Fridge / Deep Rock Galactic

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance

• Why is the Driller beardless by default? His job involves regular usage of both a flamethrower and a pair of powered, rotating drill gauntlets. Anyone who works with heavy machinery, especially lathes, is well-aware that loose jewelry, long hair, loose clothing, drawstrings for sweaters, and other such hazards are a major no-no when on the job. For the same reason, it makes perfect sense that the Driller wouldn't want a long beard getting tangled up in his gauntlets and either pulling his face to the drills, or the drills to his face. Even if he had one, it wouldn't last long with that Flamethrower going off at danger-close range. The Gunner also lacks a beard, and for the same reason; he has a rotating minigun that gets very, very hot while firing, and also spins wildly; neither of which mixes well with a lengthy beard.
• The MULE's method of locomotion is remarkably similar to how the Glyphids get around the caverns of Hoxxes. DRG probably deliberately reverse-engineered their minecart-on-legs to mimic the local fauna so that it wouldn't suffer from any mobility issues. The mimicry of Glyphid locomotion probably also is why Molly never gets attacked; the Glyphids think she's one of them.
• The Glyphid mobs being named after Roman military ranks works as a Historical In-Joke when you consider that the Romans frequently clashed with the Gauls, Germans, and Vikings - all three cultures with folklore of what would become classic fantasy Dwarves. DRG is coming from above to raid an "empire" of bugs for their resources, just like northern raiders coming down from their territories to harass the Roman Empire.
• The drop pod usually arriving hundreds of meters away from the team is usually an annoyance, but in real-world terms, this is incredible. The fact a large projectile can be launched from an orbital source on demand, then bore through kilometres of rock, and reliably end up in the same tunnel system as the dwarves every time is a frankly astounding bit of orbital engineering. Of course this is offset by solo pods, supplies, and fuel cells always landing within a couple of meters of the beacon, but that falls under Acceptable Breaks from Reality - it would suck if ammo and new players had a chance to arrive in the middle of nowhere.
  • Plausibly the Pod drops could be assisted by a combination of satellite GPS and trackers on the Dwarf miners. Supported by Salvage missions requiring a satellite uplink to reestablish remote control of the abandoned Drop Pod.
  • Of note is that the smaller pods land on small beacons that provide precise terminal guidance to land near the Dwarves or at a location of their choosing. The Drop Pod is much larger and may not be able to maneuver so precisely.
• The Meat Moss growing in the Radioactive Exclusion Zone is a form of extremophilic bacteria evolved to filter visible light through eye-like structures, not "mutant stone".
• Why don't the dwarves ever use night vision goggles, and even have them as a cosmetic item that the shop text admits doesn't actually work? Real-world night vision devices work by intensifying the incoming light or infrared, and even with the glowing crystals and flora, many caves on Hoxxes IV don't have any light to intensify. Further, sudden exposure to bright lights while wearing night-vision goggles can be blinding and several biomes have extremely bright things in them, such as blue crystals, glow-trees, and active uranium spikes, not to mention explosions and fire caused by the dwarves' own weapons. Thermographic goggles could help the dwarves see the attacking wildlife, but not all Hoxxes wildlife is guaranteed to be warm-blooded, and it would be no help in finding the way around the caves. Because of this, the flashlights and flares used by the dwarves are a perfectly reasonable Mundane Solution for lighting the caves up.
• When BET-C is brought to your side after killing the Charge-Suckers, why does it lose its shield and have lowered damage? Well, those Charge-Suckers attached to its body may have been smart enough to temporarily shove the energy they sapped back into the unit, temporarily overclocking its systems and giving it more/better combat options just to protect its unwanted passengers. When the Charge-Suckers die, the energy they previously took and gave is now gone completely, rendering BET-C at only half strength as a result. It's still powerful, mind, but the Charge-Suckers left a mark when they latched on to feed.
