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.

About the walls

u need to research grass just like every other item, they can’t be found in the science shop.

15 hours ago, Swirlyy said:

About the walls

u need to research grass just like every other item, they can’t be found in the science shop.

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.

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

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. 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

Latest notes:
A. It's basically impossible to get out of the hottub without copying it if you are looking towards it, since R3 is both the exit and copy button.

B. The "Find a second PTS terminal" quest persists even after finding a second teleporter (and using it). Likely due to it not being the second one we were "supposed" to find next. We had Trash Bags and Pergola unlocked.

C. Why do husky weeds only seem to give 4 weed stems? Shouldn't they give more than dandelions, which give 6?

D. Had an orc attack wave incoming for the better part of an hour. Someone kept threatening and massing their troops but the wave took forever to show up. It felt like it finally started the attack when we stopped moving for a bit, but it was quite odd since there was no clear indication of how to get the attack to start.

E. Armor set bonuses aren't clear enough that they exist when looking at the armor, as one needs to examine it to see the set bonus and the only other hint is when a piece is equipped it mentions "set bonus: x/3" pieces, but some indication that the set bonus exists when just viewing the recipe (the same way the other effects are shown) would be very helpful.

F. It would be nice if the omni-wrench upgrade had some indication of what it did. The other higher level tools can be used on the appropriate resource, but other than by visually guessing the effect, you can't really tell if the wrench repairs faster, repairs more health, repairs nearby objects or whatever.

G. Why in the world was the first MIX.R we were given a quest for (and the only one we know about at this point, under the skateboard) a level 4 one with a ton of difficult monsters. Was this intentional or did we miss something along the way? Having played the first game, we knew what we needed to do to deal with that but it was still pretty brutal given that it was literally our first MIX.R fight in Grounded 2.

H. There seem to be quite a few "phantom leaves" in many area, such as the hedge in the NW and N areas where it looks like you can land on something but you pass through it and fall. I don't recall this being as much of an issue in G1, where generally if something looked like a platform you could stand on it. While we obviously have stopped intentionally trying to stand on random leaves, not a session has gone by without someone falling due to "fake leaves", often because another missed jump landed them on some random geometry and while trying to get back to the expected path, a leaf betrayed them and dropped them even further.

I. The nights seem far too dark, to the point where it's a little weird that going into a cave is actually brighter than outside. It's not that I mind needing a torch, but even with a torch it's basically impossible to see past the end of your nose. We're playing on OLED screens, so the blacks are very black. I do like that the nights are dark and scary, but expanding the radius of the torch just a bit would be highly appreciated.

----
This is our first play session after 5.0.5 and boy do mosquitos feel so much better now that they aren't everywhere and following you all over the map. :p

Today's thoughts:

A. Wooly aphids on the roasting spit flicker, sort of like how partially built garden plots do

B. When crafting ropes without the crafting bench, the selected recipe resets to the crafting bench version after each craft making it hard to craft them quickly

C. Why do the smoothies (which require a bench) show up higher in the manual crafting list than items that you can actually hand craft? Ideally the common consumables such as bandages/torches should be at the top so we don't have to scroll down to get to them

D. Brick walls seem to glow on the outside from interior lights. Seems unintended.

Yes, we're still here.

A. When equipping torches from the hotbar there's no real consistency about which one gets equipped which results in having many partially used torches, often ending with them all burning out in a row.

B. It's really hard to use the ladybug to bust sour candies when they are embedded in the ground.

C. I (host) could not see the prompt for the super sour seed until after we got the seed but my guest player could see it as soon as we walked up to the spot.

D. When walking up to the cracked rock (the air vent at the greenhouse) after talking to Sloane about the archive door, the rock claimed it needed "corrosive explosives" even though it was a level 1 explosion thing. After getting off my ladybug, it correctly said "requires explosive"

A. Tiger rapiers seem really overtuned. Two people hitting the same mob tend to stun lock it in place pretty consistently no matter what it is

B. The greenhouse vent that is opened via explosive only showed as open for the host, the guest saw me just walking through the wall (and could also walk through it)

C. When you try to switch buggys it despawns your current buggy before determining if the new buggy can actually get to you, which can result in not having a buggy which was never what we intended.

Edited 20 hours ago20 hr by deathlokx