Gearhart

I was in the area north of the tropica punch where the ants, ladybug, and occasional weevil roam, and noticed bugs were getting stuck a lot. There was and ant stranded on the rock by the twig; an ant on a blade of grass, an ant on a blade of dry grass. I tried cutting the dried grass, but the ant remained suspended mid-air. I also found a ladybug stuck on top of the ice cap mint container. Basically arthropods keep spawning in locations with little space to move and no way down. On a more positive note, I noticed that the ant legs use animation sliders to adjust to uneven terrain, so all that's missing for arthropod climbing is the navigation AI.

I played yesterday, and one of the items that was an audio log (in the hedge field station) is now an invalid item. Also, the soda can in the hedge shows up as an "invalid landmark."

Assuming that the devs decide to code "packed" stems to physically interact with the world in the first place.

They'd be sideways going across (left to right). You may only be able to go through doors sideways, but it shouldn't put any strain on you, seeing as you can carry them in just one arm.

That's why I proposed the idea of pre-built, rolled up rope ladders (presumably made by the same people who made the labs) that you let down by interacting with them. That would essentially be a "checkpoint," much like the building ladder suggestion you proposed. Hauling building materials into the hedge is not only tedious, but also risky, due to the spiders, not to mention the number of areas you can't bring them to now because there's now way of walking there. This gave me an idea for a special device or BURGL upgrade that would basically add straps to your backpack that you can transfer hauled items to, so that you can swim, glide, and climb without dropping them.

A flaming arrow will be a very useful weapon in the new hedge zone: not for damaging enemies, per say, but for getting rid of spider webs. This would be particularly useful for that one web in the middle of the fist hedge zipline, as currently if it snags you you have to not only free yourself, but also float down with a dandelion and then climb your way back up to the line.

Currently it seems that the next update will feature an expansion to the hedge zone. While I am excited by what I've seen so far, there are a few issues I see with the hedge zone 1; lack of resources. Aside from spiderwebs, there aren't any crafting resources to be found on the hedge Zone's branches. This makes base building particularly challenging, as not only do your resources need to be imported, but you also have to do a lot of climbing while hauling, which is a real hassle. There should be local resources you can harvest as crafting material. For instance, that moss looks like a good way to get plant fiber. Those leaves would make a great substitute for grass. Maybe add small branches that can be chopped up to make logs. For crafting, perhaps an alternative recipe for bandages that uses berry juice. 2. Climbing (and falling) Currently, there are only a few ways to get up to the branches from the ground. This means slipping and falling will take a lot of legwork to recover from. Others have suggested rope ladders, which I agree would be an excellent solution for the problem. Perhaps there can even be pre-built rope ladders you can find and lower as you go along.

Sure, but you could build a really high base on, say, one of the shrink machines (I recommend the one the crow lands on, as there's a SCAB to be found up there), using bounce webs to speed up the transportation of material. Then you can build a zipline on there that connects to key locations throughout the map. The zipline works best when you have multiple outposts. I'm just disappointed that the zipline's construction requires weed stems, which throws building them inside the newly expanded hedge zone out the window. I really hope that they will also add weed stem substitutes that can be found on branches, as ziplines would be incredibly useful inside the hedge zone due to all the vertical terrain and spiders (which can warrant a quick retreat if you become overwhelmed.)

You can also try to build ziplines on already high structures; the trick is getting the weedstems up there in the first place.

I was able to unstick the door with a bomb.

The difference here is that the impossible (at least by our current understanding of physics) act of shrinking things is necessary for the plot of the game. Being able to tame insects, on the other hand, is not necessary for the game's premise to exist, so there's no reason to implement it. Manipulating insects, on the other hand, is very doable. You can manipulate an ant to follow you around and help you in combat by wearing ant armor and dropping a pheromone breadcrumbs to lead them to where you want to go. This would actually be more effective than taming individual ants, as pheromone trails can be followed by the entire colony, basically letting you command an army. A ladybug might be manipulated into carrying you around by waving an aphid on a stick in front of it, but ladybugs don't have that large of an appetite, so this wouldn't always work. If orb weavers were updated to behave like their real world counterparts, we could use lure arrows to lead them away from their webs and snatch all the food they've collected. Wolf spiders have sensitive eyes, so we might be able to use light sources like torches to manipulate them into certain behaviors. At least once their AI is updated to actually respond to the presence of light. But it would probably be wiser to just kill them, as they are currently the apex predators of the game, and you do not want the most dangerous creature in the game to grow in population; that would just mean more danger and less food. I personally don't want taming to be added because this game currently has potential to be educational as well as entertaining; teaching us all about various arthropods but letting us observe them up close.

Sticky traps will be essential for taking a mantid down.

Forget insects; mantids have been shown to kill and devour small birds, fish, and even frogs.

Mantises are huge, at least 5 times longer than a ladybug. We could make a two handed thrusting spear out of a foreleg alone. However, it would be incredibly difficult to kill. The good news is that due to it's size and appetite, it would seek out larger prey than us, like spiders. Also, their eyes detect motion rather than shape and color, so we should be able to hide from it by moving slowly. The best part is; they're messy eaters, so we should be able to lure tough enemies to it and loot their corpses afterward. We wouldn't get quite as much loot from it as we would if we had killed the enemy ourselves. Personally, I think with adding new creatures, they should start with smaller ones and work their way up in size, simply because larger creatures don't eat everything smaller than them.