• Q'ronar Shellbacks are found in almost every biome except the Salt Pits and Sandblasted Corridors, but their gregarious, less-armored younglings are found exclusively within the Salt Pits, which is located in the middle of the map. It can be inferred that the Salt Pits are the breeding grounds of the Q'ronar, where the young stick together for protection, consume the salt crystals and minerals to develop tougher shells, and then migrate to one of the other regions once fully matured. As for the Sandblasted Corridors, no Q'ronar can be found there due to competition or predation from Nayaka Trawlers, whose faster speed and underground movement let it evade the Rolling Attack and allow an easy hit on a Q'ronar's vulnerable underside (from a Doylist perspective, it's because having one type of Pushy Mook is enough).
• The Rival Corporation only has robots as their units, with no organic ones to be seen. This could be seen as a form of advanced Pragmatic Villainy: while Deep Rock Galactic have proven that a Badass Crew of Dwarves can achieve multiple operations on Hoxxes, they're still very vulnerable to dying in the depths and therefore being a loss that the company may not be able to afford. By contrast, the Rival Corporation may have enough resources to send out countless, mass-produced robotic units to Hoxxes to study the planet and retrieve its resources without putting its organic employees at risk. The Rival Tech enemies are easily replaceable, allowing their non-robotic controllers to stay safe and monitor the situation without issue.
• The inclusion of Leaf Lover's Special in the bar doesn't make a lot of sense since management doesn't really care if the miners come back at all, let alone if they're sober, and the miners don't like it very much. So why go through the effort of demanding it be stocked? Because it's not for the miners, it's for Mission Control. Achievements imply Mission Control drinks quite heavily, and he's not as replaceable as the miners are, so they need a way to sober him up before important missions. Enter Leaf Lover's Special. Additionally, being revived with the revival tonic will instantly sober a blackout-drunk Dwarf, suggesting Leaf Lover's might be an important element of that tonic.
• Most of the strange or frustrating things make sense when you consider how cheap and tight-fisted Deep Rock Galactic is. Why do you need to spend Nitra to get resupply drops? Because they need that nitra to make the ammo they send down. Why do drop pods land in weird places? Crappy guidance systems. Why do the minigun and the driller's drills overheat? Weak cooling systems. Miners are expected to fund their own upgrades and equipment not because DRG wants to make money off them so much as DRG needs that stuff to make the thing in the first place. The only things that are truly expensive are the more technologically-advanced items like the MULEs and the Drop Pods, which is why you're sent to salvage them. As a second layer of brilliance, everything DRG does is so cheap because that's the only way they can make money off a planet as hostile as Hoxxes.
  • In addition; a sideable amount of this equipment is probably being fabricated on the Space Rig to make it more self-sufficient. Given how often a supply shuttle carrying stuff for an event seems to crash into the planet, it's probably the only way for the Rig to be profitable on its own - fewer interstellar ships to pay for and fewer crashes to deal with.
• Several mini bosses, like the Korlok Tyrant Weed, Crassus Detonator, Rival Prospector, Rockpox Corruptor, and Huuli Hoarder (though that one's more of a Metal Slime) drop rare and/or valuable items upon death, but the Rival Nemesis disappointingly instead lets loose one final barrage of explosives and leaves nothing of value for the dwarves to scavenge. Of course it wouldn't give something of value to the dwarves, since it's designed purely to murder said dwarves. In the event of its destruction, it'll attempt one last Taking You with Me to try and ensure the dwarves demise. All the other mentioned mini bosses have something of value that's literally a part of them, so on death they drop said valuable things. The Huuli Hoarder eats valuble minerals as it grazes vegetation from them, the Rival Prospector is gathering data for its masters and needs something to store the data in, the Crassus Detonator is literally made of gold due to a mutation, the Korlok Tyrant Weed has valuable shards inside of them, and the Rockpox Corruptor is an evolved Plague Heart that contains smaller Plague Hearts.
  • This, however, could be intentional on the Rival's part. Given that most of the Rival's machines contain data cells, which the dwarves try their hardest to get their hands on, they'd expect the DRG team to approach the Nemesis once it is defeated to look for their reward, putting them right in range of the bombs. The last bomb is also always centered on Nemesis itself, denying Deep Rock Galactic a chance at hacking or reverse-engineering it as they did to Patrol Bots and Shredder Drones.
