YMMV / Deep Rock Galactic

• Accidental Innuendo: Some of the Dwarves' lines are easy to mistake for something more crass, like when they destroy a Patrol Bot and yell "Die, bolt sack!"^note ball sack, geddit?, made worse since Patrol Bots usually have a sphere as their "head".
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Just how corrupt is the Deep Rock Galactic corporation, anyways? On the one hand, they make it clear the goods, not the lives of the dwarves, are their first priority. On the other, unlike the Company, LYNX, and many other sci-fi video game employers, their employees have a union and are very well-equipped for their mission. They're even permitted to do things that would get someone fired from a normal profession in Real Life (such as drinking on the job). Are they less corrupt than most sci-fi megacorps? Do they just know that they have to invest in their employees if they expect to get anything from Hoxxes? Are they simply following dwarvern rather than human ethics? Or are the playable dwarves just the company's elite, with the remnants of "expendable" resources only being seen in Salvage missions?
• Awesome Music:
  • "Robot Getaway," one of the tracks that play when the Drop Pod is on its way or arrives.
  • "Echoes From The Past," a track that can play randomly on digs. It incorporates the sounds of picks striking rock and ancient chanting to evoke an image of Dwarven heritage; calling to mind images of the magnificent Dwarven empires of old, it hammers home that the miners of Deep Rock Galactic are carrying forwards that heritage in their conquest of Hoxxes IV.
  • "Dance of the Dreadnought" is a rock song that goes perfectly with when it plays as swarms or bosses appear — set aside the pickaxes, now we fight for rock and stone! Ironically enough, it never actually plays when the miners fight a Dreadnought, who instead get "Horrors of Hoxxes" or "Fighting the Shadows".
  • "Horrors of Hoxxes" plays during Dreadnought battles, and is appropriately enough an ominous track with creepy droning alongside the beating of drums to cause suspense and tension, fitting the terrifying and powerful opponent the Dwarves are facing.
  • Similarly, "Fighting the Shadows" covers Dreadnought battles as well and goes for an atmosphere of pure horror bordering on despair, making sure you understand you're fighting something more terrible than anything Hoxxes has thrown your way.
  • "Fathomless Tomb" is a mysterious ambient track with an utterly beautiful melody at the 5:20 mark... that trails off into something eerie.
  • "RUN!" will make you want to do anything but obey its title when it starts playing; it's one of the action scores you're bound to hear whenever you're about to fight off a swarm of Glyphids, and it does a great job at getting you motivated to show the alien bastards who's the bigger threat in these caves!
  • "The Last Ascent" is one of the tracks that can play as your team makes their escape. It's a slow burn, but once it hits its peak it does a very good job of conveying the determination of many players who will more often than not refuse to leave a dwarf behind. It's especially cathartic to hear on the tail end of a particularly intense Deep Dive.
  • "Leave No Dwarf Behind" is one of the extraction themes that gradually builds in intensity (as the countdown gets closer to the pod launching with or without you), and the climax perfectly captures the desperate but determined feeling of doubling back and blasting through a swarm to rescue a downed teammate.
  • "Journey of the Prospector", a bonus track that, like "Echoes from the Past", combines synths and a plucked banjo to create a stirring, heroic portrait of generations of Dwarven miners. It also doubles as a farewell from Ghost Ship's former sound designer Troels Rodhe Jørgenson — while it initially remained an unused demo, after Troels announced he was departing the company, he and composer Sophus Alf gave it a fully mixed arrangement, and it was added to the game in Season 4 as a tribute to Troels' legacy. Some players have since affectionately called it his Promotion assignment.
• Base-Breaking Character: Doretta. Useless liability for a Scrappy Mission that deserves to be left behind at the end? Or a lovable machine that must be rescued even if you must risk your neck to do so? One can immediately get an opinion of every player based on their actions at the end of an Escort Mission.
• Best Boss Ever: With the Season 01 — Rival Incursion update comes the Rival Corporation and their own mission, where DRG has to destroy a Facility Caretaker guarding a Data Rack inside. Said Caretaker makes for a hectic and intense boss fight, making it clear that the Rival Tech forces can provide a hearty challenge and prove that they are a danger to DRG's operations.
• Broken Base:
  • Is "Leave No Dwarf Behind" an absolute maxim to be always followed no matter what the circumstance is or is it more like a guideline? People arguing the latter say that abandoning the drop pod to save your teammates offers literally no benefit while simultaneously endangering the chances of everybody succeeding the mission, especially on higher Hazard levels and if only one person is left standing amidst a gigantic swarm of Glyphids, whereas people arguing the former say that detractors are "Stop Having Fun" Guys who take completing a mission at all costs too seriously and that managing to escape with a full team by the skin of your teeth provides a more rewarding sense of accomplishment than normal, as well as just being fun to roleplay.
  • The announcement of new updates for DRG being slowed so the devs can work on the spinoff, Rogue Core. Some fans were significantly upset at this, believing Rogue Core can just be added as a game mode to DRG despite the devs saying otherwise. A few people even accused GSG of outright scamming their audience. Others were fine with it, citing that GSG has a strict anti-crunch philosophy that prevents them from working on both at the same time, and arguing that it's ridiculous to expect them to not work on any other projects and continue updating DRG in perpetuity. This has died down significantly since the introduction of the November Maintenance Update, which among other things allows you to disable the Rockpox content for players who were sick of it, and fixed an issue with Stingtails.
  • The way the game limits earning Blank Matrix Cores and Weapon Overclocks is divise at best. Some players don't mind the real time lock^note You can earn in total 6 per week (not counting possible Dwarf Promotions): from Weekly Core Hunt, Deep Dive and Elite Deep Dive. and randomness saying it makes the game less grindy and can get players to test new classes, but detractors say the system punishes new players who lag behind older ones and the randomness can give them unwanted overclocks that might not be suitable for their playstyle, and that it can take forever to get what they really want.
• Cheese Strategy: If you have an Engineer in your team and Molly for the mission, you can dig a hole, get Molly and everyone inside the hole, seal the hole with the Platform Gun, and call for the Drop Pod. This presumably will mess Molly's pathing that she can't find any valid route, resulting in the Drop Pod landing right at your position. Don't worry, you won't get squished or take damage from it, and is damn convenient if you don't want to make a trek to the extraction point. Sadly patched out.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: There's several perks of both passive and active varieties that many players run no matter what.
  • Nearly everyone reserves a passive perk slot for Thorns. The ability to passively one-shot Glyphid Swarmers or Naedocytes can easily take off a ton of pressure, and in the latter case end the Cycle of Hurting before it can start.
  • Iron Will is similarly popular, and almost always run with Vampirism. Iron will allows a downed player to revive themselves once per mission with several seconds of Mercy Invincibility, faster movement, and a boost to melee before going down again at the end of the invincibility. This would already be an incredibly strong way to revive a teammate and save entire missions, but the perk doesn't actually force you down after the boost ends—it just doesn't give you any health on revive. This means that any healing will ensure you stay up, and vampirism (which gives you a small bit of health on melee kills) is the perfect way to do that considering how iron will increases pickaxe damage and power attack recharge rate.
  • Dash is about as common in the active perk slot (save for Scouts, who have their grappling hook) given it's incredibly handy mobility to help players evade the bugs and is usually advised to any players who feel like they're struggling in harder difficulties.
  • Heightened Senses is also a popular choice, for players who've been grabbed by one Cave Leech too many.
  • Field Medic is commonly used for its simple versatility; just being able to revive a teammate faster is a safety cushion in case the mission goes south. It's also yet another perk which synergizes with Iron Will, as a player may trigger that and then use Field Medic's active ability to instantly revive someone else.
  • Born Ready is a ubiquitous Perk, due to its massive QoL improvement. Never again will you switch out to an empty weapon, and that includes utility tools such as the Flare and Platform Gun as well!
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Glyphid Exploders have already ruined hundreds of runs, vast in number with their lightning fast speed, and exploding bulges of acid, they might as well be Banelings. They get even worse in the Magma Core, where their frequent explosions will leave holes in the ground and expose the contact-damaging magma rock. When doing hacking sections in Season 1 they're just as obnoxious, because it takes just one Exploder going off to force a reboot of the hacking drone and their speed means they're hard to keep off it. They'll also slowly blast a hole in the floor under the hacking pod so you have to keep digging it out. In the worst case, an Exploder blowing up will destroy a hacking node, forcing you to waste time setting up a new one while bugs are still spawning.
    • The infamous Bulk Detonators may lean into this territory if multiple spawn at same time, however, usually they sit tight on their higher spot of Boss in Mook Clothing - not appearing frequently, but giving the whole team a reason to panic when they do.
