Request for a bestiary in-game

[Dr_Spaceman]

After playing around with the new weapon enhancement system for a bit I'm torn. One the one hand, I'm always a sucker for crafting sets to counter difficult enemies in any game. On the other hand, I appreciated how mechanic-lite and intuitive Grounded has been so far, and weapon enhancements are (currently) very non-intuitive. There's no indication of what 'spicy' 'fresh' 'salty' and all the physical damage types actually do in-game. And even when you figure out insects are weak and resistant to certain types of damage by reading a wiki article, there's no reasonable way to figure out what any given insect is weak to outside of finding some fan-made spreadsheet.

Obviously the game is still in development and creating tutorial data is usually the last step, I just want to emphasis how important a in-game bestiary will be if damage types and weapon enhancements make it into 1.0. Knowing what insects are weak or strong against isn't something a player can figure out in-game without a lot of tedious testing. If the design intent is for players to bring specific weapons against specific enemies, the mechanical data must be available in-game. If the devs don't want that level nitty-gritty info available to players for the sake of immersion, then the weapon enhancement and damage type system probably need to be scaled back.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of how the enhancement system works within the natural progression of the game. Getting weapons enhanced early requires dangerous delves into red ant tunnels, which is tense and fun at first. But as I progressed in power, repeatedly clearing out red ant tunnels to enhance new weapons is just a mindless chore. And by the time I advanced enough to unlock candy enhancements, I was are already strong enough not to need them outside of the absolute toughest enemies (which is exactly where a bestiary would shine). Granted, this is just my experience with the system and it may be an outlier, but nonetheless the whole system hasn't felt very necessary.

I hope this feedback is helpful, and thanks for continuing to make Grounded an awesome game!

[punkxwad07]

I think this is coming. It may be talked about at pax east later this month.