Hello Miners,
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.
Revisiting Heavy Armor and armor breaking
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:
- 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.
- 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.
No more teleporting Dreadnoughts
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.
Improving how the Weapon Maintenance terminal tracks XP progress
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.
Fixing the Miner Community terminal
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.
Better access to Steam voice settings from in-game
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.
An intriguing new beer
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:
Two Ghost Ship Publishing projects launching this week!
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