  • Cave Leeches strike from above and afar, making it easy for them to get the drop on you, and incapacitate any dwarf they grab, forcing your companions to come free you. If several team members get grabbed at once, you're well on your way to a TPK^note  (It was even worse in solo, because prior to a patch there was a bug where Bosco wouldn't shoot the cave leech properly, leaving you helpless as your health was drained). The only good news is that Cave Leeches don't respawn — once one's dead, there won't be any respawning in its place. The worst part about them is that they're just uncommon enough for most players to not be on their guard for them, leading to lots of embarrassing downs if a team's not sticking close to each other.
  • The addition of Mactera grabbers has almost matched the cave leech in causing player paranoia. While the cave leech is stationary, the grabber will actively HUNT in packs of 2 or 3 after sounding a shrill warcry, and will just drop you without lowering too. Unlike Cave Leeches who don't respawn, more of these can appear during random waves. Your main respite is that they don't damage you as you're grappled.
  • For the above three, there also happen to be three types of Mutations specifically centered around making these enemies more numerous: Exploder Infestation, Cave Leech Clusters, and Mactera Plague respectively. If you see any of these (or worse, multiple) in a mission, you best be prepared for a painful ordeal.
  • Naedocyte Breeders. You know the Naedocyte Shockers that appear in hordes and can easily overwhelm a team if they don't pay attention? These are the Mook Maker versions. It's highly advisable to eliminate these as soon as possible.
    • For that matter, Glyphid Brood Nexuses, which are also Mook Maker enemies that spawn hordes of weak Swarmers. On their own, they're not too difficult to take out, but they nearly always spawn with a Spitball Infector, Naedocyte Breeder, or some other kind of nasty enemy also in the area.
  • Shellbacks can be a nasty obstacle when a Dwarf has been downed, as their knockback interrupts any means of revival with ease and they bounce around so madly hitting them while rolled up is near-impossible. The same can be said for the Nayaka Trawlers, sand sharks that ram into people when they don't grab them and haul them around the area in one of the worst biomes for getting thrown around.
  • Glyphid Oppressors are this if you're doing solo missions. In teams, having someone distract it while another pumps its arse full of lead is perfectly possible, but in solo, the only target is you, so it will more or less always present its invulnerable face to you. Because Bosco never aims for weakpoints, he'll spend most of his time shooting the invulnerable armored parts unless you can angle the Oppressor around to let him shoot it in the back. Plus, it turns much faster than the Dreadnought, making gun-and-run strategies harder. You might be able to flank it decently if you have the Beastmaster perk, but you should expect poor Steeve to get stomped into paste. And finally, its has fairly high HP with resistance to heat, cold, electricity, explosives and stun. It's also an even bigger problem while teammates have been downed, as one of its attacks will knockback any dwarves it hits and cancel reviving attempts, even if the reviving dwarf is in a shield. Your best chance is to exploit its two weaknesses: its special attacks leave it rooted in place giving you an opening to Attack Its Weak Point, and it takes extra damage from melee attacks.
  • On higher hazard levels, Mactera Tri-Jaws turn from Goddamned Bats into these. While they still have relatively low health and a prominent weakspot, a single hit from one of their triple, arcing Spread Shot (even the Splash Damage) is enough to knock out all your shield and put a dent in your health, and the spread arc makes it tricky to simply strafe the middle projectile. The best method to avoid them is a tricky circular sidestep that must be pulled off correctly or the player will get hit...players can also just move directly toward the Tri-Jaw instead, but that's assuming there isn't many other bugs in that direction as well (there usually will be). Worse still, if a player gets hit by more than one of the projectiles, it'll deal a massive amount of damage, even enough to instantly kill if all three hit. And if they decide to target Doretta, who is a huge enough target for all three projectiles to hit, they can pile on a lot of damage.
  • Glyphid Menaces are an Elite Mook variant of Acid Spitters, and can easily down you at Hazard 3 and above. They will launch an unending barrage of acid globs at you that can melt your health in seconds, made doubly worse if you're being swarmed by Grunts, and triply worse if there's more than one Menace around. They are happy to keep firing non-stop while you're pinned, but should you try and shoot them, they will burrow and pop out at another location to launch yet another barrage. Their saving graces are their distinct belch-like sound, and their bright color making them more noticeable, but make no mistake, they are among top priority threats to be focused down on sight.
  • The Elite Threat mutator allows the spawning of Elite enemies with even more health, damage and speed compared to normal ones. This includes things that would otherwise be Goddamned Bats or on this list, such as Mactera Tri-Jaws, Glyphid Menaces, Mactera Grabbers, and most horrifyingly, Glyphid Bulk Detonators. That last one is infamous for how much faster it gets, and watching a Bulk Detonator hauling ass after you faster than anything that size should be able to is one of Hoxxes IV's worst sights.
  • The Season 1 update brings the Rival Patrol Bots, which are nasty pieces of work. They move around just as much as Macteras and have a much smaller weakspot (the head) which isn't as easy to see. Unlike Macteras, they have enough health to withstand a good amount of fire on their weak point, and unlike other flying enemies they're resistant to cold/freezing. All the while, they can attack you with laser shots and homing missiles that hit you extremely hard. Fortunately, setting them on fire kills them instantly—and all their strengths make them extremely helpful to have on your side once you hack them—although said robots start being afflicted by Artificial Stupidity once you get them on your side. Season 3 gives them a good nerf in speed and damage, making them less deadly and easier to hit.
  • Rockpox-infected bugs in general are a textbook example of Elite Mooks. They have all the bells and whistles of their normal counterparts, but with the added setback of being Nigh-Invulnerable outside of small blisters which you have to shoot to do substantial damage to them; mindlessly shooting them in the face isn't an option anymore. On top of that, their attacks will gradually inflict the Rockpox status effect on you, with full infection causing a nasty Cycle of Hurting where you'll be helplessly immobilized as your health gets cut down by both the Rockpox's Damage Over Time and oncoming enemy attacks. On top of that, infected enemies have a tendency to leave around massive clouds of Rockpox around them when attacking and when they die, potentially putting you in a sticky situation even after you've taken them out. During a Lithophage Outbreak warning, infected bugs will spawn when a few Rockpox boils are cleared out, forcing you to juggle between fighting them and cleaning up the remaining boils. But even outside of the warning, there's a rare chance for a swarm to consist entirely of these pests.
  • Season 4 added Glyphid Stingtails, effectively mobile Cave Leeches with a long-ranged grapple which yanks you towards them to be impaled on their horn. Said horn attack isn't actually that damaging - what kills you will usually either be the horde of Glyphids the Stingtail just yanked you into, or the fall damage if the thing pulled you high into the air. The Stingtail does have a distinct sound telegraph for the grab, but not only is it scarily fast and accurate even with the cue, and way longer-range than it has any right to be, you may not even know where the danger is coming from until you're suddenly sent flying to your death, especially if you're already preoccupied with trying to fight or flee. They're even more annoying during objectives that need you to stay in one spot or tasks that require a prolonged button press, as they can just yank you out of the defended area (in the former case) or interrupt your animation to waste your time or even rob you of a revive/resupply (in the latter case). On top of that, tracking down and killing the Stingtail is often a chore, as not only are they one of the only large enemies that emit no light, they're deceptively tanky and completely armored, save for a hard-to hit mouth and a small spot that is only exposed if you crack their back armor. Finally, it doesn't help that these can sometimes be bugged, as thanks to the speed of yanking the player, the game can sometimes register it as high velocity, causing Dwarves to be downed from Falling Damage even if they're on the ground. Fittingly, the November 2023 maintenance patch saw them get major nerfs to their grab and durability, making them easier to deal with once detected.^note Their spawn rates were reduced, their weak points are easier to see and hit, their grab had its range decreased and gained a lengthy cooldown on a successful grab, their base HP and HP scaling was significantly reduced, and they gained vulnerability to pierce, electric, and explosive damage in exchange for gaining resistance to fire.
  • Glyphid Septic Spreaders, also added in Season 4, lob splitting globs of acidic goo that stick to surfaces for several seconds, and deal constant damage to whoever is in them. This is frustrating enough on its own, but becomes downright enraging in missions where you have to stay in one spot to defend something, upon which they'll flood the spot in question with acid to turn it into a death trap. They also tend to spawn in pairs and can be very hard to hit since their arcing shots often put them behind obstacles or on out-of-reach ledges where you can't see them, not that the lack of line of sight affects their near-perfect accuracy at all. Fortunately, they're pretty easy to kill if you can track them down, due to their massive glowing weak point and low health. Like the Stingtail, they received nerfs in the November 2023 maintenance update, where their projectiles can now be shot down early like those from a Spitball Infector, although players still have to be careful because the intercepted shots will still produce lingering acid puddles underneath.
• Difficulty Spike: The difficulty curve is gentle from hazard levels 1 to 2, it's less gentle at level 3, but the jump from hazard level 3 to 4 is often noted to be steep by a lot of players with enemies doing far more damage and being faster and bulkier than what they were used to, and let's not even start talking about hazard level 5...
