Deep Rock Galactic is turning six years old!

It seems like just yesterday that we watched our little game take its first steps. Just a blink of an eye, and the years whizz past... now, we’ll watch from the window with teary eyes, as our six-year-old game hops on the bus all by itself for its very first day at school.

Anyway, we’re throwing a party! The 'Six Years in Orbit' Anniversary Celebrations kick off on February 28th at 13:00 CET, and the event will run until March 14th at 13:00 CET.

Let's check out what the party’s packin’.


After six years of trials, R&D has officially cleared the new MK6 Armor Set for limited field testing. And as part of this Anniversary celebration, you’ll have the unique opportunity to earn this cutting-edge new armor, months ahead of schedule!

The MK6 Armor Experimental Trials assignment will give you permanent access to the MK6 suit for all four classes.

This assignment is time-limited, however – if you don’t complete it by the time the celebration ends, you won’t be able to snag the MK6 armor until it rolls out for general release in Season 05! At that point, it'll become available in the Accessory Shop, like the other armors.

A good party requires party hats. And a party hat requires an assignment, because Deep Rock Galactic is a business, not a charity. Complete the Anniversary Bonus assignment, and you’ll unlock the delightfully wobbly Party Hat - Year Six balloon top hat. As with all our anniversary hats, this one is a rare time-limited opportunity.


Left over from Mission Control’s nephew’s 6th birthday party. Keep it away from anything pointy.

We’re adding a little monitor over by the Assignment Board that displays a countdown until a current seasonal event ends. This should make it easier for everybody to check how much time’s left to complete some assignments, or enjoy the decorations!

We’ll be keeping this monitor for all future time-limited events.

Ignore the date displayed on the screen there, that was just for a test. We’re not running this event for a year and a half.

As usual, you’ll have the opportunity to earn a Double Performance Pass Bonus! Collect the glittering Year 6 Anniversary Trophy while you’re down in the caves, and your whole crew will earn double experience for that mission.

After a long negotiation process, the Interplanetary Miner’s Union has reached an agreement with Management to run an open tab at the Abyss Bar for the entirety of this event.

You read that right: Two weeks of free beer.

This policy represents a significant financial risk to the company, as every beer poured puts a dent in the next corporate earnings report. Management requests that all dwarves drink responsibly.


The Space Rig’s got to look the part for this momentous occasion, so we’re giving it the full celebrity treatment. Expect tinsel, confetti, sparklers, champagne towers, chandeliers (borrowed from the estate of Mission Control’s grandmother), and a black marble dance floor at the Abyss Bar. You’ll think they sent a Waldorf Astoria to space. Black tie attire optional.


The celebrations start on Wednesday, February 28th at 13:00 CET. See you there!

With Love,
-The Ghost Ship Crew

Patch Notes: S04.15 (96589 - 20/02/2024)


Due to demands from the Miners Union, Hunters can now Rock and Stone during prop hunt. We also fixed a pretty bad crash caused by losing a mission with bare arms, how humiliating!

With Love,
The Ghost Ship Crew

- Options: Added more space for percentage text for volume sliders
- Fixed a bug that caused Boomstick mod ‘Improved Shockwave’ tooltip showing 0 damage.
- Prop Hunt: Hunters can now rock & stone
- Prop Hunt: Fixed a bug that caused the bio tank prop to hover above the floor
- Removed a visible box surrounding Engineers Lure Grenade
- Fixed a crash when failing a mission while wearing sleeveless armor

Happy February Maintenance Update day! For this one, we’ve focused on the bugs and issues that got the most community upvotes in our PleaseFix portal. In case you haven’t heard of that, it’s the best way to report and document bugs you come across in the game.

Okay, enough chit-chat. Let’s dive into the patch notes.

With Love,
-The Ghost Ship Crew




Fun stuff first: We’ve got a brand new brew up in the Abyss Bar!

Next time you mosey on over to the bar, you’ll find that Lloyd is ready to pour up a round of delicious Hidden Dwarf Double IPA.

After teasing it last week, it's been fun to see everybody’s speculations on what this beer does.

Some people speculated that it gives you Barrel Armor. This is not the case.
Others guessed that it transforms you into a barrel. This is partially correct.
A few thought they’d heard the Hydengözik Brewery name before. They have. Sort of.

So how can we describe this tantalizing new beverage? Well, to best experience the transformative flavor of Hidden Dwarf, we recommend you gather a few pals and order a round together.

