Say hello to my beautiful oily children. There are the brown bruiser slime twins, who dish out a solid amount of damage to my enemies at the start of each turn. They're tough lads, but to be honest I prefer my quadruplet of cultist slimes. They are purple, and they have little claw arms, and they gain two attack every turn until combat is over. Towards the bottom of the class we have acid slime, who damages and poisons people just a little bit every turn. That one is a real brat. I think I might eat him soon.

I'm playing Slay the Spire with Michael Mayhem's awesome fan-made character class, The Slimebound, which you can get on the Steam Workshop for free.  It comes with 75 cards, new events, and even adds lines of dialogue when you meet other slimes in the Spire. 

In case you're not familiar with the game, slimes are a common enemy you encounter in the first few acts. Now you can become the blob, and make tiny angry blobs in your image. The slimes kids seem to get on with each other well enough, though I have my worries about greed ooze, who I found in a puddle of shit halfway through the first act. Every time I rest at a campsite greed steals 50 gold and grows stronger, and when I consume him, he just comes right back.

Yes, sometimes, in times of need, I have to regretfully eat the kids. Sometimes it helps me to block enemy attacks. Sometimes I do it to spawn different children who might deal more damage. The Spire is a tough place, and if I don't have enough bruiser slimes to wipe out a foe, I'm going to have to sacrifice some of my wobbly babies for an advantage. 

This is a well-executed mod. The cards are nicely illustrated and have a suitably drippy effect. You start off with just a few slots you can grow slimes into, but like the Defect's orb slots, you can use cards to create more. A LOT more. Though it has a smallish health pool the Slimebound's default power regenerates health for every slime you have active at the end of combat, so you can create loads of minions, use cards to have them deal damage, and then eat them at the end of combat to get right back to full health.

I love minions, so I pressed on with the slime-generating synergy in my playthrough, and ended up reaching the heart. I was able to sacrifice multiple slimes to generate tons of energy and good card draw. In panicked moments I could generate a few slimes for extra block, but otherwise I was able to let the kids autoattack enemies each turn until the cultist slimes became massive enough to delete every enemy health bar.

It's a really fun combo to build, and I saw other potential synergies on my journey to the top. You can stack a special 'slime' status effect on enemies that you can attack to deal bonus damage and heal up. There are also cards that trigger extra damage off 'tackle' moves. You can also use classic slime moves against your foes, like 'lick' and 'SLIME CRUSH!!!', though the latter leaves you exhausted for a turn after you use it.

This is exactly the sort of update I was hoping for from Slay the Spire's Steam Workshop page. The mod fits perfectly into the game and builds on the design ideas behind the three official classes. I got lucky on my first run, so it's hard to tell if it's a little too powerful at the moment, but it looks like the creator is making balance passes and tweaking the mod over time. 

You need a few other supporting mods for The Slimebound to work, but they are linked from the Slimebound Steam Workshop page. All you have to do is click 'subscribe' on each of them and then select 'play with mods' when you launch Slay the Spire. The mod's co-creator, Michael, is a game developer who has recently released a new party game called Sumo. If you're curious you can find it on Steam Early Access.

Slay the Spire finishes its run in Early Access on January 23, but that impending deadline hasn't stopped the developers from pushing out a major new feature in the first patch of the year. Patch 54, released on Thursday, includes Steam Workshop support for modders who want to make their own cards or other changes. All you have to do to enable mod support is choose "Play with mods" from a new launcher when you start the game. Presumably this will disable Steam Achievements, but we haven't verified for ourselves yet (and achievements aren't mentioned in the patch notes).

Modders have already been tinkering with Slay the Spire for awhile, but Workshop support will naturally make mods easier to install, and should make for a more vibrant mod scene. As of this writing, there are already 41 mods in the Workshop, including an API to make modding easier, content packs that add cards and relics to the game, and several new characters. Here are some to check out if you've already shown the spire who's boss a few times.

Replay the Spire and Hubris both add a whole bunch of relics, dozens of cards, new bosses, events, and run modifiers. Replay the Spire is the bigger of the two, and also adds some elite units. But either one should give you a significantly expanded possibility pool for any given run.

The Construct: One of several new mod characters, The Construct seems especially fleshed out, with a pool of more than 100 cards and a detailed description on its mod page: "The Construct's main strength is versatility - cards with the Cycle keyword will automatically discard themselves and redraw if you can't make use of them. Combine this with Mode Shift cards that allow you to alter your Strength and Dexterity on the fly, and you can ensure you always have the right tools for the job." It even includes its own bundled "mini expansion" that adds a new risk/reward overheating mechanic.

The Disciple: A character "themed after the Time Eater" with "four central themes: Card Retention, Intent Shifting, Card Transforming, and Temporary Relic Cycling." The Disciple already has quite a bit of positive feedback.

Mimic Mod: If you thought the chests treasure rooms were too safe and rewarding, this is the mod for you. Now they might be mimics.

Colored Map: Pretty simple, but you can change the colors of icons on the progress map to make them easier to distinguish. Or just ugly, if that's your jam.

RatMod: A mod for the character The Silent, which adds more cards and new mechanics: bleeding, silvered, combo, and echo. Combo and silvered sound the most interesting: combo cards do more damage based on how many cards were played before them, and silver cards force the enemy to cleanse and deal damage based on stacked silver cards. Mostly, though, I like this mod for its picture, which I'm pretty sure is an opossum.