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Everyone loves Bosco, the hovering little droid that makes missions where you don't have anyone else to help you bearable. He can mine ores for you, defend you, revive you, and he's so cute!
  • After Update 28 added a perk that let dwarves tame a single glyphid grunt at a time, Steeve (the default name for such a grunt) quickly became beloved. It's amazing how adorable a giant bug of death can be when it's not trying to kill you.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Point Extraction and Salvage missions with multiple gunners - or just one with enough resupplies - that end up looking like a tangled web of zip lines are jokingly referred to as "Gunner Nests".
  • The Corrosive Sludge Pump weapon lobs "globs of toxic waste" which are green-brown and got made "when the maintenance staff are left with too much time on their hands." Players therefore prefer to refer to it as the poop gun/cannon/thrower.
  • Breathers, the weird foghorn-like plants found in the Radioactive Exclusion Zone are typically called "pog plants" due to their shape.
  • The Engineer's yellow platforms are frequently called cheese or pancakes due to looking like flattened wheels of cheese.
  • Veterans of the game often follow in the footsteps of the dwarves and will call new players and noobs "greenbeards".
    • Conversely, veterans and long-time players of the game are nicknamed "greybeards".
  • Because of the large number of player-initiated game events that require preparation (ejecting from the mines, fighting Dreadnoughts/Caretakers, starting the Drilldozer, every machine event, etc.), a single letter R is often used in text chat as a shorthand for "ready".
  • Fans decided that the Rockpox Corruptor introduced in season 4 is named Harold. Do not ask why. Harold simply is.
  • The Driller's high explosives are called "satchel charges" in-game, but fans almost never call them that, preferring "C4."
• Fanon: Fanart tends to portray Mission Control as a tea drinker due to a seminal work by artist Joe_Duncan
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Quite expectedly, Warhammer 40,000 fans adore Deep Rock Galactic, on account of the similarity between the game's dwarves and 40K's Squats — sorry, the Leagues of Votann. The Glyphids, meanwhile, do a respectable job as Tyranid stand-ins, though there are thankfully no genestealers running around as of yet.
  • Lethal Company and Deep Rock Galactic fans immediately befriended each other for the similar premise of a bunch of workers being sent into the most dangerous missions by their careless megacorps just for profit.
  • Fans of Helldivers and its sequel are almost guaranteed to also like Deep Rock Galactic and vice versa, due to both of them being co-op mission-based shooters where you and your team fight alien bugs and robots with insanely over-the-top weaponry.
• Game-Breaker:
  • A rare intentional example is Bosco, the Do-Anything Robot that Solo players get for company. Bosco can shoot, mine, revive players, carry heavy objects, shine a flashlight, and, most importantly, fly. Bosco also knows exactly where any buried object is, and if you tag close to it Bosco will go dig it out with perfect precision. This serves to break Point Extraction and Egg Hunt missions in half, as you can tag the glow from halfway across the map and Bosco will fly over, dig the objective item out, and come back with it. The intentional part comes in because both these mission types see a gradual increase in enemy spawn rate the longer the player remains on the map, meaning they have to be finished quickly and as a solo player (especially a Gunner or an Engineer) Bosco is often the only way to get it done.
  • You have a chance to find Bet-C, Molly's bigger, badder sister. Once you remove the Suckers hijacking her and restart her, she will follow and aid you with her twin autocannons and Grenade Launcher. The only downside is her grenades are not Friendly Fireproof, but that's a teeny tiny price to pay for an invulnerable ally armed to the teeth, and can take down swarms and even Dreadnoughts.
  • Jet Boots, if your team is lucky enough to find a crate of them, completely turn the game's mobility on its head. Giving every single class the ability to survive deadly falls at the touch of a button for free like the Scout would already be a huge game-changer, but on top that they also allow for the transportation of heavy items up steep surfaces, extended parkour range, a panic button against glyphid swarms, etc. There's a reason that to offset the sheer tremendous power of this item, it only has a random chance of appearing during a mission.
  • Freezing an enemy causes their entire body to become a weak spot and they suffer triple direct damage (2.5x for Dreadnoughts). Organic Airborne Mooks instantly die when frozen regardless of their health. Further, very few enemies in the game are resistant to it, with Rival Tech machines, Elite enemies, and Oppressors being the main exceptions. A savvy dwarf can use the immense damage bonuses to skip entire phases of Dreadnought fights by freezing them and using a powerful direct-damage attack like an Impact Axe or focused M1000 shot to tear off enormous chunks of health.
  • The Armskore Coil Gun equipped with The Mole Overclock and modded right becomes the Eraser EM-1 Rail Gun with the damage amplified by how much terrain the shot passes through before hitting the target(s). Mark a large target with the Laser Pointer and a few full charges will even take Bulk Detonators down quickly.
  • The Gunner's Tactical Leadburster is a grenade that sprays lead everywhere. While it deals less damage the closer the enemy is, this means it has a massive area of effect compared to other grenades, able to take down even flying enemies. Its damage is not to be underestimated either, especially since it sprays lead over a short duration instead of a single explosive moment. 2 of these are enough to take down a Bulk Detonator.
  • During the Salvage Operation missions (described below in That One Level), where you have to stay within close proximity to the signal uplink and fuel pods or else the mission will fail (all the while under the assault of a Glyphid horde) can be quite a hard task on higher difficulties as you will usually be surrounded on all sides. Where the Game-Breaker comes in is in the form of having both a Driller and an Engineer on the team; the Driller digs a shaft under the uplink/pod, allowing it to fall to the bottom, then drops an explosive to create a large room in the rock, and drills a tunnel to reconnect with his teammates. The Engineer uses his platform gun to seal up the shaft in the roof. Everyone can now focus fire on the tiny hole every Glyphid is now forced to come through. This tactic makes make the Salvage Operation mission a breeze on even the highest difficulty. Just hope that a Bulk Detonator doesn't catch your scent, or your bunker will be a tomb.
• Genius Bonus:
  • While the Glyphids tend to use a Roman Theme Naming for some of their creatures, one particular variant of Metal Slime is named the Crassus Detonator, which covers the area around its explosion radius with gold. Crassus was considered one of the wealthiest men in the Roman Republic, and according to legend, was killed by having molten gold poured down his throat.
  • With the introduction of the Rival Incursion season pass system, the name Scrip might be familiar to some players; they were effectively a currency given to employees by companies in remote locations where conventional shops were sparse or nonexistent. Scrip could be used to purchase goods and necessities at company-owned shops to force workers to be dependant on the business for daily life. In Deep Rock Galactic's case though, it functions more as a premium currency to incentivize workers to take priority jobs.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Swarmers are designed to be these. Tiny annoying enemies that on their own don't do much damage and die to a single hit of anything you can do hurt them, they can come from nowhere always in mini-swarms, can be hard to see and shoot if you have a more precise weapon, blend in well, and when you're in the middle of swarm events their mild nips become a huge headache because any damage you take, even their piddly ankle-bites, will stop/delay the regeneration of your shields, allowing the more dangerous glyphids to get to your HP pool easier. They also have the tendency to dodge your pickaxe swings if you want to save ammo on taking them out, making them frustrating if you're trying to conserve it.
  • Both the Glyphid Grunt variants are this to some degree. Grunt Guards are only as damaging as a basic Grunt, however, have thrice the health of a regular Grunt and the ability to put their armored legs in front of them to tank damage and cover their weakspot, causing them to be a waste of ammunition often. Meanwhile, Grunt Slashers are more fragile, but do extremely high damage for their size and can inflict a debilitating slowdown that allows the other Glyphids in the area to catch up and run you over, which can easily result in getting knocked down if the player was trying to retreat at low health. They can spawn in place of a basic Grunt with the chance increasing with Hazard Levels, meaning that you'll be seeing quite a few of them, especially in swarms. On the plus side, these factors also make them excellent Steeves compared to the originals.
  • Most of the Mactera qualify. The basic Mactera Spawn is fragile but can dodge attacks if it isn't in an attacking stance, the Tri-Jaws hit hard with a triple Spread Shot attack that has Splash Damage (while having the same frailties as the Spawn), the Brundles can take a good bit of punishment thanks to being fully covered in armor that must be broken, and the Goo/Frost Bombers drop areas of hazardous stuff that greatly slows the Dwarves down or rapidly lowers their temperature.
  • Naedocyte Shockers are weak flying enemies that can show up in just about any biome. While not doing significant damage on their own and they die to even a single pickaxe swing, their shock effect will slow you down to an absolute crawl and knock you off of ziplines. The true dangers of shockers is when you're in the middle of a swarm and desperately trying to keep from getting surrounded, their slowing effect will make sure the only way out is either fighting or dying and if a cloud of them reaches you, they'll surround you from as many angles as possible to make killing them all frustrating, and all of the blue electricity appearing over your camera can make it hard to notice other dangerous enemies. God help you if they pin you down while an oppressor, dreadnought or bulk detonator is closing in. Many players roll with the Thorns perk pretty much near-exclusively to get rid of Naedocytes quickly (the other reasons being Swarmers, as above).