You’ll find that it starts a prop hunt mode on the Space Rig. :)



- Fixed Hyper Propellant OC working incorrectly with T4A Homebrew Explosive mod. This mod was only supposed to affect the actual explosion, therefore these changes have been made to make it more clear:

• The ‘Homebrew Explosive‘ mode has been changed to only affect radial damage on the weapon’s projectile.
  
• Therefore, it should no longer affect upgrades that do direct damage, such as the Spiky Grenade modification or the direct damage of the Hyper Propellant OC.
  
• Prior to the change, Homebrew Explosive had no effect on neither direct nor area damage of Hyper Propellant.

- Fixed a bug with the Cryo Cannon's T5A ‘Fragile’ mod, where shattered enemies didn’t die as expected on higher hazards
- Fixed a bug causing the Shard Diffractor’s ‘Bio-Mass Converter’ mod to not work for clients
- Fixed a bug with the Turret Arc OC where the electric damage bonus from Gemini turrets didn’t cause any additional damage when used with some other weapons
- Fixed a bug causing Turret EM Discharge OC to not proc at certain angles
- Fixed a bug that caused the Stubby’s ‘Upgraded Capacitors’ mod to roll two proc attempts with a 25% chance, instead of one roll with a 50% chance to proc. Basically, now there’s a higher chance to proc the electric effect



As discussed in the preview post, we’ve cooked up a few tweaks to make enemy armor behave more consistently, and give more incentive to pick the ‘Armor Breaking’ modification on your weapons.

- Fixed a bug where projectiles for the Deepcore 40mm PGL, DRAK-25, and Hurricane could hit an enemy and break the armor, but not damage the enemy in the same hit. This is a big day for Hyper Propellant enjoyers
- Fixed a longstanding bug where Heavy Armor (as found on the Praetorian) did not scale in accordance with Hazard level.
- Fixed a bug where the Boomstick’s ‘Improved Blast Wave’ mod did not deal damage to armor. The shockwave now uses radial damage instead of custom damage, so it should work against armor now.



- Fixed a bug that caused Nayaka Trawlers (AKA sand sharks) to not target players unless damaged by players
- Fixed a bug that let players spam-deposit the same Kursite chunk over and over again, cheesing the Kursite Grinder event
- Fixed that Dreadnoughts were teleporting for clients in certain situations
- Fixed that Molly’s escape button would not appear in Industrial Sabotage missions if you completed the Contagion Spike cleaning objective last
- Fixed an issue where some AoE attacks themselves could be affected by status effects
- Fixed an issue that sometimes caused sleeves to not match the player’s loadout when displayed in the mission end screen
- Fixed a bug with doors on the Space Rig getting de-synced between players
- Fixed a bug where Mission Control would repeat On-Site Refining objective voiceline
- Fixed that the Grappling Hook would immediately pull Scout (ignoring the ‘casting’ time) when using Jet Boots
- Fixed a bug with the server list that caused Hazard 5 missions to always appear even when they should be locked, leading to new players accidentally joining Hazard 5 (lol)
- Fixed a bug that caused Bosco skins and frameworks to appear in Cargo Crates instead of the Lost Packs as intended.



- Experience earned for Weapon Maintenance skin rewards now carries over to other unlock levels. Now you can earn everything without having to check in and ‘redeem’ stuff you’ve already unlocked. A more detailed description is available in the preview post
- Reorganized the audio options, so there’s a stronger visual indicator that the ‘Character’ & ‘Mission Control’ volume sliders are both subject to the ‘Sound Effects’ volume slider
- The menu’s Audio tab now has a ‘Steam settings’ button for easier access to Steam’s own audio settings
- Renamed the Merch tab in the menu to “DRG Universe” and added a new module for Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
- Got the Miner Community terminal's Discord integration to work more consistently (still can be a bit wonky, but at least it's better)
- Adding a small monitor near the Assignment Board that displays a countdown until a current seasonal event ends. This will first be visible during this year’s Anniversary Event. More on that real soon!



- Fixed some, probably made some new ones

Holy Hoxxes, how the months fly by! It’s nearly time for the next maintenance update for Deep Rock Galactic.

When we published our roadmap update in October 2023, we scheduled this second maintenance update for March 2024. But it’s done early! So we’re launching it here in February instead. And in a stroke of unprecedented creative genius, we’re calling it the February Maintenance Update.

