Alynxkia

I like the tree ant idea in large part due to the nest location being up high but also because it seems like it would fit in well gameplay wise. Introduce them early: In the beginning areas of Grounded 2, there’s not much to do above picnic table height. You can build up on top of the hotdog stand, but there’s nothing there. You can build up to the top of the trees or lamp posts, but there is nothing there. I would love to throw a couple minor tree ant nests in the beginning area so it’s not so… empty. There are several trees that could be used. I think the minor nests in the beginning areas I proposed should be hard to tackle. They’re more meant to present a future challenge, then be a current challenge for starting players; a reason to come back to the area later on. They are also completely avoidable with nothing you need in them to progress to the next area. Green tree ants don’t like the ground so they’re not going to seek interact with the player unless the player goes up into their territory. The recipes that unlock from scanning the materials you get from nests/enemies need to include items that players don’t actually obtain until later in the game as being able to skip to tier 4 weapons and gear before even going to the greenhouse area would ruin the feeling of progression. If the player doesn’t actually battle any tree ants until later in the game that still works out just fine. I do think the minor nests need to have something worthwhile in them and not simply be areas to grind for materials the player may not be able to use yet. Perhaps a unique weapon (maybe a salt weapon), or if the developers ever add armor dying then there could be blueprints to make the dye workbench. Something worthwhile if players go for the nests early on, but something not necessary so players can wait till they have better gear, smoothies, and mutations. Based off what I was reading one of the more logical places for there to be tree ants is actually the lime tree as they tend to gravitate towards citrus trees. I think a nest spawning there would have to get triggered the way that the Hornets get released in Grounded 1; it would not exist in the lime tree until you unlocked it later in the game. Part of the reason for that is the lime tree does not exist until we grow it. Having the freshly grown tree come with an ant nest seems weird. (Weird doesn’t actually mean all that much given that we have mind controlled insects, shrinking machines and candy that turns into magic staffs.) The other part is that the greenhouse roof is a frequent travel area for me and likely other players. The upper part of the trees in the beginning map areas are completely avoidable; you don’t have to take on this higher tier enemy in those trees unless you want to. Avoiding the tree ants if they had a nest on top of the greenhouse would not be as easy. They’re supposed to be highly aggressive. I just feel it may be better for a nest in the lime tree to be a late game spawn if the developers choose to put one in it. Tree ants can also infest shrubs so the hedges in the game also have some potential for nests or some stray enemies. So far the hedges are primarily spider and larva. There is no main ant species in them. The tree ant lab: The main tree ant nest/lab would need to be in one of the later parts of the map as the difficulty level and/or enemy count should match or exceed other main ant hills/labs that we’ve encountered. The next update seems focused mostly on a water area, but perhaps the next section of map after that could have at least a couple trees pretty close together so you could truly have a sprawling base. Resource use: The ant you proposed also has some unique aspects to it which could add more variety to the game. As you stated they make silk that means we have another resource for making higher tier items. It’s not the full grown ant that produces the silk, but rather their larva. Rather than collecting tree ant eggs to make bombs, we might need to use them to either go on the spinning wheel or into some sort of incubator that we can collect their silk from and the turn that silk into rope on the spinning wheel. if we could store the tree ant eggs in an incubator that fed into something that looked like a 3D printer using the larva as the print head slowly printing a silk thread blob… that would be pretty neat while also being a tad disturbing. As for the ant silk uses, I would appreciate a more efficient dew collector, a speed buff to zip lines when we use ant silk rope over spider silk rope, and bouncier bug rubber (thus bouncier bounce webs) rather than just more armor and weapons. They also have acid. While having something acid like is not unique to them in this game perhaps the tree ant acid could be used as a throwable weapon that inflicts a status effect on enemies. or if grounded ever adds solutions to coat your weapons in for a temporary effect, that has potential as well. It’s also worth noting that they can subscum to their own acid… Which does remind me of the infected weevils from grounded one. I’m just saying if they’re gonna have it since we’re an infection in this game, I think we found an upgraded self exploding bug. Apparently, some people eat tree ants and they have a citrus flavor. There’s some cooking potentials there. Behavior: The fact that tree ants apparently “farm” the creatures that can make honeydew strikes me as fortuitous as we already have honeydew producing insects in game. Depending on where the developers went with this design wise, the farm would either be one of the oddestly cute things ever… or creepiest… perhaps even surpassing the ant head totem cave. I don’t know how much of a pain it would be to code for, but these ants are known for making bridges and ladders out of themselves… if you were in multiplayer and could actually do something of that nature with your fellow players if you all had tree ant buggies, that could be really cool. These ants are willing to be scavengers so I think we might be able to morph a couple traits from the ****roache’s behavior where tree ants will steal loot from ant kills around them. But unlike the ****roaches where you can’t get it back after they’ve done this, I think you should have a chance to reclaim at least one thing back as the tree ants should be carrying it the way the other ants do in their mouth. One of their natural enemies is jumping spiders and several posts have been requesting that jumping spiders the end to the game. It’s a good additional enemy to add into the areas that have tree ants. Green tree ants don’t like going on the ground so if your character aggressive tree ants, but you make it back to the ground, they’re not gonna follow you far. If you stay in the tree though and the developers managed to code in their ability to make bridges and ladders out of themselves, it’s gonna get interesting.

