The Fall update is called Rot and Ruin, it is version 0.6.0, and Obsidian published its full patch notes on October 20, 2026. That leaves exactly one named update between here and an undated 1.0: the Winter drop. No date has been given for it.
If you were last here in early October, the three things that changed are the name, the version, and the size of the download. Rot and Ruin cut the PC install from 37GB to 18GB, a 51% reduction, in the same patch that moved the game to Unreal 5.7.
Every update, with the version it shipped as
| Update | Date | Version | Headline additions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hairy and Scary | September 30, 2025 | 0.2 | Axl the tarantula boss, new equipment and building |
| December Feature Update | December 3, 2025 | 0.2.2 (inferred) | Feature pass between the two big drops |
| Toxic Tangle | January 27, 2026 | 0.3 | The Garden, the Ladybug Buggy, new gear and creatures |
| Playgrounds Mode | March 24, 2026 | no version stated | The creator suite, out of test and into the live game |
| Beat the Heat | April 14, 2026 | 0.4.0 | The Sinkhole Anthill, King Dozer, the Black Soldier Ant Buggy |
| Buggy Racing | May 27, 2026 | 0.4.1 | Racing, as a feature release rather than a seasonal drop |
| Into the Abyss | August 11, 2026 | 0.5 | The pond, diving gear, and the PS5 Early Access launch |
| Rot and Ruin | October 20, 2026 | 0.6.0 | The Woodpile, the Centipede boss, Termites, the Potato Beetle Buggy, Bismuth gear tiers |
The seasonal pattern has held for five drops running: a new area, a new headline creature, a new vehicle, and a layer of progression. What the seasonal pattern hides, and what every roadmap summary including an older version of this page got wrong, is that Obsidian also ships unscheduled feature releases between the named updates. Playgrounds and Buggy Racing both arrived that way. Rot and Ruin is the first seasonal drop that also carried a technical overhaul.
What Rot and Ruin actually added
Taken from Obsidian's own 0.6.0 notes rather than from the trailer, because the two do not quite agree and the notes are the longer document.
The Woodpile. A new adventure area on the northern edge of the park, built out of towering timber and winding passages. Termites are the resident threat: Workers, Soldiers, a Queen, and an O.G.R.R. King. The marketing copy says "Termite King" and the patch notes say Queen plus O.G.R.R. King, so there are two royals in there and the trailer named only one of them.
The Centipede, and it has a name. Skritch is the boss at the bottom of the Sacrificial Pit, and Obsidian calls it one of the community's most requested creatures. It is also, by the numbers, the hardest thing in Grounded 2 by a distance:
| Boss | Tier | Health | Damage resist | Weak point | Stun threshold |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Skritch (Centipede) | 4 | 9,000 | 90% | Guts | 100 |
| King Dozer | 3 | 7,500 | 20% to 70%, by phase | Eyes | 275 |
| Axl | 3 | 5,000 | 75% | Rump | 100 |
| General Berserker | 2 | 1,950 | none | none | 90 |
Skritch is tier 4 where every other boss with a published stat block tops out at tier 3, and that 90% figure is the whole fight: everything that is not a hit on the guts is doing a tenth of its printed damage. The stun numbers are the giveaway. It carries 4.6 times King Dozer's health on a stun threshold of 100 against his 275, and a 25 second stun cooldown against his 120, so the biggest health bar in the game is also the one you can stagger most often. That is the mechanism rather than generosity: you stun it to open the guts, and the 75% it resists on both Stabbing and Smashing means swinging harder is not an alternative plan.
The Potato Beetle Buggy. Bigger than the Ladybuggy and built for close range. Its turret fires a spread of projectiles, it has a charge shot for a line of enemies, and a Healing Roar. Out of ammunition, it reloads by pulverising corpses.
Bismuth and the Yoking Press. The new gear progression. Bismuth is tied to Raw Science beneath the park, gathered and refined and then spent at a new station to push weapons and armor into higher Tiers. This is the system to know about if you have been hoarding a favourite weapon.
Perfect Dodge. A dodge timed correctly now takes zero damage and consumes no stamina, which means the counter-attack comes immediately rather than after a stamina beat. Paired with the new Dodge Master mutation, it rewards timing in a way the game has not asked for before, and it is the reason the two 75%-and-up resist fights are more approachable this patch than last.
Also in: painting, via a paintball gun called the Splotcher, on walls, floors, roofs, stairs and doors. Eight SCA.B colour schemes and five collectible figurines scattered across Brookhollow Park. Mutation loadout quick-swapping from the Hotpouch radial menu. Four new mutations: Royal Termissary, Howl of the Centipede, Rascal Rogue, Dodge Master. Abyss improvements including Bismuth, diggable chests, geysers that now emit a warming volume, and better navigation. And a fix for the "Retrieve BURG.L's New Body" quest that was blocking the main story on some saves.
The one thing to be careful about: whether 0.6.0 is live for you
Every tracker covering this update has given a different answer, so here is the primary record instead.
- October 6: Obsidian posted "Rot and Ruin Public Test Build 0.6.0 is now Available", with the usual warning that progress on the test server may not carry over.
- October 20: Obsidian posted "100 Reasons to Run in the Rot and Ruin Update", carrying the complete 0.6.0 patch notes.
- The body of that October 20 post still ends on the phrase "when Rot and Ruin arrives in Grounded 2 this fall", and no announcement after it says the build has gone out to all players.
Be precise about what that does and does not prove, because the obvious argument is weaker than it looks. Obsidian titles its seasonal launch posts exactly like this one: Into the Abyss got "The Biggest Grounded 2 Update Yet" rather than a patch number, and Beat the Heat got "Your Lizard Has Arrived". So a feature-styled headline is what a launch looks like here, not evidence against one.
