MarkofValor

Ok I goofed on submitting a quote to the OP. So here is my actual post :P. I'll start with the complaints that might be easier to answer. Bandages are not suppose to heal you all at once. They heal you over time. Just like how real bandages work. Food that you make in the cooker or the smoothie station will not only give you bonuses to things like stamina and attack, but also instantly heal you. There is a recipe that is not listed that makes generic smoothies. I'm not sure if it changed at all in the 1.0 release, but you can put in random ingredients to craft it. It straight up just heals you. It also can heal you even more if you use a certain item in the game that you have to find. (they also increased the health that recovers after eating food or using healing items.) 90% upvotes on a reddit post. Well that's 90% out of how many users on reddit? 229 upvotes and 52k users on that reddit. I'd say you barely scratched the surface on users on there. Plus that reddit isn't exactly used by a lot of grounded players. Discord is probably by far the most active, but even then that is not everyone. Social media is used on multiple platforms and not everyone uses the same ones. Which would give sparse results statistically speaking. A far clearer picture is to look at the achievements on steam for the game. Less than 10% of players on steam have acquired half of the achievements in the game. Which might suggest a more casual player base community. But it also might mean there isn't quite that many active players in an Early Access game that was not finished by the time you posted. These numbers might change after 1.0. I see a lot of streamers playing the game right now to get the first, shall we say, bite out of 1.0. I am not aware of a perma food issue in the game. Are you just mainly talking about food on the spit that could sit there and not decay? That was something that obviously got updated in the last couple patches or 1.0. It will spoil now. They gave us a way to preserve food in storage. So that might make it more in line with other survivor games like Ark that has fridges and preserving bins to compensate for unwanted spoilage. You'd have to talk with other users about end game stuff. I'm not entirely familiar with how the game is easier and is more of a slog when you have basically completed the game. I assume, just like all games it reaches a shelf life or plateaus at some point. The game is difficult. There is no better way to put it. You will die a lot. For a survival game this makes complete sense to me. I've played a wide number of survival games. Its the genre I play the most and I can say Grounded is more or less a 7 out of 10 on difficulty compared to other survival games. Lastly there is 4 game modes you can play on. Mild, Medium, Whoa!, and builder mode. Which I believe caters to the player base quite nicely. There are some like me that want a challenge, upgrades etc. And quite a bit of players that enjoy the game casually. As some commenter on another forum put it, "The cute bug game is quite deceiving when you realize how difficult it is." I won't lie, the game is tough. But there are so many ways to play the game, even custom settings to make your survival experience more enjoyable. If none of those settings work for a player, they can simply shelf the game and do something else. There is no shame from me on that. I've bought quite a few games I played for 2 hours and decided that was it for me. P.S. I would point out that having a negative outlook on the community is more than half of the focus of your last paragraph and it undermines what could have been a more constructive post from you. Most of the less vocal players like myself do not get involved in banter on social media and being toxic or calling names. But that's to be expected from kids and teenagers who haven't figured out how to filter their thoughts in a constructive way without coming off hostile. Just take those as a grain of salt. They can't hurt you if you do not let them.

Hey vaultguy. So a shield is totally worth it. Yes it protects you from 100% of the damage you would take from an attack when your guard is up. The exception being venom from bite attacks from say a spider. You will take no damage from the bite, but the venom will still get applied. It does not protect you from AOE attacks like Bombadier acid and Stinkbug gas or anything related to that. Without spoiling anything related to mutations or other gear that helps with using a shield I would suggest giving it a go. The shield has a block threshold on it. If you take too many hits to your shield it will drop your guard, your stamina will plummet and you will be stunned for a couple seconds. And yes if you perfect block you not only negate damage but your block threshold won't take a hit. This includes venom from a spider attack I believe. Also bugs has a fixed pattern. They switch between a few different attacks. Depending on the bug. You'll see big wind up attacks and quick smaller attacks. It is possible to dodge some of these attacks, but be aware that some bugs might have tracking target in their AI. So even if you side step they might follow you and hit you anyway. Or your shield. It is also possible to attack bugs in-between each of their attacks. You can get in 2 hits often and 3 hits a fair amount. But I believe in the higher level areas of the yard it might become increasingly hard to find an opening since some bugs don't follow the same pattern as bugs in the starting area. I only wish we could upgrade the shield(s) in this game.