friendly fire Turning off friendly fire shouldn't turn off achievements

[Aidan Cheatwood]

Me and my friends have been having a blast playing Grounded when we have the chance, but we feel like we can't really work together in fights when we can harm each other with the many accessories in the game and some weapons secondary effects. For example, one of my friends have an accessory that has a chance to spawn a poison cloud when landing an attack which will poison everything that is in the range of the cloud. Unfortunately this also applies to us, so when we are teaming up to fight a boss, we usually end up dying from his accessory and then he is soloing the boss. We initially wanted to disable friendly fire since we think this would fix the problem, but since it is a game setting it will change the difficulty we have set to custom, thus disabling our ability to earn achievements. An example of a weapons secondary effect harming team play is the Pinch Wacker, where it has a chance to spawn an electricity effect that stuns enemies when in range, but this stun also applies to my teammates and harms their ability to play the game with me. I personally think to solve this issue would be allowing us to disable friendly fire without changing the difficulty to custom, therefore we will still be able to earn achievements and not impact each other's gameplay (assuming that the "custom" difficulty is what prevents achievements from being earned). Perhaps a second method would be to have the accessory and secondary weapon effects not apply to your teammates, but I think this would be more difficult to do and could harm the games PvP potential. Maybe there's also an opportunity to look into a way to create teams based on colors like "green team", "red team", and "blue team". (Terraria has a feature like this if you're interested in looking into it.) This would allow rival teams between your play group where you cannot harm players on your team, but can still damage the enemy teams players. I believe this idea also has potential to expand the PvP side of Grounded to incorporate some fun community made game modes like "Team Capture the Flag" or something as simple as "Team Deathmatch" in arenas we build. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope to see this game continue to grow.