Get a fast and effective start in Grounded 2 with this detailed guide covering survival, combat, mutations, and base-building essentials.
Guide to Core Survival, Combat, and Building Fundamentals
The Quick-start Fundamentals
This section will detail all core mechanics to get you straight into the action. If you’d like a detailed breakdown of mechanics then you’ll find that below this quick-start section.
Health
Health is a simple one, spam crafting of bandages. They are easily craftable so take 5 minutes to go collect the items and produce lots of them. On Whoa! difficulty you will be taking enormous amounts of damage, even from a single hit so you’ll be running through your supply in no time.
Hunger & Thirst
There are two primary survival elements after health which are Hunger & Thirst, the drain rate of both of these scales with difficulty. The easiest way to satiate hunger is by gathering stacks of mushrooms which are easily accessible in pretty much all locations, gather these in mass, I recommend 2 stacks on Whoa difficulty.
As for thirst, you’ll start off by gathering water dew drops on the tips of leaves which you can smack to drop it on the ground. This will quickly become annoying so the best thing to do is 1. Unlock the Water Canteen item which can store 2 water drops each and 2.
Unlock Dew Collectors which passively generate water droplets. After sleeping, you’ll notice that the Dew Collectors offer around 3 droplets per collector, drink one and then store all of the spare droplets for later. With your first Molar point, I’d recommend putting it in the Thirst/Hunger stat which will take the drain rates down from 100% to 85% which is huge in the early game.
Combat
Combat is relatively simple in the early stages and slowly evolves during the game. In the early stages learning to Perfect Block is vital. Every single attack in the game can be perfectly blocked given you block during the Block Window.
This block window varies, and can be improved with the block mutation. Every enemy will have at least one attack, or attack combo that you’ll need to learn.
Typically, most enemies have a 3-attack combo. The earliest encounters with this will be on Tier 1 Red Ant Soldiers or Orb Weaver Jr’s. These are the perfect mobs to get used to the timing as on Whoa! difficulty, if you don’t perfectly block all 3 attacks you’ll go 100% to 0% health in 3 hits.
Weapon Types
Grounded has several weapon types and some status’, each bug in the world will be weak to some and strong against others so it is important that you use the PEEP.R (By pressing X on keyboard and then using LMB on a bug) which will highlight both of these for you.
Using the correct weapon types is essential in this game as if you use the wrong type you could do 25% of your damage which is just pointless, or you could get +100% and do massive damage, especially to bosses.
Base Building
Acorn Chests should be rushed in the early game as they offer high storage capabilities for pretty low investment. One key feature this game has is that you can Hot Deposit items to all containers near you. If you have 1 food chest and 1 resource chest, then items from your inventory will go to the appropriate chest based on the items already present in there.
Sort your chests out early and you will have a much more enjoyable experience with crafting. Speaking of crafting, all crafting stations will utilise nearby chests, this is indicated on each crafting station in the top right where it tells you the number of nearby containers it will use resources from.
Buggies
Grounded 2 expands upon the first game by adding in bug mounts. You’ll get your first Soldier Ant mount after about 2 hours of play assuming you’re doing the main storyline. Buggies will follow you around and protect you when not mounted. When you are mounted though, they offer a large portable storage container as well as holding around 12 plank items.
They also do more damage to things like Grass than your tier 1 omni-axe will do, as well as automatically hoovering up any resources on the ground while you hold the E key. You can only have 1 active at any time.
Mutations
Mutations are the backbone of optimising gameplay. You can setup up to 4 mutation loadouts depending on the activites you frequent. At minimum I’d recommend a combat loadout, as well as a exploring/gathering loadout. Mutations can be gained & upgraded by performing the listed action on them.
The most notable ones are Perfect Parry which is unlocked at level 1 by performing 30 perfect parries. This mutation significantly improves the power of the already brilliant parrying. In grounded 1 there were thirst & hunger mutations, but unfortunately Grounded 2 hasn’t carried them over (As far as I know).
Tips & Tricks
I personally do not like viewing any tips & tricks for a game until I have already experienced most of the content and tried to learn by myself first.
Essentials
- Easy Thirst – Unlock the Dew Collector as soon as possible, and build at least 2 of them. These will act as a completely passive way to get water throughout the whole game, this is even more important if you’re playing on ‘Whoa!’ difficulty where you require 2+ water droplets per average day. Can be researched via Spider Silk which is created after Spinning some spider webs.
- Carry 2 Water Canteens which can hold 2 water droplets per container, use this in conjunction with several Dew Collectors and you’ll be swimming in clear water.
- Easy Hunger – Collect all mushrooms you can, they are found in large quantities across the whole map and offer a very easy way to beat hunger, especially in the early game. These items have a high stack value, and only take about 7 to get from 0% to 100%.
- Repairing Equipment is vital, ensure you always carry some spare resources to repair any armour or weapons. On death, you will take significant damage to all equipped items, notably your armour, main hand and offhand items. If in doubt you’ll win a fight, just run, wasting precious resources on unnecessary repairs becomes really annoying very quickly.