  • Nayaka Trawlers are not the most dangerous of grabby enemies, seeing they neither damage you once grappled nor leave you to be dropped into the abyss like the other two. No, they will "just" haul you all over the cavern floor at speeds so high and with paths so erratic even Bosco can't hit them reliably, and drop you off in a completely different place, where something else can pounce on you while you're away from the group. And hitting them before they've even grappled you is a problem due to how fast they're are, though once damaged the rest is easier. Those who have Heightened Sense may get screwed over hard by the Trawlers, given how both they and the Mactera Grabbers trigger the Spidey Sense, making for some serious confusion for those who simply wanted a countermeasure against the Cave Leeches.
  • While not technically enemies, your teammates, through their own greed and/or stupidity, can and often do injure you and hamper your progress far more than the Glyphids, especially if you play as an engineer. Some examples include dropping a resupply pod directly in front of your sentry, blocking a huge portion of your sightline, drillers accidentally destroying engineer platforms leading to death by fall damage, prematurely starting mission phases before anyone is ready (a virtual death sentence on lethal dreadnaught hunts), hogging resupply drops or through inactivity make it harder to gather materials or side objectives. It is considered apprpriate to kick a scout who refuses to light up ceilings during cave leech infestations. In general, you're going to be hitting your teammates a lot more often in DRG than in similar games, since it's filled with weapons that deal wide AoE damage along with enemies that move erratically.
  • Q'ronar Younglings are a variety unique to the Salt Pits biome. They are much smaller, more fragile, and less persistently dangerous than their full-grown counterparts being unable to crawl regularly or spit acid. However, they still have the Q'ronar ability to knock dwarves around like volleyballs with their insane knockback. In addition, Younglings spawn and travel in packs of no less than 3 and are one of the fastest enemies in the game at full speed, able to roll up and around the very ceilings of the cave like albino pillbug versions of Sonic the Hedgehog.
  • Rival Shredders are almost like Demonic Bats. They fit the same role as glyphid swarmers do, but do way more damage, are so small and so fast that only the Driller has a shot at getting a big cloud of them down out of the sky quickly enough that they don't immediately down somebody, and are even more of a nightmare for ziplining gunners than Mactera and Acid Spitters combined.
  • The flora in the Dense Biozone count. Ejector Cacti and Trapatacti are borderline non-threats in how infrequently they attack, the low damage of said attack, and how easily they can be dispatched from a distance. Cave Urchins have pitiful damage, but are numerous in quantity and blend in with the color of the floor to make them difficult to spot. Leave these things alive instead of expending the time or ammo to remove them, and they will all bother you by infrequently poking you with a weak attack — at worst, delaying your shield's regen when other threats are present.
  • Exploders can either be this or Demonic Spider, depending on your alertness. If they catch you off-guard, yeah, their explosion hurts. But if you see them coming, you can just run past them to make them blow themselves up, allowing you to take them out without even attacking them.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Dreadnaught Hiveguards. While they are powerful enemies, most of the annoyance comes purely in how long it takes to down them. You have to kill a wave of flunkies, then shoot multiple different small weakpoints on the boss, causing it to expose its final weakpoint while spamming AoE attacks—even if you avoid getting hit by the fireballs the Hiveguard shoots out, their AoE is so large that you will get hurt if one gets thrown at you unless you're a Scout that can zipline away. Teams with bad DPS who can't do a lot of damage in the short time its health bar is vulnerable will be spending quite a while whittling the boss down, assuming they don't run out of ammo and get wiped.
  • If you are facing the Dreadnought Twins, chance are the Lacerator will die first, because the Arbalest is such a "Get Back Here!" Boss. As added insult, that also means extra time needed to whittle the Arbalest down before they heal each other.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • It is possible to fire a platform launcher at a flying bug and land a hit. Depending on where they were at the time, having a platform that's just floating in midair can be quite useful.
  • A literal case with the glyphids' AI not being able to tell downed players from living ones. When you're down a player (or more), swarms are easier to deal with when a bunch of them are clustered in one place not attacking you.
  • Minerals like Aquarq and Jadiz sometimes generate with the lode on top of the vein rather than inside it, making picking it up easy. They're particularly prone to this if they generate intersecting with an empty space of some sort.
  • Unlike standing on other things (even Molly), standing on barrels, hammers, or other dwarves causes the highest dwarf to go flying off from the lower object. This can be simple fun inside the space rig, but can lead to unfortunate falling demises in missions as the highest dwarf unexpectedly goes off a ledge from a close-quarters stairway due to jumping as another dwarf was passing through...but it'll always be a funny falling demise. In some cases, this can actually be exploited to save a dwarf who was falling to an imminent downing if the falling dwarf and/or a player underneath them manages to intercept the other one before the falling dwarf hits the ground as the knockback which occurs when a dwarf stands on top of another dwarf isn't enough to cause fall damage to the knocked-back dwarf if they land on level ground.
  • It was possible to salute while performing another context-sensitive action (like depositing minerals, or reviving another player), which was a fun way to fill the time when your dwarf otherwise had to stand still waiting for something to happen. Unfortunately, the developers reasoned this could have caused further programming problems in the future and removed it.
    • Saluting while depositing, reviving, and repairing objects might be gone, but saluting while dancing hasn't been fixed. For most of the dances, it looks pretty normal... but saluting while doing the pirouette dance causes the dwarf's lower body to continue spinning while their upper half stays in place. It's spine-breakingly hilarious, and you might catch players trying to get the randomly-selected pirouette just so they can do this bug. Other dancing shenanigans include: Drinking an Underhill Deluxe to shrink your dwarf before picking up the space ball and starting to dance so that after your dwarf grows to return to normal size, the ball he's holding will also grow. Turning on and off the jukebox while a dwarf is frozen (such as by drinking an Arkenstout) in the dancing area will also cause the frozen dwarf to change the dance pose he is frozen into in a very Nobody Here but Us Statues manner.
  • The Coilgun's Re-atomizer Overclock had a bug where it spread all effects to the enemies behind them, which initially included the Beast Master's suffix of "Steeve" and the Elite modifier. This could allow for horrors such as Elite Dreadnoughts with Steeve's innate damage reduction, but also made it possible to create funny things like Elite Lootbugs, Elite Steeves, or Bulk Detonators with a Steeve heart by its health bar.
• Memetic Badass: Karl. While the scattered comments already put him in a pretty impressive light, the players gladly ran with it and elevated him to the most badass miner to ever set foot on Hoxxes IV, and a paragon to Dwarfkind everywhere.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Scouts are popularly known using their grapple hooks to go off and die in terribly far and/or inconvenient places for the rest of the team to reach them, or just accidentally falling to their deaths. He's also the favored target of the resident Memetic Psychopath Driller's satchel charges. Notably, multiplayer mission intros often have the Scout panicking at the potential of their upcoming demise, to which the Driller responds with something on the spectrum between Get A Hold Of Yourself Man and Jerkass to One.
  • The Gunner's poor mobility is a frequent source of mockery. While the zipline can be very useful, especially for transporting objects that need to be carried like jadiz or aquarqs, it moves very slowly and is often derisively compared to a stair lift.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • DID I HEAR A ROCK AND STONE? ^ExplanationPressing the V key will result in dwarves yelling a line to the effect of "ROCK AND STONE!" in a distinctly hammy fashion. As a result, pre-mission lobbies are often full of greenbeards and greybeards alike constantly shouting "ROCK AND STONE!" at each other, with the limited number of lines inevitably resulting in this line playing - usually after several minutes of having "ROCK AND STONE!" yelled at the speaker.
  • You're going to end up seeing a lot of dwarves with orange skin and bright green hair if you play public games.
  • Dressing the Engineer up as Dr. Eggman with goggles and the Frizzy Handlebar moustache^note The description of this cosmetic even says "For some reason, you have an urge to dream up maniac machines and colorful contraptions.", suggesting this was intentional, or use the darkest skin and red hair to make Gunner into Ganondorf (the latter sometimes dubbed "Ganondwarf").
  • Calling whiny or incompetent players Pointy-Eared Leaf-Lovers is also a common occurrence.
  • "Deep Rock seriously needs to invest in better equipment!" ^ExplanationDwarves have a limited number of lines for actions like calling the M.U.L.E over. Since the M.U.L.E frequently needs moving forward to keep up with the team, most players get it to follow them by spamming the 'E' key ''constantly', resulting in this line incessantly playing.
  • MUSHRÜM! ^ExplanationDwarves in teams have a specific voice line for pointing out xenofungus with their laser pointer, as useless as that may be to do so. The combination of this uselessness with the dwarves' frankly weird pronunciation of the word mushroom has been known to stop whole teams in their tracks so they can point the Mushroom out to each other.