We’ve been monitoring the bug reports on our PleaseFix portal, and for this update we've prioritized the issues that had the most community upvotes in there. Just like last time, we’re looking to fix and improve some features in the game – but we also couldn’t resist throwing in a fun little something extra. :)

The February Maintenance Update goes live on Monday, February 19th at 13:00 CET.

In this post, we'll take a look at some of the update's highlights!

We're also doing a live preview of the update, including a read-through of the complete patch notes, on our official Twitch channel on Thursday, February 15th starting at 13:00 CET. The recording will be available after, in case you're not able to tune in. We'll also share the full patch notes here on Steam when the update lands on the 19th.

Please keep in mind: this is not an exhaustive list of everything that's coming. There will be plenty more smaller tweaks and fixes beyond what we're mentioning here. This is just some of the bigger stuff.


One big focus for this update is enemy armor properties, and the armor breaking mechanic.
Don’t tell anybody, but this hasn’t actually worked quite as we intended since the game launched. hehe



This is a fix in two parts:

1. We're making it so the strength of Heavy Armor (like that on Praetorians) now scales properly with Hazard level. It never used to do this -- so the Heavy Armor on a Haz 2 Praetorian would be just as strong as it is on a Haz 5 Praetorian, for example. Light Armor has always scaled properly, though. But now the same works for Heavy Armor, so the beefy boys are getting a bit of beef back.
   
2. We've taken a look at the 'Armor Breaking' modification, as it's been inconsistent on some weapons. This mostly affected projectile weapons like the Deepcore 40mm PGL, or the Hurricane Guided Rocket System (which fire an actual physical object, unlike most other weapons in DRG, which are just hitscan). Now, when those projectiles strike a piece of armor and deal enough damage to destroy it, they will do so -- and, they will also deal full damage to the squishy bug meat underneath. This wasn't the case previously, and projectile weapons without the 'Armor Breaking' mod won't get that same advantage.

TL;DR - This will make it so Heavy Armor is a little more difficult to break on higher Hazard levels, but it will also mean that it behaves more consistently across all difficulties, and in response to different weapons. Plus, it creates more of an incentive to pick 'Armor Breaking' modifications on your weapons.


Another thing we've seen quite often on our PleaseFix portal is the issue with teleporting Dreadnoughts. Basically, a Dreadnought can sometimes zap to another location during a fight, making you miss your shots or teleporting the thing right in your face without warning. Either way, not ideal.

It basically only happens on the client end, and often depends on your latency with the host. So while this issue may have been rare for some of you, it's been aggravatingly frequent for others.

Anyway, we've spent a good chunk of time addressing this, so the days of the Surprise Dreadnought will soon be a thing of the past. Hopefully.


When we added the Weapon Maintenance system in November, the XP tracker would only reset to the next unlock level once you went in and claimed the weapon skin reward that you earned.

Some miners pointed out that this creates some possibilities to "waste" or miss out on earned XP that should otherwise have counted toward further progress. Fair point! We're fixing it.


We're making it so that the Weapon Maintenance system will count XP up to the maximum of what it'd take to claim all paintjobs for all weapons. This means that in theory, you'll now be able to unlock every single paintjob for every weapon, without ever checking the terminal, then go in and claim them all in one go. If you earned enough XP for that, of course.

A note here - The terminal will only track XP up to what's needed to unlock all existing paintjobs. So if you unlock everything, you can't "bank" all the XP you earn after that. When Season 05 arrives and the new Weapon Maintenance paintjobs come with it, you'll still need to earn those like usual.


For some time now, the Miner Community terminal on the Space Rig hasn't really worked so well. This made it very difficult to join the a chapter of the Interplanetary Miner’s Union, organize with other unionized miners on Discord, and collect union benefits.

While Management was very pleased with this situation, the Interplanetary Miner’s Union has threatened to strike. To avoid this, we've rolled up our sleeves to get the machine working again. We actually did this a few weeks ago, but it seemed relevant to mention it here.



Now, the terminal should more reliably allow you to join a union chapter, receive the chapter tag on our Discord, and check in to collect rewards for completing community milestones. You’ll need to have Discord running while you’re playing, though.

The terminal may still run into a hiccup now and again, because when we set it up, we didn't expect several hundred thousand people joining our Discord. It's a good problem to have, though. If your terminal still isn't working, please reach out to your union chapter representative.


