Grounded adds flying beasties in its latest update
Forces to bee reckoned with
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's a swarm of bees, mosquitos and fireflies descending on Obsidian's sandbox adventure, Grounded. Yesterday, the game added flying insects and a load of new things to craft from them in its 0.60 update. I am very happy about the addition of bees. I am very unhappy, however, that there is an option to attack them. I will fight you if I see you whack a bee.
Here's the latest dev update showing these new winged creatures in action.
I'm a big fan of the fireflies, not only because they light up the night sky making it all pretty, but because they can actually lead you to dew drops. One of the more annoying things I found in Grounded is that getting fresh water requires players to find these dew drops hanging off the top of grass stems. They can be difficult to spot in the garden's grassy jungles, but now they're a little more obvious because fireflies like hanging around them, and they'll flash their glowy butts alerting you to their presence.
You'll also find mosquitoes hovering in the air, or having a stroll on the ground. They like eating aphid honey, so you'll find them terrorising those poor little green lads.
And last but not least, bees! These chill beasties spend their time bumbling between flowers collecting pollen. If you're in need of some pollen yourself, you can attack the bees to make some fall off of them. But then you'll have to fight a bee, and probably just submit to death because you attacked a lovely creature and you're a monster and you deserve it. Look, Sin was willing to die for the ants in Grounded, and I am willing to die for these bees.
Should you actually do the horrible deed of murdering a sweet bee, you'll be able to use its parts to make some new bee armour or a stinger spear. Other new craftable things include a firefly headlamp, weevil shield, and mosquito needle (which acts a bit like a rapier).
Aside from all that, the update added some great quality of life changes. For example, equipped items will no longer take up backpack space, and most unblockable creature attacks are now blockable with the new weevil shield.
You can check out the rest of the tweaks and additions in the 0.6.0 patch notes.
The flying insects update arrived in Grounded yesterday, and if you fancy giving it a go the game is available in early access on Steam for £25/€30/$30. It's also on Xbox Games Pass.