I’ve also encountered the bug where all of your building pieces say they’re supporting everything. It does not seem to happen when I’m near the base question when the game loads, but if I am far away when the game loads and then travel to the base, it’s a near guarantee I will encounter the glitch. The location where I encounter this the most is the fence post by the light in the picnic area.

I like collecting things in games and having reasons to re-explore areas so I’m all for this. Plus if you play with friends it’s nice to have different looking mounts.

Agreed. The toxic ant hill a mild form of what you’re looking for, but it doesn’t have the higher tier marble and quartz; only brittle and some sturdy. It’s also really easy if you are on a red ant mount and/or have upgraded your armor/weapons. For being in the beginning part of the game it’s not a bad mini dungeon. The greenhouse area has some interesting tunnels in the walls and an ant hill but none of them strike me as great for quartz and marble resource gathering. In the first game, that fire ant hill did provide a better challenge, but it was also placed in the late game area. Hopefully, we’ll see something decent added within the next two updates. That said, the beginning areas in Grounded 2 are so big that it really wouldn’t hurt to put in a few locations that are high leveled for early game. If you stumbled across them too early, you would learn quickly you were not ready for them and would have to come back later after you improve your gear/weapons… or get really good at perfect blocking. I am honestly a big fan of this as it would give you a reason to come back to certain areas that don’t really have any unique resources in them currently.

I cannot stress how much I would enjoy this. Online co-op is great when the other party has a device capable of playing Grounded as well as a separate account that has the game. But when you are in the same house, that is difficult. While there’s plenty of families that have multiple devices and can afford to buy a game multiple times over that is not true for a lot of players. Plus, there’s just something different about playing on the couch together and being able to see what the other player is seeing.

It would be fun to play with and super helpful getting to some very out of reach places. I think they might have to restrict that perk to a late game buggy though as that’s even more game breaking than the fact that we can build to most locations rather than actually finding the intended parkour path. Or maybe my thinking is too restrictive and it could be an early game mount on Mild or Creative… or on the flip side one that appears in NG+. They could make that spider feature only work on certain surfaces to keep it from making things too easy, but I don’t want it to start feeling like there’s yellow paint all over the map. Plus restricting it would limit the fun factor if there are too many surfaces it doesn’t work on. I would want it to work on our own bases though as I feel like that would help with building.

There are a couple threads that have the topic, but there’s no harm in voicing it again. One of the suggestions I saw on another thread that I liked was that the alternative parts could change the color scheme or the actual design. That’s more work for the developers, but it would be nice to be able to make our bases a bit more interesting. Most bases end up with dew collectors, workbenches, smithing stations, etc., and currently all of those only have one look. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it would be fun to varied up. I’m OK with having to unlock the extra versions of it and in someways I’d prefer that. Maybe some random blueprints throughout the yard to give us more to hunt down.

Ceiling foundations When you say structured, I’m assuming you mean visual support as the floors can appear very floaty. If I’m picturing what you proposed correctly, it would look a bit beams in a grid format. We’d have to have some additional pieces to accommodate triangles and curves. I would want these to block off some of the lighting that comes up through the cracks between floor pieces. Functional Trash Can Seconded. I like the idea of being able to get back random resources a whole lot. Weapon upgrade reset I’m not opposed to the idea, but I would rather have something similar to the duplicating device that was in the oak tree lab (I think it’s called the Super Duper, but it’s been a while) so I could duplicate my weapon when I reach a point where I had to branch off into the various upgrade paths. I could make a copy for each upgrade path. The two ideas do not oppose each other though, so in a perfect world we’d get both. Additional Workbench Skins I’d be up for most furniture (functional or decor) having multiple skins/versions. Variety is the spice of life when building. Waft info Nothing to add to this idea Blueprint purchases We do already have that ability. We just tend to buy the blueprints in package format like all of the clover roof pieces at once. Some are sold separately like the turret and ladders. If you’re suggesting more blueprints in addition to what we have, then yes, fully on board with that. I’d also like to find blueprints randomly in the park as I just want more things to find.

