[Discussion] The Tarr

[Tatzelwyrm]

So I wanted to bring up a point about the tarr and see what the general consensus was, and I was originally going to do this on steam forums but.. I was hoping to find a better platform for actual discussion here.

Now, I want to say that I do like the risk that tarr represent. Besides looking neat as heck, they will punish an unknowing player quickly enough but not so much that you can't recover from it. It's a setback, but you learn from it and try again, hoping to not make the same mistakes. It's simple enough and a solid consequence.

That said, I feel like it's too easy to trigger tarr. You want the tarr to be an ever present risk to trying to hybridize slime, but when they trigger so effortlessly even making your way through an area, they feel less like a risk and more like an annoyance. I've had more than one occasion where I see tarr already wreaking havoc on an area before I even enter it, so then entering an area you plan to spend time in becomes a game of 'quickly get these slime away from these other slime before one becomes a tarr' before you can even do anything else. It's tedious and for me it feels like it adds another layer of micro managing that isn't really necessary.

I'm conflicted because like I said, I like the risk that tarr represent, but I would like to see them have more of a middle ground between actually being a threat and being a thing that happens that annoys and inconveniences you. Am I in the minority? |: For the time being we have no way of telling whether slime and tarr will get ai tweaks or something as development continues but maybe it's a possibility.


Edit: this is not necessarily a discussion to propose tarr become more challenging lol, the main point is they occur too often, too easily

[Malbio]

Something that would make them a legit threat rather than an annoyance is them being able to use their armthing to grab you, not just slimes.

[Urby]

So, I think it should be important that you should always have a resource available to fight Tarr if you need/want to. Sure, their weakness is water, and sometimes there's a pond or a spring in the area. But what good is that if your inventory is full, or you have to (slowly) guzzle up water so you can try to shoot them? By the time you have enough globs of water, there might already be 3-4 Tarr that have cleared up the area.

The worst place is the area right next to the Tabby Gordo - there are Pink, Tabby, and Rock slimes that spawn there, but no easy place to get water. Sure, you could suck up a Tarr and shoot it into the ocean, but that requires A) You to expose yourself to the Tarr and B) You to not suck up a Largo, which often happen in Tarr-infested zones.

I think you should be able to slowly suck up a Tarr into your Vacpack (without it taking an inventory slot), which would cause it to function badly for a while, but at least you can immobilize/disable a Tarr infestation. You can then empty the Tarr residue in an incinerator.

If we were able to fight Tarr in this way, I would totally be up for Tarrs to be more dangerous to the player, like being able to sling to them or drag the player. That would also give more urgency to a Tarr infestation rather than "Well, I guess I should just leave this zone for 5 minutes."

[Heather]

Welcome to our community Tatzelwyrm
Neat topic.

Something that would make them a legit threat rather than an annoyance is them being able to use their armthing to grab you, not just slimes.

That would sure be interesting!
I'm torn, one of my favorite parts about this game is the mostly positive experience while encountering few real threats. Then again, I'm lazy LOL

[t0rchic]

I like that this game has a less active playstyle than many and personally would really rather not have Tarr be a "real" challenge. Minecraft, Starbound, Chibi Robo and even EVE Online to name a few have a problem caused by trying to make random enemies more "challenging". At the very start of the game they're a massive threat and are exciting, but once you make even a little progress into the game they just get annoying... In Minecraft you carry around your enchanted sword while you build and every so often you have to smack a zombie in the face once and continue with your work. It takes no effort but it's enough of an interruption to be annoying. In EVE Online you sit there mining an asteroid while your drones kill pirates for you and don't even notice them, lmao.

From a less casual gameplay standpoind I will agree that they feel more like a nuisance than an actual potential threat. If they were more rare we'd probably care more about them, but right now pretty much any time you leave your ranch you'll run into them in at least a couple places because they're so easily made and it really causes a sort of desensitization to them and a realization of the very minor threat they pose. The first couple times I ran into them personally I was like "oh no, they're eating all the slimes!" and shot them into the ocean, but now I just walk around them, suck up chickens or whatever else I was looking for, and sprint/jetpack away to my next stop. Even the one time I had them on my ranch, after the first couple formed I launched them over my house into the ocean and the infestation - if you could even call it that, lol - was dealt with.

[TheForeman]

A couple ways to make them more threatening.

