Deep Rock Galactic (Video Game)

"Rock and Stone!"^note

The richest mine ever discovered just happens to be on the deadliest planet in the galaxy.
It's also where you work.

Located in the lawless Outer Rim, Hoxxes IV is home to the richest motherlode of valuable minerals in the galaxy. The problem? It's a Death World par excellence. Many have tried to tame this world, greedily seeking her riches; all have failed — all but one. Deep Rock Galactic, one of the biggest and most stubborn space mining conglomerates in the galaxy, has set its sights upon Hoxxes IV.

Their goal is nothing less than — in their own words — the "complete subjugation" of the planet. This will be no easy feat; the natives of Hoxxes are endless and hungry, and they have the home field advantage. In the lightless depths, intruders must contend not only with the native Glyphids, but also the many geographic hazards Hoxxes has to offer; subterranean jungles, ice caverns, even the churning tectonics of the planet's very core. Who do you call on to undertake such an insanely dangerous excavation?

Space dwarves, of course!

Deep Rock Galactic is a cooperative First-Person Shooter and the debut game of Danish studio Ghost Ship Games. It was released on Steam Early Access on February 28, 2018. On May 13th, 2020, it entered full release on Steam. It has also been released on Xbox One and the Windows 10 Store, and in early 2022 released on the PlayStation 4 and 5. In it, you play as a team of 1 to 4 heavily-armed Space Dwarves on a mission to the most dangerous (and lucrative) planet in the galaxy. The game consists of randomly generated and fully destructible cave systems, containing a variety of environmental obstacles and swarming with hungry alien bugs. Players are tasked with completing a variety of objectives, from simply fulfilling a mineral quota to escorting a Drill Tank or pumping liquid minerals into an orbitally inserted refinement facility. Ideally, this should be accomplished without dying to the locals.

Luckily, the Deep Rock dwarves traded in their forefathers' chainmail, crossbows and mules for more advanced kit long ago. To combat the Glyphid hordes, Deep Rock Galactic fields four specialists, each with their own abilities and equipment:

The Scout specializes in mobility, exploration, and resource gathering. His flare gun is the best source of lighting in the game, and his grappling hook allows him unparalleled movement, making him a good choice for locating objectives or obtaining valuable items and minerals. In combat, he's best used for single-target elimination: combined with his mobility, he's able to pick off far-away, high-value enemies, circle around to attack weak spots, and lead enemies on a merry chase while his teammates take care of business.
The Driller specializes in excavating, mining, and tunneling. Everyone has pickaxes to mine with, but the Driller's massive power drills cut through stone like butter, and his satchel charges can carve massive craters in the surrounding landscape. Against enemies, he makes up for his middling single-target damage by specializing in debuffs and crowd control. His primary weapons all have associated status effects that can affect large groups of enemies at a time, weakening them for his allies to finish the job easily.
The Engineer specializes in long-term automated defenses — his claim to fame is a Sentry Gun that will lock on to targets and can easily deal with lone enemies while the rest of the team works on objectives. He also has a platform gun to shape the terrain around him, creating bridges, points of access to high-up minerals, and even arenas suitable to fight the bug hordes in. When a fight does break out, he can repel his opponents with powerful burst damage tools; his secondary weapons are especially powerful and capable of wiping out large groups of weaker mooks simultaneously.
The Gunner specializes in, well, what else? He naturally packs the biggest guns of the team, from a giant minigun and a rocket launcher to a coilgun and a massive revolver. Appropriately, he's the best suited to fighting any enemy in any situation, as all the other dwarves have limitations (such as inability to handle crowds, short range, or low ammo counts) that hold them back. Besides that, he provides multiple utility functions as well: his shield generator creates breathing room from large crowds when things start looking dicey, and his zipline gun allows the whole team to traverse long distances over large gaps.

You can visit the website here.

A Kickstarter campaign to fund Deep Rock Galactic: The Board Game was held in 2022. A spin off Reverse Bullet Hell Roguelike Deep Rock Galactic Survivor went into early access on Windows on February 14, 2024 and was fully released on September 17, 2025. A second Roguelite spinoff, Deep Rock Galactic Rogue Core, was announced to be in development in 2024.

Contact! Scanners picking up tropes, and lots of 'em:

