Lots of survival-crafting games get many updates over many years, and though Obsidian's Honey-I-Shrunk-The-Crafting-Game, Grounded, is one such game, I also didn't expect a sequel to come out so soon. During Summer Game Fest 2025, I was able to play 30 minutes of Grounded 2, both from the opening minutes of the game and with a save file that threw me into the middle of the game. Afterward, this topic was the first I brought up with the studio: Why couldn't the team continue building on Grounded instead of moving on to a sequel?"So there are a couple of different reasons," game director Chris Parker told me in a roundtable chat. "We did continue to build on Grounded. So there were four major updates after Grounded 1.0 released, and then some other support updates that came out. But on one hand, there were some limitations with technology, because Grounded was supported all the way back on the Xbox One, and so our ability to sort of grow on that platform was pretty restricted," he explained, admitting that it maybe could've been solved if the team really needed it to, but moving on from the Xbox One let the team pursue other new features, too."One of the big things was that there were some features, like in particular, buggies, [the game's new vehicles in Grounded 2,] that we wanted to solve," Parker said. "In order to solve those, we really needed to think about how they worked in the world, and what that world space looked like. They run faster, they fight differently, they do different gathering. We want to make sure all of those things work together really, really well."And in fact, our Grounded 1 team thought about doing buggies. They messed around with them for a little while, but they just found that the world space didn't really work. They made this game where we ran around. And so for us to really take this on and do this thing that we knew the community super, super loved and really wanted, we decided to go from the ground up."Buggies are definitely Grounded 2's biggest feature revealed based on what we know so far. When the game launches in Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview, two buggies will be available to start: the red ant and the orb weaver spider buggies, and each of them will come with their own abilities. To obtain a buggy, you actually have to steal an egg, then hatch it at your base, creating a friendly version of the normally hostile bug.The red ant soldier buggy is more like a "general purpose buggy," Parker explained. "It can harvest and it can place blueprints, and it can build, and it can fight with you on it, or as a companion, sort of alongside you. It can haul stuff, it has its own inventory." The orb weaver, meanwhile, has a more specific use case. It's "much more for exploration and fighting, because it's really, really good at both of those, and it's faster. It's just awesome to ride around on a spider, assuming they don't freak you out too much, but we do have arachnophobia mode coming back again," referring to the oft-praised accessibility feature.Parker said "just everything in Grounded 2 is somehow tied to feedback from the community that we had gathered at one time or another. We have a gigantic database of things that the community had asked for on Grounded 1, and when we started Grounded 2, a lot of what we started with was, 'What parts of this are things that we want to dive into and attack? And do we think we can do [them] well and actually serve the community by tackling this stuff?' So pretty much everything is focused on that," he said, revealing that buggies were the "number one most-requested feature," and so the team is excited to get that to players on day one.Day one, in this case, means the early access launch, which comes to Xbox Series X|S and PC, including Game Pass, on July 29.