Why Are My Plorts Disappearing in Slime Rancher?

My wake up call for Slime Rancher was nothing short of absolutely devastating. Since all the marketplace prices were down, and my vacuum capsules were maxed out for the corrals, why not just stack them up by the marketplace and wait for prices to go up? Great idea, right? Slime Rancher strategy 101, right?

Would’ve been great…if my plorts in Slime Rancher didn’t disappear.

Those of you who have played the game for a while are now laughing your butts off. And in retrospect, I can laugh about it, too, but man did this learning lesson suck for me as a relatively new Slime Rancher player.

Here is a re-enacted screenshot of my “brilliant” early strategy.

plort horde slime rancher
My original Slime Rancher strategy: Future riches as soon as the plort market prices go up…so I thought.

And then around 27 in-game hours later the next day, this happened:

plort poor slime rancher screenshot
Wait…didn’t my pile of Slime Rancher plorts used to be, um, way bigger?

Needless to say, that big cash infusion I was expecting to upgrade my vacuum pack and expand the ranch didn’t materialize. After taking a few minutes to sob in the corner I actually bothered to read the in-game Slimepedia and also did some research on the game itself to figure out what my issue was. Turns out it’s clearly stated.

Your plorts in slime rancher are disappearing because of improper storage. All plorts disappear 24 in-game hours or less unless in a silo, pack, or plort collector. Special plorts like puddle plorts, fire plorts, or phosphor plorts have additional requirements to avoid disappearing even sooner.

Always consider 24 in-game hours the maximum amount of time you have, but in addition to that there are some special considerations you definitely need to take into account if you don’t want to lose all your plorts.

All Plorts Disappear in (Relatively Short) Time

Apparently the game developers were well aware of how all of us players were going to try and game the system. All plorts have a very limited life span of 24 hours outside of proper storage, with many being much shorter than that without special circumstances.

You only have three options to “store” plorts longer than 24 in-game hours:

  • Keep them in your vacuum pack
  • Keep them in a plort collector for your pen
  • Build a silo (by far and away the smartest choice)

Keep plorts in your vacuum pack

Simple enough with a very obvious problem: you need those spaces. You always need more spaces. You could have a pack with 10 slots and I could still fill them all up. So this is a very, VERY short term solution at best.

But it is one way to prevent plorts in Slime Rancher from disappearing.

Keep plorts in the auto port collector for your slime pen

A solid option and one that works very well, especially if you are at a point in game where you can keep a relatively small number of larger slimes there that produce all the plorts you need. If you need less plorts, you need less food and it takes longer for the auto collectors to fill up. But once they do, you need to trade some in.

Plorts on the ground in your pens go by the same rules as those outside of them. If the auto collectors are full and can’t vacuum up and store any more plorts then those on the ground will vanish after 24 in-game hours.

Build a silo

So…I’m an idiot. This screenshot is the first Slime Rancher plort silo I built. On Day 46. And you can expand it so each side has additional storage sections for plorts so you can store up to 12 items with 3600 total units. This can be all plorts or can include storing fruits and veggies in case you want to stock up before destroying a farm to create something else.

Build a silo. Upgrade completely. Then you can really take advantage of the market when it’s giving you the best prices because you can store hundreds of plorts of different styles.

plort silo slime rancher
Yup – I waited WAY too long to get one of these installed.

Phosphor Plorts Disappear When Sunlight Hits

There’s a reason the delightful glowing phosphor slimes only show up late at night. Like they’re very firefly-like slimes, the phosphor plorts can only exist in darkness. Once daylight comes, they only have 30 minutes in game before vanishing.

So make sure those phosphor plorts are out of the sun. This is a big reason why it’s a great idea to put these plorts in the caves, or you can create a slime pen that has shade, or in the cave on your ranch, phosphor plorts will last 24 hours like the other common options because they are out of any direct light.

Puddle Plorts Die on Land

Puddle plorts need water to survive, just like the slimes that make them. These plorts only live for 30 minutes outside of water. If you find them in a lake or pond, then they can last 24 hours in-game from when they were made.

Why Did My Puddle Slimes Stop Producing Plorts?

A clue is in the game. If you see the puddle slimes blushing, it’s because they’re shy and there are too many other slimes around. Four is the maximum number of puddle slimes you can have per farm pond.

Any more than that (or if another slime jumps in the water and gets stuck) then you will notice the puddle slimes blush, indicating they are too embarrassed to produce puddle plorts. You need to thin out the overcrowding to get them back to their regular plort-producing selves once again!

Fire Plorts Need an Incinerator

This is simple enough. Fire plorts that are not properly stored only have 30 minutes before they disappear. An incinerator allows them the full 24 hour life span that other more common plorts enjoy.

Having an incinerator on the farm is crucial in order to be able to produce these consistently or store them outside of a silo. Otherwise it’s best to sell them immediately to avoid losing them.

Protect Those Plorts! (Conclusion)

You can’t just stack up those plorts and wait for the market to change. You need to have storage options in place, or just take the downtrend prices. But with the construction of auto plort collectors in your slime pens, building and fully upgrading a silo, you will have the ability to save all your plorts until they are paying the highest.

The points covered in this article are all the reasons that plorts might be vanishing in Slime Rnacher. Solve these problems and you will be good to go.

Making your upgrading into the awesome slime ranch of your dreams just a few good market days away!

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