[Suggestion] Slime Breeding

[RyuKazuha]

Hi,

while I've been playing the game I noticed a couple of things, let them stirr for a while and came up with something I'd like to see done in the game in some form or another. Slime Breeding. And I don't just mean the ability to increase the population of slimes on the farm, but crossbreeding them to get new slimes not found in the wild. I'll take some time to explain my train of thought so bear with me.

There are three Things I quite like, yet my experience with them is somehow incomplete.
First are the Tarrs. I love them, I actually contained one and experimented on it for a bit, before it collapsed in on itself. However there's no real chance of a Tarr appearing in a reasonably run farm. It's far to easy to avoid and there's a discrete lack of incentive to risk it.
Second are the Golden Slimes. They behave in an interesting way adn require some skill (or luck) to be relieved of their plorts, but that's fine. The thing is, the thrill of the hunt is the only motivation to go after them. The golden plort is nothing but a quick cash-infusion and there are easier ways to get it and usually by the time I get in the mood to hunt some Goldies, the Farm is set up as to provide all the money I need. The Golden Plort as a reward is just not cutting it right now.
Thrid is the Largos. It's neat to be able to add two types together into one Slime and I enjoy the combinations, yet it does require no skill at all to pull of and happens in the wild all the time. The mechanic to me lacks depth makes me think more about what could be, than what to do with it.

It occured to me, that there could be a way to address all of these concerns at once, by tying the elements to each other. The Tarr is in principle just slimevolution gone wrong. The Golden Slime in contrast could be considered the "purest form of evolved slime" or at least something able to lift the corruption of a Tarr. In turn, a "cleansed" Tarr could be used to facilitate the fusion of to different species within a hybrid Largo into a truly new form.

It could be as follows:

Let's say there's a plasma slime. It's not a natural variant you'll be able to find, but rather bred from Boom Slimes and Phosphorus Slimes.
In order to breed it, the player must create a Boom/Phosphorus Largo first, but he needs a "catalyst" to have the Hybrid become a true plasma slime able to produce plasma plorts.
This catalyst is gained from Tarrs by the way of sterilizing them (that is shooting them with water once) and feeding them a golden plort afterwards (probably be shooting it into their face), wich transforms them into a new type auf slime, say a rainbow slime. Rainbow Slimes may have special needs, like dining on other slime like the Tarr, and produce a rainbow plort.
Feeding the rainbow plort to a largo then prompts it to become a normal slime of a new breed, in our example a plasma slime.

One could even extend the system in a way that allows new breeds to be bred with each other again, this time using a golden plort as the catalyst to create some truly magnificent superslime species.

Also I would propably desing it so that if a pink Largo is fed the catalyst, it would turn into a pure-bred largo of whatever second species was involved, producing two tabby-plorts in case of a former "pink/tabby". This would give a reason to keep pinks around or at least revisit them later on, as well as allowing those who prefer largos to go "pure", if they like to.

I guess I'd also suggest to not allow a bred species to fuse with natural ones into a largo, to keep the number of combinations managable.

[Pengwertle]

To be honest, most suggestions I see on the forums of incomplete games are poorly thought out, require too much effort, or would be useless filler compared to other content in the game. But having a system like this or a system with similar ideas solves many of the problems I have with this game, though it would require a bunch of new models/textures. It gives a lot of content to the endgame, lots of new goals to achieve after you have all the money you need, an aspect of experimentation which really only exists in the first half hour or so of game play right now, and an incentive to actually hunt the gold slimes. This is a good idea, thank you for sharing :)

[TurnipKnight]

Some fashion of breeding would be far more rewarding and offer more content/replay value. New slime will be added for sure, but even still I feel just mixing slime feels kinda shallow. While it provides a bit of fun at first, us serious ranchers crave something with more depth. I would also like to see corrals take the form of habitats rather than a simple box. A place where slime can mingle and enjoy there captivity. Heck, building habitats to cage them could be a feat in itself and would make choosing a slime to breed a more significant choice.

[RyuKazuha]

@Pengwertle: Thank you. To be fair though, the reason many suggestions are somewhat poorly thought out is owed to the fact most people don't have any experience with game design at all. I personally find any suggestion of my players to be helpfull, if only to get me thinking about something I might not have thought about before.

As there are certainly more slimes to come, implementing the suggested or a similar system at this stage would allow for various ways to adapt without to much additional work. But that's for the devs to work through.

@TurnipKnight:

While I would like to see a system get even more indepth with breeding and habitats, I don't think Slime Rancher is gonna be or wants to be this kind of game. The deeper a system is meant to be, the more complicated it is to design, as you want the underlying rules to be as simple as possible. It's very easy to talk about what you want something to do, but designing isn't about "what do I want", but more about "how do I accomplish it in a comeplling way". Still as I said earlier, telling the devs what you'd like the game to do will help them either way, just don't get mad if they decide to not do something wich would take the game in a very different direction.