Secret Life was the 5th season of the Life SMP. It is notable for the the return of two once-absent members and the introduction of new cast member GeminiTay.
While everyone is back down to three lives this season, players had 30 hearts (i.e. triple the health) per life. However, unlike most prior seasons, Secret Life plays on a variant of the ultra hardcore (UHC) gamemode, where players have no natural regeneration.
To regain hearts, they had to complete a secret task given to them at the start of the session and visit the Secret Keeper, and be rewarded with 10 hearts if they succeed and receive nothing if they fail; while the health nominally caps at 30 hearts, the Secret Keeper can alternatively reward players with over 30 hearts with material gifts usually unobtainable in the series. Players can also reroll their assigned task for a harder one in order to gain 20 hearts, but will lose 10 hearts if they fail the rerolled task.
In addition, similar to the life-giving mechanism of Season 2, players are allowed to gift one heart to another player per session, but without losing a heart of their own; this is one method by which players can go over 30 hearts. The other method is, similarly to Season 4, by killing people, which grants 10 hearts even when that would make the player go over 30. Much like the previous season, keepInventory is enabled.
Secret Life started on October 20th, 2023 and ended on December 15th.
Note: Unless otherwise specified, all tropes pertain to the characters, not the content creators that play them.
The Secret Life SMP provides examples of:
- Accidental Misnaming: On Day 7, Skizz accidentally calls Cleo "Chloe". She does not appreciate it.
- Anti-Regeneration: The gimmick of the series; each player has a whopping 30 hearts, but they are completely incapable of healing.
- Artist and the Band: The alliance "Gem and the Scotts" act like an 80s rock band, with Gem as the band leader, and "the Scotts" being Scott and Impulse (whose real name is Scott).
- Attending Your Own Funeral: On Day 6, Cleo concludes that Jimmy has never experienced the series tradition of holding a funeral for the first person to lose all their lives (which, up until this point had always been Jimmy). As such, she decides to hold a funeral for Jimmy while he's still around to experience it. Jimmy isn't amused.
- Audience Participation: During Day 1, Grian tells the viewers that they can give suggestions for secret tasks in the comments section of the episodes.
- Blatant Lies: Gem's Day 6 task is to say nothing but lies for 30 minutes straight, so she does this when going to her XP farm.Gem: I really don't want Thorns on my armor, so I'm going to hit these Endermen– (while visiting her Zombie farm) –for a while. To make sure I don't get Thorns on my armor.
- Breaking Old Trends: Jimmy is no longer the first to die permanently in a season, as Lizzie's the first instead.
- Call-Back:
- Both Double Life's Synchronization mechanic and the Boogeyman from Last Life and Limited Life return in the form of tasks.
- The Southlanders and their "AHA" puns are recalled two separate times during Day 1, first by Grian and Mumbo when their secret tasks cause them to engage in a pun battle, and again by Jimmy and Scar when the former offers the latter a spyglass. Etho also draws on this when trying to complete a secret task suggested by Martyn on Day 4.
- On Day 2, Scott lampshades that Cleo has a drastically different opinion of Etho than she did in Limited Life. Later, Bdubs refers to Etho and Cleo as "you and Dad" when he jokes about moving in with them.
- Grian's Day 2 task, to move people's front doors around, is highly reminiscent of his challenge to constantly steal people's doors in Season 7 of Hermitcraft. This is not lost on him or Mumbo.
- During Day 7's Zombie Apocalypse, Cleo proposes to Scott that they form a Widows Alliance since they're some of the last players left uninfected, a reference to the alliance of the same name they almost formed back in 3rd Life.
- Throughout the rest of the season, Etho and others would say "Did that make you jump?" regarding some startling events, calling back to Etho's Day 2 task of trying to jumpscare people.
