So if a rancher wants to keep all their slimes fed and happy, they have to dedicate a lot of ranch space to food supply, which costs money. But this comes with certain issues: some favorite foods are grown in smaller quantities and take up space with less output, such as chickens.
Thus, it is advantageous to keep a supply of the slime’s preferred nosh on the ranch with you. If you feed a slime its favorite food, it will produce double plorts and you get double money. Each slime has a type of food (meat, veggie, or fruit) that it will eat, and one specific type of food within that category that is its favorite. But let’s start off with the basics: the care and feeding of the slimes. So it’s important to keep our eyes peeled for anything hinky in our play experiences even if they’re cutesy.Īnd, reader, there is definitely some hinky stuff in Slime Rancher, which makes sense when you think about how it’s essentially a farming sim and how the industrial meat industry in real life is largely the stuff of nightmares. In fact, these games can often use their very cuddly nature to mask some pretty horrific themes and messages (I’m looking directly at you, Bugsnax). Seems fairly harmless, yes? Well, as Ty Galiz-Rowe pointed out in their article for Uppercut, cute things shouldn’t get a pass on critical examination just because they make us feel warm and fuzzy. So, you explore the world collecting new kinds of slimes and then bring them back to your homestead and domesticate them to turn a dollar. Your job as a rancher is to profit off the goop you have acquired, via feeding them and collecting their oddly pointy excrement, known as “plorts” which are apparently a panacea of a natural resource and thus go for big bucks. These slimes come in all different colors, from a basic pink model that functions as a living garbage disposal to the delicate Phosphor slime, who requires a diet of exclusively fruit and needs to be kept in a netted and shielded enclosure because it flies and can’t stand the sun. In the game, you boldly go where some other colonizers have gone before and set up a ranch on an alien planet, to farm different variants of the dominant life form: adorable spherical balls of slime. So as is obvious from the featured image, I’m talking not about real-life animal husbandry, but about Slime Rancher, released in 2017 (early access in 2016) by developer Monomi Park. I bundle them up, say a fond and slightly sad farewell… then jettison them immediately into the ocean. For an unlucky few, however, it is the day of reckoning: they have been made redundant and are no longer profitable to keep feeding. For some of the living things waiting in the pens, it’s the start of a good day: they get their favorite food, their pen is cleaned of waste, and they can go about their business largely unbothered. I gather up my feed – carrots, strawberries, and some very unfortunate chickens – and head out to the ranch. It’s 6am, and I’m ready to begin my morning chores.
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