I don’t think there is a mechanic for that or at least I’ve never triggered it. This might have to be a feature that’s customizable in the menu as I can see some players not wanting it; having your build destroyed seems like a natural consequence to not defending it adequately to some players and thus being able to rebuild easily would make raids feel less consequential to them. I’m not in that category personally so having an easier way to restore my builds appeals to me a lot. I’m not sure how they’re saving our build data, but what you’re suggesting sounds basically adding another state; we have unbuilt blueprints, partially built blueprints, fully built pieces, damaged pieces, and then we’d need non-player destroyed blueprints. (We would not want blueprints appearing for pieces we intentionally destroyed.) I feel like having the new blueprints appear during the raid could be rather distracting, but it’s not like regular blueprints disappear during battle… I still think it would be a nice touch to wait for the “in battle” status to disappear before those blueprints become visible, but I’m not sure about the potential performance issues with that idea. I know for some of my builds a timer would be unreasonable as I would not be able to get enough resources to repair large scale destruction in a reasonable amount of time due to spawn location distance to my base and respawn rates. I do have some builds where I probably could get it done pretty quick as I used the most basic of resources. There might need a menu option similar to “destroy all blueprints in range” to let us either remove all of the non-player destroyed blueprints in range or convert them all into regular unbuilt blueprints.

I get your point that a player can choose to do that if they want to, but there are reasons that mode exists in multiple games. In many players’ heads those two scenarios are not equivalent. Permadeath mode forces the issue. Manually deleting your save is a choice. There are players that would fully agree with you because it’s easy for them to make that choice and the end result is the same. Other players would find it practically impossible to intentionally give up their progress without the game forcing it. They might want the challenge, but they struggle with the actual choice after starting. The human brain is a mysterious place. Knowing/showing that you have a 100% completed save file in that mode is typically something a player can take pride in. And then there’s the competitive gaming category of players who would want a mode like that simply to decrease the need to trust an honor system when comparing times/stats/etc.

I would love this. Sometimes it’s just not feasible to have two different systems and two copies of the game within the same household. It also would work out better when I have family visiting or I go to visit family. Plus, I just have a soft spot for games you can play together on the couch.

I do already have bridges built all over the map so being able to lay down tracks on those does sound appealing. (Even if I had to upgrade all the surfaces to stems or better first. Grass flooring just feels flimsy when I think about it for a railroad.) Zip lines are coming so perhaps a cable car if tracks are out of the question. .

That is a very cool spider and I would love to see it worked in somehow. You got me brainstorming and it would be nice if one of the underground areas we were able to get to was basically a dark + fluorescent/bioluminescence biome. Maybe an offshoot of one of the tunnels going down through the brick wall could go down a little further or it could connect to a future part of the map. I’m picturing something that gives off a nighttime magical forest/cave feeling with the gloom shrooms and insects/plants that have bioluminescence/fluorescence. A good portion of it should be lit up enough with fluorescent/bioluminescent light sources that you can navigate without a torch. There are some man-made bioluminescent plants like the firefly petunia and phalaenopsis orchids. The developers don’t have to use those specific plants, but they can choose to have their own in game science logic be applied to existing plants (or new) in the game to add bioluminescence. There’s also fungi like jack-o’-lantern mushrooms and foxfire fungi. There could be something similar to the tang puddles glow wise down there and it would be cool if when our characters/mounts walked through them that our footprints left glowing marks for a little bit. There could be some pools of water that are deep enough to dive into as there’s bioluminescent algae and other water plants. If we had an upgraded planter box that we could add some of the glowing liquid too to make whatever we planted also glow at night, that would be great for decor. I don’t really want to restrict this idea to just one biome… maybe we could have it spread kind of the way the fungi growths did when we closed off the haze in Grounded 1. We already have several areas with gloom shrooms… we would just be adding a bit more nighttime color across the park.