- Chain of Deals: Scar's secret task on Day 5 was to make a series of at least four trades starting with seeds and ending with a golden apple. Scar got this task, and traded four seeds for a camel, a camel for a zombie spawn egg, a zombie spawn egg for five diamonds, and finally five diamonds for a golden apple.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: As a result of the maximum health limit only applying to the hearts from the Secret Keeper and not player-gifted hearts or hearts gained by Reds from kills, killing two Yellows (Scott and Impulse) causes their ally Gem to gain 20 more hearts, which, on top of her still-high 27.5 hearts, means she has 57.5 hearts by the end of Day 8. This makes her an incredibly dangerous player to confront directly in Day 9, as she can take boatloads of damage over a long time and easily outlasts nearly the rest of the remaining players through sheer attrition alone. The same can be said to Pearl, who has 50 hearts at the end of the same session, albeit from committing less consensual kills throughout Day 8. Due to this, both end in the top 3, alongside Scar. Grian could have also become one of these if he had managed even a single kill in his 3v1 battle against Gem and the Scotts on Day 9, because he took a total of 99 hearts off of their team from traps and sword hits, which is more than 3 players at full health. Killing any one of them would've given him 10 hearts and a better chance to survive against the remaining two, getting even more hearts.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: This season, players gradually take chip damage from various sources (such as fall damage) throughout their lifetime, eventually leading to death because of the Anti-Regeneration mechanic. To tie into the new system, Red Names cannot intentionally go straight for a kill, but instead receive an endless flow of specific tasks to deal damage.
- Denser and Wackier: Owing to the ridiculous tasks that also frequently ask for involvement with the other players, things get comically wacky as the sessions go on, with so many people acting in so many bizarre ways that nearly everyone just goes along with it. Of course, this being a Deadly Game, this all makes the sessions where the bodies start dropping like flies hit far, far harder.
- Downer Ending: Nearly everyone dies; that's the point of the series. After the Heart Foundation and the Roomies (and Martyn, the last of the Big Dogs) are taken down, the ensuing fight splits the Mounders and Gem and the Scotts' tentative alliance, with Scar, the last unaligned player, siding with the Mounders while with them at the time. The band puts up a respectable fight but are taken down by Pearl, who didn't even want to live this long or win again, and Scar, who has refused to kill Pearl, even at her own request. The final duel ends with Pearl being shot and falling off a ledge, and while he doesn't die at the end of his episode, Scar is left alone after spending almost the entire series alone and essentially friendless. It's even more of a downer in Martyn's "Eyes and Ears" continuity, as Scar's loneliness and suffering is eventually drawn out off-screen for all it's worth.
- Easily Forgiven:
- Most of the players who have done tremendous amounts of damage to their close friends and allies for a secret task are let off with barely a slap on the wrist because it's for a secret task, so they'd have no choice in the matter.
- It's a bit of a running gag that if you do wrong to Bdubs, but then give him a horse, he'll immediately forgive you and become your best friend.
- Eldritch Location: The Secret Keeper, an giant statue of stone and moss with a flipped Watcher symbol in place of its face, surrounded by the sounds of Whispering Ghosts, where the sky goes dark for anyone who gets close enough. It is the only thing able to ignore the Anti-Regeneration that prevents players from healing, and the land around it seems to partially restore itself between the 6th and 7th sessions after taking damage from the Wither.
- Elite Zombie: As Minecraft would have it, armed zombies and baby zombies are the most common in the series. It's exceptionally notable in Secret Life; not only does the Hard gamemode cause an uptick in these mobs' spawn rates, but the tremendous amount of damage they deal cannot be regenerated by all but supernatural means (by this series' standards), causing them to be much greater threats than they have been in any other season. On Day 4, after several unfortunate encounters, Grian comments on how it's no wonder baby zombies are infamous for ending Hardcore worlds.
- Enemy Mine: On Day 9, the Mounders and Gem and the Scotts, the factions involving the two players with the most hearts on the server, have a tentative alliance to take down the Roomies and the remainder of the (Broken) Heart Foundation. The moment both factions fall, the two factions immediately turn against each other, with Scar, the last loner, joining up with the Mounders at the last second.
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: Averted. Unlike most seasons, which traditionally ends on a Last Survivor Suicide (either directly or by proxy), Scar doesn't die at the end of his final episode. In Martyn's "Eyes and Ears" continuity, however, this is defied as the Watchers simply bring Scar back to life if he ever tries to escape his Fate Worse than Death following the season.
