Stardew Valley Update Made Slime Hutch Change You May Not Have Noticed

gamerant.com:

Stardew Valley has recently made the Slime Hutch significantly smaller. While the change is already six weeks old, some Stardew Valley players have only now started noticing it.

The Slime Hutch is one of the many farm structures that can be built in Stardew Valley. Much like its name implies, it is used for raising and keeping Slimes. The facility has been part of the hit farming sim since its original 2016 release.

The Slime Hutch was treated to its first major revision more than eight years later, having been made significantly smaller by the Stardew Valley 1.6 update. The patch itself rolled out in mid-March, but some players have only now begun noticing the change. That group includes Reddit user jeeps009, whose recent post highlighting the size difference between the old and new Slime Hutch layouts recently made its way to the front page of the largest Stardew Valley subreddit, indicating that a section of the player base was oblivious to the redesign until now.

As for the extent of the change, the official patch notes attached to the game's latest major update reveal that the Slime Hutch has abandoned its 11x6 layout in favor of a 7x4 one. The surface area of the facility hence went from 66 to 28 tiles, a 57.6% decrease. While the changelog doesn't go into the reasoning behind the redesign, the new layout does have one obvious advantage in that it makes the process of setting up the Slime Hutch in Stardew Valley much easier. The old layout was fairly large for such a niche facility, so making the building smaller could incentivize more players to build it.

The fact that some fans have only started noticing this change after six weeks reinforces the notion that many have been ignoring the Slime Hutch prior to the update. Making the facility more compact without affecting its functionality may change this state of affairs, especially for people who like to use trickier farm layouts, like the Riverlands and Meadowlands Farms, which restrict the amount of real