Update 21: Going Lethal

Release Date
 External Link(s)

 — DRG Update Page

**Update 21: Going Lethal** introduced the Weapon Mastery system, an all new Hazard 5 - Lethal difficulty level, and three unique new enemies into the game. Update 21 released on February 6th, 2019.

### New Features

#### Three New Enemies

* **BET-C - The Battle M.U.L.E**

Deep Rock Galactic didn’t invest much in the safety system of their BET-C series of combat M.U.L.E.’s. It only takes a few Xynarch Charge-Sucker parasites licking the robot’s circuits to turn them against the dwarves. In that situation, BET-C’s fast-tracking auto-turret and grenade launcher could become a major threat for any expedition. If you find an infected model, aim for the attached organisms and, once they are eradicated, carefully hammer BET-C until it turns into a trustworthy companion for the rest of the mission.

* **Q’Ronar Shellback**

The Q'ronar Shellback is a deadly creature that you might bump into in the Radioactive and Salty regions of Hoxxes. Their tough shells and fast movement speed make them quite hard to kill - try to dodge its rolling attack and kill the Shellback when it stops to spray poison venom at you.

* **Naedocyte Shocker**

The Naedocyte Shocker is a strange alien flying jellyfish-like creature. They often appear in large swarms and is preferably dealt with before they get close enough to zap you with electrical shocks. So far they’ve been spotted in the regions of Dense Biozone and the Glacial Strata.

#### New Hazard Level: Lethal

By popular demand, we’ve added a LETHAL new difficulty setting only for the most masochistic and badass dwarves out there! We hope you have “fun”... :D

#### Difficulty 2.0

Enemy wave spawn logic has been tweaked, and multiple bugs have been fixed, allowing for a fairer challenge.

* **General Spawn Logic**:

The general logic behind how we handle spawns has gotten a big overhaul - balancing waves is now a much more exact and controllable thing for us. This is actually the biggest of all changes we’ve done to the difficulty system, but also the hardest to explain in detail - maybe we’ll do a blog post on this in the future :-)

* **Mission Specific Enemy Types**:

The Mission Generator now also pre-selects the specific mix of enemies players will encounter in a given mission. Instead of randomly selecting from every enemy type available in the game, players will now face themed swarms of enemies. This change won’t be particularly visible right now, but will serve to improve the overall feel and flow of the enemy swarms as we add more enemy types to the game.

The goal here is to make each mission feel a lot more unique, as well as making it more attractive for players to pursue a more strategic approach - if you have a rough idea of what awful things you might face down in the depths, you stand a better chance of going in as prepared as you can be.

* **Time**: As a rule, lowering the time between spawning enemy waves means more enemies in general, which results in an overall higher difficulty. Knowing this, we’ve made a few changes to how we time waves:

Time elapsed before the first wave appears is based on Difficulty - so higher Difficulty means the first wave arrives faster.
Subsequent waves will also spawn faster depending on difficulty level.

* **Speed**: Attack speed, projectile speed, and movement speed of enemies are increased for the highest difficulties.

* **Environmental Hazards**: You now take more damage from environmental dangers on higher difficulties.

* **You Get The Waves You Deserve**: Multiple waves are now allowed to spawn at the same time and do not cancel each other out.
	+ Example 1: Digging two eggs out in Egg hunt will generate two small waves instead of only one.
	+ Example 2: You can not cancel a wave in progress by calling in the Drop Pod

#### Weapon Mastery

A Weapon Mastery Bar has been added to all gear - as you unlock mods for a given piece of gear, your Mastery with it increases. At certain levels of Mastery, you’ll gain free bonuses. For now the bonuses are restricted to Skins, and only for the primary and secondary weapon slots. Each weapon has three unlockable skins to get.

The majority of our time with this has been spent on getting the system up and running, but we definitely intend to expand on the Skins System as we move a bit further ahead - you can expect other ways than just through the weapon masteries to earn skins in the future.

### Other Notes

**UI Improvements**:

* **New Enemy Health Bar**
We’ve completely revamped the way we put health bars on enemies. Now it will show when the player is aiming at an enemy and it will do it on top of that enemy (instead of in the center of the screen). Additionally, it displays the damage applied to the enemy with every shot.

* **New Mission Readout Bar**
The Mission Readout Bar visible on the Space Rig has been updated with more information about the mission in progress, as well as gotten a graphical overhaul.

