Sparky's Slime Handbook Part 8: A true beginners guide

Sometimes on the discord I just ctrl-f Sparky for fun, and when doing this recently came across someone saying part 4 was confusing. So i’ll redo it for the modern era. Or well, part of it, with an actual guide for someone who has never once played xenobiology before. What a slime is, how it works. ETC ETC. So, now I present:

The Beginners Guide (Not the game)

So, you walk into the xenobiology lab, and you should see three or four things that you may not recognize, and a couple things this guide assumes you will. Below are highlighted some of the more exotic things you will utilize in your xenobiological exploits.
The first thing is the computer looking thing, this is the xenobiology console.
The second thing is a smartfridge, which you’ve probably seen on other parts of the station.
The third is the slime processor, which looks like a food processor.
The fourth is the monkey recycler, which looks like nothing else.
This is a picture of a lab “in media res”, but nothing important has been moved

Each of these objects is important for its own reasons, but for now you’ll want to proceed to a biological locker (they’re orange, have a biohazard symbol on them, and should be in the lab or a nearby airlock) and collect a bio bag.
image get!
The bio bag is your single most useful tool, and should be kept in a pocket for ease of use. It can also fit on the belt, but this is not recommended, as it requires you to click and drag to get it into your hand. (That might just be personal since my mouse is shit and can’t clickdrag to save my life. If yours is more consistent, belt is a fine slot)

Once you have your bio bag, you’ll want to gather the rest of your lab equipment. You’ll want a dropper, a large beaker filled with plasma, an empty small beaker, and a syringe. Each of these can and should be placed into your bio bag image for easy access to trigger slime extracts, and can be found on tables scattered around the lab. Syringes and small beakers will be in labelled boxes, and shouldn’t be too hard to find, and plasma can be ground in the all-in-one grinder, which comes preloaded with a large beaker.


You’ll also need some monkey cubes image. These are compressed monkeys that activate when exposed to water, or that can be placed into a xenobiology console to place them down from a distance. We’re mostly going to be doing the latter, but be warned against spraying off fire extinguishers willy-nilly unless you want xenobiology to be converted into a more dense ape sanctuary than the bar. These start in red boxes marked M image and come in packs of five. You’ll want to put all ten in your bio bag image.

Next, move up to the xenobiology console and click on it with your bio bag image. This will dump all cubes inside the bio bag into the console. Then, click on the console with an empty hand. You will lose control of your spaceman, and be able to move an “AI Eye” (a blue rectangle) with the movement controls instead. You should also notice a much greater number of buttons in the top left of your screen. All of them are hotkeyed, except for the exit camera button, which looks like a crossed out camera. If you ever need to leave the console, click that button.

Taking a look around the lab and not using any other controls, you should see your first slime:
image
quickly followed by two or three more.
This little bugger is your entire job. You need to know how to grow them, care for them, and slaughter them like cattle when the time comes. Fortunately, doing this is made far easier with the console. Exploring more, you should notice six small cells, a larger seventh cell, and a blue floored eighth cell. This eighth cell is the cold room, more on that later.


Manipulating the xenobiology console has functionally two buttons and three states. Shift-clicking and control-clicking are the only two controls, and the three states are clicking on an empty tile, a slime, or a monkey.

Shift clicking on…
Nothing: Deposits any slimes in storage onto that tile
A slime (living or dead): Picks it up, and puts it in storage. Mostly used for moving things from pen to coldroom to grinder.
A monkey: Does nothing

Control clicking on…
Nothing: Places a monkey cube from storage onto the tile. You’ll be doing a lot of this
A slime: Scans them, printing a bunch of stats to chat that i’ll talk about later.
A monkey (dead): Recycles them, adding a variable (but <1) amount of monkeys back to storage.

So, control click on the empty tiles in the three cells with slimes in them, and feed each cell two monkies. This is because of how slimes work, which I’ll go over next.


So slimes have a simple life cycle and a bunch of stats, of which I will highlight the important ones.
Slime Color: Pretty simple, what flavor it is. Blueberry, Raspberry, Soul.

Nutrition: A number out of 1200, that determines how fed the slime is. Decreases over time, but not fast enough to really matter. One monkey provides enough nutrition to get this number from 600 (the starting point) to adult, which is more complex than just getting it to 1200 nutrition, because of…

Growth Stages: A number from 0 to 10, which determines how grown the slime is. When a slime is over 1000 nutrition, nutrition will be consumed until below 1000 to increment this number. When this number is at 10 and the slime is a baby, it will attempt to grow. If the slime is an adult,it will attempt to split unless prevented by the slime cap. What’s the slime cap? I’ll get there.

Mutation chance: A percentage chance of any given slime being mutant. Varies by ±5% per offspring. Generally you want to select for this when breeding, although there are times you’d rather keep a lineage of one slime.


When slimes split they do so into four babies, each of which rolls against the mother’s mutation chance, and if it succeeds randomly selects a possible mutation to become, as dictated by this here chart. (Don’t worry if you don’t recognize all of them right away, sometimes I still get gold and pyrite mixed up.)
image
Since you begin with greys only, possible mutants are orange, metal, purple, and blue. Each of these are useful in their own ways, but you’ll want to turn your eye to any non mutant greys.

Control click them and pick out the ones with the lowest mutation chance (generally <30%). Pick those ones up with shift click, and place them down into the cold room. They should eventually stop their idle animations. Then move them next to the slime grinder, exit out of the camera view, move over to the grinder, and click on it. It should begin to buzz, and when done should spit out a number of grey slime extracts.


Slime extracts are frustratingly verbose to explain, but to put it simply, injecting (or droppering in) a slime extract with a reagent consumes the extract and makes it do a thing. The one we care about is that injecting a grey extract with blood creates three monkey cubes, being a long and frustrating way of violating thermodynamics and getting out more monkey than we put in.

This is good if you like continuing with your job.

At this point, you’ve made and killed your first slimes, and activated your first reagent. The only thing left is teaching you to crossbreed, and a next steps section


Crossbreeding isn’t terribly hard. Each crossbreed name is made up of of a verb ending in -ing, and a color, and are created by feeding ten of the corresponding slime extract for a verb into the color you want.

If I, for instance, wanted a warping grey, I would look it up on the wiki and see that warping corresponds to bluespace, and feed ten bluespace extracts to a grey slime. If I wanted a warping sepia, I would feed ten bluespace extracts to a sepia slime. Crossbreeds with the same verb tend to share a mode of action, while crossbreeds of the same color share a theme.

An important note is that you can only crossbreed an adult slime. Attempting to feed a slime extract to a baby slime will not let you.


For further development, see my other guides.
That’s a joke, but seriously. Upgrading both your slime processor and monkey recycler will increase the yield of both. Crossbreeds can massively increase your efficiency too, so look into employing them at every turn.

And remember, the wiki is always your best friend.
https://wiki.beestation13.com/view/Guide_to_xenobiology
Happy hunting.