deathlokx

Today's notes: A. If you start busting an object in a chilly area and get frozen, it seems like the object will still continue to be busted even though the animation stops. B. We were starting to build a base and had built some foundation and floors. The floor wasn't well supported and we are aware of this. However, placing a "ghost" stairs and then removing it caused the rest of the base to become unsupported and fall apart, despite the fact that there should have been no reliance on an unbuilt stairs. C. I lost yet another spear. This time I captured video of it falling through the ground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHlDpcuTQSM

Back for some more Grounded 2. Here's what we noticed today: A. Right at the start, I threw my larva spear at weevil and it completely vanished. The angle I threw it at shouldn't have let it fly off and the tracking icon never showed up. I can only assume that it ended up falling under the ground. B. When waiting to rest at the lean-to, the time switched back and forth from 21:32 and 21:33. This seemed to occur every time we needed to wait to rest. C. Some spike strips showed as needing repair to the other player, who could not repair them. They showed as full health to the host, so I assume this is a desync. D. It seems like if you get knocked off your pet while reviving someone, that target can only be revived by getting back on your pet. Nobody else can revive the downed person including yourself otherwise. Their death timer also doesn't count down. E. For reasons that aren't clear to me, buggys often seem to switch to "stay" mode randomly F. Is the toxic ant nest actually supposed to be toxic? Aside from the green puddles we wandered through it without any sort of ill effects, despite the myriad of dead ants. We kind of thought we'd need gas masks to even get into the nest, but it seemed fine. G. At some point I disabled Buggy permadeath in the settings. The next time my buggy got downed, the text for the time until the buggy got KO'd ran past the end of the countdown box. H. Spike traps, like the last game, don't feel great to use. They take a ton of damage from monsters running into them (including harmless mobs like weevils and aphids) and when they break it is a mess. It would be great if they acted more like weapons/armor, where they had a "broken" state that made them non-functional, without them going to pieces so that they could be repaired. One day we'll get out of the snack bar area... :P

Today's notes: A. Sap Bandages are quite hard to figure out due to the fact that there's no clear indication as to how to heal pets with them. They don't automatically go onto your hot pouch and once placed on the pouch, the intuitive action "walk up to pet and use the bandage" results in healing the player with no explanation of what went wrong. My personal preference would be that sap bandages not be usable on players at all and/or that they really should have some text "use while mounted to heal your buggy" or their own clear on-screen control to use them. Having a "bandage pet" button while mounted would have made it clear how/when to use them. B. Two of us managed to get stuck in the pet house by walking into it and getting trapped behind the sign, requiring the pet house to be moved to escape. I haven't played around with this one too much to determine what was causing it and once we moved the pet house upstairs I wasn't able to quickly reproduce it. C. After throwing my spear I got caught in a spider-web at the edge of a short drop. After punching and breaking the web, I was instantly killed for no obvious reason. I suspect that due to the way I was stretching the web, the game considered me to have fallen with some velocity. I have a video of this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=em3Vv3GbOKo

I checked and you are correct of course, but this has its own issues: At this point in the game there are only 2 things to carry, so it's not immediately obvious that they can be scanned. This is compounded by the fact that they don't show up as unscanned in your inventory (when examining your inventory directly, they do not show up on the main inventory screen as far as I can tell). Yes they do show up at the scanning station if you happen to be carrying one at the time, but even then they're in a different part of the screen than all the rest of the items that you are able to scan. The one hauling item we thought about scanning, the red soldier ant egg, doesn't need to be scanned...so we never had a clue that the hauling items could be scanned. Something simple like one of those mini-quests to "scan a grass plank" and "scan a weed stem" would have helped significantly here to steer us in the right direction.

Just picked up Grounded 2 Beta on PS5 and have some quick feedback on the quirkier things we had issues with in our session today, in no particular order. We have not been following the Steam beta at all, to avoid spoilers, so apologies if I'm repeating anything well-known on other platforms. A. Prompt to scoop or sip water while holding the canteen doesn't clearly differentiate between hold/tap. I'm aware that there is a ring around the "hold" option, but visually they look so similar that it took us several tries to figure out which was which. B. Also canteen related, it would likely feel much better if tapping was used to fill the canteen and holding was used to drink the dew drop to avoid accidentally drinking it while you had your canteen in hand (which was rarely, if ever, what we intended to do. C. Related to the above, when attempting to "catch" falling dewdrops in the canteen, even when holding the button we would end up drinking the dewdrop rather than putting it into the canteen. Not sure why this was, exactly, but it meant we had to be very careful about waiting for the drop to settle before attempting to put it in the canteen. D. Pressing up on craft menus puts you into the "search" bar and is very easy to do unintentionally when pressing 'up' to open the crafting menu. We're early enough in the game where we don't need to search and given that on PS5 opening the soft keyboard has a slight delay, it was often an inconvenience. E. Cancelling a build is very easy to do unintentionally when pressing O to get out of other interfaces. While not game breaking, as nothing is lost, it was never what we intended while backing out of menus. F. For whatever reason, I was getting credit towards Spider Buggy mutations (the third one), despite not having any pets (before we got the ant hatchery, even) G. When attempting to view the settings for a particular difficulty while creating a world, it didn't seem possible to scroll down to examine the full list of settings. I was only able to move my cursor down 1 option and not past the first page. H. In one case when placing spits, my partner (guest) would attempt to place it and it would end up in a different spot than where they saw the ghost. If I (the host) watched them place it, I could see the ghost where it did ultimately end up but visually the location was different on their screen. I. After 3-4 hours of playing, we got some major hitching, which got worse when we went to mess with the hatcheries to hatch eggs. I'm not sure if it was related to anything we were doing or the time we had spent playing. When it got bad enough I thought the game had crashed, but it did recover and got better after that point. J. We find it a bit strange that one can unlock floors, stairs, and roofs before unlocking walls, which we have still not found. I mean, one can just attach the ceiling to the floor or use foundations or chimneys as walls, I suppose, but given that floors can be used as ceilings one would assume the unlocks wound be floors -> walls -> roofs (or all 3 at the same time, given that floors/roofs/foundations are available from the start) K. In the first Grounded, it was possible to get burn-in on OLED screens due to the brightness of the SCA.B and its fixed positions (which did, unfortunately, happen to one of us). We ultimately used the option to change the color schemes to help mitigate this. However, there is no option in the beta to modify the color schemes. We would really like a way to dim/change the colors to help protect our screens. So far we are having a lot of fun seeing the new things and we all really like the Omni-Tool. Been looking forward to the Grounded 2 Beta all summer.