* **New Biome Content**
In The Salt Pits Region, you’ll now start seeing fragile Salt Platforms - stand on them, but be careful. They’re not tested for dwarf girth.

* **Prevent Late Join Duplication**
You want a diverse team? You don't like teams with three Engineers? The Host now has the option to select “PREVENT LATE JOIN DUPLICATION” from the Escape menu and Options menu. Selecting this option means players LATE JOINING your game will need to select a character class not currently in play.
Please note: This option does NOT restrict character selection on the Space Rig - we leave that up to you guys to figure out among yourselves.

* **More Equipment Modifications**
The new Modification System has now been implemented for the traversal tools. That means more customization for the Power Drills, the Platform Gun, the Zipline Gun, and the Grappling Gun. Furthermore, your armor modding opportunities also got some tender, loving care...

* **Weapon Tweaks & Fixes**
Yes, we have been both buffing and nerfing a lot of the weapons and here is a compiled list of changes!

**Plasma Charger:**

* Flying Nightmare damage no longer stacks on top of direct hit damage.
* Bouncy Projectiles also bounce on enemies.
* Charged Shot base area of effect reduced.
* Normal shot damage increased.
* Plasma Charger and other projectile weapons no longer ignore armor. Now they have to break it.

**"Lead Storm" Powered Minigun:**

* Base total ammunition increased.
* Oversized Drum mod value increased.
* Hot Bullets mod activates earlier.
* Cold As The Grave mod no longer goes to a set value every time. As originally intended, it will now reduce the heat of the gun a certain amount per kill.
* Aggressive Venting mod now works as intended.

**BRT7 Burst Fire Gun:**

* Default effectiveness against armor reduced.

**Deepcore GK2:**

* Armor Penetration mod value increased.
* High Capacity Magazine value increased.
* Stun Hit mod renamed. Chances increased.

**Jury-Rigged Boomstick:**

* Rate of fire mod renamed to "Double Trigger".

**"Warthog" Auto 210:**

* Armor Breaking mod damage increased.
* Stun Chance mod increased.
* Turret Whip damage increased.

**"Stubby" Voltaic SMG:**

* Electrocution Bonus mod value reduced.

**Deepcore 40mm PGL:**

* Incendiary Compound mod decreases the direct damage taken by enemies, but it will set them on fire.
* Pressure Wave value fixed.

**Breach Cutter:**

* Extra Ammo mod value reduced.
* Damage tweaks to compensate for the frame rate dependency fix.
* Adjustments to the projectile to make it framerate independent.

**Cryo Cannon:**

* Sticky Ice cold effect reduced.
* Base freezing power reduced.
* Total ammo increased.

**CRSPR Flamethrower:**

* Increased base damage.
* Decreased base Rate of Fire.
* Decreased base tank capacity.
* Decreased tank capacity upgrade.
* Decreased base sticky flames duration.
* Decreased sticky flames duration upgrades.
* Increased direct damage upgrade.
* Increased direct burn upgrade.
* Increased targets explode upgrade chance.

**Subata 120:**

* Mactera Neurotoxin mod effect increased.

**Updated Unreal Engine Version to 4.21**

* For quite some time, we have been stuck with Unreal Engine 4.19, but we finally managed to update the engine to 4.21. It seems to have fixed a lot of GPU crashes. Happy days!

**Miscellaneous:**

* Alien Egg Collection mission should now properly distribute the eggs in the mission area.
* Assignment missions can now include Mission Modifiers. For difficult assignments, higher complexity missions will be preferred.
* Fixed Restore Save pop-up showing up unnecessarily for ultrawide monitors.
* Small adjustment to Steam warning message.
* Fixed a LOT of spelling errors (Yes, we know. Keep sending ‘em our way if you spot any :D).
* Attempt to fix voice chat issues.
* A maximum of 2 voice lines for waking up in Medibay will now be played.
* Umanite and Inert Uranium materials now look a lot more distinct from each other.
* Landing in Sticky Goo reduces fall damage.
* Fixed a bug with area damage falloff.
* Friendly fire modification added to Bosco.
* Glyphid Warriors, Spitters, and Web Spitters now don't always run away from explosions. It is chance based on different resistances depending on the enemy.
* Mactera should no longer die just from being frozen.
* Spitballers weak points now correctly take additional damage from weapons that do extra damage to weak points.
* Fix hanging grunt scream.
* Doubled the number of enemies that are able to target one player.
* Acid Spitters now properly do Poison Damage. (Yes we know - expect a name change here later… :D )
* Management has approved fixing critical mesh clipping of gantries near Abyss Bar.
* More random mission names.
* Many spelling errors fixed.
* New fanfare when getting promoted.
* Added Slovenian Language

### Post-Update Hotfixes

Hotfixes are small patches meant to fix bugs and balancing.

