Grounded Gets A Shared World Feature That Makes It Easier To Play With Friends

Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming Honey I Shrunk the Kids-inspired multiplayer survival game Grounded recently received its final pre-launch patch ahead of its full release in September. The patch introduced a small round of fixes along with a nifty “secret feature” called Shared Worlds.

The feature makes it easier to play with friends on player-hosted servers by allowing the servers creator to save the server on the cloud as a Shared World. This gives other players the ability to host the server even when the primary host is offline. All progress made will be kept regardless of who hosts the Shared World.

Players can designate Standard Worlds as a Shared World through the Save/Load menu and can have up to three Shared Worlds of their own and 50 worlds shared with them at any given time. All Shared Worlds need to be hosted as a multiplayer game and can only be hosted by one player at a time. They are also available across all platforms and can be saved and copied to be played as a local Standard World or shared with other players to be played locally on their end.

Obsidian warns that the feature is still in beta testing and that players may encounter issues that will require the shared saves to be reset or be deleted entirely. “If you test this feature out with a save with lots of progress, make sure it is not the only working copy of the world you have on your account,” the studio advised. “The shared save service could also go offline at any time during this testing phase to account for issues or updates as needed.”