For those who want more communication options than the ‘V’ key (though we can’t imagine why), we’re making it easier to access Steam’s general settings from within DRG’s own settings menu. That'll make it easier to get to the voice options and tinker with them.

Nothing groundbreaking here, just some simple QoL stuff. We hope it’ll be helpful for those of you that like to use it.


There’s a new beer coming to the Abyss Bar!

It’s called Hidden Dwarf Double IPA. We haven’t got the kegs shipped up to the Space Rig quite yet, so we haven’t had a chance to taste it. But we’re able to share a picture of the label, plus a description from the vendor:



Side note: this week also marks the Early Access launch of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and SpellRogue!

These were developed by Funday Games and Guidelight Games respectively, and published via Ghost Ship Publishing. We’re very proud to help bring these games out into the world, and we’re super excited to hear what you think.

You can check out both games down below:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2321470/Deep_Rock_Galactic_Survivor/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1990110/SpellRogue/

Both games' developers will be joining us live on Twitch this week! Funday Games will join us on Thursday the 15th, and Guidelight Games will be there on Friday the 16th. We'll go live at 13:00 CET on both days.

That’s all for now! Hope everybody’s doing well.
We’ll be back real soon with the full patch notes, plus some more fun stuff to share. :)

With Love,
-The Ghost Ship Crew

We’re here with a quick cross-promotional spotlight: two new games are launching to Early Access this month via Ghost Ship Publishing!

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is coming out on February 14th, and SpellRogue is coming two days earlier on February 12th.

Granted, we’re a bit of a biased source here, but we think both games are super cool. We’ve got both trailers down below, plus links to each game’s Steam page. Check ‘em out!




Made by: Funday Games (Aarhus, Denmark)
For fans of: Vampire Survivors, Brotato, Soulstone Survivors

Welcome to Deep Rock Galactic’s roguelike auto-shooter spinoff! Like always, you’re going down to Hoxxess to mine minerals and blast bugs. But this time, you’re going solo. Become a one-dwarf army, wield four guns at once and stack overclocks on top of each other, so you can survive the worst that Hoxxes throws at you.

Anders, founder & CCO of Funday Games, says: "We wanted to make a version of DRG without everyone's favorite part – the co-op multiplayer. It's risky business mining Hoxxes alone, but it's a risk we're willing to bet your life on."
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor launches to Early Access on February 14th.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2321470/Deep_Rock_Galactic_Survivor

--



Made by: Guidelight Games (Copenhagen, Denmark)
For fans of: Slay the Spire, Dicey Dungeon, Monster Train

Fan of roguelikes? Have a gambler’s brain? Love casting spells? Meet SpellRogue. It’s a deck-building roguelike with turn-based combat, where you roll (and re-roll) your Mana Dice to power spells and take down the vicious Voidwalkers. Build up a beefy deck of spells and luck out with powerful Artifacts and Rituals, and you might just get strong enough to take out the big bad space squid at the end.

Here's from Tim, co-founder of Guidelight Games: "SpellRogue is for all the dice lovers out there, and anyone who loves a roguelike with a big focus on a variety of intricate builds. If your brain lights up when you string together crazy combos, or when you get lucky with an unstoppable class build, you'll like this one!"

SpellRogue hits Early Access on February 12th.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1990110/SpellRogue/


That's all for now. Rock and Stone, you beautiful dwarves!

With Love,
-The Ghost Ship Crew

The Lunar Festival is now live in Deep Rock Galactic! We're bringing it back for the Year of the Dragon. We look forward to a peaceful coexistence between dragons, dwarves, and caves full of gold.

You'll find some new assignments (and their fashionable rewards) now live in the Mission Terminal, and Management worked through the night to decorate the Space Rig for the occasion. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to get fresh persimmons in space?

All Deep Rock Galactic employees are encouraged to partake in this optional company event. Failure to attend will be noted in next year's salary negotiations.

Here's what's on the menu for the Festival:

• Earn the new Enter the Dragon hat! It's both draconic and iconic.
  
• Collect previous exclusive headgear with the Last Year's Blessings assignment!
  
• Rescue the lost Lunar Festival Dragons! We'll give you an XP bonus for your troubles.
  
• Throw fireworks at your friends! In the game. Please don't do this in real life

The Festival ends on Thursday, February 15th at 13:00 CET.
So don't go dragon your feet on this one!