#### Hotfix 1

7th February, 2019

**Overall Difficulty tweaks**

* Longer time between random enemy spawns for all difficulties (Lethal not so much)
* Difficulty rating of Mactera Grabber and Bomber increased, so the spawn system spawns them less often.
* Enemy encounters in caves reduced in size
* Less enemy spawning during Salvage and Point Extraction (Please remember that we still want these two missions to be the most hectic missions)
* More Nitra spawning in Egghunt missions

**Weapons, Upgrades & Mods**

* Naming and Descriptions of Upgradable Armor Suits updated
* Optimization of Skin Thumbnail material
* Breach Cutter should no longer be framerate dependent
* Tweaks to Breach Cutter damage to match the frame rate dependency fixes
* Fix stat view of all armors
* Fixed issue with health mastery not applying correctly
* Fixed Bosco’s stats for its Upgrades in the APD-Terminal - they will now show different stats depending on what rocket is active and other stats have been fixed to look nicer
* Cryo Cannon and Flamethrower no longer stops after hitting the first enemy
* Charge Blaster hold button functionality
* Driller Armor - Fixed shield mod value
* Driller changes: Double Drills, Lowered initial Mining Rate slightly, Increased base fuel,
* Increased fuel mod values, Drills can now hit multiple targets at once, Drill Speed tweaked
* Fixed drills not being able to hit enemies at point blank
* Velocity modifier for the cryo cannon firing audio is now set up correctly
* Cryo Cannon - The spray goes through enemies so multiple targets can be damaged at once (this change applies to CRSPR Flamethrower too).
* Cryo Cannon - Base pressure drops at a slower pace allowing to hold fire for longer.
* Cryo Cannon - Base direct damage increased
* Cryo Cannon - Base direct cold effect increase (enemies freeze faster)
* Cryo Cannon - Tweaks to some enemies' temperature resistance.
* Plasma Charger - Total ammo increased
* Fix Scout Dual SMG Skins only applied to one weapon

**Enemies**

* Fixed cave leeches so they no longer spawn during waves when Cave leech mutator is active
* Fanfare not playing double
* BET-C grenade particles significantly optimized
* You can no longer pick flowers and take a leisure ride on the zipline while getting grabbed by a Cave leech
* Crash fix for Shellback

**Misc**

* Moved Skins icon down a bit
* Layout and font tweaks on a lot of Popup windows
* Mission Bar layout tweaks
* Fixed a bug where downed players would get stuck in the air if the terrain under them gets removed, they will now fall down to the nearest floor instead.
* A lot of difficulty tweaks
* Serverlist ClassLock icon updated
* Mouse Icons added for several missing buttons
* Tweaks to Salvage difficulty
* Potential Fix for a crash related to the intro movie

#### Hotfix 2

8th February, 2019

* Fixed spiders exploding after having been frozen and then unfrozen now work correctly
* Serverlist tweaks
* Increased Ammo amount in Mine Head Sentries *(400 -> 600 ammo)*
* Increased cost for Mactera and Grabber - they are a bit rarer
* Tweaked Point Extraction a bit easier - longer between big waves and bit smaller end wave
* Minor overall tweak on the difficulty
* Fixed up some grammar issues on the Motivational Quote monitors
* Small tweaks on various enemies sight
* Minor tweaks on overall Haz 4 and 5
* More mission names added
* Poison resistance upgrade icon updated
* Fixed several bugs related to players dying from Iron Will after the drop pod leaves, entering and beginning to leave in the drop pod with Iron Will active will now block the player from dying.
* Fixed wrong values for Gunner and Driller revive invulnerability mod
* Increased Ammo amount in Minehead Sentries
* Increased cost for Mactera and Grabber - they are a bit rarer
* Tweaked Point Extraction a bit easier - longer between big waves and a bit smaller end wave
* Try to fix Bet-c sound issue where shooting sound gets stuck
* Fixed a bug where the beers would get removed when picked up in the spacerig
* Fix Cave Leech den not spawning more cave leeches.
* Fix bug that could cause slightly more cases of single type waves in low difficulty circumstances
* Fixed a bug where the deposit-bucket would get stuck on the player character