Borderlands 4 It Grows Below Walkthrough
From the moment you enter the Hollows beneath Kairos, the game signals that this is not going to behave like a conventional Borderlands encounter. Lighting becomes uneven, audio feedback gains a subtle echo, and the space itself feels less like a mined cave system and more like something that has been partially grown rather than carved. The mission quietly shifts your expectations before any combat even begins.
Entering the Hollows: The First Signs of Something Wrong
The mission begins at a sealed industrial access point on the surface, where Ellie's investigation has traced anomalous biological readings beneath the ice. The descent into the Hollows is linear in pathing but vertical in structure, which already creates a sense of instability. You are constantly dropping, climbing, and grappling through overlapping layers of abandoned mining infrastructure.
What is important here is not difficulty but pacing. The game deliberately avoids overwhelming you with enemies early on. Instead, it lets you move through quiet spaces where environmental details become the primary source of tension. Pipes are twisted in unnatural directions, walls appear slightly organic in texture, and faint pulsing sounds seem to originate from no fixed direction.
First Combat Pressure: Controlled Swarm Encounters
Eventually, the environment begins to resist your progression more directly as you encounter early infected hostiles. These enemies are not individually threatening, but they operate in swarm logic, meaning their danger comes from positioning rather than raw damage output.
Combat in this section is designed to disrupt momentum rather than challenge mechanical skill. You are forced to shift between vertical positions, manage spacing, and avoid being surrounded in narrow cave corridors. The terrain itself becomes part of the combat design, funneling movement and limiting escape routes.
Once the area is cleared, the mission transitions into its first traversal complication: partial flooding within the cavern system.
Flooded Caverns: Navigation Over Combat
The flooded caverns mark the first major change in gameplay rhythm. Combat becomes secondary, and navigation becomes the primary challenge. Visibility drops significantly underwater, and spatial awareness becomes fragmented due to distortion effects and echoing light refraction.
You are required to alternate between swimming sections, air pockets, and grappling points embedded in cave ceilings and walls. Unlike typical underwater segments in shooter games, this area is not designed to be fast or efficient. It is deliberately slow, forcing you to interpret movement through environmental cues rather than direct sightlines.
The most important skill here is patience. The correct path is usually not hidden but obscured, meaning it exists in plain sight but is visually masked by water distortion and lighting inconsistencies.
Hallucination Event One: Breaking Environmental Trust
After exiting the flooded cavern system, the mission introduces its first major perceptual break. The hallucination sequence does not interrupt gameplay control, but it completely destabilizes visual reliability.
Structures appear duplicated or partially missing. Walls shift position when not directly observed. Sound becomes layered, with echoes that do not match physical space. Importantly, nothing in the HUD confirms that anything is wrong. The player is forced to rely on motion continuity rather than visual confirmation.
Encounter with Daphne: Narrative Stabilization Point
After the hallucination fades, you encounter Daphne, who serves as a grounding narrative presence within the mission. Her role is less about exposition dumps and more about restoring directional clarity to an otherwise unstable experience.
Daphne introduces the concept of biological sampling within the corrupted ecosystem. She explains that the growth beneath the Hollows is not simply spreading but adapting, and that physical samples are required to understand its behavior.
Organic Sampling Phase: The Ecosystem Pushes Back
The collection phase is where the mission's design becomes more systemic. Instead of discrete objectives, you are interacting with a reactive environment that responds dynamically to your actions.
Organic growths embedded in cave walls and floor structures must be destabilized to extract samples. These interactions frequently trigger enemy responses, meaning that every collection action carries immediate risk.
The key design intention here is to create a loop where exploration and combat are inseparable. You are never simply moving through space or simply fighting enemies; you are constantly triggering and responding to environmental reactions.
As you progress deeper, the ecosystem becomes more visually aggressive. Organic structures begin to resemble defensive formations rather than passive growths, suggesting that the environment itself is responding to your intrusion.
Underwater Expansion: Depth as Disorientation
Some of the sample locations require returning to submerged sections of the Hollows. These underwater expansions are more complex than earlier flood zones, featuring branching tunnels that loop back into each other in subtle ways.
The challenge here is not survival in combat terms but cognitive mapping. The environment resists easy mental reconstruction, meaning players often rely on lighting cues, oxygen rhythm, and movement flow rather than direct navigation memory.
At this stage, the mission begins to blur the distinction between exploration and psychological pressure. You are no longer simply navigating a space; you are trying to maintain a coherent understanding of it.
Hallucination Event Two: Spatial Instability
The second hallucination event escalates the instability introduced earlier. This time, the distortion affects not just visuals but spatial consistency itself. Pathways may appear to shift when revisited, and certain environmental markers may seem to migrate between locations.
Unlike the first hallucination, which was primarily perceptual, this one feels interactive. It interferes with your sense of direction while still allowing progression. The game never fully removes control, but it undermines confidence in that control.
This section reinforces a key psychological effect: the player is still progressing forward, but they can no longer fully trust their interpretation of that progression.
Returning to Daphne: Synthesis and Escalation
Once all required samples are collected, you return to Daphne, who uses an industrial synthesis device to combine the biological materials. This process produces a volatile compound intended to interact with the deeper corruption source.
This moment is structurally important because it shifts the mission from exploration to confrontation. Up to this point, the player has been gathering information and Borderlands 4 Items. Now they are preparing to directly engage the source of the anomaly.
The tone becomes noticeably heavier after this point, with environmental hostility increasing and traversal becoming more restricted.
Descent to Crazy Earl: The Collapse of Environmental Stability
The final descent into Crazy Earl's location represents the most unstable portion of the mission. Enemy density increases, organic corruption becomes more aggressive, and environmental lighting becomes increasingly erratic.
What changes most significantly here is pacing. Earlier sections allowed for observation and adjustment. This section removes that breathing room. Encounters are closer together, and environmental transitions are sharper.
The sense of moving through a coherent space begins to dissolve entirely. Instead, the environment feels like a sequence of overlapping biological chambers.
Eventually, you reach a sealed structure associated with Crazy Earl, triggering the mission's final confrontation.
Boss Encounter: Crazed Earl and the Final Collapse
The boss fight against Crazed Earl is structured in multiple phases that reflect progressive corruption.
In the first phase, Earl retains partial humanoid behavior, relying on aggressive melee strikes and short-range disruptive attacks. The arena is confined, forcing close engagement and constant movement.
As the fight progresses, his form becomes increasingly unstable, shifting into a heavily mutated organism that blends humanoid remnants with large organic mass. This phase introduces environmental hazards that alter the battlefield dynamically, forcing continuous repositioning.
Damage windows are brief and require precision rather than sustained aggression. The fight is less about overwhelming force and more about recognizing exposure moments when the boss is vulnerable.
Defeating Earl resolves the immediate threat but does not fully stabilize the environment, reinforcing the idea that the corruption is systemic rather than localized. You can also buy Borderlands 4 Boost to help you fight.
Final Thoughts
What separates "It Grows Below" from standard Borderlands mission design is its use of environmental instability as a core mechanic rather than a visual effect. Combat remains familiar, but everything surrounding combat is designed to erode certainty.
It is a mission built around descent, not just physically, but perceptually, and that is what makes it memorable.