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#-C

Absurdly Short Level: Done efficiently and correctly, especially with a competent team, Point Extractions, already considered the shortest mission type, can be finished before reaching 10 minutes^note with all secondaries gathered and maybe even one of the easier Machine Events finished too. Similarly if the team is daring enough and has the skill to survive, they can pull all alien eggs from Egg Hunt and summon anywhere between one to three big swarms + the smaller ones and be done with the mission just as quickly— of course, surviving the legion of bugs heading your way may prove difficult at higher hazard levels...
Achievement Mockery: There are several hidden achievements awarded for doing particularly dwarvish things.
- "Without A Paddle," for being the last dwarf standing, with no ammo, while a Dreadnought is active.
- "Designated Decoy," for taking more damage from a Dreadnought than anyone else on the team.
- "The A-Team," for stuffing a barrel into each of the Drop Pod's four seats.
- "Time Well Spent," for stuffing every barrel in the Space Rig into the drop pod. "Management weeps."
- "Foreign Objects in the Launch Bay", for kicking every last barrel in the Space Rig into the launch bay forcefield. "You are why Mission Control drinks."
- "Self Control," for taming your barrel-kicking urges for ten consecutive digs.
- "Darwin Award," for jumping into the fiery, barrel-disintegrating barrel game hoop. While drunk.
- "Party Time!," for everyone toasting on the dance floor and then drinking their drinks in unison while a song is playing.
- "I Like It Down Here," for staying in one mission for over an hour.
Acid Attack:
- Several enemies have the ability to spit acid at range, such as the Glyphid Acid Spitter, Glyphid Menace, Glyphid Praetorian, and the Spitball Infector.
- The Driller's Corrosive Sludge Pump fires caustic sludge that sticks to enemies or surfaces and causes a Damage Over Time effect on enemies caught in it. Enemies killed by this will melt away with No Body Left Behind.
Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: Due to how fast the game's pace is or might be, groups tend to keep chat conversations short and to the point using abbreviations to quickly relay important information to the team.
- "R" is meant to tell everyone you're "ready". Usually said before progressing important parts of the mission ^note or calling the Drop Pod for extraction, the latter of which sets off a time limit to escape the map and an endless horde of bugs to impede your escape.
- "Bulk" (or "Det") is used to warn of a Bulk Detonator's presence if pinging isn't an option (such as if it's within earshot but not yet visible).
- "Leech" is used to warn if you get grabbed by a Cave Leech and prevent the same thing from happening to would-be rescuers.
- "Event" refers to Machine Events, optional missions triggered by Core Infusers that, with more than two people, usually require some coordination to clear without issues. In the case of an Omen Extermination Tower, it's usually quite difficult to finish without everyone in the team present for the fight.
Action-Hogging Opening: Sometimes happens when players join other games and a swarm or a boss fight is ongoing. Extra care should be taken as they have no Mercy Invincibility and have to quickly get their bearings and fight to survive, especially when playing at higher hazard levels.
Affectionate Gesture to the Head: You can pet several creatures on the head (or anywhere in general) and the dwarf will make a comment or affection gesture towards the creature. Tamed Glyphids and Lootbugs will wiggle happily in response when petted. Other creatures like Hexawing Gniffer, Cave Vine and Breathers can also be petted, but they won't react to it.
Advanced Tech 2000: Somewhat paradoxically at first glance, the M1000 Classic, given the weapon is clearly an Expy of the World War II-era M1 Garand rifle. However, mod and Overclock Flavor Text indicates that the weapon is actually a railgun.
Advancing Wall of Doom: Added in Update 25 is the Haunted Cave mission modifier, in which your dwarves must complete their mission while being chased relentlessly by a ghostly horror in the shape of a Bulk Detonator. While certain status effects can slow it down, it's completely invulnerable, and the only thing that can keep you safe is running away and completing your mission before it can catch up.
Advice Recollection Snark: One possible thing Dwarves can mutter to themselves while working is "'Become a miner,' they said! 'It'll be easy,' they said! Ughh!"
A.K.A.-47: The M1000 Classic is unashamedly based on the iconic M1 Garand, one of the most well-known firearms in American history. It even comes with the Garand's trademark 'Ping!' sound made when reloading.
All the Worlds Are a Stage: Downplayed with Deep Dives which gives three seeded missions that changes every week. However, the team going into a Deep Dive, normal or Elite, has to know the missions they're facing and possibly the dangerous Warnings which makes them more difficult. Solo players need to be particularly knowledgable of the character they choose as they have no one else to rely and cover for them.
Alien Catnip: Inverted — the in-universe justification for why your dwarves are eating the health-restoring mineral known as red sugar.
Dwarf: Red Sugar here, but watch it! It's highly addictive!
Alien Invasion: An unusual example where the players are the alien invaders. Deep Rock Galactic is launching what amounts to a full-scale orbital invasion of Hoxxes IV; they openly state that their goal is "the complete subjugation" of the planet. All of the usual tropes are present — the dwarves have overwhelming technological superiority, they travel to and from the planet in indestructible ships, and they exploit the planet for resources and even abduct some of the inhabitants by way of Egg Hunts. The catch is that the only native inhabitants seen so far are (presumably) nonsentient, animalistic bugs.
Alien Kudzu:
- The woody chambers and passageways of the Hollow Bough are absolutely covered in overgrowths of an invasive red thorny vine. It appears to all be of the same species (the dwarves even comment that it "looks like one big thorny organism"), but takes three different forms:
  - Creeper Vines are the most common and sprawl across rooms and tunnels, sprouting from holes in the wall, which they will slither back into if damaged. Short contact with a Creeper Vine deals some Scratch Damage.
  - Bloated Vines are sessile and much larger than the other forms. They act as part of the terrain and can be mined, but beware of the large protruding thorns, which get launched outwards if mined.
  - Last and certainly not least are the Stabber Vines, which look similar to a cluster of three Creeper Vines but with enormous sharp blades at the tips. These will target any dwarf that gets too close, lining up the blade before lunging forward to deal massive damage (and knockback). Once all three vines are defeated, it will let out a enormous howl.
- Season 3 introduces the Lithophage virus, also known as Rockpox. Originating from an infected meteor that was pulled apart by Hoxxes' gravity, the meteor pieces contain Plaguehearts that grow into Contagion Spikes, infecting the rock around it with dark, reddish-brown spikes and causing it to grow sickly yellow boils. The contagion can spread further into the native wildlife, transforming Glyphids into nigh-invulnerable boil-ridden monstrosities that can only be damaged properly by popping the boils.
All-Natural Gem Polish: Enor Pearls are always perfectly spherical. As these "pearls" are found buried in the earth rather than inside a giant mollusk, it's anyone's guess as to how they're supposed to form, although the name is probably just a figure of speech.
- One of the randomly-selected Flavor Text lines for a Deep Dive in the Sandblasted Corridors states that the region's high winds are responsible for shaping them, implying a process akin to the smoothing of river rocks.
Ambiguously Human: Deep Rock Galactic itself. According to the website, they have "long relied on" dwarves when it comes to dangerous excavations. This implies that the company itself is actually run by humans, or at least non-dwarves. Mission Control is never revealed to be a human or a dwarf either. When Update 18 added the bar, it also added "Leaf Lover's Special", a sobriety-inducing anti-beer maligned by the workers because it's implied to be brewed by elves. The description also says it was only shipped in to "please Management", implying the presence of elven higher-ups at DRG.
And This Is for...: "For Karl!" is a common rallying cry by the dwarves. While it's one of several slogans they can shout when you hit the "salute" button, they can also snarl "This one's for Karl!" when mowing down Glyphids. Who Karl is, however, remains one of the game's biggest mysteries.
Animal Lover: The Dwarves, surprisingly, are quite friendly with any wildlife that isn't actively attacking them. They have the option to pet most of it too — Lootbugs, Cave Vines, Breather Plants, Hexawing Gniffers, and Tamed Glyphids can all be the recipients of a dwarven Affectionate Gesture to the Head. Downplayed in that they also don't necessarily mind killing that wildlife if it happens to get caught in the crossfire or earn them money and they're very enthusiastic about slaughtering hostile critters.
Anti-Armor: Every class, though not for every gun, has access to an upgrade that allows them to cut through heavier chitinous armor like hot knife going through butter.
Anti-Frustration Features: Many, many examples here.
Anti-Grinding: At endgame levels, normal missions stop being quite enough to fuel upgrades, and you have to rely on weekly assignments and Deep Dives for both overclock cores and the crafting resources they demand. These missions are designed so that they can be completed in one or two long play sessions, after which you must wait for the next weekly reset or grind away for low returns from non-assignment missions. Most players simply choose to stop playing for a bit and wait until next week. This is intentional on the part of the devs, and keeps the game from becoming a second job, or from making players feeling burnt out or forced to play a lot to keep up with more experienced players.
Anvil on Head: While hardly practical due to the setup required, you can use resupply pods and other droppables to kill bugs. It deals a ton of damage too, potentially one-shotting non-Dreadnought bugs. Of course, it can also happen to you if you ignore the blinking beacon on the ground, or just plain forgot a supply pod was coming.
