In Grounded, you are shrunk to the size of an ant and must survive in the beautiful yet perilous micro-world of a suburban backyard. This harsh and dangerous landscape can be navigated solo or with up to three additional players in co-operative multiplayer, as you work together to progress through thrilling story-based missions or explore the farthest reaches of the intricately detailed game world.

You hear the voice of a mysterious robot named BURG.L. He seems to know what’s going on and lets you know that the machine to turn you back to normal size is currently out of order. For now, everything in the backyard is trying to kill you and it’s up to you – and up to three friends, if you’re playing co-operative multiplayer – to survive the perilous landscape.

The backyard is rife with different kinds of ants, flying insects, and spiders. You must gather, craft, and build bases from scavenged items found in the backyard, searching for life-saving resources such as the dew off grass to quench your thirst or transforming an acorn shell into body armor to defend against a host of unpredictable creatures. Can you thrive against the hordes of giant insects, fighting to survive the perils of the backyard?

It's been a while since you've last heard from the Grounded dev team at Obsidian, and we wanted to update you all what's up and coming for Grounded. We are approaching the one-year mark from the Game Preview/Early Access launch and we still have so much that we want to do for the game. Some of these larger features take time, and with a small team it's difficult to release content every month while balancing larger tasks that need to get done to finish the game. We will be looking at doing larger and slightly less frequent updates moving forward, which will allow us to make our updates more meaningful with more and better content. Our goal is to find the right balance of keeping the game fresh with new things while giving the team enough time to make quality features. As always your feedback in this process is critical as we figure out a good release cadence as we continue on the path towards our 1.0 launch.

We are hard at work on the next update (0.10.0), which is one of our largest yet, which is on track to be released at the end of June. We have decided to not do an update for May and focus our efforts and polish on the larger update coming next month. The team is excited to share some of the details of what's to come.

Flipped Buildings

With the next update, you will be able to flip some building pieces to get the mirrored version. For example, the spiral stairs can be flipped to fit your base.

More Building Pieces

We've heard that you would like more building pieces. We are adding more curved walls, more roof variations, and even pillars.

Giant Food Item Changes

Giant food items, such as Billy Hogs, Archers Cookies, and apples, have been changed to be found more frequently. Ants will harvest their food from the large food through the day - if you follow them to the source, you can harvest a much better food item as a reward.

Photo Mode Additions

Photo mode has a few new features to get that perfect shot, including adjusting the time of day.

ARC.R

The latest in the range of modified TAYZ.Ts is an enhanced defense variant called the ARC.R. Outfitted with a capacitor stack and hefty arm cannon, ARC.Rs unleash energized balls of charged static for a greater challenge in lab combat.

And More!

We've done a few more things this month like add sprinting while climbing up ladders, and our programmers have upgraded to the latest and greatest version of Unreal (4.26.2), which now allows us keep up with the latest features of the engine that is used to build Grounded. For example, in the latest version of Unreal we will be able to take advantage of the new particle engine called Niagara.

This is a small preview of what's coming in June (we don't want to spoil the big stuff). As always, please join our discord and give us feedback on the state of the game - we love to hear what you think. Together we can make this game the best it can be.

Stay tuned for more information about the update, and thank you for being so supportive over the last year. See you in the backyard!

The Grounded Team

To summarize, you want to: Go Big Or Never Go Home.

Available through Xbox Game Preview with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Steam Early Access, Grounded will be available for Xbox One digitally through Xbox Game Pass, and PC (Microsoft Store/Steam) in 2021.