A few years ago I posted this thread with my suggestions for a better slime breeding and raising experience. After seeing that Slime Hutches received no changes in 1.4, I feel it's time to bring back attention to this issue. Slime Hutches require daily attention that can't be automated, for an average return per day of less than 1000g. Both Barns and Coops can make much, much more money per day even without professions like Rancher or Artisan, and are both available earlier than Slime Hutches. The Crystalarium, which also needs Iridium Bars, can provide up to 150g per day per tile, while requiring a lot less effort and initial investment than Slime Hutches. Even if one wanted to kill slimes for their drops, doing so in Slime Hutches is risky (as you might only leave slimes of a single gender) and much slower than simply heading to the mines or the desert. The Slime Ball mechanics also seem to incentivize leaving slimes alive, but for no real benefit. So once again I am asking that Slime Hutches are made the worthy endgame building they're supposed to be. With a considerable material and gold cost, the Slime Charmer Ring being almost required, and the difficulty and time needed to fill a hutch with purple slimes, the rewards should be changed to match. Maybe Slime Eggs need a few extra steps that can increase their worth even more, the same way milk can eventually become iridium starred cheese.
Process the eggs into something more valuable is a excellent idea! Also they should lay eggs more often.
I think the slime hutch could be made more interesting... but it's also not that bad as is. The building itself and slime farming is mostly a novelty. You do actually recoup your investment at about the same rate as many other farm buildings/activities with just the slime farming part in the building. That maxes out pretty fast, though, like you said. But the additional (albeit rare) drops from slimes makes up for it in a pretty big way. I'd consider that part passive. Even though you have to fight slimes for it, you will be doing that while doing any dungeon delving anyway. Especially with a burglar ring, a full day mining will often gain a slime egg from loot, adding 1,000-5,000g. That adds up pretty quickly. In fact, the return per month for me rivals and maybe even surpasses a barn with a couple 5-heart pigs in it (since they don't work on rainy days or winter)... and is actually a lot less work if you ignore the slime farming in the building. So I agree that I'd like to see the slime farming part in the building be a little more interesting, but I think the return on investment in general is fine as is.
An idea that I had was to give it 2 upgrade options that are mutually exclusive from each other: (meaning that, if you want to have both, you need to build 2 Slime Hutches and upgrade them separately) * Deluxe Slime Hutch Cost - 30,000g Materials - 500 Stone; 4 Iridium Sprinklers It works just like the regular one, but you don't need to fill the water troughs anymore. This upgrade would be for the people that want the Slime Hutch to farm Slime Balls to create eggs in the egg press to sell. * Slime Castle Cost - 40,000g Materials - 500 Stone This one has a little door like the Coop. The Slimes inside can still breed even at maximum capacity (20 Slimes, if I'm not mistaken), but the extra slimes will be expelled out through the little door. This upgrade would be for the people who want to breed slimes to kill for the loot. The water troughs still exist inside if you want to generate Slime Balls, but you still need to fill them with water like the regular Slime Hutch.
You're right, an automatizated system would make sense since we have it for every kind of gameplay (metal, animal or crop), I think that CA unintentionally missed this with the slime hutch.
oh wow, that'd be great, those upgrades i would like sprinklers to be able to fill the trough, though, but that could be a thing for the sprinkler mod(s), i guess and some more slimes would be more fun, imo maybe a possibility to set it to your preferred limit? maybe with an upgraded one, we'd have 10,20 or 30?
That might get a little exploited depending on how many extra it made per day, though it would take some doing to get it going. Per the wiki (maybe slight spoiler ahead), white slimes with all even numbers drop diamonds 100% of the time. I'm pretty sure when the slimes mate, they use a pretty reliable method of mixing the parents colors. So if you eventually created a slime hutch with a male and female that both ended up with the same all even white numbers, you could create a hutch full of 100% diamond drop slimes. Farming them inside the hutch would be dangerous, since you might kill too many, and it would take quite a while to get that combination again. But if it spit out, say, 5 slimes a day and you killed them with a burglar ring for fun, that would be 10 diamonds a day for very minimal work.
Yeah, a good point, but I dunno. I always found slime breeding way too complicated to even reach this point. I decided to instead breed purple ones for iridium ore and to create slime balls to create eggs to sell when I built my hutch.
Now that I've played around with fish ponds a bit more, it's really disappointing to see that all the improvements that could have made Slime Hutches unique and interesting were instead given to the fish ponds. You slowly build up the number of fish over time, getting more and more unique items depending on the type of fish that you're raising. This could've been such a wonderful addition to the hutches, instead of introducing yet more benefits to an already well-developed side of the game, i.e. fishing.