Apologetic Attacker: Dwarves remark that Loot Bugs are adorable and it makes them feel bad to kill them... but also, if the Loot Bugs didn't want to get murdered, they shouldn't have gorged themselves with valuable minerals.
Dwarf: I die a little inside every time I have to take out a Lootbug...
Dwarf: I killed a Lootbug, and I'm not so proud about it!
Dwarf: Sorry little bug, your own fault for being full of goodies!
Dwarf: You shouldn't eat precious minerals! It will get you killed!
Armor Is Useless:
- The dwarves' armor suits range from the Driller's, which is heavy-plated Powered Armor, to the Scout's, which is little more than a flak jacket over a skin-tight space suit. All dwarves have the exact same amount of base health and shielding, regardless of class; all armor upgrades shared between the four dwarves are equally protective as well.
- Alternate armor skins purchased from the accessory shop or downloaded as DLC allow dwarves to change the equipment they wear on missions, but these have no effect on gameplay either, even if their description says it does (like the increased armor of the MK 4 Driller suit, or the decreased armor of the Roughneck getup).
The Artifact: Some official artworks, as well as the statues that appear in the Memorial Hall, depict the dwarves with their first-generation gun models, rather than the updated ones that are actually used in-game. This may be a deliberate Call-Back, as a form of recognition for the players who were playing way back then (aiding this theory is a terminal in the Memorial Hall that lists every tester of the closed alpha.)
Artificial Atmospheric Actions: At the start of each mission, you'll hear a conversation between a low-pitched and a high-pitched dwarf. This happens even if your team composition should make it impossible (IE: 4 Scouts, or 2 Scouts and 2 Engineers), of if you're on a "Rich Atmosphere" mission, which makes each dwarf's voice really high-pitched.
Artificial Brilliance:
- Glyphids challenge traditional tactics, as they are able to Wall Crawl and attack from any direction. They will utilize the bore hole left by a supply drop as a surprise attack vector, take routes that maximize cover from the Engineer's sentries, make pincer movements to force Gunners into leaving a flank open, and skirt around flames left by the Driller rather than suicidally charge through them, similarly they'll try to avoid harmful terrain such as Magma Core's exposed lava as much as possible only waddling on them if it's the shortest path to attack you.
- Glyphid Web Spitters and Acid Spitters aren't intended for direct combat, and are instead better at spitting webs and acid from afar and debuffing anyone they hit. As such, they tend to stick to walls and ceilings, far away from the fracas at large.
- Praetorians that take a lot of damage all at once (such as losing their armor or taking a high explosive to the schnoz) will immediately stop charging their target and start running away, only to charge from another angle or passage so they can possibly surprise their target.
- Glyphids wearing a live sticky grenade (or in the blast radius of one) will flee and scatter in an attempt to minimize the grenade's effects.
- Glyphids that are suscpetible to the Fear status effect will stop whatever they're doing to get out of the Drilldozer's way. Glyphid Grunts will sometimes have the same response to a Driller with revved-up drills.
- Glyphid Stalkers that get marked with the laser pointer will drop all pretense of stealth and attack immediately.
Artificial Stupidity:
- Molly's pathing on occasion can get a bit... derpy, especially around small holes or openings. Thankfully, if she gets stuck too long, the hatch will open without her, so her pathing derping out won't cost you a mission. Sadly, there's nothing to be done if Molly realizes she's far away from everyone and decides to come from the direction you're running down a tunnel for while you're being pursued by a swarm of enemies.
- Bosco won't attempt to aim for the weak spots of enemies. Normally, this is passable, since either it or the player will be able to bust through most enemies' armor easily, but against enemies that are flat out immune to attacks that aren't on weak spots, like a scrambled BET-C or a Glyphid Oppressor, Bosco struggles. This issue is thankfully averted against OMEN Exterminator towers, where Bosco will home in on their weakpoints once they're exposed.
  - Further adding insult to injury, if a player orders Bosco to use his secondary rocket attack while he's in the midst of navigating past an obstacle, it occasionally results in him staying in place and blankly staring through the wall. Mercifully enough, ordering him to follow you can result in him firing the rocket the moment the highlighted enemy is in his sight.
- The Drilldozer's pathing doesn't account for potentially damaging obstacles in its path. It won't try to avoid exploding plants, it sees no issue in running over Bulk Detonators, and it will happily run over lava spouts in the Magma Core (that said, it one-shots all of these obstacles, including BET-C.) The Drilldozer can get very confused about its route to the Ommoran Heartstone, resulting in it doubling back on itself or taking bizarre routes (bonus points for getting itself stuck in the air on tiny pieces of rock while doing so). As you spend the majority of an Escort Duty mission fighting off bugs, these issues can potentially sink a mission. Though the devs thought it was fun(ny) that the Drilldozer could go vertical or drive on thin air, they eventually reined in these "glitches" by Update 33.
- Glyphid Menaces often reallocate a few times in order to throw you off and to get a better angle of shot and snipe you, but on occasion they can start shooting you even though you're clearly behind a wall or a big obstacle which turns them into sitting ducks.
Artistic License – Chemistry:
- If you destroy Christmas decorations on the space rig, management might threaten to flood the rig with radon gas. All of radon's isotopes are radioactive, with the longest-lived one (radon-222) having a half-life of 3.8 days before decaying into polonium-218. Radon-222 is part of the uranium-238 series, and directly comes from radium-226, meaning if management really insists on gassing its employees with radon, they'd need to keep a large supply of radium so it can decay into gas, but they'd need to use it quickly before it decays into polonium. Moreover, radon is a noble gas (like helium) meaning its valence electron shell is full, so it is effectively chemically inert and doesn't react with anything. The only mechanism for radon to directly kill someone is if there is so much of it it displaces oxygen - again, this could be accomplished much more simply with more mundane noble gasses like helium or argon - or even better- with actual toxic gasses that kill by interfering with metabolic processes like nerve agents. There are simply more practical options available (notwithstanding the fact that since the rig is in space they could just vent the atmosphere into vacuum).
- Uranium is depicted as a vibrant, glowing green crystal. In reality, uranium is a dull gray metal.^note Also you render the harmful radiation of it inert by breaking part of the crystal; suffice to say, you can't unprime uranium by physically breaking it in reality. Instead you would go from a semi-manageable large lump of radiation to a lot of equally radioactive dust.
Artistic License – Geology:
- Instead of having ice caps, Hoxxes has a layer of permafrost deep beneath the surface of its continental plates. Which makes no sense. This is even lampshaded in the biome description, as it's driven at least one scientist on DRG's payroll to quit his job at the sheer affront to science done by this find.
  "At least one of our xenogeologists quit in a rage when research started on this region. Instead of having conventional polar ice caps, and in violation of all physical laws we know of, the continental plates of Hoxxes rest on top of a planetwide permafrost layer several miles deep. As always, DRG recommends a "don't ask" approach when dealing with the peculiarities of Hoxxes' makeup."
- It's briefly mentioned during the Season 5 assignments that Hoxxes has at least three crusts, which is impossible for a planetary body.
Artistic License – Nuclear Physics:
- Virtually everything related to the Radioactive Exclusion Zone. The radiation Hoxxes is suffering from has apparently given the local glyphids superpowers, and somehow mutated the stone of the cavern itself into forming tumors and walls of living eyes. This is a particularily egregious example, given that the radiation in question is stated to be gamma radiation — that is, nuclear radiation. Somehow. It could possibly be all the crystalline uranium scattered about the place, except that Uranium is a gray, non-lustrous metal, not a green, glowing crystalline mineral.
- The uranium crystals are much, much more radioactive than real life uranium ^Science!. The radiation in the game is more consistent with isotopes like cobalt-60, cesium-137 or snorting ground-up polonium-210 ^note. Anything this radioactive would have quickly decayed.
- It's possible to encounter "inert" (non-radioactive) uranium crystals alongside the extremely radioactive ones. In reality isotopes decay at a steady rate that can't be sped up or slowed down, and (virtually) all isotopes are chemically similar and are extremely difficult to separate, so you wouldn't find heterogeneous large deposits of "decayed" uranium alongside highly radioactive uranium. You know what's called uranium that completely decayed and lost all its radioactivity? It's called lead.
- Somehow, the Deepcore 40mm PGL's "Fat Boy" overclock manages to pack enough plutonium into a man-portable shell to cause a tiny mushroom cloud and area of Damage Over Time fallout. In reality, mushroom clouds result from any sufficiently powerful explosion; they are not exclusive to nuclear blasts.
Artistic License – Space: The altitude readout on the insertion pod while it's on the space rig reads 37,000-odd meters. In real life on Earth, space is officially considered to begin at 80,000 meters from sea level, with the ISS orbiting at a whopping 408,000 meters, and even then, the ISS and other satellites have to account for (extremely) thin traces of the atmosphere gradually slowing down their orbital speed. It's possible Hoxxes IV has no surface atmosphere to speak of, which wouldn't cause drag, but the high orbital speed of an orbit at 37,000m would cause problems for any vehicle trying to rendezvous with the space station (such as a pod full of dwarves and minerals trying to return to the base). Subverted, however, when one considers the consistent failure of Cargo Shuttles to arrive safely at the Rig — every holiday, they crash into Hoxxes.
