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Discussed. Jimmy claims on Day 5 that the only people the Bad Boys love are their own mothers.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: While most seasons involve the Sole Survivor of the Deadly Game pulling a Last Survivor Suicide to invoke this, Limited Life stands out for being the only season where this outcome is inevitable due to its Death's Hourglass mechanism.
• Fatal Fireworks: From Day 6 onward, 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.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: A more literal example that usual; while digging straight down to Y-11 on Day 1, Jimmy points out he can hear lava along the way. About five seconds later, he and Joel find where the lava is... right underneath their feet.
• Foreshadowing:
  • During the choosing of the third Boogeyman on Day 1, an ominous Boogeyman jingle can be heard from Grian and Tango's perspectives due to proximity chat. Is it any wonder that Martyn, who was standing next to them at the time, turns out to be the next Boogeyman?
  • Several remarks have been made early on about how flammable the Woodland Mansion at the heart of the map is. As expected from players in the Life series, it gets burnt down by the end of Day 1... and in the later half of Day 2^note it was reset due to the expected mobs not having been present on Day 1, since the world was generated in "Easy" mode.
  • On Day 8, after Scar returns from ambushing and killing Tango, Cleo compares their life-times and predicts that they'll die together. While it's not by natural causes, the two do indeed end up permanently-dying about 20 seconds apart from each other.
• Fun with Acronyms: 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.
  • When Bdubs briefly joins them on Day 5, Impulse says they should be renamed to B.I.T.E.S. to include him.
  • During Day 1 while Martyn was considering teaming with the "Skizz Protection Squad", he suggests team T.I.M.E.S. to them with his own initial, although it doesn't come to pass after his Boogey attempt and making an alliance with Scott. He brings the suggestion back on Day 8 for their temporary alliance, though just as T.I.M.E. due to Skizz's unfortunate death in the previous day. He also suggests S.M.I.T.E. in the event he could convince Scott to join them.
• Game of Chicken: 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.
• Geas: The Boogeyman curse functions along the lines of one: to kill another player by the end of the day, or have their life-time cut short by up to a third of its original length (Limited Life).
• Ghost Reunion Ending: After all of them are taken out in the finale, the Clockers family reunite as ghosts watching over the action throughout the rest of the server.
• The Great Fire: Near the end of Day 1, Cleo sets three blocks of the Woodland Mansion on fire, which the Bad Boys have previously established as their base. In minutes, half of its interior has burnt to the ground and the fire itself has spread to the dark oak forests nearby.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: The Bad Boys all wear black leather jackets to reinforce their image as 'bad boys'.
• High-Altitude Battle: As Grian correctly predicted on Day 4, most of the battles in the final few sessions take place in the sky; more accurately on the various sky bridges (or "Skynet" as the players call it), with the players' main form of fighting being trying to shoot or hit each off or dropping TNT minecarts from above. After the season, there is a mutual agreement among the content creators to never use this strategy again.
• History Repeats: Discussed on Day 1; six minutes in, Grian messages in the in-game chat if anyone is willing to bet Jimmy will be Killed Off for Real first again, after having the dubious honour of doing so for the past three seasons. On Day 7, this does come to pass, as Jimmy is indeed the first one out. Again.
• In-Series Nickname:
  • Martyn refers to the Bad Boys' Bread Bridge as "Grainbow Road", while Scar calls the Coral Isles the "Knockoff Panda Reserve" for its bamboo barrier.
  • After the construction of the Bread Bridge, the Bad Boys have occasionally been called the "Bread Boys". Occasionally, even the Bad Boys themselves refer to the group as such in slips of the tongue.
• Jacob and Esau: The Clockers' family dynamic goes as such — after a messy separation in the "pre-season backstory" (whatever it may be), Cleo shows favouritism to Scar (and vice versa), while Etho dislikes everyone in the family except Bdubs, who prefers to remain "neutral" in familial conflicts.
