https://store.steampowered.com/app/676510/Industrial_Petting/
An interesting early access game where you farm slimes and other "pets" but with a more industrial automated direction akin a light weight factorio/satisfactory sort of deal.
Colourful graphics with a very cartoon esthetic the usual sort of things like different pets in different biomes.
The main gameplay loop is similar to a lot of these sorts of games you collect up resources and build basic stuff and then you have to go out and find the various "pets" they each have different criteria for collection. With the basic slimes it's just pet them and then they will follow you to the collection things. Some of the more advanced ones have more elaborate criteria (the garderner pet needs to water 5 plants the nibbler has to eat something and so on)
Once you've collected one of the pets types you can then make it in a pet factory some pets are made with other pets. You can then start to automate pet construction harvesting resources to make the pets then providing (first manually then later through automated means) their needs to get them happy so they will be sucked up by the pet vacuum's boxed up and sold off and or ground up to make other pets (I assume they are ground up :D)
It's a fairly chill sort of game with a fairly extensive tech tree you can unlock getting to the point where you can plant food automatically for the pets or produce more advanced foods or goods with factories.
And like any good indie game worth playing it features hats. Ones you can wear yourself or put on the little slime pet's.
It's early access and I had a few issues with it. Some of the more advanced pet types just wouldn't let me pet them to set their happy state so they could be harvested and these were the pets required to unlock the automated petting machine so I was stuck in a bit of a loop.
Sometimes the ai on the pets is a little wonky they can get stuck or target things they can't get to food or harvesters or what have you. You can use fences and various tools like scarecrows to get the pets where you want them but sometimes the results are unpredictable.
Anyway it's single player but has online coop pretty fun game if you like the factory builder sort of game type with some rough edges that hopefully they will smooth out
Comments
I watched a video through and it does look like fun - it's the sort of chill game that I could really spend time in. Satisfactory has become so large that I feel kind of overwhelmed by my factories.