Idle Lab Rats
favorites
completed
100 ratings
Posted June 16, 2024. Updated April 24, 2025. Played 6527 times for a total of 7646 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
hey! wanted to join, but the discord link in your description is invalid!
developer response: Sorry about that. I guess Discord links default to expiring in 7 days. I've updated the link (hopefully with a permanent one).
made some god rats (max gene traits, 110+ for each attribute, and have my personal favorite abilities) and now im just waiting for update. Cant wait!
Drift King + All Out is an amazing combo. this is insane especially if you can get them to have good intelligence.
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.
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.