- Exact Eavesdropping: On Day 6, Scott overhears Jimmy instructing Pearl on her secret task requirements while hiding in an underground hole, and runs off to warn Skizz and tell the Yellow Names on the server so they can make guesses. Fortunately for Pearl, her task requirements specify that for her to be called out by a Yellow Name, she has to specifically be called a "traitor", so Gem's guess is nullified by the task technicalities; meanwhile, the Mounders (Joel and Bdubs) refuse to betray their ally.
- Failed a Spot Check: Near the end of Day 6, Etho has to bring a Warden to the surface as part of his secret task (a joint task with Grian, who needed a Wither, and have them fight). While BigB, Scott, and Etho run past as fast as they can, BigB yelling "Oh my!" in particular, Scar has a friendly chat with Grian, oblivious to the Warden coming up behind him.
- Foreshadowing: At the beginning of Day 6, a Wither painting can be seen hanging in Etho, Grian and Cleo's base. Soon afterwards, Etho and Grian have to reroll for hard tasks as consequences of the last session. The hard tasks in question? Bring a Wither and a Warden to a central area and make them fight. This is later lampshaded by them.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: Day 7. It starts out normally enough, but Gem's task to spread the Boogeyman curse (which overrides infected players' original tasks) quickly shifts the episode to a Zombie Apocalypse type survival event.
- Game of Chicken: Invoked on Day 6 as a joint secret task between Bdubs, Impulse, and Scar, where they have to engage in activities that will cause damage, and can only succeed their respective tasks if they win more than three competitions. 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.
- Geas: The personalized secret tasks in Secret Life must be fulfilled. 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.
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: Cleo, Skizz, and Etho's joint Day 7 secret task revolves around this dynamic, with Skizz and Etho respectively acting as the "angel" and "devil" on Cleo's shoulders; the two can only win if Cleo listens to them more. Meanwhile, Cleo is told to alternate between the two's advice and keep the books balanced, and to pretend she's not in the know about the situation.
- A Good Name for a Rock Band: The alliance name 'Gem and the Scotts' is joked to be a good name for an '80s rock band, and the three involved choose to theme their attire for the season as such.
- Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: No one on the server wears a helmet; enforced in that 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. This comes back to bite Scar as makes and puts on a helmet twice in the season 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.
- History Repeats:
- 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 both of the seasons he has appeared in so far.
- Like all past seasons, Scott and Cleo are 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.
- Hot Potato: Pearl's Day 5 secret task, submitted by _term1576, requires her to play this with her secret task book, ensuring it's always in a player's inventory and to keep a slot in her own inventory open, while others have to try to return the book to her; if she has the book with her at the end of the session, she fails, and if anyone else has the book by the end of the session, they have to reroll for a hard task on Day 6. In the end, Etho is left in possession of the book due to movement difficulty caused by his own secret task of the day, forcing him to reroll for hard.
- Hurricane of Puns:
- Day 1 kicks off with Grian and Mumbo's assigned tasks being opposite each other, and Mumbo is soon able to complete his task by making one bad pun after another with Grian in relation to their items and the environment, while Grian is unable to complete his task for another while, due to Mumbo laughing at every single one of the puns he makes.
- After Martyn is tricked into joining Joel's "Round Mound" cult, they exchange puns of words rhyming with 'mound'.
- Impossible Task: As the series goes on, the difficulty level of each secret task starts going up, with the rerolled tasks being notably nigh-impossible to complete. Given the Deadly Game nature of the series, it's likely intended for some of these tasks to be outright impossible and to weaken the players enough for everyone to lose lives eventually.
- Gem's Day 3 assigned task is to open the End portal. Granted, the End portal only has one Eye of Ender left to be filled in, but to get an Eye of Ender, one has to travel into the Nether and fight Blazes (which deal tremendous amounts of fire damage) near a Bastion (where another player has already died trying to loot), on a server with an Anti-Regeneration mechanism. They'd also have to kill an Enderman, which are fairly dangerous and have historically been responsible for several deaths in the Life series already. While Gem does die once from aggravating an Enderman by complete accident, she succeeds in this task with some help.
- Joel's Day 3 rerolled task is to pull off a 100-block water bucket clutch in front of the whole server. This in itself isn't impossible to pull off, but failure to complete it in one go will require death, to which Joel thinks once is more than enough.
