Grounded Shared Worlds

Developer Obsidian has announced that it's testing a major new Grounded feature right now. 'Shared Worlds' are being worked on for the studio's garden survival sim, with a wider release expected soon.

In short, Shared Worlds provide the option to save your server in the cloud for friends to then download and play on, even when the creator is offline. Think of it like a persistent world that exists even when you log off! Here are the team's patch notes for the feature, currently in testing:

Secret Feature Added: Shared Worlds

You can now create a Shared World as well as the Standard Worlds you have been doing since Game Preview launch. Shared Worlds are stored in the cloud and you can share them with any of your friends so they can host that world while you are not online.

-You can own up to three Shared Worlds at any given time.
-You can have 50 worlds shared with you at any given time.
-Any Standard Worlds from before can be converted to a Shared World via the Save / Load menu.
-Any Shared World you own or have been shared with can be copied down as a local Standard World for you to play on your own.
-Shared Worlds can only be played by hosting it as a Multiplayer game.
-Only one person can host a Shared World at a time (others will be able to join the current player who is hosting).
-Any game progress that happens while anyone is hosting a Shared World will be properly restored regardless of who hosts the world next.

Potential Use Cases:

-Owner of Shared World who is hosting can logout for the day and have someone else who has the world shared with them re-host it while they are offline.
-You can use this system to share copies of save games with friends: Create a Shared copy of an existing world, share it with said friend, have them download a Standard copy of it on their end.
-If you own both a Steam copy and an Xbox / Windows Store copy, you can use this system to have a single Shared world that you can play through across all platforms.

NOTE: This feature is considered beta and could have issues and could require online shared saves to be reset / lost as bugs are ironed out. If you test this feature out with a save with lots of progress, make sure it is not the only working copy of the world you have on your account. The shared save service could also go offline at any time during this testing phase to account for issues or updates as needed.

Does this sound like a good feature for Grounded? Let us know your thoughts on it below!

[source forums.obsidian.net]