Slime Rancher expands for free into the jiggly glitch dimension
Slime 'pickins
Squidgy first-person farm 'em up Slime Rancher is one size bigger and goopier today. Developers Monomi Park have released two bits of DLC, one of them big, challenging and free, and the other one small, entirely cosmetic and paid. Viktor's Experimental Update is the free expansion, taking players into a world of slime simulation. Slimeulation, even. It's infested with glitchy, fragmented slimes that you can collect, convert into bug reports and cash in for a stack of new rewards, including some new gadgets. Below, a look at this blankly smiling virtual world within a virtual world.
The Slimeulation (I love that word, I'm sorry) unlocks quite late into the game, and is effectively a self-contained mini-game with its own reward track. You'll need to have unlocked the Ruins, purchased a Lab Expansion and completed a Range Exchange job for local mad scientist Viktor. Once that's all done you can visit his workshop and enter The Matrix But Gooier. You have a limited amount of time to use Debug Spray to reveal glitched slimes and hoover them up before the simulation breaks down. Getting hit by this virtual corruption on your way out makes you drop your glitches, so avoid the angry, evil looking goo.
Sadly you can't bring glitched slimes home, on account of them not being real, but you can trade in the bug reports for new multi-task drones, a portable water tap, deployable slime bait and a few others. There's apparently an experimental chicken cloning device that doesn't always work right, so, fair warning. Such is the nature of science, mad or otherwise. And doubly so when it's literally powered by malfunctioning slime.
Outside of this free expansion, the Secret Style Pack is the game's first DLC, and refreshingly minor and entirely cosmetic. It scatters twenty treasure pods around the world, each containing a new slime skin that you can apply to critters on your ranch. According to the patch notes, one side effect of adding this new slime-reskinning tech is improved slime faces for everyone. Now they can smile blankly at you better than ever before.
The Viktor's Experimental Update expansion for Slime Rancher is live now. The Secret Style Pack is available on Steam and Epic for £5.79/€6.59/$7.99. The base game is also half off on Steam. Don't forget that Slime Rancher was one of the Epic Games Store's first giveaways - if you picked it up but haven't given the game a try yet, now would be the time.