So I play on Xbox and had a pet gnat with whom I stored some valuable items on. The gnat has disappeared. I tried loading earlier auto saves and found nothing. They aren’t even in the pet house anymore. They can’t die because I have invincible pets enabled. I tried scanning for gnat fuzz and raw gnat and proceeded to check every red square on the map to see if they had the lil fire ant helm and nothing. The only other thing I read was a pet leaving when unhappy. If that’s the case what happens to my items? Can I recover them? I had some trinkets you can only get once. If they’re lost forever I can’t bring myself to start over.

Was this ever answered? I have the same issue but have not seen my pet since. It seems that right when I placed the inventory items in, ran back to base, then the pet disappeared and was no longer linked to the pet house. I checked the house link and made sure the pet was happy before I placed the items in the pet’s inventory and now it’s either roaming around (has a helmet on) or is just gone gone… how do I find him or how do I retrieve the inventory? 

Hello guys Just wanted to update as of April 7 2024, this issue is still active as it just happened to me. I lost (fortunately I duped a spare) an intern badge and several high upgraded weapons, armor, and ant armor. Pretty bummed and I believe this needs an pet inventory recovery feature in the debug menu. Even if the pet dies or abandons offscreen, the lost inventory was priceless

-Hello

I'm sorry to hear that you all have run into a similar issue with your pet and their inventories. I know that there are some changes coming to pets in the Super Yoked update that drops on April 16th. If you're still running into similar issues after the update is available, please feel free to submit a bug report. Once we have your report we will work with you one on one to provide our QA team with as much information as possible, so that hopefully a solution can be developed. 

Obsidian Support

Thanks, and sorry for the frustration that this pet issue has most likely caused!

This bug persists in the Super Yoked update. My Baby Red Ant, carrying several unique items, has disappeared permanently and the recover lost pets debug has no affect. I've spent hours trying to fix this and am honestly going to need to take a break from the game, or just blitz to New Game + for a chance to get another one. If there is a way to recover lost pets besides the debug option in the menu, please let me know.

Having a similar issue. Lost my red ant pet in the undershed and recover lost pet doesn't seem to be working. 

Any tips on how to get it back or get another would certainly be appreciated. Absolutely loving the game overall. This is honestly the first issue I encountered after 85 hours of playtime.

Having same problem.

 

The same mistake, the black ant with trinkets disappeared, it's a shame

Just so everyone knows many updates later and there still having the pet problem I just lost my black ant with all my repair glue on it 

Just created an account to say this has happened twice to me... One of the ant babies I had that disappeared had an inventory full of upgrade stones... RIP Antastasia...

I find this bug may happen if you go underwater with your pet and die several times.

It's seems like when die in water, pets have chance to disconnect from player(can't see pet icon in inventory page but still can see in game).

If player can find back their pet and reconnect it then everything is ok. But there's a high chance pet will stuck in object due to the serious module bug in present version. In this case, player will permanently lose their pets unless reload data before dead and lost connect with pets.

 

I find this after losing my black and fire ant baby and several materials. Hope fix this soon

Issue still not adressed and no fix for it.

The "fix" still doesn't work, it's probably because of the pet "happiness" but there should be some warning or a way to recover your gear that you put on the pet.

2025 and it’s still not fixed. Absolutely ridiculous 

It's march 2025. Still happening. Just had my baby red ant go missing and pet invincibilty is on. It's happy was managed

As  of August 1s,2025 the disappearing pet and inventory issue is still not fixed 

Problem Occured Again Today. Is the Third Pet that got missing on My Save. Aphid, Black Ant and Fire Ant.

This bug is still happening.

Happend to me today too

It’s ridiculous how this is still happening. My two pet ants just disappeared without warning.  

This is still happening now. Guess it won't be fixed anymore since there's Grounded 2 now? Sucks I like my pet aphid.

Ugh I see posts like this and I hate this company more and more. How can you let such a big issue go for so long? I’m trying to “fix” the fact I can’t even use their shared world system and I just bought the game. I’ll be avoiding this developer in the future.

I lost my weevil pet in this way. I tried taming other pets, but it doesn't work. It'll be awhile before I'm even able to build pet houses, and I have no reason to believe that pet houses will help resolve the situation anyway. The impact on my gameplay is huge. I had become accustomed to requiring less food and water, and frankly, it sucks now that I havr to go back to how it was before the weevil pet.

From what I can see, this is a major issue that's been around for at least 3 years, with no fix in sight. That's a GIANT red flag, and it honestly makes me regret buying this game. There's really no excuse for a game studio to leave something like this unresolved for 3 years. I've played games with far more complexity, and a much larger user base, who fix bugs rapidly, sometimes even on the same day they are reported (Factorio is the gold standard). So, there is really only one reason a bug this prevalent and detrimental to game play is allowed to exist for 3+ years, and the reason is that the production company simply does not care. This is why it's such a huge red flag. I'm a software developer, and I'm no stranger to bugs and broken features, but I also don't tolerate them in my applications. Someone reports a bug, I fix it, and it really is as simple as that.

So, I've played about 84 hours of Grounded up to now. I built some amazing houses, some amazing ziplines, some very fun bounce web elevators, and I was planning on doing quite a bit more. But I'm done now. I'll go back to playing games made by people who have standards and who actually care about the thing they're making.

Obsidian, honestly, you suck. You got my money, so congrats on that. But you really do suck so hard.