Grounded: Guide To New Game Plus

Your time in the back yard doesn’t have to end with Grounded’s New Game Plus mode.

After hours of fighting spiders and robots, building your base, and upgrading your equipment, you've finally beaten Grounded, and it's finally time to get back to your normal size. But what if you didn’t?

Grounded’s 1.4 update introduced an alternative. Instead of finishing the game, you can hop on over to an alternate timeline and do it all again. Using the Remix.r and Grounded’s New Game+ mode, your adventure in the yard doesn’t have to be over any time soon.

How To Start New Game Plus

While other games have you start a new game plus after hitting the credits, Grounded has you do it just before. Once you’ve successfully defended the JavaMatic and crafted the Embiggening Cocktail, you’ll be guided to the Spac.r on the middle of the lower yard to finish the game.

Even if you don’t plan to rush into new game plus straight away, you don’t have to activate the Spac.r. You’re free to explore the yard for as long as you like before finishing the game.

Instead, head to the north shore of the Pond, where you’ll find a flowerbed. In the wall of the flowerbed, there will be a crack and a tunnel. Follow this tunnel, and you’ll find a large, sealed Ominent door, surrounded by monitors.

As the monitors suggest, you’ll need to have beaten a few challenges before heading into new game plus:

While you can access the Broodmother and the Mantis boss fights without any difficulty, gaining access to the Wasp Queen will require you to open the Brawny Boy Bin by killing enough wasps and destroying their hives.

You do not have to defeat Director Schmector or the Infected Broodmother to unlock the door in the flower bed wall.

Once you’ve done everything required, you’ll be able to open the door to the Remix.r Lab. In here, you’ll find various resources like toast, but the main appeal will be the large, purple machine in the middle of the room: the Remix.r itself.

Hold the interact button on the red dial at the front of the Remix.r, and you’ll be warned about the enormity of what it is you’re doing. Confirm it to be warped back to the Teen Case in the lower yard, and new game plus will begin.

What Changes In New Game Plus?

As you’d expect from a new game plus mode, everything is more difficult than it is in the base game. Enemies hit harder and faster, making even your +9 upgraded armour feel weak in comparison.

However, this isn’t just changing some stats. The entire yard will be ‘remixed’, with a number of big changes:

• Enemies locations – where enemies spawn will change. For example, there will now be a Black Ox Beetle near the Spac.r.
• Infused enemies – starting with the first run of new game plus, infused enemies spawn. These enemies are powered up by raw science, and, alongside their pink glow, include much higher health pools and special attributes. Killing an infused enemy can grant you up to 3000 raw science, making hunting them down a good way to farm for it.
• The tree, sandbox, bicycles, and even the house itself have all changed colour.
• New candy can be found – areas that had mint originally, for example, may now have spicy candy instead.
• New recipes at the ASL terminals.
• Milk molars and raw science both respawn in random positions. You do lose most of your milk molar upgrades, though, meaning you’ll need to track down more molars quickly.

Hopping over to a new timeline does also mean you make a few sacrifices when entering new game plus, though. As you are completely restarting the story, all of the world-changing actions you made before will be reset, including:

• Story progress will restart from you having to rescue Burgl.
• All doors, like the hatches to the Pond Lab and the door to the Undershed, will be locked until you reopen them in the story.
• The Brawny Boy Bin will be resealed until you anger the wasps enough to reopen it.
• The gas canister in the Haze will be unplugged. This means the spread of infection will disappear, with it all going back to being limited by the Haze, and you won't be able to access the Infected Broodmother until you reseal it.
• You lose the Assistant Manager's Keycard, and any other Ominent keycards you've found.
• Any other events, like knocking over the trowel in the yard or bombing open the entrance to the larva cave, are undone.
• The Ant Queens will return to neutral. The only exception to this is if you killed a Queen with infected food in your last run. This time, you'll have more infected ants in the map, and the Queen herself will be covered in fungus. This resets on your next run.

What Do You Keep In New Game Plus?

You don’t have to start again from nothing in new game plus, which, in a lot of ways, makes it easier than your first run.

All of your items, resources, and equipment will be exactly where you left them. Even your dropped backpacks carry over, so don’t worry about grabbing all of them before heading to the Remix.r.

It’s a good idea to get the Fungal Charm before starting new game plus. There’s a good chance that the infused enemies you encounter have explosive attacks, and having the Fungal Charm on hand can reduce the damage you take from them. You can get this from the Haze by chopping down infected mushroom spores.

Any bases you've built will also still be there. Crucially, this includes ziplines, which can help you get to the labs so much quicker than if you were travelling on foot. It’s also nice to still have a place to sleep, instead of scrabbling to make a lean-to like in your original first days in the yard.

Though you do lose your milk molar upgrades, you don’t lose your unspent molars or mutations. The most important thing this effects is the Pond Lab, as you’ll still have access to both your diving equipment and the Merteen mutation to make that first approach to it a lot easier.

Any data you collected will still be unlocked as well. Though the 1.4 update removed the requirement of getting every single gold creature card for a 100 percent completion, your bragging rights will still be safe as Peepr cards are saved between runs.

Finally, you won’t lose your raw science. You’ll need a lot of it to unlock the new recipes found only when you first enter new game plus – the recipes for the new weapons, for instance, costs 50,000 science.

How Many Times Can You Do New Game Plus?

You’ll have to finish most of the story to do the JavaMatic defending again, but as long as you meet all the requirements to unlock the Remix.r, you can repeat the process as many times as you like. The number of times you’ve restarted the game is represented by a purple toast icon.

Each time you start a new game, things like the colour of the tree and the sandbox, the location of milk molars and raw science, and the types of candy you find in the yard will all change again. Everything also becomes stronger, and infused enemies will also pick up even more attributes, making them harder to deal with.

It’s a good idea to export your save before entering a new game plus. This is because Grounded limits you to ten save slots , with each save after that overwriting your oldest save.

By exporting saves, you’ll always have a copy of your previous world in case you find the next step up too challenging.