I like the carnivorous plant idea as I don’t think there’s any plants that can hurt us currently. It could add a new challenge. I do think it needs to be able to hurt bugs as well though if you somehow managed to make their flight/crawl path go through the danger zone.

I would also like more collectibles like scabs. I’d also like to be able to find unique items that you can use to decorate your base. It can either be the already built item that we then we have to move it back to our base or it can be a blueprint. I just want there to be more things to find out in the world to make the map more rewarding for exploring. If it is a unique item and not a blueprint, it be nice if we could replicate the items somehow; like we used to be able to replicate weapons in the first game. Or it could respawn like the marble and quartz do.

You are not alone and asking for that. There are multiple threads. It’s definitely a source of frustration. I’m currently working on a base under the statue and that is a long, narrow hallway… I can’t access my storage chests in the majority of the base. I’m even OK with it being something we have to upgrade ourselves like the way Enshrouded did it where you have to add an upgrade to a chest to let you access from a distance.

I think this comes from people who are having a hard time with the game or are impatient being more vocal than people who are having an easy time and/or enjoying the challenges they find. The people struggling get more clues/direction/guidance due to raising their concerns, (there is nothing wrong with that either if it helps the player enjoy the game), but other players are let down by the lack of adventure/surprise/challenge. I have a couple posts where I asked for a mode where we aren’t given the exact location to go to for things on the map or by waypoint icons. I get that some players want the flashing icons and star waypoints and they don’t wanna spend their time hunting through the map, but I like stumbling upon things as I explore and it’s kind of impossible to stumble upon any of the big stuff in this game as there’s icons flashing on the map. My favorite part of playing Grounded 2 so far is when I made my way over to the greenhouse and garden area before I had any quests to do over there and I just freely explored. I feel like that section of the map is far more interesting than anything else currently in the game and it was definitely more rewarding exploring. I found more things to interact with than in the earlier section of the map and since there wasn’t a quest I didn’t know what my goal was which gave me back a sense of curiosity/wonder I had been missing. Unfortunately, you’re not gonna be able to get a lot of the resources over there until you have upgraded your tools. It’s a bit like building a path into the upper yard in Ground 1 before you can break pinecones, cut roots, smash sour candy or have unlocked certain doors. Still fun to explore, but you can’t reap all the rewards.

I want an option to play the game where it’s not going to give me the locations of the chips or add markers for the next story point. I know there’s plenty of players that would lose their minds without having those goals right there on the map so I do think it needs to be an option and not the default, but this is the kind of game where I would love stumbling across a lab rather than knowing where to find it. Finding Ranger stations (admittedly a bit easy as you can look for sprinklers) and milk molars and bits of raw science are already quite satisfying, but the biggest finds (labs/chips) are blazing neon (figuratively) on the map. I’d rather there just be a few comments from Sloane/Stranger or hints the logs to help.

I would not mind it if Grounded implemented chest upgrade system where we use the O.R.C receivers to increase the range that our sca.b can pull supplies from. I honestly have no idea how Grounded lore might explain that we can pull stuff from chests. I’m just making stuff up now. Sticking with the same “in my head lore”, perhaps there is a Ranger station where we can upgrade our sca.b to have even more range.

The first thing we’d have to solve is what would be the most basic building and crafting resources besides the insects. We can give the house some potted plants and a greenhouse, but the majority of the map would not have grass, clover, sap, wood stems, stone, pine needles, mushroom, clay, dew, berries, etc. (Barring an abandoned house that’s being reclaimed by nature.) There could be a fair amount of wood furniture basically everywhere so you could easily find splinters. There could be a woodshop somewhere in the house to add additional wood resources but again that doesn’t put them all over the map. If we added in some small animal cages in other rooms though that could provide multiple locations for gathering wood shavings/saw dust. Honestly a hamster maze sounds like cool dungeon/lab. A fair number of rooms could have carpets and thus there could be carpet fuzz and/or lint. If the rug happens to be shaggy, it could end up feeling like exploring a short grass area. A craft room could provide some fabric/paper resources. Maybe some glue globs. Some tiny paper clips. A broken sauna could provide a foggy, moist environment that’s different from the rest of the house. If we can get into the walls, that means we do have access to insulation. There could be various types used in a single building so different parts of the map could have different insulation resources. We could still find nails and thus rust. We should still be able to find candy inside. Water could be found from dripping faucets and maybe leaking from sone pipes in the walls/floors. If there is a wood-burning stove stove of some sort, then we have a way of getting charcoal. Somehow hair ties end up everywhere in my house so I feel like that could be a random resource find. We also need a reason for the house to either not be inhabited or implement a stealth mechanic to avoid the full size humans living there. If the full size humans knew you were there, either they would be nice and help you thus defeating the need to do basically anything in the game or they would present a threat. If the house is inhabited though and you need to stay hidden, that limits where builds can happen. The easiest route to keep the gameplay most similar to the current Grounded gameplay is to have a reason the house is not inhabited. Though I have to admit, it would be interesting to try to infiltrate the house of someone high up in Ominent with the goal being to find some sort of technology or evidence. Though I wonder if they really wouldn’t think to defend against tiny invaders. Maybe it’s best to mix both and have the house in question be abandoned by a high-ranking Ominent employee and they did defend against tiny invaders and you have to deal with some surprises on your adventure.