  • WE'RE RICH!^Explanation In a similar vein to the above, the callout for a piece of Compressed Gold or a chunk of Bittergem. It already sounds weird enough when it isn't combined with the Scout's helium squeak or the Driller's cavernous basso, and it's not uncommon to see the entire squad group up around the gold/bittergem, chanting about how rich they are. In fact, one of the gripes veteran players have with greenbeards is that the latter tend to deposit compressed gold too soon, before the team can have their fill of "WE'RE RICH!" spamming. This became an Ascended Meme with Mission Control eventually chiming in and telling the team to knock it off and get back to work.
  • Pinging goo sacks ^ExplanationWell, you see, hearing dwarfs yell "It's a goo sack!" "Goo sack!" "There is goo in the sack!" is just funny.
  • Due to the shape and appearance of the Engineer's platforms, parkouring while playing as him as come to be known as "Cheese Surfing."
  • The Engineer using a Fat Boy grenade to kill a single Fester Flea or otherwise using the Fat Boy overclock irresponsibly is the spawner of many jokes.
  • "High Moss Arboreal," a fictional/hypothetical counterpart to the game involving elves exploring treetops. Originating from an April Fool's post on the subreddit, many players, despite their open (and practically mandatory) disdain for "pointy-eared leaf-lovers," expressed a desire to play such a game for real. Time will tell if Ghost Ship implements the idea.
  • I wanna dip my balls in liquid morkite. ^Explanation A DRG subreddit user posted a modified version of the "I should dip my balls in sulfuric acid" meme. This unexpectedly took off and began a commonly-spammed meme on the subreddit and DRG's Discord channels; when the Developers tried to shut the shitpost spam down, it resulted in something of a briefly Broken Base in the community before dying down after Meme Acknowledgement and Creator Backlash by the meme's originator.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • The Driller's melee-oriented and Friendly Fire-prone playstyle seems to attract the craziest, boldest of players, or at least this is the perception. As such, the Driller is seen as an absolute battle-crazy madman that will charge even Dreadnoughts and Bulk Detonators close up so they can personally murder them and will eagerly bomb his own allies with his Satchel Charges if there's no enemies around, when he's not drilling off tunnels into the darkest, nastiest corners of the cavern to kill what's in there. This has been acknowledged by Ghost Ship Games by joking that Driller is for PvP and a voiceline when pinging a Driller that tells them "Easy with the C4!". His arsenal (which includes high explosives, experimental radioactive pistols, a flamethrower, a Freeze Ray and a goddamn corrosive waste cannon) is also laden with weapons that are blatant war crimes, including one that microwaves a target until it pops. His Season 3 grenade, the Springloaded Ripper notably deals more friendly fire damage than usual, making it easy for it to kill his team especially when it keeps going round and round a tunnel with allies.
  • Engineers armed with the Fat Boy overclock are notorious for blowing up their own teammates, either intentionally or accidentally when trying to nuke the Glyphids, and general irresponsible usage of what amounts to a spring-loaded nuclear warhead. It's to the point where the mere mention of a Fat Boy in use on a mission elicits caution from the other players on the team.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Some sound effects are ear candy:
  • A Driller's Impact Axe hitting an enemy with a very satisfying thunk.
  • The CRSPR Flamethrower's growl-like noise as a new fuel tank is added.
  • A Resupply Pod touching down after drilling far enough.
  • Cracking open a Lithophage Meteorite sounds oh so satisfying.
  • A mineral chunk or egg being dislodged and tumbling out of the wall it's stuck in.
  • Opening a Cargo Crate, or finding a lost Dwarf's gear buried somewhere, plays a subdued but still rewarding fanfare segment.
  • Starting up the Refinery in On-Site Refining sounds very guttural and impressive.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • One mission modifier is "Parasites," wherein each glyphid has a parasitic worm inside it, which bursts out upon the host's death and poses as yet another enemy you have to kill. You'd expect something like Chest Bursters that lunge for your face, right? Well, what you actually get is a bunch of worms that just aimlessly flop around like epileptic pool noodles. They usually die while still in your line of fire, and their weakness means this modifier can make for an accidentally easy mission.
  • In Lithophage Outbreak levels, it's possible for the Dwarves themselves to get affected by the Rockpox. It has a frightening build-up, with the screen turning yellow at the sides and a fast heartbeat that plays the closer one is to infection. When the infection meter fully builds up... it doesn't turn the dwarves into diseased husks, but merely encases them in tendrils that immobilize and deal low Damage Over Time until Smashing Survival removes them and resets the infection meter. It ends up feeling more like a minor inconvenience than a horrifying infection.
• Paranoia Fuel: Two words: Cave Leeches. Thought Half-Life's Barnacles are bad? They can strike you when you least expect it, with only a momentary hissing sound to alert you of their presence. A hissing which sounds remarkably similar to the sound your burning flares make, which is likely to induce further paranoia and confusion. There's a perk that indicates when you're being targeted by one of these, but then it's all a matter of if and when your spidey sense kicks in, and this can be complicated if there are Nayaka Trawlers lurking around (at least the Mactera Grabbers have obvious screeches). They also spawn rare enough (outside of Cave Leech Clusters) to always catch you when you finally put your guard down after not seeing (or being grabbed by) one for a couple of missions.
• Player Tic: Two especially common ones: spamming the "Rock and Stone" taunt at teammates while inside the drop pod, and repeatedly slapping the fuzzy dice in the drop pod while waiting on teammates to enter it. Repeatedly marking to get the "MUSHRÜM!" and "WE'RE RICH!" voicelines is also popular.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Resource distribution is always a difficult juggling act. For crafting resources Jadiz was this for much of the game's history, being both the most required and hardest to get, but this was alleviated with the addition of new biomes; in the current update Enor Pearl is considered the hardest resource to come by, with Magnite and Bismor close behind, while Croppa and Umanite are both seen as too common. When it comes to beer crafting, Starch Nuts are seen as far too common as while they are the most-used ingredient the brews that make heavy use of them (Gut Wrecker and Mactera Brew) are generally considered less desirable. Thankfully, Season 4 introduces a new use for Starch Nuts as the only ingredient of the Randoweisser beer, which requires ten Starch Nuts to randomize your loadout on your next mission for a Self-Imposed Challenge.
  • Objectives that require you to stay close to them while they work, such as Fuel Cells, Black Boxes, Hacking Pods, and Drop Pod calibration units, may land or appear in completely indefensible locations like on a narrow cliff or balanced on a precarious vine or bridge. If you can't drop them into a more defensible location with a Driller or build out a fighting arena with a lot of Engineer platforms then you're forced to fight the entire wave at point-blank range.
  • Bug attack waves can occur when the team is doing a Machine Event. It's no problem in Egg Hunts, Salvage Missions, and Eliminations, where they only occur when extracting an egg sometimes in the former, and simply never happen normally in the latter two, but in Mining Missions, On-Site Refining, and especially Point Extractions, an additional attack wave on top of the Machine Event's hordes is basically a death sentence. The absolute worst instance is during Escort Missions, as the Drilldozer will constantly be under attack by enemies until the core is secure, which means that attempting a mission event before then is practically suicide. Even when the core is secured, most of the time doing a machine event at this point means running back all the way just to do it.
  • The M.U.L.E.'s pathfinding when returning to the Drop Pod can get bizarre depending on your location. There are times where it takes paths you will have much difficulty following, like natural holes in the caverns or craters, or something outright impossible like Supply Drop holes. Mitigated if you're a solo Scout that can follow these weird trails, and negated if there's a Driller around and can just plow through the 200 feet of stone between you and the Pod, but other classes are gonna have a bad day of desperate pickaxing.
  • Until it was fixed, the character mounting system was subject to a lot of criticism. Unlike in some games, dwarves would mount automatically when they so much as touch a ledge or even other players, rather than prompting players to execute this action as they please. The result was a lot of accidental leapfrog antics that result in wasted time, or at worst, characters getting downed by fall damage. There are still issues with mantling simply due to the way jumping interacts with the fully-destructible environment. It's not unusual for a character to jump, try to mantle up a ledge, and get sent flying backwards or sideways because of a nearly-invisible lip or protruding bit of ground on the ledge they're trying to reach. Annoying if you're just trying to get up a steep ledge, fatal if you're a Driller trying to get an objective out of the ceiling.
  • Drop pods, fuel cells, and other things that descend from above don't account for their directionality. This can lead to minor annoyances like a fuel cell on a Salvage Operation dropping with its charging port inside a wall and needing to awkwardly circle the Drop Pod to find the entrance, or mission-enders like the Drop Pod landing on a cliff with its entrance ramp pointed away from any standable terrain, where only a Grappling Hook or Zipline can reach the boarding ramp unless you have an Engineer with a full tank of platform ammo, or more rarely a solid wall where only a Driller can get to it.
