Grounded 2's fire bricks show up in quite a few new crafting recipes, including those for the diving suit. You need that to explore the pond's depths and reach the abyss area, but Grounded 2 is in no hurry to show you how to make fire bricks. You need to scan a resource that, depending on how much exploring you've done, you might not even know exists. You'll also need a new processing station.
Below, we show you how to get fire bricks in Grounded 2, including how to unlock the fire brick recipe and all the prep work required to make them.
How to get the fire bricks recipe in Grounded 2
To unlock the fire brick recipe, you'll need to scan a piece of phantom quartz. Phantom quartz is a new item introduced in the "Into the Abyss" update, a pink gemstone that appears under and around the dead oak tree in the Gnarly Bark region. There's quite a lot of it in the cave-like hollow under the tree, and you can enter it from the northeast side, near one of the rubber duck points of interest.
However, make sure you're prepared for combat, as the tree hollow is a dangerous place. Diving bell spiders infest the waters there, and their attacks inflict venom. There are several phantom quartz deposits underwater here, but stay out of the water unless you have a spear or already scanned the pond jockey and built a harpoon gun. Grounded 2 won't let you use any other weapons while swimming.
The situation on land isn't much better, as pincher and whipper earwigs stalk the area around the phantom quartz deposits. And in the area around the oak, you'll likely run into striped bark scorpions. They behave similarly to their northern scorpion brethren, only they deal more damage, and the O.R.C. variants have lasers on their stingers. Fun!
Anyhow, you also need your omni-hammer upgraded to the third tier to bust and harvest the quartz. Once you're ready for a possible fight and have your hammer in order, head under the tree and bust up some quartz. Head back to a ranger station and scan it to unlock the fire brick recipe.
How to make fire bricks in Grounded 2
Crafting fire bricks requires:
- 4 chunks of clay
- 1 stack of crushed quartz
- An oven
You can only get crushed quartz by feeding phantom quartz into the quern. If you don't have that station unlocked already, it becomes available automatically after your brainpower level — raised by scanning new items — reaches 11. Building it calls for sturdy quartzite, which you can find, among other places, in the War-Torn Anthill on the path to the garden alongside plenty of brittle quartzite.
Note that the oven is not the same as the thing you cook meals in. That's the cookery, in Grounded 2's language. The oven is essentially a kiln, and you only unlock that by collecting the Hedge Turbo Disk. It's in the northeast corner of the Fire Pit region, an area full of spider webs and guarded by a wolf spider. You can make it through on foot or with your ant buggy, but we strongly recommend using the orb weaver buggy just to make it a bit easier.