EDIT: We posted an FAQ in the Steam forums. Find it here.

Listen up, Miners!

Fasten your safety harness and keep your eyes focused on the information terminal - this is going to be a long lecture.

The next update is a big one. The smart ones among you have probably already guessed it; Update 25 is all about the Endgame in Deep Rock Galactic.

What does all that mean? Well, first and foremost, the endgame will be focused on content that is primarily available once you have enough missions under your belt to promote your first dwarf. We are aware that once you get your dwarf past the first promotion, there are other and better-paying mining gigs out there, so we are setting you up for some special assignments for you to do once you reach the appropriate rank.

Be aware that this is a preliminary description of what we want to do; as this is a creative process, the design is subject to change along the way.

Deep Dives

Once your first promotion happens, we will trust you enough to grant you special privileges and access to a new mode called Deep Dives. This new mode is a set of periodical high-risk multi-objectives, that won’t give you the normal payout, but instead, award you "Batteries".

Each part of a Deep Dive will take you deeper into the bowels of Hoxxes IV, and you will have to field a full team of reliable dwarves from the very beginning to be able to make it to the end - the current personal drop pod will not be able to make it this deep (and the current budget does not allow us to upgrade their performance to this extent), so at the end of each part, we won’t be retrieving you but supplying you with a fresh pod to take you to the next and deeper part of the Deep Dive.

A Deep Dive will consist of three different missions chained together with a mix of objectives. These objectives will be similar to the main objectives you already know, except more than one will need to be completed. Example; In one mission you might have to salvage two Mini-M.U.L.Es and battle a dreadnought. Health and ammo will carry over from one Deep Dive mission to the next, so be sure to stock up on Nitra and Red Sugar before you move on.

The difficulty level on a Deep Dive will be fixed. You will not be able to bring a greenbeard to a Deep Dive. Do not attempt a Deep Dive on your own or while ill-prepared - you’ll be wasting company resources, and you don’t want that kind of attention from Management.

A new Deep Dive will appear every week. You will be able to do a Deep Dive several times, but you will only be able to reap the main rewards once. Should you fail during a Deep Dive, which we fully expect many shall, you will receive a partial reward - but the real gold is at the end of the Deep Dive, behind the hordes of vicious aliens.

Furthermore, each Deep Dive will take place in the same caves, with the same types of aliens for everyone. However, spawns will still be unpredictable, so stay alert while on a Deep Dive.

Machine Events

Using Batteries, you will be able to access Machine Events, that will randomly appear in the normal missions. You will be seeing abandoned machinery appear in some normal missions, but interacting with them will only be possible if you have Batteries. Every dwarf, even greenbeards, on the team will be able to get access to these events as long as at least one dwarf has enough Batteries to activate it, and chooses to do so.
Activating these events will add something entirely new to do, like hunting Glyphids for resources, tracking treasure or throwing explosive barrels at something big and angry.
The rewards for activating and successfully completing a Machine Event will be a craftable item Blueprint, credits, and XP.

Blueprints and Overclocks

Blueprints will give you access to a new, powerful type of weapon modification called Weapon Overclocks, that goes in their own unique slot. There will be a vast number of available overclocks for the weapons, but beware - turning up the juice might not be all it’s cracked up to be as the more powerful Weapon Overclocks comes at the cost of instability in the form of drawbacks.
Blueprints will be awarded randomly - and some might be rarer than others - but you will never be awarded the same Blueprint twice.
Blueprints will also cover new rare cosmetics, such as weapon skins and glorious beards, matching the latest dwarven trends from back home. Even Bosco might get some fancy new skins.

So when is this happening? Due to the size of the upgrade, and the upcoming summer holiday, it's going to take a bit longer than usual. We're committed to releasing Update 25 in August/September. This is a huge thing which we know you'll love.

Once again, be aware that this is a work in progress and that anything in our roadmap might change as we test and improve.

And more?

While we’ll focus on the Endgame in this update, we might add some additional small surprises to Update 25, but you’ll have to stay tuned for those.

Are we at 1.0 yet?

Not yet. As you may have noticed, we’ve shuffled the roadmap a bit. That doesn’t mean the ideas for future content we had listed have gone away for good - we just want to focus on Update 25 and commit to that. We still have a lot of content we want to make come alive in Deep Rock Galactic, and the Endgame update is not the end of that.