Walker

The walker, also known as a dumbbell, and also referred to slangily as the blue planet, is a monster which looks like the planet Uranus: a turquoise ball with a gray axis tilted at 45 degrees, and works similar to the pink ball, glider and fireball, but chooses a random direction out of all legal directions to turn when it runs into something. This movement pattern can often lead to fits of frustration among even the highest-level Chipsters, and particularly among less experienced groups. Like the bug, the walker dies in water and on bombs, and treats fire as a wall.

The following diagram illustrates these properties:

The walker, from where it is, moves east onto the trap, and is then stuck there until something releases it. In this case, Chip is at the controls. In the meantime, Chip may remove one or both of the dirt spaces. If he leaves both of them alone, the walker is repeatedly forced to move D and will repeat this forever until Chip removes a dirt space, which allows the walker to possibly move in that direction and kill Chip. If this space is already removed before the walker is released, the same two options hold. If both dirt spaces are removed, however, the walker has three options to choose from. In this level, only the eastern dirt would be removed, so that the bomb would be exploded. Should the western dirt be removed, and the walker chose this direction, the ice and force floor would redirect the walker towards the bomb.

There are two differences for the walker in Lynx mode: the walker considers all four directions, even if they aren't all legal moves (the MS walker simply doesn't add it to the random number generator), and if the walker chooses a blocked direction, it counts as the use of a move.

Trivia

• The first Chip's Challenge level with walkers in it was Nice Day. Consequently, the route through it is not guaranteed 100%.

See also

• Jumping Swarm, a level with one walker