- Mumbo's Day 3 assigned task is to prevent another player from taking more than 3 hearts of damage. Unfortunately for him, the player assigned to him is Scar, who is infamous for being The Klutz. After hearing about it, Grian comments that if he had received that task, he would have just immediately gone to reroll.
- Lizzie's Day 5 rerolled task is to get the entire server to sleep.
- In-Series Nickname: The alliance 'Gem and the Scotts' and their base have been referred to by various nicknames, including "the Cherry Blossoms", "Cherry Hill" (for their base), and "the Scotts and Tots" (by Scar).
- Irony:
- Halfway through Day 2, Pearl watches Impulse fail his assigned task by blabbing about it before hitting the Success button, and says she's sure she won't do the same thing. At the end of the session, that's exactly what she does as well, and in front of the entire server at that.
- On Day 4, Lizzie and Scott comment on how they spent the better part of the session making paths to connect the server for the former's secret task (and by extension, the latter's), but end up not riding along those paths to get to the Secret Keeper.
- On Day 7, Gem's task ends up unleashing a Zombie Apocalypse across the server. At the end, one of the only survivors ends up being the player literally named ZombieCleo, which multiple people comment on. She puts on her "Human Cleo" skin the following day to showcase that.
- It's Probably Nothing: At the start of Day 3, Lizzie hears the sound of crunching dirt while near her house. Initially, she assumes that someone is digging beneath her home, before learning that the composter makes the same sound as breaking dirt blocks and writing it off as just her hopper automatically feeding items to her Composter. As it turns out, someone really was digging below her house: Grian was trying to move her door.
- "Join Us" Drone: At one point during the Zombie Apocalypse at Day 7, the ones afflicted with the Boogeymen curse croon to the defending survivors to join them in the middle of combat.
- Keeping Secrets Sucks: The season's premise; it revolves around having to complete specific tasks every session within a certain time limit, but if anyone tells another player their task, unless it's covered by the task instructions, they fail and may receive a penalty. Yellow Names are also allowed to guess the secrets of Green Names, which means they have to put extra effort into keeping their actions a secret or otherwise create diversions to prevent accurate guesses. That being said, it's acceptable for a normal player to guess another player's task and try to help them complete it instead of ratting them out.
- Loose Lips: A recurring trend on the server is for players to complete their respective task requirements but accidentally reveal its nature to someone else before they press the button, resulting in the day's task being registered as a failure.
- On Day 1, Scar's failure to keep his own secret task a secret while he's still doing it is broadcast to the entire server via the in-game chat. As he's the first to do so, and with the approval of the rest of the server, he is allowed to reroll for a harder task as opposed to hitting the "Fail" button.
- On Day 2, Impulse and Pearl both fall victim to this just before hitting the button, although Pearl unwittingly succeeds in her task; Impulse's episode for the session is fittingly titled "Loose Lips Sink Ships!". Scott also falls victim to the exact same thing, but retrospectively gets let off on account of everyone being exhausted by time of filming.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Nearly everyone on the server collectively loses it when Etho and Grian bring a Warden to the surface on Day 6, and proceed to do so a second time when Grian spawns in the Wither at the heart of the server.
- Mattress-Tag Gag: A brief one; about five minutes into Day 7, Pearl catches Scar rifling through her chests in an attempt to gather supplies to start a Pillager raid. In response, Scar claims to be conducting a mattress inspection and that Pearl pulling off her mattress tag is illegal on the Life series, with Martyn backing him up as he's trying to cause Red chaos.
- Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Invoked as a secret task requirement. On Day 6, Etho and Grian receive the shared task of staging a Warden and Wither fight in the middle of the map. By the time it's over, two players are permanently dead and the land is heavily damaged.
- Opposite Day: Scar's task on Day 4 requires him to do the opposite of everything someone asks him to do.
- A Rare Sentence: Given the name Grian chose for his pet magma cube on Day 7, he ends up saying the following:"I am wasting my session with Etho's Dishwasher… Y'know, there are things that you say in Minecraft, and that was not one of them I ever expected to say."