Ascended Meme:
- The common fan saying "If they don't rock and stone, they ain't coming home!" (referring to the common expectation of dwarf players returning salutes) was eventually added as one of the possible lines the dwarves will say when saluting.
- For a while, Bismor was the only crafting mineral to not have a unique shoutout from the dwarves when using the terrain scanner, which eventually became a joke among fans. Some of the new lines reference this.
  Dwarf: Bismor! Feels so good to say it.
  Dwarf: I'm so glad to announce that I've found some Bismor!
- In-Universe, the dwarves would call the Drop Pod "our very own express elevator to Hell." Come Update 34, Mission Control would occasionally call it this during Deep Dives.
- Season 3 acknowledged the players' tendencies to crowd around xenofungus and compressed gold to chant "Mushroom" or "WE'RE RICH", by way of Mission Control snapping and telling you to get a move on already if you continue long enough. In addition, the Rival Nemesis' lure lines also now include "Mushroom" and "We're rich".
- In 2023 people asked for the event Oktoberfest to be named Rocktoberfest. While it couldn't be done in the same year, on the next year Ghost Ship Games actually renamed the event.
- Several of the voice lines for Heavy Extraction missions introduced in Season 6 have the dwarves quoting (or singing!) Wind Rose's "Diggy Diggy Hole," which fans have been referencing for years (both in regards to DRG and at concerts for Wind Rose, where "Rock and stone!" chants are not unusual in concert).
Assist Character: Bosco, a small drone who will accompany you if there are no other dwarves in your lobby. He doesn't bring as much firepower as another dwarf would, and lacks any mobility tools that the player can take advantage of; in exchange, he's able to fly, mine, fight, and revive a certain number of times per dig. He is also indestructible.
Attack! Attack! Attack!: The Glyphids, as a race of giant carnivorous insects, will never stop attacking dwarves that invade their territory until the miners finally die or leave. This is likely why that Deep Rock Galactic's mining operation is based on an orbiting space station, rather than a more conventional base on the planet, since the Glyphids would eventually wear down even their defenses.
Attack Drone:
- Bosco functions as one during Solo Missions in addition to providing illumination, handling certain mission specific tasks, as well as digging dirt and/or mining minerals for the player.
- Beginning in Season 1, the dwarves come up against swarms of Rival Tech Shredders, which attack by charging at them then shredding them. By Season 3, however, enough Shredders were salvaged from dwarven beards and reverse-engineered to develop the Engineer's Shredder Swarm Grenade, which deploys 5 allied Shredders that temporarily go after the closest enemies in the Engineer's immediate vicinity.
Attack Its Weak Point: Glyphid Praetorians only take damage when struck in the face or abdomen, as they have layers upon layers of heavy chitin plating. Oppressors go beyond that and can't take damage from the front at all, and Dreadnoughts take it even further as even their abdomen is bulletproof, requiring that you shoot the light armor away first (see Multiple Life Bars below), and they demand teamwork be used to take them down; someone needs to Draw Aggro whilst everyone else attacks it from behind.
- Generally speaking, if it's a bright and glowing part of a creature, or a head, you can bet shooting it in that spot will deal far more damage than normal.
A-Team Firing: Downplayed, but present. The Glyphids are so fast and numerous that you're often rewarded far more for blasting away at the horde than you are for trying to aim; most engagements will be at danger-close range anyways. This is encouraged by the weapon design; by default, the Engineer is packing a shotgun, the Gunner has a minigun, and the Driller has a flamethrower — not exactly precision weaponry. Even the Scout, who is the most lightly armed, has a fully-fledged assault rifle; it's the most accurate of the default primary weapons, but that isn't saying much. Somewhat averted by the Scout's unlockable M1000 Classic, a more traditional (but still scopeless) sniper rifle, and the Gunner's Bulldog revolver, a powerful, accurate Hand Cannon.
Auto-Revive: Downplayed by the Iron Will perk, which allows the player to choose to get back up for a temporary damage-immune last stand after being downed, once per map. After this last stand runs out, the player is downed again, unless they receive any sort of healing before the buff ends.
Bad Boss: Zig-zagged. Deep Rock Galactic openly admits that they value their equipment considerably more than their employees' lives. Mission Control is entirely honest about this, and the dwarves appear to share the same attitude, not being particularly upset if they're left behind on a dig. That being said, DRG also goes out of its way to ensure that their employees are equipped to deal with whatever hazards they're expected to face, supports them with regular supply drops in exchange for Nitra, and fields a well-equipped space rig to dispatch them from. There's also the fact that dwarves who fail a mission or are left behind will respawn in the medical bay with a line suggesting they remember their previous experience and were somehow rescued, leaving it ambiguous whether fallen or abandoned dwarves actually suffer the consequences of their situation.
The Bait:
- You can get the "Designated Decoy" achievement for becoming this during a Dreadnought battle, by taking the most damage from it out of everyone else in your team.
- The Engineer's L.U.R.E. grenade is specifically designed for this purpose, projecting a holographic image of a dancing dwarf that attracts hostile aliens to attack it before zapping them with a burst of electricity when its duration expires.
- The Unknown Horror in missions with the "Haunted Cave" hazard is an Invincible Boogeyman of a Bulk Detonator that cannot be damaged, but can get its attention drawn towards a player that shoots it. Many multiplayer missions often have one player act as the designated bait to draw it away from the rest of the team.
The Beastmaster: Any player can become this thanks to the aptly-named Beast Master perk. Players with this perk can tame one of the three basic Glyphid Grunt variants to assist them in battle, causing it to immediately turn on its pack and become extremely loyal to the dwarf that tamed it, following them anywhere they go and attacking any enemy that threatens them — even Bulk Detonators.
Beating a Dead Player: The bugs will just as readily target downed dwarves as living ones, eventually resulting in a huge swarm around them if they aren't revived in short order. This, it turns out, is really useful, because it means less bugs going after the remaining teammates and also makes them an easy target for a well-thrown grenade or three. Meanwhile, the downed dwarf is no worse off for it, since they are effectively invincible in this state and there's no time limit on reviving them.
Berserk Button: Management's priorities are not quite in order when it comes to punishing dwarves for rowdiness in the space rig. Kicking barrels into the Launch Bay or even the Drop Pod will get you threatened with vandalism fines and generally just berated, even when these can damage the equipment and dwarves. But breaking holiday decorations is what gets management to threaten to close the Abyss Bar down, cancel the holidays (even for Mission Control), and flood the rig with Radon gas, going by Mission Control's exasperated lines.
BFG: There are constant implications that the armaments your dwarves get for their missions, mostly properly sized if not a little too huge for them, are waaaaaay oversized for mere humans. Even the Scout's assault rifle is apparently pretty huge. In fact, pretty much all of the guns DRG fields qualify; even the turrets sport barrels that look sized to fire entire carbines of smaller calibres.
Gunner: It ain't a gun if it don't weigh at least one hundred pounds!
Bizarre and Improbable Ballistics: The Engineer's LOK-1 Smart Rifle can lock onto enemies, showing a curved trajectory from the gun barrel to each locked-on target. It then fires bullets that take those exact curved trajectories, making it useful at hitting weakpoints by deliberately aiming away from the target.
Blaming the Victim: When you kill a Loot Bug, your dwarf will often claim it's their fault for being full of valuables.
Booze-Based Buff: As of Update 18, certain varieties of liquor available at the Abyss Bar, like the Red Rock Blaster or Dark Morkite, will grant your dwarves a stat buff (the former giving a hefty health buff and the later an increase to resource gathering capabilities) for the next mission. Anything that isn't made of Barley Bulbs, though, will just get you plastered at best.
Boring, but Practical:
- Compared to the enormous minigun toted by the Gunner, the Scout's Deepcore GK 2 has a tiny magazine and a much slower rate of fire. However, it does more damage per bullet than the "Leadstorm" Powered Minigun, doesn't have to deal with heat buildup, and starts out fairly accurate without upgrades, whereas the minigun has to chew through a good amount of ammo as it gets more accurate. This suits the Scout as a forward roving class, equipped to handle the infrequent skirmish and use his Grappling-Hook Pistol if he gets in over his head.
- The Gunner himself qualifies. None of his skills are particularly flashy; in contrast to the Driller, the Scout, and the Engineer, he has no gimmick other than shooting. His primary weapon is the "Leadstorm" Powered Minigun, with all the subtlety and nuance that implies; his secondary is the "Bulldog" Heavy Revolver; his utility item is a spherical shield generator, and his mobility item is a Zipline Launcher. Compared to the Scout with his Grappling Gun, the Engineer's turrets, or the Driller's CRSPR Flamethrower, these all seem fairly mundane, even if they are incredibly satisfying to use. But try getting through any high-level digs without at least one Gunner on your team, and see how long you last without his firepower and shield to back you up against swarms.