  • Due to the way the levels are generated it's possible for tunnels or passages to be completely blocked off by crystals, requiring a player to dig through them to progress, which is especially rough on newer players who might not be familiar with this and assume it's a dead end. It's especially common in the Crystalline Caverns and Salt Pits due to the multiple types of large crystals that can generate there; coincidentally these are also the first two zones new players are permitted to go into.
  • In On-Site Refining missions, the keypress to grind along a pipeline and the keypress to build or repair the pipeline are the same. Cue many, many, many accidental grinds while trying to fix the pipe mid-swarm.
  • Hacking. The HACK-C pod always feels like it drops the furthest possible distance away from the target, the hacking nodes need to be so close together to work that you'll be trying to link them together for what feels like hours, going directly up or down is pain if you screw up a node, and to top it all off, the drone stops working if it takes too much damage and needs to be restarted, something that is thankfully absent from salvage missions. It should be no surprise then that players are not leaping at the opportunity to do Prospector Data Deposits when they find them. Fortunately, Season 3 addressed these issues to make hacking less of a hassle, with Hacking Nodes now having a much larger radius and HACK-C requires a shorter amount of time to successfully hack.
  • In Lithophage Outbreak missions, the Lithophage can be randomly generated in hard to reach areas, such as high up or even behind enclosed caves that are initially hidden from the player's view. Since the player needs to remove a large percentage of the Lithophage infection to remove the Contagion Spike, this can make finding and cleaning that last patch of infection very difficult or even impossible — which in turn, can render a mission unwinnable because all Contagion Spikes must be neutralized in order to complete the mission.
  • The way Blank Matrix Core^note used to turn them into Weapon or Cosmetic Overclocks them after successful Machine Events and Weapons Overclocks are earned is not very popular among new players. You can only obtain at maximum 6 per week ^note Weekly Core Hunt, Deep Dive and Elite Deep Dive with no means to accelerate the process. Since there are 148 overclocks to hunt, if they want something specific, they better not be in a hurry.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • If one gets heavily drunk at the Abyss Bar, they'll deal with Camera Screw through seeing double and Interface Screw by a lack of balance and one's dwarf swaying left to right. You can bring this effect into missions if you're so inclined, but the game won't reward you for succeeding on a mission like this.
  • Carrying Doretta's core to the escape pod after a successful Escort mission. The carrier can't defend themselves and is severely slowed down, and you are given no reward for this, save for her cameo on the victory screen. Many players take it upon themselves to do this solely out of love and appreciation for Doretta. Of course, there are detractors of this practice, citing that it's a waste of focus and resources better spent on actually extracting the team, and that carrying Doretta is an unnecessary risk.
• Song Association: "Diggy Diggy Hole", from the Yogscast Minecraft Series, has become associated with Deep Rock Galactic due to how both the song and the game are about dwarves digging holes.
• Squick: Glyphid Septic Spreaders attack by firing their sepsis at you. According to the Miner's Manual, they're firing out corrosive pus at you, which means they essentially have a disgusting, weaponized blood infection. It even applies in-universe, as the Dwarves may occasionally have Brain Bleach reactions when getting blasted by the stuff.
• That One Attack:
  • The OMEN Modular Exterminator's most troublesome attack is the bottom module's Radial Pulse Gun, which constantly fires Spread Shots of wide and extremely damaging Painfully Slow Projectiles similar to those fired by the Engineer's Breach Cutter while also rotating randomly, meaning that it's unpredictable in telling whether there's going to be a wave headed for a Dwarf. It's the one module that's consistent in all variations, and it forces the Dwarves to either weave around, place platforms carefully, or play jump rope, all while at the mercy of its other attacks. One Dwarf also needs to be standing on the platform that makes this module vulnerable, making dodging the unpredictably-fired waves even harder for them. Once it's removed, the Dwarves have far more breathing room to avoid the sweeping lasers, the searchlight gun, or shoot down the homing drones, and most importantly, stand on the other access platforms without having to move around or jump as much.
  • The Nemesis has its grab attack. It's like a Cave Leech that can chase you, which is horrible enough as is, but it can grab up to two Dwarves at one go and then getting it to let go of the dwarves it's snatched up before it crunches and zaps them into incapacitation is even harder. It's especially bad in solo play, as Bosco will usually be unable to get you out and thus even getting one inch too close to the Nemesis will cost you a revive. Later updates seemingly made it a little easier for the Nemesis to drop you under duress, so Bosco can at least save you before you get crunched. On higher Hazard levels, not even Bosco can save you as the grab will almost certainly instantly kill you from full health.
  • The Dreadnought Hiveguard, once its main weakpoint is exposed, will roar and stomp onto the ground, sending out explosive projectiles in all directions. At higher hazard levels, this is comparable to a Bulk Detonator's fiery stomp in damage and range, but the Hiveguard will execute the attack multiple times in a row and from a further distance, presenting a huge risk if you try to get up close and nail its weakpoint.
• That One Boss:
  • THE TWINS. Although they are the only dreadnought variant to not have indestructible armored sections, they make up for it through sheer evasiveness, damage, and unique mechanics that make them so loathsome to fight. As the name implies they fight as a pair, with the Lacerator at the front dealing devastating close range flame belch and earthquake stomp attacks while the Arbalest stays on the ceiling providing covering fire with a wide range of projectile explosives. During the fight they will burrow away and reposition at random, functionally teleporting across the caves or in the Lacerator's case right under your feet with high knockback. If one twin is focused on by the dwarves the other twin will transfer some of its health to heal the injured one in a period of invincibility that regenerates both twins' shells, and the injured one will regain 3-4 HP for every one the other loses. If the area is small or cluttered the Arbalest may simply decide to stay out of the dwarves' lines of sight, turning it into a giant health battery for the Lacerator. When one twin dies (usually the Lacerator) the survivor will go berserk and start attacking non stop with their crazier options in a literal Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Finally, killing one Twin while the other is above 50% health (which requires some doing, but is possible) may result in a bug where the other twin turns invulnerable until it burrows and surfaces again, meaning all you can do is dodge its frenzied attacks and hope it burrows soon.
  • When the Dreadnought variants were added to the game, the original version of the boss was updated to keep pace with the new Hiveguard and Twins variants... which primarily amounted to making its numbers better: it has more health, its armor regenerates faster, etc. The result is a boss that's very good at killing players, with its lethal attacks and high aggression, but mechanically isn't so fun as it lacks gimmicks other Dreadnoughts have that give them some extra gameplay depth, like needing to position yourself to aim at a small weakspot or juggle two bosses at once.
  • The OMEN Modular Exterminator is this for machine events, and is one of the few machine events many choose to skip. Three of the four possible weapons it has are capable of murdering a dwarf quicker than they can blink. The Radial Pulse Gun shoots a Painfully Slow Projectile at the base of the Exterminator, which can deals heavy damage multiple times due to the projectile being that slow. The Heavy Burster will shred anyone caught in its spotlight with near instant hit high damage bullets. Finally, the Drone Deployer shoots glorified homing missiles that are only slightly weaker than an exploder. You have to juggle your attention between all of these modules and slip up even once, and if it downs you it's unlikely you're getting up without Bosco or Iron Will.
  • The Caretaker quickly gained this reputation when Industrial Sabotage missions were released. It's a very long fight with an even longer list of mechanics that players have to react to, and opportunities to actually damage the boss are limited. The adds are even worse, especially the robot tentacles and the sniper turrets. All in all, it requires the players to spin plates constantly being on the move, pouncing on opportunities to do damage when they appear, and staying alive and topped up on ammo. Oh, and the fight also makes various popular builds pretty much useless as the Caretaker is immune to status effects and difficult to fight with close-range weapons due to its size and tendency to electrify the platform it's floating over if anyone steps on it.
  • Rockpox Corruptors from Season 4 are pain incarnate whenever they show up. They require dwarves to strip its shell with Lithofoam and Lithovacs before cracking its cores, similar to a Contagion Spike - but at least when dealing with a normal Contagion Spike, your team has the leisure of the Spike not moving around constantly, making it near-impossible to quickly coat it in foam and suck it up before it flees. Not to mention that once you actually damage it a bit, it'll start to fight back with a powerful ground stomp like a Glyphid Dreadnought and waves of Combat Tentacles that can be hard to see in the mess of Rockpox. Worst of all, though, is that Corruptors are unlike other bosses in that they don't stop glyphids from spawning so you can focus on them, so you'll have to contend with every other hazard in the level and potentially even swarms while trying to fight the damn thing. Of course, Corruptors are totally optional, but they're "optional" in the sense that they'll be covering every flat surface in a mile radius with hazardous slowing Rockpox if left unchecked, so unlike a Machine Event or most of the other random encounters, you basically have to fight one when you see one if you don't want to be gimped for the rest of the mission.