- Robbing the Dead: On Day 7, Cleo decides to rob Lizzie's base after the latter's final death the previous session; Etho then additionally suggests they burn the base to the ground since Lizzie's not around to object anyway, while saying he's supposed to be more "evil" than them as the "devil" on their shoulder.
- Royal "We": Jokingly namedropped by Scott when Mumbo asks Bdubs to share his ancient debris on Day 2, saying "we could have Netherite" when he's clearly intending to keep it all for himself.
- Scooby-Dooby Doors: Martyn edits himself and Jimmy chasing Big B through his Backrooms on Day 5 to look like this.
- Shout-Out:
- When the Big Dogs faction collectively goes Red mere seconds after each other, cue some dejected jokes across the server that they're now Clifford the Big Red Dogs.
- Etho's assigned secret task on Day 5 is to never move when someone is directly looking at him, like a Weeping Angel.
- While trying to clue Cleo in on her secret task on Day 6, Scar claims to have hated watching The Sound of Music growing up, in nod to a famous scene from the movie which fits Cleo's task requirements; Cleo doesn't clock on to this and instead sings "Do-Re-Mi" to Impulse in an attempt to guess her task.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: On Day 6, "Tango" repeatedly asserts he remembers how his alliance, the Heart Foundation, works and the events of past sessions. Like Gem and Lizzie with Cleo and Pearl in Limited Life, he's actually subbed in by Ren and equally confused about what's going on.
- Together in Death: Discussed. While watching Joel try to get his initiation kill for the Infected on Day 7, Scar suggests to Gem that if Joel dies in the process, it would be a nice gesture to bury him next to Lizzie.
- Too Dumb to Live: At the end of Day 6, multiple people question why Jimmy and Mumbo were running around trying to fight Grian's Wither and Etho's Warden while on their Red lives, resulting in their final deaths to the latter… especially in contrast to Martyn, who ran to hide in Big B's Backrooms away from the chaos for most of the fight.
- Unfortunate Names: On Day 1, Bdubs suggests that he, Mumbo, and Cleo could be called the "Axis" because they were going to have a theme of rotated houses. Cleo is quick to nip it in the bud, and it takes a few seconds for the other two to figure out why it would be a bad idea.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: As early as Day 2, everyone is getting used to seeing strange behavior from their server-mates (often attributable to their respective assigned secret tasks) and as such they stop questioning it. This is mildly Played for Drama on Day 2 as Jimmy and Lizzie both fail their tasks and call out the server on this, as they both needed people to respond to their antics in certain ways (or at all), but never received a response.Grian: This series, I just stopped asking questions.
- Wham Episode: Day 6 comes with a large uptake in the death toll, including three players being Killed Off for Real for the season, as well as both the Warden and a Wither being summoned to the surface near the end. It's also a twist episode for the entire series in that Jimmy manages to not be the first to die permanently this season.
- With Friends Like These...: Namedropped by Grian after the Greens who guessed his task immediately sold him out to the nearest Yellow despite having nothing to gain from it. Zigzagged because that's exactly what he wanted them to do, as his real task was to bait a Yellow into guessing incorrectly.
- With Us or Against Us: Played for Drama. Martyn adopts this attitude in relation to the Big Dogs as a Red Life alliance, in that everyone who joins up has to renounce their previous alliances to ensure full faction loyalty. This policy he enforces causes an argument over Bdubs' Conflicting Loyalty, in that Pearl is fine with him being with the Big Dogs as long as he doesn't have to ditch the Mounders in the process, while Martyn insists on him picking a single side and sticking with it. The same policy also drives Skizz away from joining the alliance in favour of staying with the now-Broken Heart Foundation.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Invoked on Day 7 when Gem's secret task denotes her as Patient Zero for the Boogeyman curse, and is tasked with infecting everyone on the server.You are infected with the Boogeyman curse. You must kill a non-Red to infect them. Once you have infected them, show them this book. Their task, if they have one, is replaced with this. Yellows cannot call out this task; you cannot reroll for hard. You succeed when all non-Reds have the curse during the session. All infected players can work together. Anyone infected can kill a non-Red, but the most recently infected player must be involved. If you turn Red, you can choose to be free from the curse by hitting 'Fail' early.
