Difficulties

When a player starts their game, they have the option of playing as three different slugcats. Although the different slugcats have many different features, the vastly different skill and dedication levels required to play each slugcat mean that they are frequently referred to simply by their difficulty level. Yellow, White, and Pink (or red) slugcat correspond to easy, default, and hard difficulties for the game respectively.

Yellow Slugcat: The Monk (Easy Difficulty)
The monk is more in-tune with nature than your average slugcat. Predators are less common and slightly less aggressive, and less food is required for the player to hibernate. Karma gates will also remove their requirements after their first use, meaning the player cannot get trapped and can easily backtrack after progressing. Creatures are also much more quick to befriend or forgive yellow slugcats. The only significant downside is the monk's reduced damage when throwing spears, making certain enemies harder to kill should the player attempt combat. The monk is designed for players seeking a more peaceful experience.

White Slugcat: The Survivor (Normal Difficulty)
The classic Rain World experience, white slugcat has standard karma gate requirements, requires 4 pips of food to hibernate, and must deal with the ever-present threat of predators.

Pink Slugcat: The Hunter (Hard Difficulty)
The Hunter is a very different experience from the other two modes, and takes considerable dedication to complete. The hunter is carnivorous slugcat, a strange creature with the odds stacked against them. The Hunter eats primarily meat, and will happily make a meal out of otherwise inedible predators such as lizards. On the other hand, common food such as Bats and Blue Fruit feed only 1/4th of a pip of hunger. Since the Hunter is pushing past their place in the food chain, they are karmically imbalanced, and karma flowers will not spawn on this difficulty. Predators will spawn in greater numbers, and some which were hidden away in only a few corners of the world are now much more ubiquitous. Although the journey will be difficult, the Hunter is adapted to it. The Hunter is faster and stronger than other slugcats, and also has the ability to carry a second spear on their back. Their heightened metabolism will require more food per cycle than other slugcats, forcing the player to battle for their survival.

The Hunter's journey is significantly different from the other two, starting in the middle of the Farm Arrays instead of Outskirts. The Hunter holds a strange green Neuron Fly and Pearl and must quickly head straight for their destination as they will cease being able to reincarnate after twenty cycles.