all updates for Idle Lab Rats
back to gameOctober 21, 2024
Fixed an issue with serializing for languages that use a comma as a decimal point.
October 19, 2024
Release ver 0.3 - Husbandry
New Additions
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Exhibition Grants (Ex-Grants) - Instead of submitting a rat to receive grant money, test the rat's mettle against a special challenge maze. These can grant greater money rewards, Grant Level Xp, or even unlockable lab tools and abilities! These challenge mazes include some new rules for success and failure. Each attempt requires a grant charge, which builds based on research gained.
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Husbandry - Mate two of your rats to keep the abilities you like and generally improve their stats. Offspring will have a mix of the parent's stats and sometimes an improvement over their parents.
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Progression - some lab tools are now unavailable to start and require the player to complete an ex-grant to unlock them. These ex-grants become available at certain grant levels.
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New Abilities - Totem abilities unlock with ex-grants and will start to appear on rats in the market
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Tracker lab tool - increases research per completion (instead of carpenter, which now increases maze build time)
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RATScan lab tool- a late lab tool (Grant Level 7) that lets players peek at latent abilities
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Help section - It might not include everything. Please ask questions or point out anything confusing.
Bug fixes
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Scry now correctly identifies the path to the cheese
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Blink shouldn't get the rat stuck... (hopefully)
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Many others
Balancing changes
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Proficiency - Proficiency upgrade costs are now shared between attributes but the cost increases slower. This adds some build variety beyond increasing all proficiencies equally.
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Attribute XP - Attribute xp calculation was something like proficiency x Xp Events (nodes visited, dead ends, energy spent) ^ 1.2. This rewarded rats more for longer mazes and disincentivized degenerate strategies like infinite 3x3s. The side effect was rats finishing a maze quickly were less rewarded than rats who get lost.The new system has a maze mult, which increases with larger mazes and multiplies all xp events the same, regardless of how long a rat is in a maze
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Research - Research scaling was too flat.It now uses the same maze mult as an exponent to research gained. There's still a finite reach, but it's greater now
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Grant levels - grant levels require more Xp. Early levels are almost unaffected, but later levels will require much more xp. Content in this update ends at Grant Level 8.
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Grants - Grants have higher required levels to complete. There were some problems around having no completable grants and no money to buy a new rat. This is resolved by giving money on selling a rat for its attribute levels.
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Attribute effect scaling - Some effects were too linear (intuition, migration, sniff) and some had too harsh of diminishing returns (speed mainly).