[HOLD FOR APPLAUSE]

Ah, another perfect joke. Thanks everyone.
Have fun!

With Love,
-The Ghost Ship Crew

Sorry this post comes a few days late -- we got caught up rewatching our favorite movie, Crouching Miner, Hidden Dragon. Also I had influenza.

Anyway, the Lunar Festival is coming back for 2024! We've freshened up this seasonal event to ring in the Year of the Dragon, and we're bringing you a fresh crop of collectibles, delightful decorations and fun hats.

This year’s Lunar Festival begins on Thursday, February 1st at 13:00 CET, and it runs until Thursday, February 15th at 13:00 CET.

Here’s what’s in store!



First thing’s first: the cool new hat. We’re welcoming the Year of the Dragon with this dashing new headgear, which features a movable jaw, wiggly whiskers and googly eyes to distract your foes. It’s called Enter the Dragon, because your head enters it when you put it on. Smart, right? Complete the hat’s seasonal assignment, and it’s yours to keep.


If you slept through 2023 and 2022 (Years of the Rabbit and Tiger, respectively), you’ve still got the chance to snag the hats from those previous Lunar Festivals. As always, we’re bringing them back as rewards for the Last Year’s Blessings assignment! Get it done, and you’ll be a couple hats richer.


We’ve received word that a reckless Longbeard courier has lost countless Lunar Festival Dragons in the depths of Hoxxes. These golden statues are of tremendous symbolic value, so we’re contracting you to retrieve them. Dig up and deposit a dragon during a mission, and your whole team will earn a Double Mission Performance Point Bonus!


Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper Lunar Festival if the Space Rig didn’t look the part. When the event starts, you’ll find the Rig dressed to the nines with festive banners, glowing paper lanterns, ripe persimmons and traditional charms galore. We’ve also stocked the Rig with a generous amount of firecrackers. Please don’t use them while other dwarves are sleeping.

The festival begins this Thursday at 13:00 CET. Hope to see you there!

With Love,
-The Ghost Ship Crew

We hope your new year is off to a delightful start. We also hope that one of your 2024 resolutions was "consume more infographics," because that's exactly what we're here to share!

2023 was a terrific year for Deep Rock Galactic, and for the crew at Ghost Ship Games too. We decided to recap the year (as usual) by digging deep in the data mines, and pulling up the most exciting, interesting, exciting, and silly statistics we could find, to understand Deep Rock Galactic by the numbers.

If you've ever wondered about:

• The leading cause of death for dwarves on Hoxxes
  
• Where Deep Rock Galactic sits on the list of best-reviewed games on Steam
  
• How many times the average dwarf passes out drunk at the Abyss Bar per year

We've got all that below, plus bucketfuls of more fun facts and data! Give it a look.

Hope everybody's doing well, and thanks for such a fun year!
We're looking forward to 2024, and the big bold horizon beyond. :)

Rock and Stone!

With Love,
The Ghost Ship Crew

Great news: we fixed the hat!

To celebrate our nomination for the Steam Awards last month, we announced a sweet new hat: the Jagged Bugbasher! It was supposed to come out shortly after the initial blog post, but something about the hat made the whole game crash for anyone running older Ryzen CPUs.

After a bit of tinkering, we got the hat working now. We're not really sure why, or how, but it works.
So now you can grab it!

Pictured: An ancient helmet imbued with a strange and powerful aura. Legends say it contains the power to tear apart the very fabric of the world. Or at least to overheat a few CPUs.

All you've got to do is log in to Deep Rock Galactic before January 29th at 13:00 CET to claim it. It's not available for consoles quite yet, but we expect to have it out with the next patch, likely in the coming week.

Great! That's all sorted. Now to take a biiiiig sip of coffee, and check to see who won the 'Labor of Love' award!

With Love,
The Ghost Ship Crew

Patch Notes: S04.13 (build 94396 - 04/01/2024)

Hello Miners,

We have Identified our pre-xmas crash to be related to older gen Ryzen CPU’s. We have attempted some fixes, but adding additional logging, just in case the fixes do not work.

With Love,
The Ghost Ship Crew

--- PATCH NOTES ---
- Attempt at fixes crash for older gen Ryzen CPU’s
- Added additional logging

Changes from S04.12:
- Fixed a Steam Socket issue that caused networking not network in some rare cases.