Hey Miners!

It’s been far too long since we last had some proper news! After we launched the game back February, we scrambled to release a lot of smaller patches. But keeping such a high frequency of updates kept us from tackling more meaty features and content. So we decided to slow down a bit and work on a larger update. And we got some good and bad news for you on this. The bad news is that you’ll have to have a bit more patience until Update 14 is ready for release. The good news is that you can try it out already now on the Experimental Branch!

The Experimental Branch

What the heck is the Experimental Branch, you might ask. It’s kind of like an Early Early Access, we might answer. In other words, it is a branch on Steam, where we are uploading the very latest version of the game.

Here is a quick checklist to see if the Experimental Branch is something for you:

• You like new things, especially when they are not explained
• You laugh whenever a game crashes (you will laugh a lot)
• You think incomplete features and placeholder assets are quite interesting
• You can’t resist a game with a lot of weird bugs
• You are not scared of losing your progress
• You enjoy to watch Steam download a new version of the game, again and again
• You LOVE to test and report bugs, and you excel in providing clear steps on how to reproduce the bugs you encountered

If you can say YES to all of those, then you should enter the Experimental Branch!
If not, then take a peek and see if it is something you can get used to. Or wait for the official updates.

How to play in the Experimental Branch

To play the experimental branch, do the following:

• Right-click on Deep Rock Galactic in your Steam Library
• Choose Properties
• Go to the BETAS tab
• In the drop-down menu of “Select the beta you would like to opt into:”
  • Select experimental – latest dev build – enter at own risk
  • Press on the button close in lower right corner
  • You might need to restart steam to make it download the new build

What about my save game?

The first time you start in the Experimental Branch, the game will copy the save game from the main branch. Moving forward, those two save games will be separate and playing in the Experimental Branch will NOT affect the save game in the main branch.

Where should I report bugs and write feedback?

We have created a new subforum of Steam called Experimental Branch. Here you can discuss the new features and report bugs specific to the Experimental Branch. There is also a similar channel on our Discord server for this. We are also considering setting up a Trello board just for these bugs. We’ll announce this in the Experimental Branch subforum.

Am I allowed to stream etc. it?

You are allowed to stream etc., but please notify your viewers that this is experimental.

Should I reset my progress?

Yes. No. Maybe! We do have some new content that requires higher player rank (a new mission type), so maybe test that out first. And then reset progress and test out other features. You can reset your progress in the Options menu.

Will you ever force a reset of my progress?

For the Experimental Branch, there will almost certainly be some progress resets. For the main branch, we are still discussing the right approach. We would very much like to hear your opinions on progress resets in Early Access and we’ll probably present this question in a thread in the forum.

What new features and content are in the Experimental Branch?

We have a LOT of new things for you to test. Not all of these will make it into the next Update. But by helping us test this, more of them might get included. The full changelog is quite large, so we’ll make a separate post for that in the Experimental Branch subforum.