• That One Disadvantage:
  • For a while, "Shield Disruption" was the only mutation that didn't increase the amount of elite enemies. It's still widely agreed to be the most dangerous, as it completely disables the dwarfs' shields. Not only is all damage semi-permanent, making the limited amounts of red sugar and resupplies into precious commodities, but several useful perks and upgrades are rendered null and void. Even though the Dwarves take 30% less damage from non-friendly sources as compensation^note This translates to a dwarf at full health on Shield Disruption having about an extra shield's worth of health compared to normal, it's still a huge hassle that demands players be far more cautious.
  • "Haunted Cave" is a fun time for dwarves who define "fun" as "constantly being hunted down by an invulnerable Bulk Detonator." Considering most dwarves don't like that definition, this mutation tends to be one of the least popular. In multiplayer games, the common strategy is for one dwarf to waste all their time kiting the Unknown Horror around while the rest of the team plays the game, and in a solo game the player will have to spend a lot of time backtracking and waiting for the Horror to move away from the thing they need to do, especially if it's something Bosco can't do. Additionally the Horror is almost as fast as Molly, which can make depositing minerals very frustrating for a solo player.
  • "Low Oxygen" is exactly as bad as it sounds. In short, everyone has to spend about 10% of their time right next Molly (or mine heads, on missions where she's not around), resupply pods, or a defensive objective^note e.g. Doretta, uplink modules, etc.; stay away for too long, and you'll quickly start taking damage straight to health. While it's not so bad in Mining and Salvage missions where the layout is relatively linear or on Escort Duty missions where players will likely be sticking near Doretta, it's an utter nightmare on Egg Hunt and point extraction missions where the objectives are scattered everywhere, and generally forces players to stick together and slow down. Things really get hairy during dreadnought battles and swarms, where the need to constantly stay on the move limits how much time you can spend near an oxygen supply. But once you get through all of that you still have to extract, which means the one source of mobile oxygen supply is now completely out of your control. Since the drop pod is usually more than a minute away (which is about how long you can last without oxygen resupply), you need to keep pace with Molly, facing the tides of glyphid that entails and hoping the shortest route to the pod doesn't include any cliffs.
• That One Level: Due to Hoxxes' status as a Death World, expect a lot of this.
  • The Magma Core, due to its extreme degree of environmental danger. Convection, Schmonvection is not in effect, fire geysers are everywhere, and large amount of any given level is covered with dangerous-to-touch magma rock, of which more is created whenever the terrain is damaged by anything other than a pickaxe. Earthquakes also happen, slowing down all the players with little warning and tearing open a magma-lined fissure that can spell doom for anyone who falls in, something especially easy since its indicator can be hard to notice during swarms. And the level generation's tendency towards high, ribbed-shape ceilings makes gathering resources painful, especially without both an Engineer and Scout, since a sizable chunk of them will generate in the "walls" 40 feet off the ground. It gets worse if the Exploder Infestation hazard is active, as every Exploder blowing up will uncover more and more magma rock. Engineers and Drillers can make the terrain worse with their weapons; the grenade launcher explosions (especially the Fat Boy overclock) and the big explosions from satchel chargers can create huge and hot craters filled with magma rock, making traversing the area even trickier.
  • The Hollow Bough is almost always much, much taller than it is wide and covered in damaging thorns, meaning you have to be very careful and conservative with ziplines/platforms in order to get anywhere, and on-site refining missions are the worst because the liquid morkite wells are almost always above the refinery. Building pipelines vertically is a huge pain in the ass, very easy to mess up lest you risk falling to your death, and makes you a prime target for Mactera and anything that has knockback. Escort Duty is almost as bad, since Doretta will occasionally go vertically up a wall.
  • The Glacial Strata, though it lacks the perpetually hostile environment of the above, is considered by many to be even worse nonetheless. Freezing isn't exclusive to the Glacial Strata, but unlike other regions it doesn't go away over time. If you don't stand in one of the hot springs dotting the map or take care to avoid every source of cold damage, your dwarf will eventually freeze solid. Freeze doesn't deal damage itself and you can break out on your own, but it does make you take triple damage, so being immobilized in the middle of a firefight can turn deadly. And there are LOTS of ways for cold to build up in the Strata: geysers that spray out chilling winds, freak snowstorms that drop your speed and visibility to near nothing while building a good 50% of your freeze meter, and Underground Monkey variants of common enemies that now have ice abilities. There are also patches of snow on the ground that are difficult to notice and will slow you down at the worst times. Moreover, the icy walls are subtly reflective with any level of light, which obscures the reflective, "Notice This" properties of mission-critical ore veins. In addition to all of the above, the ground can crack open just like in the Magma Core. While it may not have the same immediately lethal consequences that the exposed lava veins do in the Magma Core, it's a distressingly common trend for these deep cracks to appear in floors that also serve a ceilings for a massive cavern underneath, usually resulting in a long, fatal drop for the dwarves if they don't get out of the way in time or a flood of enemies to come surging up from the cavern below. Oh, and these cracks occur with virtually no warning save for the sound of ice breaking that lasts for all of half a second before the ground opens up.
  • Sandblasted Corridors has a lot of wind tunnels that don't telegraph nearly as often and have an incredible range and pushing power that can easily send you flying into a fatal drop, and the makeup of the procedural generation has a very high odds of pairing this with large high-roofed caves or really deep pits which exacerbates this. It also has intermittent sandstorms which reduces your visibility even in well-lit caves to almost nothing and drastically slows you down while blowing away any minerals you have, making eggs, aquarq and big gems like enor pearls annoying to turn in. Finally, it's the only biome that's home to Nayaka Trawlers who can be far more annoying than Mactera Grabbers as far as disorienting your group goes. At least there's a significant plus in that its terrain breaks with just one pickaxe hit, so everyone can dig fairly decently.
  • Fungus Bog is usually not as deadly as the examples above but, by Karl, is it annoying. It's often generated with tons of vegetation that can visually impair all dwarves and very often it'll spawn with segments full of green sticky goo that reduces their movement down to a crawl to the point it makes a Gunner's zip line trek upwards look like you're about to break the sound barrier. It also features poison spewing plants and it always spawns lots of them clustered together which will make you want to nuke the damn things.
  • Due to the procedural world generation any level can become That One Level as unlucky world generation can lead to missions being borderline impossible. Examples include compressed dirt being hidden, mission objectives being in inaccessible locations or terrain generation that prevents the player from exiting the mission. One particularly curse-worthy instance is when the caves suddenly open up into one massive (100+ meters long and 60+ meters up) sprawling chamber with an incredibly high ceiling, crisscrossed by a few thin snaking rock formations as intermittent levels to tread on. The valuable minerals will often generate quite high up on the walls and only 2 of the 4 dwarves are equipped to handle prolonged open-space traversal. Good luck not running out of ziplines. This is especially common in the Hollow Bough, Azure Weald and Dense Biozone.
  • Salvage Operation missions start by having the team find and repair a couple of machines, followed by heading back to the drop pod in the mission and powering it back up. The latter objective boils down to fighting off a swarm akin to a finale in Left 4 Dead while staying in a small zone for some time, and leaving the zone decreases progress and can even fail the mission if it hits zero. TWICE. God help you if a Bulk Detonator shows up, forcing you to choose between fleeing the radius and jeopardizing the mission or just getting blown up. Even after all this, the dwarves still have to wait 90 seconds for the drop pod to power up, enduring a tidal wave of bugs in the process.
  • Point Extraction is pretty simple—you just have to find all the Aquarqs, mine them out, and get them back to the minehead. The mission compensates for this simplicity by throwing half the glyphid population on Hoxxes at your face. Enemies spawn at a far greater frequency than normal, both in isolated groups and full swarms (and unlike most mission types, Mission Control won't alert you to the swarm until it's started), and only spawn in bigger numbers with each passing second. The scattered ammo pods, increased nitra frequency, and the minehead's defensive guns do little to ease the constant pressure you'll be under. Oh, and good luck spotting the telltale glowing blue speckles on the walls to indicate the Point Extraction objectives (which don't appear on the minimap) in the Dense Biozone or Azure Weald, where the walls already have bioluminescent speckles. The one saving grace is that the moment the drop pod comes in (which is still 2 full minutes of bugs), you can board it and get the hell out.
    • For the sake of comparison, most missions would take an impossibly long time to reach a point where enemies are spawning faster than a solo dwarf can kill them (you'd almost certainly run out of ammo first)^note  and endless spawns are generally reserved for specific Hold the Line objectives (see Salvage Operation above) or the extraction sequence. Point Extraction? At Hazard 4 or 5, it's common to reach that point in about 15 minutes.
    • The bug waves in the Point Extraction mission only get weaker with fewer players...their spawn rate does not decrease. Good luck doing anything other than mining the Aquarqs and fighting off the bugs if you're a solo player!
  • The Escort Duty mission puts all other mission types to shame in terms of difficulty and annoyance. As shown by the title, it's an Escort Mission where you need to protect a large Drilldozer as it makes its way to its destination. There are many reasons why it's the most hated mission type in the game:
    • It's one of the few mission types that has an outright Nonstandard Gameover. Guess how you obtain it.