• Kill Steal: Discussed. On Day 3, Cleo makes a deal with the Mean Gills that if they are being chased down by a Red Life, they will allow her to intervene and kill them first so that she gets the time increase instead of the Red Life. It's later invoked on Day 4 once the entire server is out for Green Life blood.
• Last of His Kind: Downplayed; as of the start of Day 4, Bdubs, Impulse, Scott, and Tango are the final Green Names remaining in a server of Yellow Names, many of whom are willing to do anything it takes to get some more life-time. This culminates in half of the server joining the hunt for Green Name blood.
• Last Request:
  • Discussed at the start of Day 1, where Martyn, Skizz, and Etho discuss what their preferred final meals would be if they genuinely had 24 hours to live in real life.
  • Skizz's final request to the T.I.E.S. before he allows Etho to Mercy Kill him is that one of T.I.E.S. must make it to the final three of the season. It comes true in the finale as Impulse makes it to 2nd place, with Etho also coming close by making it to 5th.
• Meaningful Name: The faction 'Entertainment Mountain' is so dubbed due to it being located at the heart of the map. This gives them a prime view for any recent respawns and any burnings of the Woodland Mansion nearby. They were later renamed to 'the Clockers' due to their base taking the form of a clock tower.
• Mercy Kill Arrangement:
  • Scott's two deaths on Day 4 are arranged with Cleo and Martyn (in advance and impromptu, respectively) so that they can receive the life-time increase that comes with the kill, as opposed to the temporary Yellow alliance intent on hunting him down. Immediately after this, Skizz and Tango make the same arrangement for the same reason.
  • By Day 7, this has evolved into a form of self-sacrifice where players willingly allow themselves to be killed by their allies so they can have some extra life-time.
• Monster of the Week: The Boogeyman, who is randomly selected out of the living non-Red players and must kill someone by the end of the day, or drop a colour grade and lose up to eight hours of their limited life. Meanwhile, anyone who gets killed by the Boogeyman will lose two hours of their life instead of the standard one, basically doubling the gains and losses for any Boogey kills. In all, the Boogeymen were Scott, Bdubs, and Martyn (Day 1), Joel (Day 2), Impulse (Day 3), Tango (Day 4), Tango again (Day 5), Lizzie-as-Pearl (Day 6), and Etho (Day 7); there was no Boogeyman on Day 8 as everyone was on Red by that point already.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Martyn's first episode of the season is titled "THE SANDS OF TIME".
  • When Scar and Martyn try to put an AFK Grian on a minecart track on Day 3, Scar starts singing the exact same song from the last time he put an AFK Grian in a minecart in Season 8 of Hermitcraft.
• No Blood for Phlebotinum: Given that the world is only 700 by 700 blocks big, there's bound to be conflicts over resources.
  • 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
  • The 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.
• No, You: When threatening Entertainment Mountain with a Bread Bridge invasion, Joel says, "You'll see what happens" if they mess with the bridge. In turn, Bdubs replies that the Bad Boys will see what happens if they go through with this. This goes on for about ten seconds.
• Nosy Neighbor: Naming themselves after the trope, the Nosy Neighbours faction, consisting of Pearl and Big B, live next door to Entertainment Mountain next to spawn and have a habit of snooping in on the ongoings of the server, involving everything and everyone. This results in a lot of Exact Eavesdropping.
• Painful Pointy Pufferfish: Since the Mean Gills faction lives in the sea, they weaponize the pufferfish that naturally spawn there as defensive weapons. This tactic has since spread to adjacent alliances like the Clockers.
• Playing Catch with the Old Man: Parodied on Day 5 where Etho takes Bdubs and Scar outside to play catch after a family meal... with TNT minecarts. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
• Poke the Poodle: The self-titled Bad Boys spend their time partaking in abhorrent activities like trampling crops, breaking carpets, washing away torches with water buckets, and digging straight down... into lava. And also intruding on other factions' territory with their Bread Bridge and sneaking outside the world border.
