The day is finally here - the 1.0 launch of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. If you’re a new player: Welcome! Most of the update notes probably won’t mean much to you yet, but this version of DRG:S is the most approachable it’s ever been. We’ve reworked the game’s flow with clearer goals, expanded mission variety, and a deeper progression system, refined through feedback from our Early Access community. The game remains challenging, built around the push and pull of mining for power while fighting to survive.
If you find yourself stuck or facing issues, technical or gameplay ones, the fastest way to get help is by joining our Discord, where the devs and veteran players hang out: https://discord.gg/drgs
If you’re a returning player: Welcome back! And thank you so much for your support and for helping us shape the Early Access version into the game you are opening today. DRG:S fans have helped us translate, balance, test, and prioritize what features we’ve worked on for the last year and 9 months. We couldn’t ask for a better community.
Here’s what’s new in Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor 1.0:
We’ve added a new mission to the game called Escort Duty, where you are tasked with escorting B0b-33 the Drilldozer, a machine built to smash through rock, swarms of bugs, and minerals until it gets to the coveted Ommaran Heartstone. Unlike the Elimination mission, your primary objective isn’t just survival - it’s protecting and maintaining the drilldozer until it reaches its goal. B0b-33 requires constant refueling with Oil Shale, and if it runs dry, it grinds to a halt until you mine more.
The mission begins with clearing a path to the drop zone, where you must arm explosive charges to blast open a way down for your drilldozer. Once B0b-33 is safely delivered, players advance deeper into the caves, culminating in the final stage: drilling into the Ommoran Heartstone. The Heartstone’s outer shell is too strong for pickaxes, so the drilldozer is essential. However, it also triggers defensive mechanisms like laser-firing Beamers, which must be hacked down with your pickaxe before progress can continue.
Escort Duty demands new strategies. Instead of focusing on boss-killing builds, players must manage swarms while defending a mobile objective. B0b-33 itself can be used both as cover and as a weapon to mow down enemies. Pacing is crucial: the drill only moves when players stay close, giving them control over tempo but increasing swarm difficulty the longer they wait.
The full Steam post about the new mission can be found here.
With the addition of a new mission, we’ve rebuilt progression around a mission roadmap. Each mission type (Elimination and Escort Duty) now has a separate track of five sectors, with gates marking key milestones in your journey. Advancing requires clearing enough mission goals to unlock a sector gate, a special dive on the next hazard level. Beating a gate opens up the next sector.
Advancing into the next sector increases the difficulty, with more demanding objectives and added modifiers that make each dive feel unique, challenging, and rewarding. From Sector 2 onwards, missions combine a higher hazard level with unique mutators, giving each sector its own flavour and challenge curve.
Gear drops are a new system that adds depth and long-term progression. Gear can drop randomly during missions, with bosses guaranteeing a piece, and can be accessed and equipped between missions through the gear menu. Each item provides passive bonuses similar to meta upgrades, with six main types: Armor for defense, Weapon Mods for combat stats, Canisters to alter weapon effects, Gadgets for mining and collection efficiency, Tools for reload and range, and Chips that grant unique upgrades to Bosco. Some gear crosses categories or comes with quirks, which are special effects that can significantly alter playstyles, from enhancing resource potency to changing mission mechanics.
Gear comes in four rarities from Uncommon to Legendary, with higher rarities offering more stats and sometimes multiple quirks. Gear rarity odds improve as your Player Rank increases, while gear level scales with progression milestones (for example, completing your first Hazard 2 dive raises the minimum level of all feature drops. On top of that, gear can be upgraded up to three times using credits and minerals. Gear may appear weak, but stats scale dramatically, stacking with meta upgrades and multiplying with build choices. The result is a system that ensures long-term progression, meaningful decisions, and a more impactful role for Bosco.
The full Steam post about gear can be found here.
1.0 introduces save slots, so you can keep your Early Access progress and start a brand new run if you want to experience the new systems from the ground up.
With gear now carrying much of your long-term power, some of the raw stats from meta upgrades have been shifted into items. At the same time, hazard levels have been rebalanced to keep late-game challenges meaningful once your gear fills out. The result is that your old maxed-out save will feel weaker at first, and Hazard 5 will hit harder until you rebuild your strength through gear.