Wait, I thought they patched it so that removing the stump no longer prevents them from respawning?

maybe smaller items, like easter eggs and halloween candy, could land on top of built structures rather than falling through them. This could damage structures, but would still be better than outright destroying them.

exactly. I've never played Ark; but I have played 7days to die, and that game had a tool you could use to upgrade buildings, provided you had the proper materials. Now, given that many buildings in Grounded use materials that are hauled; a tool wouldn't really work here, but perhaps we could add something that allows players to opt to "upgrade" an existing wall when they are carrying the necessary materials; being able to upgrade grass walls to sturdy walls when you're carrying weed stems and woven plant fiber for example.

The only issue with seasonal changes is that the new decorations could destroy built structures. And if you happened to have your spawn point set to a lean-to that some giant placed a pumpkin on, well... Basically, due to the scale of the game, the appearance of decorative items could have a big impact on gameplay. Of course, since this game takes place in the backyard, rather than the front yard, we don't need to worry as much about having structures destroyed by lawn decorations.

I think the current pallet limits are fine for early game. That said, it would be great if you were able to upgrade buildings later on, adding more materials to expand them. I'd imagine as the game is further developed and we can progress further into the late game, more effective versions of existing buildings would become available; like how acorn chests are an upgrade to storage baskets.

The devolopment team director himself stated that he'd love to add world changing events to the game; going from his prior experience with MMORPGs, drastic world changing events are highly desirable for sources of conflict, but you can't make very many of them due to having to come up with an explanation for how this single event can have such a big impact. But here, the world can be drastically changed by the simplest of things. Just look at those bootprints going through the yard. All it took was a person walking to create massive craters. And one of the potential world-changing events the director mentioned was rain (as well as the sprinkler by the bird bath turning on).

The last sentence of my quote literally explains the difference between how something works in real life and how it works in a videogame. Also, this game is NOT fantasy based; it's science fiction based. It isn't set in Middle Earth or Wonderland or a galaxy far far away, it takes place in a suburban backyard. A setting, mind you, that anyone living in a suburban home in a temperate region and didn't spend the majority of their childhood indoors would be familiar with. Making up whatever BS you want isn't going to fly here because it's already established to take place in a world vastly similar to our own. As for the thing you quoted saying it sums thing up best, that has absolutely no bearing on my argument for proposed combat changes, as an American teen is less likely to be familiar with the concept of a well timed block (which doesn't even make sense when you're trying to use it against something several times your size), and more likely to be familiar with the concept of swinging a stick to hit something coming at them. This is because of a certain American sport commonly practiced by youth called "Baseball;" I'm sure you've heard of it, seeing as one of the first things you see in the game is a baseball. Anyways, in case you are unfamiliar with the sport, Baseball revolves under the principle of hitting an incoming projectile with a stick in order to knock it away from you. Effective swing techniques in baseball is swinging in a sweeping arc in order maximize the surface area of the swing and get an angle that deflects the projectile a significant difference. This exact technique translates really well into knocking the head of a soldier ant out of the way as it lunges at you. No martial arts training required, just a fight or flight instinct set to "fight."

I think rain would have a much bigger impact than merely having to dodge raindrops. You'd have to worry about running groundwater sweeping away loose objects, uprooting sprigs, and damaging structures. Some structures, like foundations, would be resistant to damage. Would make building on high ground a smart strategy even after the devs figure out how to have arthropods climb up walls and other vertical surfaces.

I decided to search the internet to see if anyone else had attempted to code arthropods that climbed on walls in UE4 before. There's a forum about climbing ants where someone made the following suggestion: Then there's this guy working on making a spider AI that can climb walls and ceilings. here's another guy trying to do the same thing here's a step by step tutorial Or, you can simply use this free plugin to do it. It's a bit outdated with the latest edition of UE4, so it will likely require some tweaking, but it would still be very useful as a reference.

I believe ladybugs would also be weak in their bellies and would hover. Of course, IRL ladybugs also emit a foul odor as a defense mechanism (though this is squirted out in liquid form rather than gas), and their bright red wings warn vision-based predators that they aren't a good meal, which should carry over to ladybug armor. Another combat strategy that would be particularly useful against beetle types would be flipping them onto their backs, immobilizing them and exposing their weaker underbellies. I'm not sure how this would work in-game; maybe if they rear up to do a stomp attack you could hit them with a spear or rock to knock them back.

honestly, having wolf spiders be active around the oak tree during the day makes little sense due to them being nocturnal hunters. Even ignoring the fact that they'll most likely be sleeping during the day, their sensitive eyes and lack of eyelids would cause them to be overwhelmed by the brightness of sunlight. Although, I wonder... Maybe the wolf spider was asleep, but was woken up by the explosion. If that was the case, perhaps the strategy here is to block up the oak tree before activating the mysterious device.