The GRAIN ROT descent: elevator, Grinder and the Corrupted

§1

The shape of a run

Confirmed

A run begins on a cursed elevator that carries the crew down from the Outpost into shifting underground ruins. What you find there is furniture: breakable, carryable, and worth gold once it is fed to the Grinder. What finds you is the Corrupted — vessels like yours that the Rot has taken, reacting to sound, movement and each other in ways the developers openly describe as impossible to predict.

The failure state is collective. If every member of the crew breaks, the run loses its loot, which is what makes a teammate blocking a corridor a tactical event rather than a joke. The store description frames this as a design decision rather than a bug: extraction is a shared risk, and the Grinder only pays out for what actually reaches the elevator on the way back up.

The nine features the publisher lists for the game describe the same loop from a systems angle: vessel possession and swapping, physics-driven co-op extraction horror, tactical carpentry with interactive furniture, procedurally shifting underground dungeons, persistent Outpost rebuilding, cursed emotes, rescuing survivors in the Deep Layers, body corruption and mutation, and cosmetics. Every one of those nine pillars shows up somewhere on this ledger; none of them is expanded with numbers the developers have not themselves published.

View from a wood-panelled room into a lit metal elevator car where two vessels wait, one with a glowing magenta chest core and one in dark armour with a green core; the player’s clawed tool is raised at the right. — **Store frame 8 — the cursed elevator**Two vessels wait inside the lit elevator car, one with a glowing magenta chest core and one in dark armour with a green core, moments before the doors close on a run.

Source — Steam appdetails about_the_game.

§2

Reading the HUD

Read from screenshots

No controls page or HUD legend has been published, so this table is read directly off the eleven official store screenshots rather than off any developer documentation. Six readouts recur across the frames that show combat or elevator moments, and all six are listed once here rather than repeated per screenshot.

Close-quarters combat with motion blur and orange sparks: damage numbers 14!, 7 and 12 float off a struck Corrupted, the HUD reads 78 health and 105 energy, and the lower-right prompts read Grab on the mouse button, Build on Tab and Eject on R. — **Store frame 6 — close-quarters combat readout**Damage numbers 14!, 7 and 12 float off a struck Corrupted; the HUD reads 78 health and 105 energy, and the lower-right prompts read Grab on the mouse button, Build on Tab and Eject on R — the only official frame that shows all three prompts together.

On-screen readouts visible in the 1.0 screenshots
Readout	Position	Observed
Health	Bottom left, red cross	100 in lit chambers, 78 mid-fight, 30 in the drum corridor
Energy	Bottom left, yellow bolt	Separate bar: 140 in the Outpost, 105 in combat
Hotbar	Bottom centre	Four numbered slots; a pistol in one frame, a saw weapon in another
Damage numbers	On the target	7, 12 and an emphasised 14! in one exchange
Nameplates	Above each crewmate	POLAR, GRAPES, CLOUDZ, JERRY, BUBBLES, TRUTHINGTON — one colour each
Prompts	Bottom right	Grab on the mouse, Build on Tab, Eject on R

Eject on R is the line worth marking: it separates the Spark from its body, which the developers describe both as a survival move and as a way to launch a teammate out of theirs. Sparks & Vessels takes it from there, including what the store's own gameplay clip shows about which hosts exist beyond the wooden default.

Source — Official store screenshots 1, 3, 6 and 11; no controls page has been published.

§3

The Corrupted and the Rot

Confirmed, unnamed

The Corrupted are vessels the Rot has taken. The developers commit to exactly one behavioural claim: they react to sound, to movement and to each other, and the interaction of those three is deliberately unpredictable. Nobody at the studio has given an enemy a name, a health value, an attack pattern or a weakness — and the 1.0 announcement adds "new enemies", "elite encounters" and "boss encounter" as categories without naming one.

Depth is the difficulty dial. The deeper the crew goes, the worse the Rot gets: bodies warp, voices distort, emotes change. Two of the 21 launch additions push directly on that pressure — two new biomes with dedicated ambience music, and new elevator modifiers that change a run before it starts. Both are developer-listed scope items rather than numbers, so this ledger records them as areas of the game that changed at 1.0 rather than as a difficulty curve with values attached.

That is why this sheet has no bestiary. Named rosters circulate elsewhere; the wikis publishing them state in their own pages that the names are unverified, which the evidence audit on What is confirmed works through in full, alongside the exact route count the largest of those competing wikis publishes.

First-person view down a dark plank corridor toward a distant lit opening while the player holds a marching drum, orange note marks flying from the beaters; the HUD reads 30 health and 100 energy with the Grab, Build and Eject prompts at the lower right. — **Store frame 11 — cursed emotes in a plank corridor**A crewmate beats a marching drum down a plank corridor at 30 health, with something standing in the lit doorway at the end. Cursed emotes are on the official feature list, and the Corrupted are described as reacting to exactly this kind of sound.

Source — Steam appdetails about_the_game; 1.0 scope list of 14 July 2026.

§4

Contact sheet — what is down there

5 official frames

With no roster published, the publisher's own frames are the reliable record. Each of the five frames below is a distinct official scene pulled from the eleven store screenshots, in the order Steam itself lists them. Click a frame to bring it up on the stage above the strip; the caption states only what the frame actually shows, quoting the HUD numbers and nameplates where they are legible rather than guessing at anything outside it.

Three player vessels with the nameplates POLAR, GRAPES and CLOUDZ face a tall spiked Corrupted holding a flail in a dark stone chamber lit by wall lamps; the first-person weapon fires from the lower right and the HUD reads 100 health and 100 energy.

Frame 1 of 5 — Spiked Corrupted, store frame 1Four crew vessels — POLAR, GRAPES and CLOUDZ are named over their heads — hold a lit chamber against a much taller Corrupted with a spiked crown and a flail arm. Health and energy both read 100.

01

02

03

04

05

Frames 1, 2 and 3 show three visually distinct Corrupted archetypes at three different ranges — melee flail, sawtooth lure and a ranged robed figure — which is as close to a bestiary as the published material gets this week. Frame 9 shows a threat waiting in an unlit doorway rather than attacking, with the Rot's colour fringing visible on the pipework; frame 10 shows the consequence side, two players reduced to Sparks while another vessel remains embodied.

Source — Steam store screenshots, App ID 4450620, in the order the store lists them.