Slime Rancher 2, the sequel to Slime Rancher, recently featured a significant update on their official Slime Rancher site on November 14th. Not seen in the first game, it features a new dynamic weather system that allows for rain, snow, thunder, and more!
The long-awaited sequel was released on September 22nd, 2022. While it’s not totally complete yet, Monomi Park, the creators of both games, has been steadily releasing patch notes and new content for Slime Rancher 2, and this one doesn’t disappoint.
In case you’re not familiar with either Slime Rancher games, they’re both a single player game where you are the main character, Beatrix, and you have a ranch on a strange planet full of different slimes. Your goal is to corral them and earn money by collecting their plorts when you feed them. Through this, you can unlock expansions to your ranch and eventually unlock the laboratory on your land to create gadgets and other decorative items to customize your space.
There’s also a narrative you follow by finding different notes as you explore the biomes beyond your ranch and discover new slimes, food, and more. You also fight tarr, which are the enemies of the game created when slimes eat more than one other plort that’s not their own. However, if you’re looking for a more casual gaming experience and not have to worry about them, you can turn them off in the settings. Sometimes, I personally like a challenge, but I will turn them off if it becomes too much because they can get out of hand fast!
One of the things I love to do in the game is combine slimes to make different hybrids. For example, you can give a pink slime a tabby plort and they become a bigger pink tabby. You can’t change that particular slime anymore after that, but the beauty of the game is that you’ll never run out of slimes to experiment different combinations with.
Now that you have an understanding of the game, let’s get back to the update on Slime Rancher 2. All the new weather patterns include wind of varying strength that has the potential to turn into windstorms. There’s rain, also with varying strengths, that could turn into a storm that forms puddles on the ground, as well as thunderstorms that could have lightning strikes. There’s snow, but only in the Powderfall Bluffs biome, pollen of varying strength that can aid vine growth, and finally, slime fall, which is exactly what you think it is! All of these weather events also come with a new original score associated with each one, so be sure to listen for it when it starts to rain or storm.
The newest update also features two slimes from the original game: Dervish and Tangle slimes, which are some of my personal favorites. With these slimes’ return also comes their favorite foods: pickled pears, painted hens, and chickadoos.
A more minor change to the game is some alterations to the Slimepedia, my favorite being that Beatrix physically checks it before opening it, something she couldn’t do before. There’s also updated accessibility and some slight interface changes to the Slimepedia.
I got to play the game and experience some of the new weather. So far, I got only to experience mild rain, but it was a refreshing change from the usually always sunny and stagnant climate both games had. Though, the exception to this is the glass desert in the first game, which features harsher weather and the occasional firestorms.
You can view all the updates and bug fixes in detail here. In the end, they hinted at another significant update in early 2024, which features an updated gadget system to truly transform your world. Now that this new update has come out, it’s time for me to get back into it while I wait for the next update!