The real tell is what usually follows. Beat the Heat was live on April 14 and hotfix 0.4.0.1 posted on the 15th. Into the Abyss launched on August 11 and two hotfixes went up within a day. Rot and Ruin has had no patch or hotfix post in the six days since, and Obsidian's own support form nonetheless lists a 0.6.0.3 build, which is hard to explain unless something is out and already being patched quietly.
So the practical answer: if Steam has handed you the much smaller download, you have it. If it has not, you are on 0.5.1.1 and Rot and Ruin is a public test you can opt into. We are not going to print a live date the studio has not.
What Winter still owes you
Obsidian's year two roadmap lists one more named update after this one, and it is described by season with no date and no version.
The Winter contents, as the roadmap art has them: a new park area with its name still hidden, a mechanic referred to as "Salty", more Buggies, a new story boss, new creatures, new building content, and the fourth tier of Omni-Tool upgrades.
One clarification worth making, because Rot and Ruin muddied it. The Yoking Press that just shipped upgrades weapons and armor through Tiers. The Omni-Tool tier four that Winter is carrying is a separate track, and the Fall notes mention the Omni-Tool only in bug fixes. Pushing your gear with Bismuth now does not advance you toward the Winter unlock.
After Winter there is an explicitly undated Future Plans block: two further locations including an expanded Abyss, new park bosses and what Obsidian is calling "Colossi", base moving, more equipment, and general improvements.
Playgrounds is not on the roadmap, because it already shipped
Correcting our own correction, and this one needs saying plainly because this page had it wrong in both directions.
This page first called Playgrounds "the most interesting item on the roadmap" and framed it as near-term. It was then revised to say creator tooling had slipped into the undated Future Plans block, with "no window has been given" for anyone waiting on custom challenge tools. Both readings were wrong, and the second was worse, because Playgrounds Mode went live on March 24, 2026.
Obsidian's own announcement that day ("Playgrounds Mode is Here!") describes what actually shipped, and it is not a teaser:
- Two maps. The Grassbox, returning from the first Grounded, and Brookhollow Park itself.
- Logic tools that chain. A Trigger Volume defines an invisible zone that fires when a player enters it; link it to a Random Chance tool, link that to several Creature Spawners, and you have a randomised encounter. Obsidian's own worked example is exactly that.
- The Handy Gnat is back, with a new traversal feature for hard-to-reach spots, alongside the returning gizmos and gadgets and new ones like the O.R.C. Transmission Device.
- Community Playgrounds, a browse-and-vote menu for other people's creations.
- The skybox barrier removed from Playgrounds and Survival both, so you can build as high as you like.
The test build opened on February 24 and the mode left test a month later. Props, creatures and customisation options have been added to it with each update since, which is presumably what the "creator tooling" line in the Future Plans block refers to: more Playgrounds content, not Playgrounds itself.
So if you came here looking for when the custom challenge tools arrive, the answer is that they arrived seven months ago and you can launch them from the main menu. The argument this page kept making for them still holds, and it has had seven months to be proven: creator tools are how a finite map becomes an indefinite content stream, and they are the feature most likely to carry a survival sandbox for years.
Reading 0.6 as a progress bar
Into the Abyss shipped as 0.5 and read as roughly the halfway mark. Rot and Ruin moves that to 0.6, and the Winter drop presumably to 0.7, which leaves the Future Plans block carrying everything from there to 1.0.
Where sources stop agreeing is what that implies, so here is the disagreement rather than a false consensus. One reading takes the remaining backlog at this pace and lands on 2027. Another points at roadmap wording about updates "leading toward the 1.0 release later in 2026", which the calendar has now largely overtaken: two months are left in the year and one undated seasonal update stands between here and the end of it. Obsidian has not dated 1.0, has not named a quarter, and has not repeated the "later in 2026" line in any post since. The only defensible position is that 1.0 is undated. For scale, the first Grounded spent about two years in preview and was better for it.
If you are playing right now
The Woodpile is where the progression is, and the fastest way to be ready for it is to not be fighting Skritch with a Tier 2 weapon. Get Bismuth, find the Yoking Press, push one weapon up rather than three sideways.
Two things specific to this patch. The install is half the size it was, so if you have been short on drive space on PC, that problem may have solved itself. And Perfect Dodge changes how the hard fights read: Skritch's 90% resist and Axl's 75% both assume you are willing to wait for an opening, and a dodge that costs no stamina is how you get one.
If you have not touched the pond content, it is not wasted work. The Woodpile is a land biome and nothing in 0.6.0 invalidates diving gear.
And if you have never opened Playgrounds, it is sitting in your main menu and has been since March. Community Playgrounds is the part worth ten minutes: other people's arenas and puzzle gauntlets, with a voting system to sort them.
On PS5, Early Access has been live since August 11 at the same version as everywhere else.
More Grounded 2
- Grounded 2 bosses and where to find them
- Skritch, the Centipede boss
- Into the Abyss update and PS5 launch
- Grounded 2 beginner's guide
- Grounded 2 tier list
- Grounded 2 wiki hub
Two version numbers in that table are inferences rather than quotes: the December 2025 update is given as 0.2.2 because the hotfixes that followed it were 0.2.2.3 and 0.2.2.4, and the Playgrounds release announcement attaches no version at all, so the column says so. Every date, and every other version number, is taken from Obsidian's own Steam announcement feed for Grounded 2 (app 2661300), read in full on October 26, 2026, rather than from a roadmap graphic or a secondary tracker. That is what turned up the Playgrounds error: the release announcement is dated March 24, 2026 and sits in the same feed as everything else on this page. Boss stat blocks are from the Grounded Wiki's creature pages for Skritch, King Dozer, Axl and the O.R.C. Cockroach Queen.
