by RyuKazuha » Thu Dec 31, 2015 4:26 am
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.