Slime Rancher squelches out of early access in August

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Further updates include harder mode, easier mode, maps and more.

Slime Rancher is a game about hoovering up slimes, exploring, and farming on an alien planet, and it's proved rather popular in the year-and-a-half the sandbox title has been in Steam Early Access. Slime waits for no man, however, and so Monomi Park's open adventure finally has an actual release date, and it's very, very soon.

Slime Rancher 1.0.0 will release on August 1st, as this news post on Steam explains. It's a "smaller update that ties up a few loose ends in the current game", and your current save files will be perfectly usable, so it's perhaps nothing to get too excited about. However, the post also details some of the future updates the team are planning to possibly wadge into the game after version 1.0.0, and they include a casual mode, a harder game mode, a map system and a few other bits and bobs.

That map system will be released ASAP, and while it won't be too detailed as the team "still believe that exploring the unknown and learning the world is important to the experience", it should "alleviate some of the frustration" you might be feeling as you get about.

That Casual mode is basically Adventure Mode but with no tarr, while the new Iron Rancher mode sounds a mite more involved, and will play out like this:

"An exciting new game mode that adds a replay-able, survival-like experience to Slime Rancher! Aimed at veteran ranchers who have cleared Adventure Mode and seek an increased challenge, the Iron Rancher Competition has you racing against the clock to collect quotas of various plorts across multi-day rounds. However, each round offers unique challenges and remixed rules that greatly changes the standard Slime Rancher experience. Vampiric chickens? Whaaaa?"

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.