- The Dash perk. Compared to getting a Glyphid companion, reviving yourself through sheer willpower, or having a sixth sense for anything trying to grab you (and breaking free if you're caught anyway), all this one does is just make you move faster briefly. However, it has a very short cooldown and unlimited uses, and it is a very good general perk. Some very nice applications for dashing are: A) Escaping a Dreadnought's shockwave attack. B) Escaping Mactera Bomber/Fungus Bogs goo. C) Crossing larger gaps. D) Moving heavy objects like Aquarqs or eggs faster. E) Giving yourself more space to work with when fighting a horde. F) Rushing to teammates when something threatening like a Bulk Detonator or Dreadnought is on you. G) Quickly retreating from a Nemesis' "Instant Death" Radius, and so much more!
- "Bunker" strategies, in which players carve out a room they stand in and fend off hordes from. Compared to jumping around and shooting bugs in a big arena, it's a lot more boring to stand in place and shoot down a single corridor, but funneling bugs through a chokepoint using this technique makes swarms a lot more manageable since it's impossible for them to surround the player, and Area of Effect or One-Hit Polykill weapons can maximize their benefits.
- Born Ready has your inactive weapons automatically reload after 5 seconds. Mostly a convenience perk, but you'll be glad you'll never have to draw a secondary with an empty clip. It also allows your dwarf to theoretically fire without ever having to manually reload simply by rotating your primary and secondary every 5 seconds. And as a bonus, weapons with reload times longer than five seconds (such as the Thunderhead) will still be reloaded after Born Ready triggers, effectively shortening their reloads.
- Clean Overclocks provide a small buff with no strings attached. Nothing fancy like turning your grenade launcher's ammo into pocket nukes, or adding electricity to your shots, but sometimes a little extra ammo or magazine size is just what a weapon needs.
Boss in Mook Clothing: Several of them can appear as rare random spawns in the caves, and usually are just as threatening as you would expect.
- Menaces are much less subtle than their fellow ranged brethren, glowing bright blue with a distinctive bulbous shape and deep warbling noises. They attack with a rapid-fire barrage of light blue spitballs and will continue to fire for several seconds without moving unless interrupted. Menaces also have a significantly beefier health pool just under or equivalent to a Glyphid Praetorian, coupled with a unique ability to flee and reposition themselves and retreat from damage near-instantly by burrowing into the cave walls, making them one of the highest mobility attrition units in the Glyphid family.
- The Glyphid Oppressor is a much more durable variant of the Glyphid Praetorian intended to be a new variant of the Mighty Glacier. It is completely invincible from the front, with its abdomen being the only vulnerable spot, meaning you can't just use More Dakka to chew through the armor. It is also significantly wider than a standard Praetorian, with upward-flaring armor plating that can completely block a Driller's standard tunnels as it advances. If stunned, it will retaliate by performing a loud radial knockback attack akin to that of a Dreadnought. Otherwise, it's just another Praetorian variant that dies like any other with enough bullets and skill.
- The Glyphid Bulk Detonator is a thankfully rare variant of the Glyphid Exploder about the size of the Glyphid Dreadnought, and with about as much health. It also has resistance towards special damage types including fire, electricity, and other explosives, allowing it to almost No-Sell most of the heavy or otherwise armor-ignoring weapons the dwarves carry. Unlike the mook variant, this guy can use explosive melee attacks with no damage to itself and can use this to dig towards targets if its path is blocked. Upon death, the Bulk Detonator stops, primes for three seconds, and explodes in a ten-meter radius that launches smaller (head-sized as opposed to car-sized) explosive pustules that detonate on contact. It leaves quite the impressive crater on the terrain too, sometimes deep enough to register fall damage. If you spot one of these, mark it for your team and then run. These monsters will end runs if not dealt with properly. In-universe, DRG considers these to be one of the most dangerous threats to its operations, and notes that their explosion upon death is on the kiloton scale (i.e. equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT).
- Rival Nemesis: A floating killer robot deployed by the Rival Corporation with the specific purpose of killing the dwarves. It can fire a moving force field from its "eye" that blocks most shots, and has an "Instant Death" Radius where it grabs up to two dwarves within a sizeable range and incapacitates them while dealing constant damage to them. It has a lot of health, and although it is instantly destroyed when it catches fire, it's a lot more difficult to set it ablaze than other enemies. Finally, upon destruction, it will teleport a bunch of Phase Bombs near the dwarves in a Last Ditch Move to blow them up.
Bottomless Magazines:
- Averted very thoroughly; even the Engineer's Turrets need to be reloaded. The only gun in the entire game that has infinite ammo is Bosco's primary weapon, while the only infinite-supply item the dwarves have are their flares, which regenerate over time. Ammo management is a critical part of getting through more difficult operations. Special mention goes to the Gunner's "Bulldog" Heavy Revolver, which holds only four shots in contrast to the usual six — the rounds are so freakin' huge that there's no space in the cylinder for ONE more, let alone two! Then comes the Unstable Overclock Elephant Rounds, which has the revolver use modified autocannon shells so big the cylinder can only hold three at a time.
- Played straight for both Lithophage contagion-cleansing tools in the LithoFoamer and the LithoVac. Both have an infinite amount of ammunition needed to clean the Lithophage, and do not need reloading. The LithoFoamer is capable of dealing damage, but at 0.1 damage per hit, it struggles to kill even a Swarmer.
Bottomless Pit: Averted; every pit and fissure actually does have a bottom, though some can be so deep you can barely see a flare thrown down there. Jumping down is generally not advised, though — Falling Damage aside, getting back up can be an ordeal.
Breather Episode: After Season 3 and 4's harrowing encounters with the Rockpox, the horrors it's inflicted on Hoxxes's native wildlife, and how lethal it is to Deep Rock Galactic's employees, Season 5 starts off as a relief by announcing the destruction of the primary Rockpox meteor, and its main storyline is a lighthearted segment about the Dwarves' use of the Drillevator and R&D looking into and experimenting with the Morkite Seeds. The Core Stone is an intense event and the Corespawn it summons have unsettling appearances, however, so time will tell if this optimism will last.
Brick Joke: One of the possible voice lines a dwarf will say when fighting Shredder drones is "Shredders! Don't get 'em in your beard!". Come Season 3, the description for the Engineer's new Shredder Swarm Grenade states that R&D created it by reverse-engineering Shredders found tangled in the beards of dwarves who recently fought Rival robots on a mission.
- Similarly, one of the Smart Stout voice lines has a dwarf ponder why they don't put guns on the M.U.L.E. for extra support. Later on, the game saw the introduction of BET-C, essentially an early version of Molly that traded mineral storage for weaponization... and you find out it wasn't the smartest idea after all, because the reason BET-C was discontinued was because a lifeform native to Hoxxes was able to feed on her battery supply and turn her on the miners.
Brutal Honesty: Mission Control, and by extension Deep Rock Galactic, make absolutely no bones about the fact that they consider the Drop Pod and the M.U.L.E. far more valuable than their employees' lives. The dwarves themselves appear to be completely fine with this stance; if left behind while the rest of the team escapes, their response is effectively to calmly shrug and admit that "sometimes you win, and sometimes you die".
Bug War: A Corporate Warfare version between Deep Rock Galactic and the various insect-like creatures of Hoxxes. Unlike most examples, however, the Glyphids and other creatures don't seem to be a Hive Mind or have an overarching goal. They're just reacting to the dwarves' extremely disruptive presence and swarming in reaction to the mining operations. Deep Rock's main goal is gathering the planet's abundant minerals, which the Glyphids themselves don't seem to care about in the least, and the dwarves would probably just ignore the insects if they could. Also, it's virtually impossible for the dwarves to hold ground for very long, and the few missions involving large-scale equipment involve dropping in with disposable short-term mining platforms to quickly extract a high-value resource and then beat a hasty retreat before their position is overrun by the Glyphids.
Bunny-Ears Lawyer: DRG's employees constantly curse and whine, get drunk on the job, play with anti-gravity on the space station, and blow up hundreds of precious fuel barrels for fun. They always get away with this because the company does not have any other employees who are skilled and/or insane enough to take their place.
Caps Lock, Num Lock, Missiles Lock: On the PC version the all-important flare button "F", used to provide most of your light in the caverns, is also directly next to the grenade button "G." Woe befall you should these be mixed up in a volatile environment or a tight tunnel with teammates, but thankfully the controls can be rebound.
Cat Scare: Cave Leeches are incredibly threatening enemies that can single out dwarves and kill them off one at a time; if they aren't immediately saved by their teammates, a single Cave Leech can easily take down one or two dwarves, or even pull a Total Party Kill if encountered during a critical moment or nobody says there's a Leech above. The incredibly similar but docile Cave Vine, on the other hand, is liable to be mistaken for a Cave Leech and blasted into next week if those not in the know see its tendril descending.
Chainsaw-Grip BFG: Sported as the primary weapons of both the Gunner and the Driller. The Engineer gets one as an unlockable secondary weapon.
Character Select Forcing: All of the Dwarves can be played for any mission (unless the server host enables the setting to prevent duplicate classes), but at high enough hazard levels, Onsite Refining all but explicitly requires a Driller on the team, especially if the caves are complex enough. If the team doesn't have a Driller, they're going to spend a ton of time digging paths for pipes (or end up with pipes that are much longer and more windy than they need to be) and will likely get overrun if they aren't hasty enough.