They already do grab ahold of you if you get to close but make them blind you so you can't grab them back as easily.

Make their deaths impermanent. When a tarr dies it infects the land. If a slime were to spawn on that turf it spawns as a tarr. This, of course, can be washed away before anything spawns.

Have their grabs interrupt your hold on them.

Different types of tarr dependent on the three slimes that it is made of. The worst I can immediately imagine is Phosphor Rock Boom Tarr.

On the flipside of difficulty make their natural spawning rarer. This can be done 2 ways I can think of. Make slimes less common, or there's a chance instead of a tarr, one of the other plorts get overridden. Honestly, I think the less common slimes are a better route.

[Tatzelwyrm]

I'm not necessarily saying that the tarr should be more challenging. I'm more pointing out that once you encounter them the first couple times they quickly become something that inconveniences the player more than anything (such as in the area Urby points out). I want them to have more of a middle ground, as in, I would like to see them still remain a threat in the back of the player's mind, but they can't do that if even the wild slime trigger them like nothing. You see them and your reaction is basically just "oh great, these things again" because they trigger so easily.

Maybe instead of having tarr form every time a largo eats a third type of plort, it has a chance to become tarr instead? You could have this chance be 70-80% of the time and still keep the game very casual to players, but the guaranteed chance of tarr spawning, combined with areas containing 3+ type of slime makes it frustrating sometimes. (also if a largo could eat a third plort and not instantly become tarr it does not further hybridize either, just nothing would happen)

[MLeonhardt]

Make their deaths impermanent. When a tarr dies it infects the land. If a slime were to spawn on that turf it spawns as a tarr. This, of course, can be washed away before anything spawns.

I really don't want this to become Super Mario Sunshine In Space m8

How about instead of Largos instantly becoming a Tarr, they just have a small chance to become one, as was stated just before.

Something to balance this drastic reduction in the amount you would see of them, regular Tarrs would no longer reproduce by attacking other Slimes or Largos, but would instead just eat them, removing them from the area. To go with this, Tarrs, when blasted with water enough, would explode into 3 smaller Tarrlets, which would then chase down and try to merge with other non-Largo Slimes to create a new Tarr. Tarrlets could then be sucked up and shot into the ocean, or scrubbed out with a single spoot of water from the vacpac.

[NekoSlime]

The tarr are by design meant to be an annoyance outside. If you're even remotely good at Slime Rancher (which honestly only takes an hour or two of playtime) then Tarr should not be a worry at your ranch. Only when you go outside. And that's completely intentional! It makes things more interesting and fun when you go out on adventures. With that said, I still tend to completely ignore them sometimes when I go out. Maybe if they gave you some coins for killing them, it would be more worth it to spend your time cleaning out the random outbreaks.

Your suggestion of making them more rare won't solve the problem. We're still going to ignore them when we go on adventures. The main thing is that they need to give us a bit of a reward for killing them.

[Pyrotrap]

The tarr are by design meant to be an annoyance outside. If you're even remotely good at Slime Rancher (which honestly only takes an hour or two of playtime) then Tarr should not be a worry at your ranch. Only when you go outside. And that's completely intentional! It makes things more interesting and fun when you go out on adventures. With that said, I still tend to completely ignore them sometimes when I go out. Maybe if they gave you some coins for killing them, it would be more worth it to spend your time cleaning out the random outbreaks.

Your suggestion of making them more rare won't solve the problem. We're still going to ignore them when we go on adventures. The main thing is that they need to give us a bit of a reward for killing them.

Being "good at Slime Rancher" as it is currently is irrelevant. This is the alpha not the full game. We expect that the full game will have much more content and therefore take longer which is why we use this fourm to suggest changes we'd like to see during development. One major problem is that the Tarr are too annoying and not much of a threat. Some people think they should be rarer, whether through making them only have a chance to be formed or through making slimes less likely to eat Plorts on their own, and some people think they should be more dangerous to pose an actual threat you can't just always ignore if you want to explore or gather resources in the area.

[NekoSlime]

The tarr are by design meant to be an annoyance outside. If you're even remotely good at Slime Rancher (which honestly only takes an hour or two of playtime) then Tarr should not be a worry at your ranch. Only when you go outside. And that's completely intentional! It makes things more interesting and fun when you go out on adventures. With that said, I still tend to completely ignore them sometimes when I go out. Maybe if they gave you some coins for killing them, it would be more worth it to spend your time cleaning out the random outbreaks.