We recommend warming up in Hazard 3-4 while you fill your gear slots and climb back towards the higher hazards. A fresh save is entirely optional, but it can be a fun way to rediscover the early climb with all the new systems in place, offering smoother progression, more variety, and more meaningful choices right from the start.
Class mods now come with their own unique appearances, so a Recon Scout and a Sharpshooter Scout don’t just play differently, they look different as well. This gives each class mod a stronger identity and lets us add more personality to them. The skins are automatically unlocked when you acquire the class. All of these appearances, along with other cosmetic skins, can be viewed in the new Skins menu from the main screen.
With 1.0, you can now complete a total of 300 achievements. They span multiple categories: endurance challenges like completing dives or killing huge numbers of enemies, natural progression milestones such as leveling weapons or clearing high-hazard dives, and quirky tasks that require unusual playstyles. Some are punishing, like finishing a Hazard 5 dive with no gear, or surviving Hazard 3 without shopping. To top it off, 28 community-suggested achievements have been added, including clever challenges like landing on the drop pod ramp three times with jet boots or keeping all weapons at equal levels.
We’ve added a Twitch integration to the game that lets your chat:
Pick weapons
Pick overclocks
Pick lootcrates
Pick shop choices
Pick mutators
And pick level-ups
We can’t wait to see the chaos this will cause.
Automatic bug bonk
Dwarves now bonk nearby small bugs with their pickaxe, pushing them back a short distance. This helps you squeeze through swarms without annoying chip damage and gives you a moment to react when tiny enemies spill through freshly mined walls. The change makes those situations feel more fair and gives you more control. Hazard balance has been adjusted with this in mind.
Shop reset
Meta upgrade shop has been reset, is now cheaper, and is now slightly less powerful to compensate for the addition of gear.
Balance pass
As a part of the larger changes to the game, we’ve slightly rebalanced many artifacts, OCs, and a few weapons. The vast majority of these changes are small buffs.
Temporarily Removed Vanilla
We’ve temporarily removed the vanilla game mode because it needed some tweaks. It will return in a patch very soon.
Over the last 1 year and 9 months, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor has grown a lot thanks to your feedback. Here’s a quick look back:
Content we added:
2 new biomes: Salt pits (dense brittle rocks, falling crystals, and q’ronor shellbacks) and Azure Weald (healing crystals, bounce membranes, and mini exploders)
New enemies and bosses: the Dreadnought Twins, reworked the classic Dreadnought, Elite Q’ronar shellback, Huuli Hoarder, Glyphid Warden, Mini Exploders, and Big
New overclocks and artifacts: added dozens of new overclocks and artifacts, new stats (Pierce and Potency), and a weapon inspect screen.
Meta progression: expanded upgrades and save-system overhaul.
Pain points we addressed:
Overclocks: Originally, you had to level a weapon to 12 before its overclocks became available, which made early runs feel wasted. Now, overclocks unlock the first time you use a weapon.
Masteries: Bonuses used to scale with hazard level cleared, creating the impression that you needed to grind every weapon, class mod, and biome hundreds of times. In 1.0, Mastery bonuses are no longer tied to hazard level. When you complete a mastery mission, you get the full bonus, with only the minimum hazard requirement (hazard 2, 3, or 4, depending on the challenge). For bragging rights, achievements now reward clearing them on the highest hazard, but power progression is streamlined.
Morkite Reactor Cores: Introduced during EA to gate higher-level meta upgrades, they added friction without much benefit. With the rebalance for 1.0, cores have been removed, and progression is smoother.
Boss fights: In early EA, the optimal play was often to ignore the end-of-stage elite to farm mineral and XP, which felt backwards. Now, the faster you kill the boss, the better chest reward you earn, making for a tradeoff between chest reward and farming.
Thanks to everyone who mined, tested, broke things, and reported issues to us. 1.0 stands on your work, but it’s not the end of the journey. We see this as a foundation to build on, and we’re excited to keep growing Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor from here.
Rock and Stone!
The Funday Dwarves
'Excited', I mean - no need for you to be nervous.
