Dying is not the end of your dino's run, nor is resetting to 1.0 growth as pointless as it first appears. In this brief guide, I will explain the benefits of dying and resetting, and how they can help you grow a true titan to dominate the leaderboard of a server. You WILL Die Death... is everywhere. Most of us try to avoid it, others can't get out of its way. Every day we fight a new war against germs, toxins, injury, illness, and catastrophe. There's a lot of ways to wind up dead. The fact that we survive at all is a miracle. Because every day we live, we face... 1000 Ways to Die. - Ron Pearlman, 1000 Ways to Die Death isn't really something you can avoid in Beasts of Bermuda. If you choose to run the gauntlet and grow infinitely, you will soon discover that food and water are huge issues. Herbivores become lawnmowers turning forests into deserts, while carnivores ravenously attack anything in sight. Water sources drain and become dirty faster, yet there is no corresponding boost in movement speed to get you to the next one quicker. You're more susceptible to sickness, and dirty water, the wrong plant, or a bad carcass will eventually see your resources draining even faster than before. If you're crazy or desperate enough to take a shrine blessing during the gauntlet, even more strain is put on your reserves of food and water. Sooner or later, your dino just won't be able to keep up with one or both of these demands. Choosing not to run the gauntlet is no guarantee of long-term survival, either. While resources may not be a problem, you're also not getting any stronger. It's almost inevitable that you'll bump into someone who is running the gauntlet, and if that someone is a carnivore, you're on the menu. Those are just the deaths that come from gameplay mechanics. If players are fulfilling trials, which includes "hunts" for all dinos regardless of diet, then even an encounter between two herbivores may end with someone dead. And of course, we cannot forget those who intentionally die by sacrificing at the altars of the three deities. Try as you might to survive, Bermuda and her inhabitants will kill you. But that doesn't have to be the end of your dino. The Purpose Of Death There are four possible actions to take with a dead creature: delete, sacrifice, resurrect, or reincarnate. Deletion is generally the worst possible option, and doesn't tend to be used unless someone is farming for egg mutations and needs to get rid of dinosaurs quickly. Living dinos can be deleted as well. A sacrifice will take your creature's accumulated trial points and apply them towards another creature's resurrection cost. If it had pledged to a deity or been killed at an altar, its corresponding trial points will be increased. Living dinos can be sacrificed as well, but it's more efficient to take them to an altar first, so I don't recommend doing it. Resurrection brings a dead creature back to life, but with lost growth. Failing to meet the resurrection cost results in additional lost growth, though as this guide will later show this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Reincarnation deletes the creature and replaces it with an offspring, which is treated as though your creature mated with an opposite-sex clone. The offspring follows most of the normal breeding rules, except there is no incest for the self-mating, and trial scores are used in place of the Good Parent talent as an inherit modifier. These are the actual challenge percentages you see on the trial screen, not the raw points used in sacrifices. An overall score of 85% or better in a given category guarantees you will not get negative inherits in the corresponding talents, and this can be viewed on the death screen. Pledging or sacrificing to a deity raises these percentages the same way as it does trial points, so you can safely ignore one of the three if your play style makes it too difficult.As you can see, death is simply another tool in your arsenal, not the end of your run as it would be in many similar games. By now, though, you may be wondering how to use it to your advantage. Reincarnation sounds nice and all, but it's a lot of work to get to a point where you're guaranteed an awesome set of inherits. In the meantime, you've still gotta deal with lost growth every time you screw up, which gets tedious and irritating. But what if I told you that lost growth was an opportunity to improve your current dino, too? Come Back Stronger As previously mentioned, a resurrected creature will lose some of its growth, even if the resurrection cost is completely fulfilled. Because talent points are tied to growth, this consequently means you may lose some talent points. Rather than simply stripping you of talents at random, the game will disable all of your talents until you remove one(s) of your choice. This prevents you from being too powerful relative to your growth level. The same will happen if you choose to reset your growth to 1.0 on the character menu, which can be quite a drastic reduction depending on how far you made it in the gauntlet. The fact that you get to choose exactly which talents are removed is an important yet often overlooked aspect of this process. How many times have you built your talents in a way to make growing up as easy as possible, only to find that this build is far less useful as an adult? So you make a new dino and build for adulthood, but now you're struggling to survive your childhood. The talent reset removes this conundrum entirely: make whatever build you want, and then either play until death or reset when it feels appropriate. Prune off the talents you no longer need, and retool for the current situation. For example, young dinos of all species are extremely vulnerable to weather, and are easily killed by a bolt of lightning dealing 2400 damage. For larger species, though, weather barely affects you as an adult, and a lightning strike is both survivable and fairly easy to recover from with some purple flowers. So taking weather resistance early on and deleting it later might be the way to go if you want to specialize elsewhere for the gauntlet. If you still need the deeper tiers of the survival tree, you could simply take the resilience path instead, or snake over from the power tree. There are also situations where the server is saturated with a certain species you wish to counter, or the population has shifted in a way that makes your previous lifestyle too dangerous. Maybe you're a Rex and wanted to try your hand at the Jagrex build, but found that there are far too many aquatic players for this to be a safe build at the moment. In these cases, dying or resetting gives you the chance to adjust your strategy and build for a different environmental niche, one in which you will find more success for a time. One of the game's death messages reads, "Come back stronger." This is not mockery, nor a challenge. It is, as it turns out, a piece of guidance. Whatever you were doing clearly isn't working, so take this opportunity to rethink and re-equip. Don't rage against death as if it were a punishment, and instead use it as a tool the game has provided you with. Understand the lesson being taught by the unforgiving islands of Bermuda, and you truly will come back stronger.