Your suggestion of making them more rare won't solve the problem. We're still going to ignore them when we go on adventures. The main thing is that they need to give us a bit of a reward for killing them.

Being "good at Slime Rancher" as it is currently is irrelevant. This is the alpha not the full game. We expect that the full game will have much more content and therefore take longer which is why we use this fourm to suggest changes we'd like to see during development. One major problem is that the Tarr are too annoying and not much of a threat. Some people think they should be rarer, whether through making them only have a chance to be formed or through making slimes less likely to eat Plorts on their own, and some people think they should be more dangerous to pose an actual threat you can't just always ignore if you want to explore or gather resources in the area.

I mean, that is exactly what I said, except I also proposed an alternate solution since the rate of tarr outbreaks isn't much of a problem. If they drop coins when you defeat them, it should alleviate a lot of the stress of seeing them, and remove some of the pointless monotony of defeating them.

Alternatively, if you really don't want to deal with them, running past them remains a viable option.

[Tatzelwyrm]

In all fairness we don't know what Nick and Mike had/have planned for the tarr so we can't at this point and time say for sure what they were "designed" to be. I don't want them to simply be an annoyance though, hence why I started a discussion to see what other people thought. I want tarr to remain something players keep at the back of their mind as they explore, but I'm not saying they should become a challenge to players and must be dealt with either. Being rewarded for fending them off would give incentive for players to pay attention to them, but they still spawn way too easily, whether you want to deal with them or not. Just running away from them doesn't address the issue of them being tedious and annoying when they occur in an area you wish to spend time in.

[machallboyd]

Surprise Tarr outbreaks on new players are the best part of every YouTube series. Dude loads some heterogeneous corrals up and you know you're in for a treat soon.

[glinkBobby]

Tarrs should appear less frequently and be a lot harder to deal with.

[clmurphy74]

Some very thoughtful comments. I agree that the tar is annoying. If you get the jet pack, and upgrade it to the fullest, you can get high enough to just watch the tarr, safely out of reach (99.99% of the time).

That being said, I agree that making them more challenging isn't the solution, not entirely. Maybe using some of the suggestions above, like the one about when you hit them with water, they split into two or three mini-tars that you can suck up into the vac pac to dispose of in either an incinerator or the Slime Sea. Maybe combine this with a reward for getting rid of them? Or getting a chest/box that you can break, that has a higher probability of containing a Gold Slime for a Gold plort?

[TheMageOfMist]

Some very thoughtful comments. I agree that the tar is annoying. If you get the jet pack, and upgrade it to the fullest, you can get high enough to just watch the tarr, safely out of reach (99.99% of the time).

Have you seen how far they can jump? Sometimes in the Moss Blanket, if I am not throwing them over the cliff edge or shooting them with water... They are zooming through the sky over it and apparently into the slime sea, I didn't realize what the black dots were at first. XD There was also one time when I was hiding on a cliff watching the Tarr when all of the sudden one super-man jumped up at me. Scared the life of of me.

[NeferNightbug]

Tarrs should appear less frequently and be a lot harder to deal with.

Well, from first-hand experience, the Tarr do seemingly just love to bounce behind Ranchers and flank them and dodge your shots.

But seriously, the Pink Slime spawn rate needs to be dropped massively when there are other slimes about. Those damn Pink Plorts just get everywhere, and then the Rocks and Tabbies needed to get off your feet in the early game become Largos, meaning you just lost a slime, and then the Boom and Honey Slimes also go Largo, which is even more annoying because of the rarity of the Honey Slime (I have seriously taken up one area of the Moss Blanket for complete clearing, sucking up all the Pinks, Stony Hens, Carrots and Mint Mangos and throwing them all over the wall.)
But hey, they have their uses. The spot in the Moss Blanket between the Pink Boom Largos and the river area is generally bristling with Pinks come 6:00, so I stop by the river to literally grab a Tarr after I collect all the Honey Slimes and just let the Tarr eat the other slimes and Largos.

[asdfghjklinkin]

Something I agree with SO MUCH is that the pink slimes spawn way too much. In the first few areas you can explore, it's fun at first and it doesn't seem that there's too many. But I'm on day 42 at the moment, and I've been trying to capture one more phosphor slime, and every time I go out they all transform into largos because of how many pink plorts there are. All I want is one, seriously.