Grounded 2 adds a major new feature that lets you create rideable versions of some bugs to help you traverse the map faster and more conveniently. You won’t have access to a buggy right away, but it’s worth knowing how to unlock these helpful rides as soon as possible. Here, we guide you through unlocking and crafting a Red Soldier Ant Buggy in Grounded 2.

How to unlock the Red Ant Soldier buggy

Mild spoilers: You’ll need to progress through the main missions until you complete the Missed Connection questline. This sends you into an anthill looking for an Ominent employee and scavenging their body. Completing this quest rewards you with the ability to buy the blueprints needed for building a Hatchery.

How to build a hatchery

This Hatchery blueprint costs 500 science points and must be purchased from the Science Shop section of the Ranger Station.

If you don’t have enough points, check your challenge tab to see what challenges you’re close to completing. This will be faster than going out and searching for the pink glowing orbs that grant you Science Points, but you’ll want to still collect those whenever you can.

The Hatchery blueprint gives you access to three new craftables:

• The hatchery
• Red Soldier Ant buggy
• Ant Nest

To build the hatchery at your base, you’ll first need the following items:

• 6 – Weed stems
• 1 – Acorn top
• 5 – Acorn shells
• 5 – Mite Fuzz

You can find several acorns near the base of trees, like the one in the Entrance region on your map, though acorns can be found elsewhere, too. Weed stems are gathered from dandelions early on, so look to the tips of the grass that towers over you and head toward any dandelions you can see to chop them down and collect some weed stems.

The Red Soldier Ant buggy requires a specific ant egg plus the materials needed to build the saddle. All together you need:

• 2 – Grub Hides
• 3 – Sprigs
• 1 – Acorn shell
• 1 Red Soldier Ant egg

How to get a Red Soldier Ant egg

You’ll need to venture inside another ant hill for this Red Soldier Ant egg. This requires you to fight several Red Soldier ants, which are much larger than the regular red worker ants you’ve seen scurrying around outside.

Eventually, you’ll reach a lab room with a reddish brown color egg in a test chamber of some sorts. This is a Red Soldier Ant egg, but you can’t access it. Continue to pass through the area and you’ll reach another area with Red Soldier Ant eggs. You can only carry one at a time, and it doesn’t store in your inventory. This means you’ll need to run back to the exit and drop it whenever you need to fight off some ants.

Make sure you have a decent weapon, some armor, and plenty of bandages just in case.

How to hatch the egg

Carry the egg back to your base and place it in the hatchery you built. Hatching time for the Red Soldier Ant is 12 hours in-game time, which in real time means you only need to wait about 25 minutes.

Interact with the hatchery once the egg is ready, and congratulations, you have your very own friendly ant mount to make traveling the park much faster. The ant comes with storage space, can gather materials, fight off some bugs, and naturally, you can pet the fella.

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