all updates for Idle Lab Rats
back to game0.4.2 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
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
October 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).