Grounded – What’s in the Koi Pond Update

Grounded’s latest update provides a whole bunch of new content for the Koi Pond area. Developer Obsidian Entertainment released the early access update with the next-gen console launch for the Xbox Series X and S on November 10. If you’re wondering what’s new in the Koi Pond update and whether to hop back in, we’ve got everything you need to know below.

Table of Contents

What’s New in the Koi Pond

Where is the Koi Pond

How to Fight Underwater

New Koi Pond Creatures

How to Make Koi Scale Armor

How to Get Into the Koi Pond Lab

What’s New in the Koi Pond

The Koi Pond update has added landmarks to the northern pond in Grounded alongside new creatures, buildings, recipes, weapons, and more. The goal of this guide is to give you information on everything you can expect and a short summary here for those that want to know what’s new.

• 4 New creatures, one of which is a boss.
• 1 New armor set, Koi Scale Armor
• 8 New Recipes, not including the Koi Scale Armor.
• 2 New buildings for making a base on water.
• 3 New mutations
• 3 New SCA.Bs
• A short new quest

Where is the Koi Pond

The new Koi Pond biome is circled in the screenshot above. Otherwise, just make your way all the way up north past the giant oak tree and you’ll come across a wide span of water. Hop on into the water for a new experience and short quest as well. Be sure to not run out of oxygen, because you’ll die instantly if you do. You can use large air bubbles to get oxygen back.

How to Fight Underwater

Grounded’s new Koi Pond biome requires a different set of weapons if you plan on fighting the new aquatic creatures. The one weapon that you can still use underwater is the tier 1 Pebblet Spear. Otherwise, you’ll want to craft a tier 1 Pebblet Dagger. This requires 2 Pebblets, 2 Crude Rope, and 2 Lilypad Wax. You can get Lilypad Wax by gathering it from underneath lilypads. The Pebblet Dagger can be used to gather harvest Eelgrass underwater or against enemies like Diving Bell Spiders.

Other weapons you can use in the Koi Pond are the Bone Trident, Stinger Spear, and Rotten Stinger Spear. While you can’t craft a Stinger Spear until bees are added into Grounded, you can find a rotten version deep underwater in the Sunken T-Rex’s mouth.

New Koi Pond Creatures

Name	Passive or Hostile	Description
Koi Fish	Hostile	Large boss fish that doesn’t seem killable yet due to it not having a health bar when attacked. Seems to one-hit players.
Diving Bell Spider	Hostile	An underwater spider that has a venom attack. Drops Diving Bell Spider chunks.
Tadpole	Passive	A passive creature that you’ll find frequently. Drops Raw Tadpole Meat.
Water Boatman	Passive	A passive creature that drops Water Boatman Fins for making fins to swim quicker.

How to Make Koi Scale Armor

The new armor set added in the Koi Pond update is Koi Scale Armor. Unlike most armor sets, you don’t actually need to kill the enemy this armor is based on. It doesn’t even seem possible to kill the Koi Fish right now. However, you can find Koi Fish Scales and Sunken Bones near the bottom of the Koi Pond, deep down. Harvesting these with a shovel will give you a small amount. And if you need Silk Rope, you can use Web Fibers at a Spinning Wheel to make some.

All ingredients required to make the Koi Scale Helmet, Chestplate, and Greaves: 10 Koi Fish Scales, 8 Eelgrass Strands, 7 Lilypad Wax, 3 Silk Rope, 5 Sunken Bones

How to Get Into the Koi Pond Lab

Finding the Lab and Getting More Oxygen

There are two cave entrances deeper into the Koi Pond that eventually lead to an underwater lab. If you head toward the eastern side of the pond, there’s an area with bubbles coming up from deep down. You can follow these air bubbles down to where a Sunken T-Rex landmark is near a bright light. Before you start heading along a trail of lights toward the Koi Pond Lab, you’ll need a good source of oxygen. Unfortunately, the only source of air bubbles down here is near the Sunken T-Rex. Therefore, you’ll need to make new gear if you don’t want to die immediately after running out of oxygen.

First, you should kill the passive Water Boatman creatures to make Fin Flops. These shoes will help you swim quicker. Then, you can either craft the tier 1 Gill Tube or tier 2 Bubble Helmet for more oxygen. The main difference between crafting each helmet is that you’ll need Sunken Bones for the Bubble Helmet, which may be tough to get. You’ll either need to kill a Koi Fish or dig bones out of the ground near the lab. And lastly, you can craft a Liquid Gills smoothy using Water Flea Meat.

Opening the Lab

Before you can open the lab, you’ll need to find three yellow breakers that you can twist a dial on by interacting with them. If you head toward the lab from the Sunken T-Rex landmark, take advantage of the fans near each light that propel you forward. They have tiny bubbles coming from them if you don’t notice them immediately. The fans will bring you toward each breaker with the first one being a little before the area with the lab entrance. The other two are below it with fans nearby as well. Once all three breakers have been turned, the entrance will open below the lab.

Powering Up the Koi Pond Lab

Once you’ve made it into the lab, there’s a computer in a nearby room to turn the power on. There’s also a bed by the entrance that you can use to save. Anyway, interacting with the computer will unlock a new doorway further into the lab. Continue deeper in by heading upstairs and then up another set of stairs to a new computer that unravels the underwater observatory. Now you’ll have access to another area from the center of the lab that leads outside back into the water. This is an easier way into the lab near the observatory outside.

That’s all for our look at the Grounded Koi Pond update, if you have a question or are looking for some help, feel free to ask in the comments below. If you want to see the full patch notes of the Koi Pond update, you can find them here. For more Grounded guides, head to our guide hub here.

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Grounded is available in Early Access/Xbox Game Preview as of July 28, on Xbox One and PC. It became available on the Xbox Series X and S on November 10, 2020. It’s also on the Xbox Game Pass at the time of publishing this article for both Xbox One and PC.