I don't cave on Early Access games too often these days, but Slime Rancher has been calling to me for months now. I got a bit anxious for its full release, put on my biggest hat and belt buckle, grabbed my vaccum, said, "Ah, that's close enough," and finally opened my ranch for business. It turns out that first person slime ranching is my kinda ranching.

Once I got over the fact that interacting with slimes will always feel like an RPG sidequest, I started to enjoy my daily ranching schedule. With any simulator or game with an active clock, I've learned to just go out in the world and try to break things as soon as possible before eventually restarting the game to play it "for reals." My crash course into slime culture was quite amusing and rather therapeutic. Sucking up smiling slimes makes my smile even bigger than theirs.

Getting down to ranch business though, I was worried that I'd get a bit stressed out by all of the tasks at hand to run a perfect slime ranch. Slime Rancher embraces a bit of chaos from the beginning so I never attempted to kid myself that things would run smoothly. Instead I turned my attention to getting to know the different types of slimes out in the world and figuring out how to start making money to afford as many slime pens as possible. That's when Slime Rancher won me over forever - the key resource that makes you money is by selling slime splorts. A splort is a piece of slime poop. You make money by selling shit. That means to be the richest slime rancher I just need to gather as many slimes as possible and stuff them full of food. There's something joyous about sucking up a ton of vegetables and a ton of slimes and then shooting everything into one corner until splorts are everywhere.

Eating, pooping, and making money is a routine I understand. I'm just getting started but I already know that I was born to slime ranch.