Pet route: Some species of jumping spiders are quite small and would suit being a pet even when compared to your shrunken size. They are hunters so they could randomly supply the player with aphid/gnat/weevil meat. Perhaps petting the jumping spider could increase the odds of that occurring for a period of time. They’re also pretty good at fleeing so maybe they could act like an early warning system; if they are traveling with your character and you get within a certain range of one of the more dangerous enemies they abandon you to your potential doom and return when you have been out of imminent danger for a bit. Or if they are chilling at the base they bail if dangerous enemies come close and come home later. Mount Route: Jumping spiders can be larger than ants so they could be a fun mount. if they ever let mounts have passive abilities when you’re not using them, it could potentially still hunt for you. I would not want it to run away on me as a a mount though. I would appreciate it having superior jumping when just exploring the world and far less fall damage. I also think it should having superior dodging abilities in battle compared to other mounts.

I like your ideas regarding broadening the use of the tamed bugs. I would definitely enjoy them gathering things. Even if the majority of the time what they brought back were common items; if every once in a while they could bring something rare that would feel pretty sweet. I’d even be OK if certain bug types only ever picked up things that your character had dropped or started the harvest process of rather than hunting down enemies. If I decimated an entire section of grass and I had a couple tamed ants that I was not actively using as my mount; it would be pretty nice if those ants went and tried to gather some of that grass. The smaller bugs could pick up arrows or sap from the collectors. Being able to unleash your entire tamed army of bugs would completely change the feel of raids. It’s possible it could make raids a little too easy… or it could result in your bug army being decimated. It really depends on if the developers decide to adjust the scale of the raids to match the number of participants and/or how well you can juggle defending/rescuing your comrade bugs as the need arises. And if you have upgraded your mounts, they should do better in the fight thus giving you more payoff on investing in them.

In the beginning I recommend getting on top of one of the large leaf milkweed plants away from your base. By being up in the air, you only have to worry about one flying enemy typically. In the starting area, it’s usually a bee. If you head to the picnic area it will change to a butterfly. If you can take down the one flying enemy, then you can try picking off any ground enemies that spawn with a bow or just wait them out. One of my favorite spots is on a log fence in the picnic area post by a light pole. it works just like the milkweed plants except I find it far easier to not accidentally fall off. That said, I don’t disagree that it would be nice to have a feature that lets players adjust the difficulty and frequency of raids. I’m a very big fan of letting people play the way they like to play. I think it would be nice to have this be a feature players can adjust from within the game and not have to set it at the start of a new game. Initially players may not enjoy the raids but later on they might enjoy a challenge. The raids are a good source of science and resources.

I just want a pet that will collect the arrows that fall through the map for me. I lose my mind when I am right there The arrow icon is right there… and I cannot get arrow.

On a different thread there was conversation regarding weather patterns impacting the bugs that appear and the resources that are available and requiring different armor or even creating the need to take shelter. A flaw with that is it could be really annoying waiting for the right weather when you need a particular resource. I had proposed a weather machine. We already have a shrinking machine and mind control bugs. The ice cream cart creates a winter wonderland. Why not a full blown weather machine (that initially we cannot control) and thus we end up with various weather patterns and even season like changes. To address the RNG problem that would likely occur at some point and to just make the gameplay interesting, we could find various chips to help us program the weather machine so we could create the kind of weather we wanted, for at a small period of time, before the machine went back to its default programming.