Clarke's Third Law: The Shard Diffractor's inspecting animation sometimes has the Engineer mentioning this. Given how little about the Ommoran Heartstone is known it could be either pure technology or Magitek.
Engineer: Indistinguishable from magic!
Chromosome Casting: Every humanoid character in the game is male. Only some of the mining equipment is addressed with feminine names and pronouns, in the same way boats are. Mining does tend to be a very male-dominated field, after all.
Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Any class can use any cosmetic item, but their suit colors cannot be changed so that they can be easily identified: Blue for Scout, Red for Engineer, Yellow for Driller, and Green for Gunner. Flares are also color-coded.
Combat and Support: Downplayed. Every class has the ability to fight and do any of the main mission objectives, but with that said, some classes are better suited to do the job, like Drillers digging straight for Liquid Morkite Wells in On-Site Refining and Scout getting Aquarqs out of trick places in Point Extractions.
Combat Medic: The only kind of medics you can expect to see on Hoxxes. All dwarves can revive their teammates, and the aptly-named Field Medic perk makes the process substantially faster, in addition to giving you one free instant revive per dig.
Combat Tentacles:
- The Rival Corporation's Caretaker robot possesses several bladed mechanical tendrils, connected to the base of the data vault it is defending. They can lash out at dwarves with a melee attack or shoot out a flurry energy projectiles from the claw located on the end of each. They can be damaged and will retract, but will return again after a short while, ready to lash out again.
- Rival Nemeses also have a pair of tentacles, which they use to grab and steadily whittle down the health of unlucky Dwarves.
Companion Cube: The dwarves appear to be rather prone to this mentality. The M.U.L.E, All-Purpose Drone, and Drilldozer all receive affectionate nicknames from the miners, and they often treat them like friends, with Molly, Bosco and Doretta/Dotty being their respective names. The dwarves can also salute with Bosco and give Doretta pats. Management has taken steps to crack down on this behavior — by which we mean "they lecture the dwarves about it every so often, very sternly, and then look the other way." Mission Control even refers to the M.U.L.E. as Molly in several of his lines.
Space Rig Announcement board: PSA: The M.U.L.E. units are neither sentient nor pets. Calling them "Molly" will not impact the M.U.L.E. unit's programming.
Contractual Boss Immunity: Subverted: While the Frozen status effect is still incredibly reliable for the majority of enemies encountered in the caves, Dreadnoughts, Detonators, and all of their variants are highly resistant to freezing. While they can be frozen, it will last only for fractions of a second. Korlok Tyrant-Weeds and BET-Cs play this straight and are completely immune to being frozen.
- Rival Company enemies are very weak to fire, with most of their units being destroyed outright upon being ignited. The Prospector and Caretaker are immune to fire, so no instakilling a 3-phase fight for you.
Continue Your Mission, Dammit!:
- More like "Start your mission, Dammit!" Goofing off for too long on the Space Rig will elicit a response or two from Mission Control telling you to get to work.
- While in the caves, pinging a Compressed Gold nugget, Bittergem or certain xenofungus in the Fungus Bogs for too long will cause Mission Control to practically beg the player(s) to get back to work in such way you can practically hear him facepalming.
  Mission Control: (long-suffering) Oh, my aching head...! Would you lugs please bloody focus...?
Controllable Helplessness: Downplayed. If your character is downed or incapacitated by any means you can press the "shout" button to make your character shout a line and try to get your team's attention. If you're downed and have Iron Will you can revive on your own once and stay up if you patch yourself up before its effect expires.
Cores-and-Turrets Boss:
- The Korlok Tyrant-Weed is a menacing collective of symbiotic alien plant life organized around a central bulb. Korlok Sprouts serve as its biological turrets, spitting a barrage of acid shots at any dwarven team who disturbs one. The Healing Pods continually replenish the core's health, so they're a high-priority target. And finally the Korlok's core, a heavily-armored bulb with a strange, almost crystalline center, is the only part that is vulnerable. It will only become exposed after enough Healing Pods and Sprouts have been killed, and will quickly re-armor before sending out more sprouts and pods.
- The OMEN Modular Exterminators are three-tiered towers that DRG created as an experimental means of dealing with hostile wildlife that was deemed too unstable. When the Machine Event is activated, one such Modular Extermination Tower must be destroyed within a time limit. A dwarf must stand on one of three maintenance platforms to expose and destroy cooling tanks that are the cores of each Module. All three sections have their own weapons, and apart from the bottom Module, which is always a Radial Pulse-Gun, the individual weaponry varies between the Drone Replicator, Heavy Burster, and Twin Slicer. The cooling tanks take several seconds to expose and remain vulnerable for only a few seconds each time, and depending on how many Modules are still active, staying alive long enough on the platforms to access the tanks can be difficult.
- The Caretaker is an upside-down mechanical pyramid with four Robotic Appendages that act as turrets which respawn some time after being taken out, one vent at each of its four top corners, and four eye-like cores in the center with one on each side. In order to damage the boss, the four vents need to be taken down, which causes one of the cores to open and close. Attacking the opened core deals damage to the Caretaker, although removing every third of its health will cause it to close all its cores, repair its vents, and summon enemies before the vents turn vulnerable again.
Corporate Warfare: In the Season 1 update, an unnamed Rival Company started to muscle into Hoxxes IV with fully unmanned, AI-directed operations and hardware; DRG's response to this (after several attempts at communication, which the rival refused to answer) was to immediately begin industrial sabotage operations, commanding the dwarves to attack Rival Company installations on sight, sack them for all their worth, be it minerals or data, and destroy everything that they can't steal.
Corrupt Corporate Executive: Subverted. DRG considers their hardware more valuable than their employees, and the promo shows how a mission where a full Molly is retrieved but everyone else is killed is considered a success. But they never hide this priority to their employees, the dwarves themselves seem to have no issue in it, and Mission Control does try to provide the best support as he could to the team. All in all, it's probable that the dwarves just have a different mindset than humans. Played straight when a dwarf drinks Smart Stout and comes to the conclusion that he and his colleagues are being exploited... before deciding not to think about it and go for another pint.
Critical Existence Failure: For both dwarves and the Glyphids, their health bars could be near zero, but they'll be able to move and attack as if they had full health.
Crosshair Aware: If Mission Control sends a supply drop or other tools, a beacon will appear where it lands. Don't linger on it, lest it falls on your head and likely one-shots you.
Cuteness Proximity:
- The Dwarves are typically extremely jaded and gruff, but they'll still occasionally comment on how cute the Loot Bug is when you pet one. They also pet and babytalk tamed Glyphids as if they're big friendly dogs, rather than murderous space spiders.
- In the stunningly gorgeous Azure Weald biome, the dwarves actually take a liking to a few of the plants there, calling the Nectar Rind "pretty", and "asking for a friend" if they can take a plant home in a pot for their bunk.
- The Radioactive Exclusion Zone likewise has the Breather plants and the Cave Vines, which can both be petted just like lootbugs. Doing so will typically have the dwarves express their fondness towards the Breather/vine as well.
- Dwarves may comment that the modified Rival Shredders that an Engineer can deploy are pretty cute when they're not hostile.
Cutting the Knot:
- The destructible terrain means you have many opportunities for this. The Driller is particularly well-suited to doing so, given that his dual drills allow him to tear through even the toughest terrain in no time flat.
- During Extraction, you have to backtrack through the cavern, which can often be a one-way trip without the use of ziplines or engineer platforms, never mind how many obstacles lie in your way. Alternatively, if you have a Driller, you can just dig straight towards the Drop Pod.
- Some caves will be littered with poisonous plants, lava geysers, crystals that shoot lightning, or swaths of green goo that slow you down. Well-placed ziplines and/or engineer platforms will let you move over and around them with no trouble.
- The Praetorian is heavily armored and immune to gunfire, except for its glowing abdomen and face. But explosives and fire ignore armor, so you can always just bomb the hell out of one instead.
- The Glyphids will happily use this against you as well, as mentioned above. Glyphids will pour out of Driller tunnels and drop/resupply pod holes, and Bulk Detonators and Dreadnoughts will dig towards you by exploding massive holes in the wall if you try to outmaneuver them by going into a space too tiny for them.
- In-universe, Management's response to the continued disruptions and casualties caused by the Rockpox comet and R&D's inability to figure out a solution resulted in them just blowing the comet up with a massive nuke by Season 5.
Cycle of Hurting:
- Can be done by you or by the bugs. Several weapon upgrades and Overclocks give players the ability to stall, stun and keep enemies under pressure, unable to attack. On the other hand, the enemies will always have Grunt Slashers that can stun players and prevent them from running away, leaving them ripe to being swarmed.
- Another variant of this trope is what is known as "death loop", which is getting downed again not long after being revived. Higher difficulties makes enemies faster and stronger and players health regeneration much lower, so it's not uncommon to see players getting downed over and over until the situation finally stabilizes.

