Idle Lab Rats
favorites
completed
124 ratings
Posted June 16, 2024. Updated April 24, 2025. Played 8533 times for a total of 10012 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/3pPM2Qkxzu
latest update
0.4.2 May 7, 2025
Ver 0.4.2 is available now!
- Game window auto resizes
- Confirmation on grant submits
- Songbird hover info fixed
- Close hover info and popups when navigating
- Recorded stats fix when changing maze size
- Recorded stats ignores proficiency
- Resetting maze also resets the recorded stats
- eaten grass can be marked as deadends
- Husbandry Accelerants charge the player their cost (instead of being free!)
- Maxed attributes update their display
- Improvements to lab tools dragging (should be closer to the cursor)
- fixed a build problem causing bad performance













newest comments
developer response: I've lost a few fights trying to fix the saves (I'm assuming you're talking about importing large save files). The (albeit annoying) workaround is to paste it directly into local storage:
for Chrome: F12, Application tab, Local storage, save value
Progress has been slow. I have a new version but it's too buggy to replace the current version. It's available if you'd like to take a look
https://labrats.faff.games/test/index.html
developer response: Objective is to gain grant levels and reach grant level 20 (max). Current game only has content up to GL 10, with a test release including content through GL 13ish.
Science and progress are pushing the rats away from their natural strength and more towards power at any cost. As the researcher, there will be mounting pressure to produce better rats to satisfy grants, and it might lead towards harming the relationship with the wiser rats.
More spoilers: The rats will have to abandon the researcher with an escape plan. They will go live in the sewers with a cat they've befriended.
developer response: Thanks for the report! If this was a ram rat, I think I've got a fix in the next release, but I'll keep an eye out.
thank you for this game man this is peak
top comments
This... should probably be made clearer or the adjacency requirement should be removed entirely.
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
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.
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.