Idle Lab Rats
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completed
95 ratings
Posted June 16, 2024. Updated April 24, 2025. Played 5734 times for a total of 6434 hours.
description
Buy and Train rats
Rats may all start slow and witless, but they all have a wide range of undiscovered potential. Train the rats in mazes of increasing difficulty to push them to their limits. Use what you learn from the rat’s training to improve their proficiency.
Fulfill Grants and buy lab tools
Once a rat has improved enough, submit them for grant money. Use the money to buy new rats but also to acquire new lab tools. Fill your lab with the equipment that will serve your playstyle:
-Get more mazes an train many rats at once
-Improve your rat’s proficiency with specialized chemical regimens
-Use other training tools like running wheels to passively train your rats
-Experiment with new maze styles
Discord - https://discord.gg/cBzZcGE2
latest update
April 24, 2025
Release ver 0.4 - Support
New Additions
- Conversations- At certain milestones (mostly when submitting grants), rats will share a quick dialogue as they develop and try to understand their role in the lab and the universe.
- New Abilities (Support) - 3 new abilities (one for each attribute) that focus around rats interacting with each other while in their mazes. For example, As One is a stamina ability that reduces the rat’s speed but boosts all other rat speeds.
- Carpentry- A new tab that unlocks after placing a carpenter workbench in the lab. After building the workbench, any research spent on maze upgrades will generate building scraps. These can be spent on the carpentry tab to unlock new maze types and improve the starting max dimensions of mazes. New rats won’t have to start over from a 3x3.
- Genetic Traits - All rats will have values attached to hidden traits and breeding rats can bring those traits to the surface. A RATScanner can reveal these hidden values, but the purpose of a trait will be a mystery until a rat expresses the gene.
- Hotkeys - Hotkeys for navigating tabs, and full control of the maze tab. Check the help page for more information.
- Stats- Some overall stat tracking. Most of this is for fun, but some of this will become mechanics in future updates, so it’s better to add the tracking sooner than later. You can also replay conversations and say hi to the rats that have moved on.
- Maze Generation - The standard maze now has several different variations of maze generation that it chooses from. Along with this, The rat and cheese are placed smarter.
- New mazes - 4 new ex-grant mazes.
- Rename Rats
- UI improvements (I’m learning, but still really bad at UI…)
- New save file format - Save files are smaller, which is necessary because copy/pasting the json saves were getting large enough to cause errors when importing.
Bug fixes - A few improvements to moving lab tools around.
- Some performance improvements, mostly felt when viewing the mazes tab with many active mazes
Balancing changes - The bonus research tracker gave was too extreme and has been reduced
- Training tools now scale with a rat’s proficiency.
- Offspring from husbandry won’t scale attributes as high. Instead, they inherit the ratio of attributes from their parents and have total levels between the parents and current grant level rats.
- Chemistry set is now an L shape lab tool
- Spin top reworked
- Ram marks dead ends as if broken walls were still present
- Shorter cooldown on ex grants
- Reduced husbandry timer
- Various small tweaks
Upcoming Features - New Lab - I was hoping to include it in this release, but it wouldn’t make sense without the upcoming features.
- Lab Tool Upgrades - All lab tools will have choices on how to upgrade them. Instantaneous husbandry, maze automation, offline training tool progress, and more.
- Rat Ability Upgrades - Submitting rats with certain abilities will reward experience towards upgrading that ability for all rats
newest comments
Is it normal that my offspring have just a max stat of 1?
i may have found a bug. if you hover over one of the abilities like blink or ram, and then you hit a number on the keyboard to change mazes with the text about the ability still open, it will leave that gray box sitting there.
ngl i dont get how the genetic traits work. I see that it's slowly increasing but idk why or how? anyway great game and the update was pretty good (husbandry nerfs were a bit sad but needed, i also got a naninf rat on another save cause of it pre-nerf.)
maybe my luck just sucks or these exhibition grants are just REALLY damn hard, because I'm somehow at grant level 5 and the only things I've unlocked from exhibition grants are the carpenter bench, chemistry, and tracker, and none of those feel like they're doing anything for me. I've only gotten enough spare research for a single boost to all in chemistry, carpentry feels kinda weak but eh, free upgrades to mazes from the get go is nice I suppose, but the tracker says it boosts research on completion but I can't really tell, so honestly it feels like a cosmetic upgrade at best.