D-F

Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
- Do not play this game for too long before switching to a game that's similarly ill-lit. You will find yourself spamming F (or whatever button you have mapped) to toss flares as soon as it gets even slightly dark, even outside FPS games.
- In a similar vein, if you're used to shooters that let you aim down the sights with the right mouse button or right trigger, you'll want to shake that habit quick, as that instead brings out your pickaxe.
- Bunnyhopping and firing is a skill anyone venturing at higher difficulties learn to the point it becomes natural like breathing to them. Problems come if a Scout uses the Special Powder overclock as you may unintentionally propel yourself upwards when shooting an enemy at your foot and jumping or worse, rocket yourself downwards by trying to shoot something above them which can potentially get yourself killed by fall damage.
- The Rival Incursion season terminal has a horizontal bar that can be scrolled through to see rewards for the entire season. When forced to translate the vertically-aligned scroll wheel to be horizontal, many software applications have it set so that mouse wheel down will scroll right, and mouse wheel up will scroll left; Google Chrome is one example of this: on pages that are wider than the screen or when zoomed into an image very closely, scrolling right or left when inputting shift and mouse wheel down or up respectively. Deep Rock Galactic does it in the opposite direction, i.e., mouse wheel up will scroll right and mouse wheel down will scroll left. Anyone who uses software where scrolling horizontally is a frequent action will find themselves screwing up in this menu often.
Dangerous Backswing: The pickaxe can hit enemies directly above or behind the dwarf swinging it, most often happening when a Glyphid sneaks up behind a mining dwarf only to receive an accidental Offhand Backhand.
Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Dwarves can take some serious and vicious beating from the Glyphids and knocked down over a dozen times in the same mission but will always get up none for the worse after a being aided by Bosco or a fellow Dwarf. Even being wiped out on a dig just causes everyone to wake up in the infirmary, with the only thing you lose being any mission completion rewards. You even get to keep whatever resources you deposited in the M.U.L.E. before the mission failure (but only a fraction of them).
Death World: Hoxxes is described as the most dangerous planet in the galaxy, and it earned that reputation. This is the reason Hoxxes is still teeming with scores of rich minerals — nobody except Deep Rock has had the balls to successfully launch mining operations on it. Many have tried before and failed. To wit:
- The surface of Hoxxes is a scorched wasteland that is incapable of supporting any life; the underground is more hospitable, except that it's infested with giant, vicious bug aliens.
- If they don't get you, the geography of the planet isn't much more cuddly than the Glyphids are; radioactive crystals, carnivorous jungles, frozen underground tundras, magma-filled caverns that undergo tectonic shifts — and on top of all that, no matter where you are on the planet, bone-shattering drops are an everyday occurrence in the caves of Hoxxes.
Decapitated Army: Defeating the Caretaker will destroy all enemies in the arena. Finishing most machine events, except Tritilyte Deposit and OMEN Modular Exterminator, will create a shockwave that kills every bug in the vicinity. Defeating the Core Stone will kill every Corespawn Crawler.
Developer's Foresight:
- The dwarves have accurate voice lines when using other classes' equipment, such as a Scout using an Engineer's platform gun, something that can only be noticed by modding the game.
- The Dwarves' Holler Button will change depending on each situation. If you're carrying something heavy or are incapacitated (grabbed by an enemy or downed) they'll yell different lines. In similar fashion if you try to call for Molly in missions where she isn't present (Point Extraction and On-Site Refinery) the Dwarves will shout different lines.
- Deep Scan missions require the use of the Drillevator to access the Morkite geode that is located hundreds of meters below ground. Crafty players (or those using mods) that know where the geode is may use a team of Drillers to simply drill down there, only to be blocked by super-dense rock that they cannot drill through. If you somehow manage to get past that and reach the geode, the Drop Pod cannot be called down because the Drillevator serves at an Event Flag that allows the Drop Pod to be called after the Drillevator reaches the geode.
- Fighting the Caretaker in Industrial Sabotage missions will have it armed with mechanical tentacles that will shoot and lunge at you. If you manage to get to an area where the tentacles can't reach you, one of them will dig through the ground and appear next to you so they can still get to you.
- As of Season 5 the Driller's flamethrower will also heat up Dwarves that stay in its flames, which can be handy in Glacial Strata where the coldness meter only lowers when inside hot springs or when close to machinery like the Refinery or the Minehead.
Die, Chair, Die!: A hard instinct to resist when you can swing a pickaxe just by holding a button in a fully destructible environment. The dwarves will even blurt out lines about it.
Dwarf: Die, worthless crystal!
Dwarf: Worthless, but fun to destroy!
Diegetic Interface: The game is generally designed such that most of the UI's information is also shown on the in-game objects. Guns have visible ammo readouts on them, a hologram icon shows Bosco's current task and a screen on his back shows how many revives he has left, checking the map requires the dwarf to hold up and stare at their terrain scanner (visible to others as a tablet), pinging and marking requires holding the laser pointer and pointing at things, Doretta Shows Damage on her parts, a giant green meter on the Onsite Refinery's side indicates how much progress has been made to refine minerals, etc. This can make it possible to play the game entirely HUD-less if you're willing to be unsure of how much health exactly you have (short of when you're not in great shape, as indicated by a Heartbeat Soundtrack and the edges of the screen becoming bloodied).
- To a more minor extent, every thing available to the player in the Space Rig requires interacting with a suitable object (character customization can only be done at a wardrobe, upgrades are equipped by a computer, perks are unlocked while looking at a KPI terminal, missions can be chosen through the 3D display in front of the Drop Pod, etc.)
Diminishing Returns for Balance: Zig-zagged. Having a full team of a single class is usually not a huge problem and it often leads to amusing results like a mesh of ziplines in a full team of Gunners, holes and tunnels everywhere for Driller teams and a ridiculous amount of platforms for teams full of Engineers. However, having more than one Scout, at higher Hazard levels, is often frowned upon since they have the most trouble fighting off large quantities of enemies and more than one being in a team is often seen superfluous (save for certain missions like Point Extraction) and a potential hindrance at higher Hazard levels.
Disaster Dominoes: It's not unusual for things to spiral out of control during swarms, especially in higher hazard levels. One team member going down is usually bad, but then another member can go down trying to revive them and the third member can go down in similar fashion.
Don't Celebrate Just Yet: Finishing a mission is only a part of the job. Surviving until you get extracted from the map is a whole other ordeal, especially if your team is all battered up and low on ammo. The endless hordes of bugs coming your way will try their damnedest to prevent your escape.
Double Unlock: Most gear upgrades involve not just reaching the required criteria, but also having the credits and resources to purchase them with. Some upgrades are even triple unlocks — for example, unlocking an Overclock from a Blank Matrix Core requires earning a Blank Matrix Core, encountering and passing a Machine Event, then paying credits and resources to obtain the Overclock.
Drill Tank: The Escort Duty mission tasks you with protecting and maintaining one of these as the tank tunnels its way to a valuable deposit. The dwarves affectionately refer to it as Doretta, or Dotty for short.
Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: Additional players can join a job in progress, being delivered near already active players via a smaller drop pod. Players can also leave at any time, and will leave the minerals that were on their person in a heavy bag. The game will scale the number and durability of bugs appropriately.
Drought Level of Doom: One of Mission Control's quips when the Drillevator drops is a reminder that you should stock up; indeed, once the Drillevator gets moving, it becomes incredibly awkward to spawn in a resupply pod from which players can replenish health and ammo, as the platform doesn't allow resupply pods to land on it. Better stock up before you start the mission.
Due to the Dead: The Dwarves kill bugs in Karl's name and make toasts in his honor. Occasionally when finding Lost Packs they'll quickly mourn their fellow fallen dwarf.
Dwarf: (solemnly) Rest in peace, Whalepiper. We'll get your gear home...
Dug Too Deep: Hoxxes is a figurative and literal gold mine of resources, but also full of absolute nasties beneath its surface. Your job is to actively defy this, packing massive guns in your trips down below, slaughtering tons of insectoid beasts as you claim the treasure down there.
- With the addition of Deep Dives, you do this intentionally in a single outing, digging in for a mission, completing it, digging in deeper for part 2, and then on for part 3, each one more difficult than the last. And if you're feeling courageous, you have Elite Deep Dives.
- The Escort Duty mission is a more straight example, as Doretta will eventually drill her way to the Ommoran Heartstone, a living rock which does its damnedest to destroy her. The dwarves just have to protect her long enough for her to break through the Heartstone's exterior and expose its core.
- Core Stones are introduced in Season 5, implied to be this; they're theorized to come from deep within Hoxxes, and their value is second only to their lethality. Before you can recover them up to the surface, you'll need to contend with wave after wave of Core Spawn, freaky abominations that are worse than Glyphids and will do their damnedest to make sure you don't survive the encounter.
- Digging Too Deep is implied to be what eventually leads the events of the spinoff game Rogue Core, with the aforementioned Core Spawn being a sample of what horrors await. Season 5 lampshades this with its title: Drilling Deeper.
Dual Boss: The Dreadnought Arbalest and Dreadnought Lacerator, collectively the "Dreadnought Twins", are a pair of smaller Dreadnoughts which pupated inside the same cocoon. They complement each other in battle, with the Lacerator getting up close and personal with melee and short-range fire breath attacks, and the Arbalest attempting to flank the team of dwarves and attacking from a distance by spitting explosive projectiles. Periodically, or when one is damaged enough, the twins will burrow into the ground and reappear next to each other connected by a tether of energy, which evenly divides their health between each Twin's separate life bar and regenerates their armor. When one of the two is killed, the other becomes more aggressive.