• The Carnivorous Larvae in Parasite mission modifiers cannot infest the Dwarves because they developed to parasitize the native life. The Dwarves aren't native to Hoxxes, hence the far different biology prevents them from being infested.
• Flying enemies instantly die if they're frozen. Floating Rocks can be frozen unlike Rival bots, but they don't instantly fall to the ground and shatter like every other non Rival airborne enemy. This is because the Ommoran Heartstone itself is lifting the rocks rather than the rocks having the ability to fly on their own.
• Grunts and Praetorians seem to be the only Glyphid subspecies vulnerable to the Ebonite mutation seen in one of the Machine Events. Of course they would therefore also be the only Glyphids affected by the Rockpox : whatever causes the Ebonite mutation is also the reason why they're vulnerable to the Lithophage in the first place. Of course, a more Doylist explanation would be that fighting a Rockpox Oppressor or Rockpox Mactera would be way too much of a pain in the ass gameplay-wise.
  • It could also just be that the Lithophage simply can't employ the Mactera in any meaningful capacity. Remember how it makes physiological changes that cause the body to become numb and rigid, as well as increased appetite, necrosis and lethargy in the Praetorian infected? The changes to an average Mactera would probably make it completely unusable for fighting against the Dwarves - never mind dodging, they'd barely be able to get off the ground before needing to eat something or tearing a wing off.
  • This however is now subverted with Rockpox-infected Mactera. Indeed, both the Glyphids and Mactera weren't immune to Kursite infection.
• Salvage missions' unique aspects were likely previous mission procedures before they were improved to the present day's - teams were previously sent down with Mini-M.U.L.Es to allow them to spread out and mine the cave quicker, but this made them liable to be separated and easily killed by swarms so now teams are only sent down with a single Molly to help prevent this. The Drop Pod may have used to stick around longer than the five-minutes-maximum it does now, but this risked the thing getting attacked and broken which causes DRG to lose their entire investment on the mission so they set a strict time limit to prevent this.
• Why are the bugs really angry and swarming all over the place during Point Extraction missions? The Mine Head boring in along with the Drop Pod causes far more vibrations through the ground with the Dwarves' entry than other missions and tips more of the bugs off that something out of the ordinary is happening. This occurs to a similar but smaller extent in Escort Duty missions with the bugs frequently-but-not-as-incessantly attacking because the drilldozer has the Dwarves going through different cave systems rather than the single large cavern that Point Extraction missions take place on, which are far easily for the bugs to home in on.
• Given how cheap Deep Rock Galactic is, it seems odd they'd go out of their way to bring back Dwarves that were downed by the time the mission was over. That would imply that DRG is sending in someone or something to rescue them when they're left behind, as is implied by one of their animations if down by the time a mission is over being Bosco dragging them in by the leg. However, consider that the Dwarves have gone on so many missions with such a high success rate, compared to the implied death rates of other miners; after completing a Lithophage Infested mission, Mission Control will sometimes state that the Rockpox killed three teams' worth of workers while you were out in the field. DRG is willing to expend a bit more to keep them alive because they're so much better than the rest of the workers and it'd be more sensible to ensure the lives of the miners who keep bringing in good hauls than to just look for new miners to replace them who might get themselves killed before reaching the quota.
  • It also explains why you only get a meager fraction of the reward and collected minerals in the event of a mission failure, even if all objectives have been fulfilled and you only failed because something bad happened while you were trying to reach the Drop Pod : whatever DRG does to bring you back alive to the Space Rig (rescue team using Dwarf-sized pods similar to the ones used by players joining a mission ? Emergency teleportation devices ?) costs money, and since the mission's failure was your own fault to begin with, it's only fair that the cost of saving your hide would be deduced from your reward.
• Glyphid Septic Spreaders attack by firing globs of their own corrosive pus at you. Sepsis is a condition where the body's response to an infection causes injury to its own tissues and organs. Considering that these were introduced in Season 4 where the Lithophage outbreak became even stronger, they're likely the Glyphids who developed some resistance to the Rockpox, but it's still too strong for their bodies to fight off properly.
