Best Weapons in Grounded

Discover the top melee and ranged weapons in Grounded. Learn about the Toenail Scimitar, Widow Dagger, Rusty Spear, Insect Bow, Black Ox Crossbow, and Sour Staff for easier combat.

To keep things fairly simple, we’ll be covering the best melee and ranged weapons in Grounded to give you a good idea of what you should be aiming for to make your combat experiences in the game much easier. We won’t list them in any particular order because each one of them can be more useful than another in a specific situation, depending both on your playstyle and the type of creature that you’re fighting.

You’ll notice that we include two or more weapons for each category. This is because there are often at least two weapons which are so similar in performance that it becomes difficult to discern which one is better. In these cases, the better weapon is entirely dependant on the use case scenario, which we’ll cover in each category.

Fastest One-Handed Melee Weapons

Toenail Scimitar / Widow Dagger / Rusty Spear

These are three of our favorite weapons because they all combine speed and damage in a deadly way, while also providing good stamina management. The Widow Dagger is particularly underrated, perhaps due to its modest visual appearance, but don’t let that fool you. This little dagger can inflict massive amounts of damage in a short space of time, and it will also apply poison damage over time. If nothing else, this dagger feels the fastest out of all the other weapons to us, but its real value comes from the way it manages stamina consumption while doing this. If you compare it with other weapons, you can inflict similar amounts of damage to one or more enemies while retaining a lot of stamina. There is also no pause in the combo animations, allowing you to spam attacks without interruption until your foe is dead. The same is true of the Rusty Spear, but you won’t be able to execute as many attacks before you stamina is depleted.

To provide a clear comparison, the Toenail Scimitar allows you to execute just 13 regular strikes before your stamina is entirely depleted. The Rusty Spear allows you to execute a more impressive 20, but the Widow Dagger allows for 26. If you consider each weapon only in these terms, you might assume that the Widow Dagger is the best out of all three in any scenario. That would be true if you just want to slash through multiple enemies or one large enemy with as many hits as possible, but you should also consider the fact that both the Rusty Spear and Toenail Scimitar inflict slightly greater damage per hit than the Widow Dagger, which can be useful if you’re only fighting enemies which will die before you run out of stamina anyway. For longer duration fights, the Widow Dagger may be more useful, but this gets more complicated when you factor in the possibility of consuming stamina by sprinting to avoid incoming attacks from enemies.

Another thing that should be taken into consideration when choosing which of these weapons might be more useful for you is the damage types. The Rusty Spear and Toenail Scimitar both inflict infection (also known as rust) damage, while the Widow Dagger inflicts poison. You’ll need to look at the weaknesses of each enemy type that you encounter to decide which is more useful. In addition, the Rusty Spear deals stabbing damage, while the Widow Dagger and Toenail Scimitar deal slashing damage, each of which can be more effective against specific enemies.

Ultimately our preference here is the Widow Dagger, simply because it allows you to slash at enemies for a longer period than nearly any other weapon. You may feel like a bit of a glass cannon as you do this, but it’s worth it as you see enemy health bars ripped to shreds in seconds.

Most Powerful Ranged Weapons

Insect Bow / Black Ox Crossbow / Sour Staff

Now for a completely different playstyle. If you prefer to play as someone who focuses on inflicting ranged damage rather than getting up close and personal with all those nasty bugs, there are three main options available to you: Bows, Crossbows, and Staffs. Of all three weapon types, our picks are the Insect Bow, Black Ox Crossbow, and Sour Staff. Although each of these are ranged weapons, they are quite different in terms of their handling and potential damage output.

The Insect Bow is likely to be the first decent ranged weapon that you can craft, so you’ll have plenty of time to play with this and get used to its capabilities. It inflicts decent damage with reasonable speed, and it provides you with versatility in terms of damage output type since you can craft different types of arrows for it such as Gas Arrows, Venom Arrows, Spicy Arrows, Mint Arrows, Salt Arrows, Sour Arrows, Bomb Arrows, and even Lure Arrows. Each of these will be useful depending on the type of enemy that you’re fighting, so be sure to check