    • The Drilldozer moves at a snail's pace, even when all players are nearby. It moves even slower if they are not.
    • The Drilldozer must stop at least once during the journey to the Heartstone. This involves carrying its gas canisters to extract a unique mineral type, Oil Shale. Said mineral is harder to break than the surfaces of the hardest terrains, which makes trying to dislodge it with a pickaxe practically folly if it happens to spawn in a bad place. Oil Shale has a nasty habit of replacing the biome's minerals as well, making its payout in that field poor.
    • The mission isn't immune to random attack waves despite having guaranteed swarms whenever the driller is on the move. Both of these are on top of the incredibly long Hold the Line sequence once the Heartstone is reached.
    • Speaking of that Hold the Line sequence, it consists of 4 phases, each of which put the Drilldozer under constant pressure. The first and third phase consist of a glyphid onslaught from every direction which is quite hard to keep off the Drilldozer, but the second and final phases are even worse. Phase 2 supplements the glyphids with flying rocks—if you don't destroy them quickly, they'll slam into the Drilldozer for massive damage to both the Drilldozer and any dwarf trying to repair it. In the final phase, crystals occasionally pop up from the ground and will start melting the Drilldozer's health unless they're mined through. And between each phase, the Heartstone will release a shockwave that knocks you away from the Drilldozer and leaves you with barely enough time to repair or resupply. Overall, the Heartstone fight is a stress-fest that demands a level of quick decision-making well beyond anything else in the game.
    • The level layout has Nitra, gold, and the occasional biome mineral and secondary objective item scattered along the Drilldozer's path. It's a chore to attempt to harvest these and protect the Drilldozer at the same time, even during pit stops.
    • The drilldozer might decide to take a very strange path to the objective, which can be a problem if it decides to relocate to a presently-inaccessible position while under attack.
    • The drilldozer will heedlessly plow through anything in its way, including huge patches of explosive plants, magma geysers, bulk detonators, and other things that go boom. However, it does have some damage resistance against environmental hazards and will only ever lose one of its three health bars to a bulk detonator explosion, but the players standing near it aren't so lucky.
    • Enemies that spawn as part of an event, such as a Machine Event or a Rival Hack, will also attack the drilldozer. This can make some machine events unwinnable, especially solo, as you don't have time to complete the event while also keeping the drilldozer alive through the continuous assault, forcing you to complete the main objective before even thinking about pursuing additional objectives.
    • For added fun, the level can be generated with nasty hazards that make things even more dire, such as Elite Threat which spawns Elite enemies that can make much quicker work of Doretta, or Lethal Enemies which makes all melee enemies hurt her twice as much.
    • In Deep Dives, Drilldozer objectives are the only type that are just as long as a regular mission. Take all of the points above, now imagine having to deal with those while you're also mining Morkite or gathering alien eggs. The only saving grace is that there's only ever one stop for the Deep Dive variant, as opposed to the possibility of having two stops, which would make an already long mission even longer.
    • Annoyingly, all class promotion assignments, with the exception of one, require at least one Escort Duty mission to be completed, and weekly assignments are hardly any better, forcing players to play a mission that they could otherwise avoid like the plague.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Gathering Fossils is probably the toughest of the "Gather Individual Items" secondary missions, despite needing the fewest of the bunch (10 Fossils compared to 20 Boolo Caps and 15 Apoca Blooms). Less common and much harder to see than other gatherables, fossils also spawn on the widest angles of terrain, meaning they can and often do appear on sheer walls or in the ceiling where even a Scout might struggle to get them safely.
  • Introduced in an update are Gunk Seeds, which put the Fossils to shame. Gunk Seeds need to be shot down from the ceiling to be grabbed and sent to deposit. The worst part is that they're as heavy as large gemstones. It's hell when it's during Point Extraction or Refining missions, where the MULE is replaced by a stationary deposit at the main base. Few bother actually completing this secondary objective under these conditions. Thankfully, you can always order Bosco to pick up the Seeds for you on Solo missions so you don't have to haul them all the way back to the deposit spot yourself, but it will make him unable to attack enemies while he's carrying the Seed. Plus, once you pop the sack the game has the decency to show the seed in the Terrain Scanner, which is always helpful if it falls into a crevice and you lost track of where it landed.
  • The same update also introduced Ebonuts. Thought gathering Fossils was bad enough? Now try it when you need to crack them open with your pickaxe, and you need to collect more of them! At least they don't spawn on high walls nearly as often. And they used to be worse, as the shell didn't glow in the dark until it was patched in, making them all but impossible to see. The only thing that makes Ebonuts less-reviled than fossils is that Scouts can usually stand on them when they're in a wall, making them easier to get for that one class.
  • Flea Extermination is the only objective that doesn't involve depositing. That's basically the only positive thing about this, since the fleas fly fast and are difficult to locate without their flashing abdomens and distinct noises. For most, you'll have to spend some rounds chasing these down, though high-damage weapons like the Bulldog and M1000 can often kill them in one shot and the Cryo Cannon and Smart Rifle both make flea-hunting trivial.
  • Gathering Dystrum itself isn't such a problem, as it's a mineral similar to Morkite and is reasonably plentiful wherever they appear. However, doing the milestones for completing this objective counts, as Dystrum only ever appears in Point Extraction and On-Site Refining missions for whatever reason. It's generally agreed that if you do either of these, you'll want to wait for the Dystrum objective to be available, as the other objectives can still appear too.
  • All Machine Events can be nasty in one way or another. For all of them, you'd consider yourself lucky if they appear in Egg Hunts, Eliminations, or Salvage missions, where the more regular attack waves can be choreographed (or are nonexistent in the case of Eliminations). Anywhere else, and you're at the mercy of RNG whether they show up during the event! In the case of Escort Duty, the enemy may attack the Drilldozer, whose destruction results in mission failure. It's often agreed that the best time to tackle a Machine Event during Escort Duty is after the Heartstone has been harvested, but before calling in extraction.
    • Tritilyte deposits are one of the more annoying Core Infuser events for purely technical reasons; you have to manually carry between 5-10 nanite bombs dropped in from a drop pod to it and blow it up before the timer runs. While not bad on its own, the drop pod tries to spawn "close" and this doesn't always work out because the drop pod can't find a good position. At best it will show up a short but doable jaunt away, if you have bad luck it could spawn somewhere that needs immense effort to reach and get back to the deposit. If you get really unlucky and it can't find anywhere nearby that it says is viable, the game could spawn it at 0,0 on the map, which is where the missions start and depending on how deep the caves is, makes it Unintentionally Unwinnable.
    • Ebonite Mutations can be annoying for those who don't really focus on melee combat. Thankfully, the machine will deploy powerups that grant infinite strong pickaxe strikes for a period of time, but the objective enemies are invulnerable to everything but melee attacks.
    • Kursite Infection requires the elimination of certain enemies with yellow glows. These can range from the mundane grunts, to the tough-as-nails Praetorians, to the difficult-to-track Macteras. In the case of the latter, pray that they aren't killed above some chasm where it's folly to recover the Kursite! Worst are the Acid Spitters, though, as they're the only Kursite-infected enemy that will make you find them instead of coming to you. They also almost always appear on the ceiling, making them the most likely to drop Kursite in an inaccessible location. It's also possible for the Kursite-bearing enemies to spawn in an inaccessible or undiscovered part of the level, rendering this Unintentionally Unwinnable unless you get lucky searching.
    • The Omen Modular Exterminator is basically That One Boss of Machine Events. It has three sections that need to be destroyed, and can only be done so by targeting its vulnerable spots that surface for brief periods of time. All the while you're being attacked by an assortment of lasers, bullets, and drones. And there are pressure plates that need to be stepped on to activate the vulnerable spots too! Basically, you're a sitting duck while the machine wails on you with no means of retreat!
• Ugly Cute:
  • Many players find the Loot Bugs adorable, given their harmlessness, sad-puppy noises, and fat, bulbous bodies. The Devs eventually acknowledged this by allowing players to pet them, causing them to wiggle in response.
  • Glyphids. Basic Grunts have a saucy abdominal wiggle when walking that makes them come off as sassier than they have any right to. Steeve the tamed Glyphid proves that they're sort of adorable when they're not trying to kill you. He even waggles his abdomen happily when petted. Even the Dwarves seem to find Steeve cute, if not other Glyphids.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The game is gorgeous despite its low poly look, thanks to the beautiful scenery, lighting and shadow effects. The real kicker however, are the amazing animations, especially the twirling with the revolver, which is almost hypnotic.
  • Each biome has some kind of excellent looking visual effect. For example, the Glacial Strata has beautiful reflective lighting off the ice.
  • The scenic view of Hoxxes IV from the Space Rig deserves special mention here. A breathtaking view of the planet you'll be digging and blasting your way through, coupled with an intriguing and beautiful glimpse of the cosmos around you.

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