Stardew Valley - Slimes

Slimes come in colours by depth and behave alike, hopping at the farmer. A slime hutch on the farm breeds them for slime and eggs.

Overview

Slimes are one creature wearing many coats. The game draws a single grey blob and tints it, so every slime in the valley shares the same body, the same hop and the same two attacks, and only the colour and the numbers change. The green one in the first corridor and the purple one in the desert cavern behave identically while hitting for wildly different amounts.

They are also the only monster family a farm can keep. A hutch built behind the farmhouse turns a pest into livestock, and the slimes bred there produce the material that half the crafting menu wants.

Their colour is not decoration either. A slime's tint is rolled when it spawns, and the game checks that tint against a list of colour ranges to decide what the corpse drops, so a farmer reading the colours is reading a loot table rather than a palette.

Groups

The main line runs by depth. Green slimes hold the upper floors of the mine and the Secret Woods and are the softest thing in the game. Blue slimes take over around the fortieth floor and have a nasty habit of glowing and speeding up each time they are struck. Red slimes hold the floors below the eighties and hit hard enough to matter. Purple slimes belong to the desert cavern with roughly double the health of the red ones. Two metal variants live in the Quarry Mine and on the random dungeon floors, one dropping copper and one iron in a repeating roll, and the island has the striped tiger slime in its grove and in the volcano.

Every slime has a sex, and a male one wears a small antenna, carries a quarter more health and hits a point harder. Rarer still are the special slimes, marked by a yellow star, with triple health, double damage and a chance at the valley's special items.

Then come the size and state variants. A big slime is a single large blob that bursts on death into several small ones, and it is the normal form in the desert cavern. A dangerous slime wears sunglasses and appears once the shrine at the bottom of the mine has been switched on, with twice the health and twice the bite, and those sometimes stand stacked, with a strike flinging the top one across the room as a projectile. A gold slime is the lottery ticket of the family, turning up about once in a thousand and dropping a gold coin worth a serious sum. The prismatic slime is the last, shifting colour as it moves while the wizard's jelly request is open and carrying a thousand health.

Order

A farm meets green slimes on its first trip down and spends the first twenty floors learning the charge. Those floors are also where the two small accessory rings fall out of them.

Blue slimes arrive with the lift at the fortieth floor, and they are the point at which a farmer needs a real weapon rather than the starting sword. Red slimes in the eighties are where defence starts mattering more than damage.

The hutch is a mid-game project, because its bill asks for a stack of stone, Refined Quartz and an Iridium Bar on top of a five-figure sum of gold. Once it stands, Marlon posts a starter egg, and from there the building runs itself on water. The island slimes are the last of them, waiting in the grove and the volcano.

Best

Ranked by what they are worth killing, the purple slimes of the desert cavern win. Their iridium drop rolls repeatedly until it fails, so a floor of them can hand over more iridium than a morning of mining nodes.

The metal pair in the Quarry Mine come second for the same reason, since their ore rolls repeat and the Quarry Mine is a quiet place to work.

Green slimes are the best of them for one narrow job. The thousand kills on the guild's eradication list accept any colour, and the upper floors spawn them in crowds, so an afternoon sweeping the first twenty floors is the cheapest progress towards the ring that makes the whole family harmless. The ones in the Secret Woods are better still, because they drop mahogany seeds a tenth of the time.

Among the colour rolls, the white slimes are the prize. A fully pale one can hand over Refined Quartz, Iron Ore or a diamond outright when its colour values line up, which is the rarest drop condition in the family. Brown slimes pay in hardwood, and the striped island slime carries ginger, taro, Pineapple Seeds and occasionally a Mango Sapling.

Locations

The mine is the obvious home and runs the whole colour sequence down its length. Slime-infested floors appear at intervals and fill with them, and those are the floors to linger on when the eradication count is the point of the trip. The Quarry Mine holds the metal pair, and the desert cavern holds purple slimes and big purple sludges on any floor.

The Secret Woods in Cindersap Forest holds green slimes permanently, in the open, with no floors to descend, which makes it the best place to meet slimes without committing to a mine run.

The farm is the last location and it is optional. The wilderness layout spawns them at night once combat skill is high enough, and any farm can be opened to them by lighting the dark shrine in the witch's hut. Slimes killed there hand over a third of their usual experience, which makes it a decision about materials rather than about levels.

Uses

The slime they drop is a crafting staple. An Oil Maker takes fifty, the first combat ring takes a smaller pile with Bug Meat, and the Cork Bobber takes a handful with hardwood, so a farm that never fights still needs a supply. A hundred of it pressed in the egg machine becomes an egg, which is the only way to choose a colour deliberately.

The hutch turns all of that into a routine. Twenty residents, with every trough filled, leave up to four slime balls on the floor each morning, and the balls break open without any fighting at all. Handling the slimes occasionally produces Petrified Slime, which sells for a fair sum.

The eradication reward is the other payoff, and it changes how the mines feel. A thousand kills earns the ring that stops slimes damaging the farmer and stops the sticky debuff, which removes the most common monster in the game from the rest of the run.

Strategy

Corner them rather than chase them. A struck slime is knocked backwards out of sword reach, so the efficient approach is to close fast and pin the blob into an angle where the knockback has nowhere to send it.

Block the charge when there is one to block. A sword's defensive stance stops both the hop and the leap, and a well-timed block buys time for a full swing in return. Against the stacked variety that matters more, because the flung top slime is a projectile the charmer ring does not stop.

Fill the hutch's troughs with a sprinkler rather than a watering can, since one sprinkler inside removes the only daily chore the place has. Keep a Wicked Statue standing in there as well, because a witch flies over on a random night and turns every slime inside black, and the statue, built from a recipe Krobus sells, is what turns her away.

Bring the loot rings on a slime trip. Rolling the drop table twice applies to every colour in the family.

Notes

Slimes breed. A male and a female in the same hutch, and occasionally in the mines or the woods, produce a small slime that grows into an adult, and the game works out the child's colour from the parents one channel at a time, usually taking the higher or the average. A patient farm can steer a hutch towards a colour that way, and the purple end of the spectrum is the profitable one.

The eradication counter takes the small slimes that burst out of a dead big one, so a farm chasing the thousand should pop the big ones and then clear the fragments.

Big slimes sometimes look half-empty, and that is a signal rather than a graphical oddity. While one of Mr. Qi's harder commissions is running, a big purple sludge carrying a special drop turns semi-transparent so the contents show through.

All Slimes

Every entry in this group, with its key details.

Name	Image	Location	HP	Damage
Slimes		The Mines, Skull Cavern, Quarry Mine, Secret Woods, Tiger Slime Grove, and Volcano Dungeon	Varies	Varies