Why the labels exist
GRAIN ROT launched on 7 August 2026 and within days had more than a dozen guide sites covering it. Most were generated automatically. They contain invented weapon names, invented enemy names, invented gold values and invented mechanics — and they contradict each other, because none of it came from the game.
The problem that creates for a player is not that the information is wrong. It is that you cannot tell which parts are wrong. So the first thing this site does is separate the two, visibly, on every page:
Official means it comes from a Valve or Steam API, the Steam store page, the official patch notes, an official developer post, or the studio's own site. These are quoted rather than paraphrased wherever the exact wording matters.
Community means players report it consistently but it has never been confirmed by the developers. It is often correct and often useful. It is not the same kind of claim, so it does not get the same styling.
The order we trust sources in
- Valve and Steam directly — the store API, the Deck compatibility endpoint, the official news API, the store page itself.
- The developers — patch notes, Steam community posts, and beckandbranchgames.se.
- The publisher's press release, where multiple outlets reprinted identical wording.
- Players — Steam discussions and reviews, labelled as such.
Other guide sites are not on that list at any position. We read them to see which questions players are asking; we do not take facts from them.
Corrections we have already made
A verification policy is only worth as much as the things it catches. Three from the first week:
- Steam Deck. Sites describe GRAIN ROT as "pending" review, or as Playable, or as Unsupported. Valve's own compatibility endpoint returns no rating at all — the game has not been tested. That is a different answer from all three. See the Steam Deck page.
- Public matchmaking. Guides written in release week say GRAIN ROT has none. Patch 1.07 on 12 August added a public server browser and password-protected servers. See how many players.
- Loot values. Several sites publish exact gold figures per item. None of them agree, and none cite a source. We publish the rule that actually decides value instead, and say plainly why the table is empty. See the loot value database.
What we will not do
- Invent names or numbers. If the developers have not published an enemy name, a weapon stat or an achievement list, the page says so. Several names circulating as fact — Emberheart, Rusted Cleaver, the "Corruption Meter" — appear in no official material and are not used here.
- Reprint other sites. Everything here is written from primary sources.
- Touch piracy. We do not write about unauthorised copies, do not link to sites distributing them, and do not build pages targeting those searches. The game is $9.99 and made by two people.
- Claim to be official. We are not affiliated with Beck & Branch Games or Neem Interactive in any way.
How this site is kept current
GRAIN ROT shipped seven patches in its first five days, so anything written once and left alone goes stale fast. The patch notes archive is imported from Steam's official news feed by a script rather than transcribed by hand, so new posts arrive as the developers wrote them. One limitation worth stating: the importer adds new posts and leaves existing files alone, so if the developers later edit a post we have already imported, our copy keeps the original wording until someone re-imports it. Every entry links back to the Steam post, which is always the current version. Every page carries the date it was last checked, and pages affected by a patch are updated when that patch lands.
Dated figures — review counts, prices during a sale, live events — are shown with the date they were read, because they will change.
Found something wrong?
Email contact@grainrot.cc and it gets fixed, with the page's date updated so you can see it happened. If a claim on this site does not have a source you can check, that is a bug in the page, not a detail — please report it the same way.
First-hand detail is just as welcome as corrections. Several pages here say plainly that nobody has worked something out yet — how the Corrupted Elite fight actually goes, what the glint tiers are worth, whether the game runs well on a Steam Deck. If you know, we would rather publish your account with your name on it than keep guessing.
Trademarks
GRAIN ROT is a trademark of its respective owners. Beck & Branch Games and Neem Interactive are named here descriptively, to identify the game this site covers. No affiliation or endorsement is claimed or implied.