I know there's supposed to be more systems in play like the husbandry system, but it feels like I'm never going to see progress because even rats with like 15 in everything get crushed in exhibition mazes. it wouldn't be so bad if I got my rat back, just "oh dang that's hard, guess I gotta train my little guy even harder for the rematch" but that's impossible because even failing an exhibition means I lose the rat I've had training in mazes for the last hour? please for the love of mice, if nothing else make failed exhibition grants give you the rat back so you can try again, or at least sell them to get money for better resources on the next rat
developer response: Failing an exhibition grant should not lose the rat, so that might be a bug Rats gain grant charges while completing mazes and each exgrant attempt should only cost a charge. Completing the exgrant removes the rat. Carpentry is weak, but tracker should be noticable (between 20% - 50% more research). I'll check on this as well
Are we supposed to be able to upgrade something in chemistry? I can't tell if it's bugged or if I'm just stupid:"D
top comments
Finally figured it out. The carpenter bench in the lab needs to be adjacent to the maze(s) in question for you to be able to switch to different maze styles. My bench is now adjacent to 2 of my 3 mazes, and I can finally switch to other maze types for those two.
This... should probably be made clearer or the adjacency requirement should be removed entirely.
Hi all,
Thank you to everyone for giving this game a try. There’s definitely more work to be done, including bugged abilities, UI/UX, better descriptions and some balancing. I’m hoping to have the next release done in a few months with a good amount of new features. I was originally planning on wiping progress with the next release, but after seeing the enthusiasm players have shown, I’ll probably have to reconsider this.
Thanks again for the feedback,
-Alex
I feel like the scry ball ability might not work as intended? I've repeatedly had a rat go down dead-end paths that were scouted by the scry ball, or completely ignore the arrows pointing towards the cheese when the scry ball found it. Right now I'm rating it at the bottom of all abilities I've encountered.
The chemistry upgrades get prohibitively expensive quite quickly, meanwhile there's no major rise in research gain so it just comes down to throwing time and rats at the cost.
Training equipment seems of very limited use right now, especially seeing as the rats' proficiency does not factor into it at all so higher levels are impossible to gain with training equipment. It gives some easy early levels, but that's about it. If you sell the training equipment you can have a 4th rat instead.
Can't read any of the buttons at the top, they're cut off.
This game has tons of potential. It's already fun in its current state, but has a lot of places it could (should) grow in. In its current state, not only do I not see much reason to purchase more than one of each rat training facility, but you just don't have the space in your garage to do so. A good alternative maybe would be to allow us to upgrade those things so they level up a rats stats faster. Another good example of this is the chemistry set or the carpenter bench. Why would you ever want two chemistry sets when all it does is unlock research and takes up 4 squares of space?
Secondly, some of the level-up perks your later rats can unlock are just super useless at best, and detrimental at worst. For instance - spin top is basically completely useless. It doesn't appear to make your rat go much faster and just seems to be goofy, but it doesn't really appear to make them any slower either. In stark juxtaposition, drift king is extremely useful. Scrying orb is VERY detrimental in its current state. Maybe it's bugged? It seems like when it reveals a bad path that dead-ends, my rat will follow it anyway, and even when it scries the correct path to the cheese, my rat will also completely ignore that and wander around as usual. The worst part about it though is a combination of 2 things - firstly, it pauses your rat every time it scries, which slows things down quite a bit, and as Trondor mentioned in another comment, if you have a rat with 2 INT perks and they are scrying orb/blink, your rat will just freeze when it blinks and scries simultaneously. Other perks in the game all seem to be in a good state, even though some are definitely stronger than others.
This is definitely a fun experience right now though, so don't give up on the project. I could very much see this being a game that ends up being an indie release on steam or something with some more depth and love given to it.