• When drinking Smart Stout a Dwarf might claim they know how to always make the drop pod land wherever they want it to. The Engineer can, indeed, make it land where they want.
• The Engineer's LOK-1 Smart Gun has several references:
  • It seems like an odd choice for it to be named after Loki, but Loki is the god of trickery and deception and the LOK-1 allows you to make trick shots that don't take the usual straight path.
  • LOK-1 can be read as "Lok-one", which sounds like "Lock On", which describes how the LOK-1 works.
  • It can also be read like binary switches (where 0 is the value for "off" and 1 is the value for "on"), which makes LOK-1 mean LOK-On.

Fridge Horror

• On Extermination digs, Mission Control will comment that you need to kill the pupating Dreadnoughts before they turn into something even worse. This begs the question of what exactly they're pupating into, given that Dreadnoughts are already tank sized organic juggernauts who can breathe fire!
  • It is possible to find absolutely massive fossilized remains in Sandblasted Corridors. Maybe that is what pupating Dreadnoughts can turn into.
• Up until now, DRG were the only company crazy enough to make a living mining materials from Hoxxes, a Death World that no sane person would ever even think about going to. Yet the Rival Corporation has come to stick their feet in DRG's territory. It makes you wonder if word has spread of DRG making mining Hoxxes possible, prompting other companies to make the journey and bring their own operations over. The Rival Corporation is already difficult enough to deal with - who knows how powerful other corporations will be?
• The Rockpox hasn't made the No Biochemical Barriers jump to Dwarves... yet. Getting fully infected simply causes Rockpox to grow all over you to immobilize and deal damage over time, which can be shaken off via Smashing Survival. However, considering that it's capable of taking over the Glyphids and Praetorians, it's only a matter of time that it can transform the Dwarves...
• The Nemesis mimics common player lines while searching for Dwarves, which is creepy enough. However, an update made it so the Nemesis could also mimic their "MUSHRÜM" and "WE'RE RICH!" lines after they became memetic. Not only does it know common Dwarven tongue, it also knows our common tongue.
• Salvage missions show that the Drop Pods don't always work on the way out. Indeed, failing to triangulate or fuel the drop pod will cause Mission Control to declare the mission a failure and end communications, implying the match's team is now stranded on Hoxxes IV(...for how short that probably will be). At least modern teams' failures are precluded from becoming Salvage missions, since a full-size Molly is never found on such missions.
• The Ommoran Heartstone actively defends itself, which may mean that the Dwarves are actively drilling through a very-unconventional but non-hostile living creature to get its core. The final explosion that occurs after the Core is exposed which kills any bugs around it may even be the Heartstone's final attempt to protect itself (or try a Taking You with Me) with a different kind of explosion than the ones that occurs at the end of previous phases, but due to the differences between the wildlife's physiology and the Dwarves, it ends up only harming the wildlife.
• One of Mission Control's post-assignment mission lines in Season 4 has him mention that one of the Space Rigs orbiting Hoxxes IV (Space Rig #5, more specifically) was completely destroyed, with its entire crew killed in the process, after a direct impact from a Lithophage meteorite hit the station and caused the explosion of its fusion core. Meteor impacts have been a frequent hazard to ground squads during Season 3, but it's the first time that a Space Rig has been hit by a meteor fragment. The idea that a random Lithophage meteor could hit "our" Space Rig at any given moment is already a scary thought, but what makes it even scarier is the possbility that the meteor that destroyed Rig 5 didn't hit it by accident, and was actually a voluntary effort on the Lithophage's end to directly target those who have been hindering it.
  • This also doubles as Fridge Brilliance as to why the players' Space Rig wasn't targeted. The players' Space Rig already has multiple Rockpox growths on it thanks to less-than-stellar containment of the plague hearts. As such, if the Lithophage is indeed capable of thought, it would pass the partly-infested Space Rig off as "already infected" and thus have no reason to hit it with a meteor fragment. The player Space Rig's poor handling of the Rockpox ironically saved them.