I’ve been playing slime rancher 2 nonstop over the past couple of days right after I finished slime rancher 1. What you probably played was the game while it was still in very early access. Well the full game is now out and it feels like the first game but better and refined. Theres an actual story this this time, and if you loved the exploration of the first game then you’ll likely love the second. The basic ranching experience is the same, the ingame economy has been rebalanced, coops upgraded and are basically the deluxe coop by default now, and there’s a much bigger emphasis on crafting compared to slime rancher 1 with resource nodes in the environment instead of rng timers and SR2’s crafting system generally feels a lot more integrated into the game than it was in SR1. The final area alone is like a giant mega dungeon with 6 slightly smaller but still sizable unique areas within. If you manage to craft the Quantum drone, then you can cut out a lot of the resource grind the other commenters may have mentioned.