• Refuge in Audacity: When Joel became the Boogeyman on Day 2, he and the other Bad Boys plotted to get the kill. How? By building the highly visible Bread Bridge from the Woodland Mansion to Entertainment Mountain, complete with an obvious powered railway track.
• Russian Reversal: Joel's response after discovering that other players have been stealing from and griefing the Bad Boys' Bread Bridge:
  Joel: You come for Bread Bridge, and Bread Bridge comes for you. That's my new motto in life.
• Shout-Out:
  • The faction based on the Coral Isles is known as "the Mean Gills", and their strategically-placed dolphins are named 'Bluey' and 'Bingo' (with Martyn singing the theme song when he hears this).
  • The frog which Jimmy and the Nosy Neighbours feud custody over is named "Judge Judy And Executioner"; the reference is very much invoked.
  • During the mourning period for Bread Bridge on Day 5 of Limited Life, the Bad Boys compare their solemn suits coupled with their sunglasses to the attire of the Men in Black.
• Sickeningly Sweet: Played for Laughs. On Day 6, Impulse and Tango feign nausea from eavesdropping on one of Skizz's "affirmation" sessions of the day. Skizz chalks it up to them being jealous that they haven't had their own sessions yet.
• Sunglasses at Night: Having sunglasses as part of their Bad Boys team-skins, Jimmy, Joel, and Grian wear these no matter what time of day it is. Grian, at the very least, wears them on top of his head rather than over his eyes, while Joel wears them below his (presumably perched on his nose, but you can't see a nose on his skin).
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: More accurately, a Surprisingly Sudden Series of Deaths occur on Day 3. Having turned Yellow early in the episode, Scar spends much of the session attempting murder on the Green Lives. This results in him getting five kills in quick succession, and that's not even counting Impulse's Boogeyman kill on Pearl, Joel's two revenge kills on Scar and Martyn for messing with his fellow Bad Boys, and various miscellaneous deaths caused by trivial reasons or accidental murders. From this point onward, there has been a massive uptick in deaths in the season.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Throughout Day 6, "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.
• Teleportation Sickness: Ender-pearling results in the loss of 2.5 hearts of health in-game. Because of this, several characters have died ender-pearling away from fights throughout the season, be it physically throwing one or via activating an ender pearl stasis chamber.
• Tropical Island Adventure: The Coral Isles are constructed with such a setting in mind. While it fits the holiday resort aesthetic for the first few days, it quickly becomes a major battleground on Day 4 when bloodthirsty Yellow Names start circling its Green inhabitant like sharks in a thriller.
• Visual Pun: Invoked at the cost of biological accuracy; the frog murals on the Nosy Neighbours tower have visible, poking-out noses as opposed to two nostrils.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: On Day 4, the temporary Yellow alliance certainly consider themselves as this, believing that hunting down the last Green Names can cause the server to return to peace. This is, of course, discounting the fact that most of the Yellow Names chose to initiate or join this witch hunt because they want more life-time for themselves.
• Wham Episode: A two-parter:
  • On Day 3, Grian is out sick and AFK for the entire session. This results in a near free-for-all where the Bad Boys try to protect Grian while every other faction tries to kidnap him. 13 deaths rack up over the course of the session, among which 5 are caused by Scar alone. By the end of the day, most of the server has gone Yellow, which builds up to...
  • Day 4: Since most of the server has gone Yellow over the past couple of days, many of them quickly go on a killing spree to hunt down as many Green Names as possible to get ahold of their life-time. The bloodthirst and bloodshed over the first hour alone leaves no Green Name unscathed and causes Pearl to believe the rest of the server has collectively gone insane. Apparently, the rest of the server agrees with this sentiment and cuts the recording session short by an hour.
• Wrong-Name Outburst: On Day 7, Grian nearly refers to Joel as Scar when he jumps from a lethal height.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: On Day 5, Grian calls Jimmy "Jimmy" instead of "Timmy" while screaming at him to kill the Enderman attacking him.

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