The key you got is almost certainly a hallucinated item. Instead of asking, raise the affection level, they'll come to you and give you the 'correct' one, but I've never once coerced the real one from any NPC, they come to you when you earned it.
The context the npcs have makes them think slimes are omnipresent because it is literally in every prompt and described in such a way it makes them feel central.
Also they are frequently convinced that the item drop from slimes are in fact living hostile slimes, so be careful if you are storing slime remains on the ground.
The key for the shed is a special case, for every discussion with the tavernkeeper, the game engine prompts the llm to ask if the tavernkeep is giving the key and if the answer is yes, it adds the key to your inventory, it does not go through the usual "did the npc give an item" multi step protocol that is used in normal times to generate an item.
Querying the LLM for one item specifically every turn would be quite inefficient. What actually happens is that the game asks the LLM to check if any item has been given to the player in general, then asks for the name of the item. If there's an ad-verbatim match in the game's database of predefined items or the NPC's inventory, that item is given to the player directly, otherwise the game tries to find the closest match in the previously mentioned pool of items. If the result is a generic item, there are further steps of customization. The key items NPCs give to you at high relationship are procedurally generated, so they're not part of the item database or the NPC's inventory, and as such can't be given to you in the current version. Gareth's shed key is a predefined item, so it can be given to the player. I hope that helps.
As for the slime fixation, it's currently an issue but I'm working on it.
hallucinated items? now thats funny. Yesterday me, gareth and darian went on a hunt for doppelgangers because I mentioned to darian that gareth kept forgetting about important stuff. We eventually went to check on Roselyn when she noticed me and Hayden had glowy infections (i had slayed something called a revenant and got injured), we got quarantined and Darian sat on me to keep me still so Roselyn could "heal" me through dialogue. This is amazing xD
I think I read somewhere that this project won't be getting content updates but hopefully the devs reconsider cos this is truly special. Would love to see more NPCs, maybe even the capital that the NPCs mention frequently one day, if they're ambitious enough :D
Three Eyes is currently working on eventually getting custom NPCs implemented, and done a lot of work on the back end to support it, but I don't think we'll see any more "official" NPCs, save for maybe an example one if they don't re-use the example custom PC. I did hear that work had begun on another project, but I'm not sure what has priority now, what form that project will take, or what the timeline is on custom NPCs or any other projects.
Thanks for the info. I mean it makes sense, the description of this game mentions it is an experiment. If their next project is an evolution of Silverpine then I'm all here for it and will support them. There is some serious talent behind this and it would be awesome to see even more work done that is centered around LLMs on this scale.