What you need to know
- Grounded received a new feature called Shared Worlds that is now available for public testing.
- Shared Worlds allow players to upload their saved games to the cloud where friends can host them while being offline.
- The game is currently in its final public test before its official launch on Sept. 27 after two years in early access.
Grounded developer Obsidian Entertainment has added one new feature to the survival game a month before its official launch, and is now available in public testing.
The new feature is called Shared Worlds and allows players to share their created worlds with friends without being online. According to the patch notes, these worlds are uploaded to the cloud and friends can host those instances on their own.
There are some restrictions for the beta feature, such as only three Shared Worlds can be uploaded at a time and players can access up to 50 worlds shared with them. Standard Worlds can be converted to Shared Worlds, but Shared Worlds can only be hosted as a multiplayer session. Only one person can host a specific world at a time, and any progress made will be "properly restored regardless of who hosts the world next."
Obsidian said some use cases for the feature allow players to share copies of games by creating a Shared copy and having others download it as a Standard World, and an easier way to have a single world going back and forth between Steam and Xbox/Windows Store versions. The developer did add an import feature to transfer save games between Steam and Windows versions with the final public test last month.
Grounded will be launching into 1.0 with a huge update on Sept. 27 for Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, PC, and is included with Xbox Game Pass.