Dungeon Bypass: It's a game about mining with destructible terrain; this is an inevitability. One strategy frequently used by Drillers (and expected of them by other players) is to save their fuel until the escape pod is called, then drill the team an express tunnel to the escape point, skipping all the backtracking. Quite frequently, this can result in the team beating Molly back to the drop pod!
Dynamic Difficulty: The more players a team has the stronger enemies become. Common enemies like Grunts will only have their damage boosted, but special enemies like Praetorians, Spreaders and Menaces will gain a health boost as well.
Earthquakes Cause Fissures: A trope present in Magma Core and Glacial Strata, with the fissures opening in random places near the dwarves, and making the mining work that much more difficult.
Easter Egg:
- Mission Control has several hidden voice lines responding to various shenanigans particularly inventive dwarves get up to in the space rig, including kicking barrels into the launch bay or the Drop Pod. He also has several unique responses if you manage to kick all of the barrels in the Space Rig into either of the aforementioned places, although this is much easier said than done.
- Managing to kick one of the hammers left lying around the Space Rig into the barrel hoop will make the score counter display "Hammer Time".
- There's (currently) no visible prompt to do so, but pressing E on a Loot Bug will cause your dwarf to pet them, resulting in an appreciative wriggle and a purr.
- Season 3 focuses around a passing comet infested with a lithophage virus. If you drink a Wormhole Special and teleport outside the station you can see the comet passing underneath and behind the station, still shedding the lithophage meteoroids you have to deal with on Hoxxes.
- If the Driller fires his flamethrower at a plastcrete platform or the ice in Glacial Strata for long enough, he'll melt a hole in it.
- Jet Boots shoot out jets of fire when activated, and those jets will set anything directly below the wearer on fire. Creative dwarves can kill small packs of glyphids and even get rid of Praetorian and Oppressor death clouds this way.
Easy Level Trick:
- The final objectives of Salvage missions are to have the whole team huddle around two large machines as they link up to and power up the drop pod; said machines can be repositioned by mining out the terrain from underneath and letting them fall straight down. This is something that can be exploited by an Engineer and a Driller (or, alternatively, just an Engineer and some extreme patience): players can mine out the floor from underneath the machine and create a small room under the floor, then seal the hole in the ceiling. They're now situated in an airtight bunker that enemies can't spawn in nor pathfind their way into, and when the players want to leave, tunnelling a new exit creates the perfect chokepoint to kill the horde of monsters in. The only way this strategy can be thwarted is by the very-rare Bulk Detonator blasting its own path into the bunker (though the team is screwed six ways from Sunday if this happens and the Driller isn't tunneling out), or an Oppressor digging its way in, and neither are even guaranteed to appear in the mission at all.
- Industrial Sabotage's final objective is to destroy the Caretaker, a massive Rival Company robot, which involves damaging exhaust vents to get it to expose its "eyes" and damage the Caretaker proper. Drillers can dig a hole above the Caretaker and drop their satchel charges on top of the boss. Done right, this damages all four vents at once, and two well-placed charges will outright destroy them, saving the team ammo, time, and trouble. The only thing Drillers doing this need to be careful about are their own ammo, the Phase Bombs, and the occasional robots the Caretaker can send their way.
Eat Dirt, Cheap:
- The space rig's notification boards occasionally mention "morkite ale", and Dark Morkite is a drink at the Abyss Bar; either that's just a name, the Morkite is mined as nourishment for the dwarves, or Morkite is used as an ingredient, vaguely like with real-life Goldschläger.
- There's also Red Sugar, which crystalizes on the walls of the caves and is usable as medicine; callouts describe it as "highly addictive," indicating that it may be a potent painkiller or anesthetic.
- The adorable Loot Bugs of Hoxxes eat the minerals around them, meaning they'll drop small amounts of gold and nitra when killed.
Effortless Achievement: There's an achievement for not messing with the barrels for 10 missions consecutively. It runs under the assumption that you're willingly holding yourself back, but the trope still applies because it requires absolutely no effort at all to get. Hell, you could probably got for 10 missions without even realizing you can kick the barrels around, and then be surprised when you're rewarded for unknowingly refusing the urge to do so.
Electromagnetic Ghosts: Contrasting the icons shown for everything else in the game, The Unknown Horror is shown on the Terrain Scanner as a black void.
Elevator Action Sequence: The climax of the Deep Scan mission involves your team of dwarves riding a "Drillevator" down to where the Morkite Geode is located, frantically repairing the tracks on the sides to keep them from overheating and blasting away dozens of bugs as they crawl out of the walls down toward you. The real danger posed by this section is if the bugs manage to catch up to you because the Drillevator is stopped, since it's a very small and hard-to-maneuver-on platform.
Elite Mook: The Elite Threat warning makes the game occasionally spawn elite versions of several enemies. Elite enemies universally get more health, become slightly larger, resistance to status effects like freeze or on fire, and increased move speed, and depending on the enemy in question, some additional enhancements. The elite grunt guard for example gets knockback added to its attacks, and the elite mactera spawn shoots two acid spines instead of a single one.
Elves Versus Dwarves: Elves do not make an appearance, but friendly fire may result in a dwarf calling his coworkers "pointy-eared leaf lovers", implying this trope is in full swing. One of the battle-preparedness lines when starting a mission is, "Come on lads, are we elves or dwarves?" The Flavor Text of a certain hated organic beer at the Abyss Bar implies elves brew it, making the dwarves absolutely despise it (usually, if one orders the beer, they'll whisper the order to the bartender, or suggest that they hate it so much that they'll also request it be thinned with some water.) That beer is also explicitly stated to be served only to please DRG Management, which implies that it has elves employed at the executive level and adds a touch of class warfare to the conflict.
Embarrassing Hospital Gown: Ever since Season 2, players who fail a mission or get badly injured on the Space Rig will respawn in their home base's medbay, with their normally professional gear being swapped out for a hospital gown as a way to humiliate them. While the dwarves' backsides are thankfully covered in this case, the fact the dwarves' only other article of clothing is a set of Goofy Print Underwear debatably makes it worse.
Emergency Weapon: Pickaxes can be swung to damage enemies as well as mine, and pickaxes will never dull in a mission, but one probably shouldn't considering using it for that purpose other than some swarmers or maybe a grunt of two at most. Swinging it slows you down for a little while and prevents sprinting. That being said, a few perks can make for using the pickaxe for more than very occasional ammunition conservation a bit more feasible.
Empty Levels: Dwarf levels never give any form of status boost per se, they're necessary to unlock assignments for new weapons and weapon upgrades. Likewise, the blue level will not give any form of status increase, but will allow players to accept assignments for cosmetic items like new armors and pickaxe parts.
The Engineer: Obviously The Engineer, but every dwarf is this, regardless of class. They can fight and mine, but also repair mini-mules, do field repairs on a Drill Tank, build pipelines, and so on.
Equipment-Based Progression: Your strength doesn't come from your character level. It comes from your gear, and your character level merely allows you to buy more upgrades to make your weapons stronger. The first promotion of any character also gives you access to Overclocks, which can further enhance your guns.
Escort Mission: Update 32 added the Escort Duty mission, where your job is to defend a Drilldozer (affectionately referred to by the dwarves as "Doretta") as it drills a tunnel towards a valuable Ommoran Heartstone buried deep in the planet. Bugs will target the Drilldozer as it moves from cave to cave, and it periodically stops and needs to be refueled by mining "oil shale" with a special fuel canister/mining laser device. Fortunately, after the Heartstone is retrieved, the Drilldozer does not need to be escorted back out; all you need to do is make it to the drop pod with the Heartstone intact. Update 33 made it so players can bring Doretta's head to the drop pod to bring it back with them, but management doesn't care either way. Heartstones are reportedly worth a fortune, to the point where using heavy machinery in a one-off disposable manner just to get one of these rocks more than pays for itself.
Establishing Character Moment: Your introduction to DRG is a training in a place called Shallow Grotto. The first interaction with Mission Control has him giving you instructions with impeccable professionalism, while the Dwarf you're controlling reacts with varying degrees of indifference or annoyance, establishing their workplace relationship. When an unexpected swarm breaks Mission Control makes very clear he does not expect you to survive through it, but after you fend off the swarm he (very badly) says he knew you had it in you. Everything in Shallow Grotto is what you should expect of DRG, the company and the game: grouchy Dwarves under the stuffy Mission Control who work for a company that cares more about profit than their lives.
Everything Fades: Played straight for enemies, but averted for the utility tools. If you can keep your ammo up, there's no limit to the number of platforms and ziplines that can exist (ziplines will even persist if everything that they're attached to is destroyed). Standard flares and the Scout's Flare Gun zigzag this — while they will never disappear from the game world, the light they give off will eventually dissipate over time, necessitating repeatedly deploying more to keep the area well-lit.
Everything Trying to Kill You: The only thing that probably can't get you killed in this game is probably static ground and even that is a little dubious on some biomes. The number of harmless lifeforms on Hoxxes are massively outnumbered by hostile ones. Space mining is a competitive business, but Hoxxes hasn't been touched due to its incredibly hostile inhabitants even though it's extremely rich in minerals. Hazards besides the Glyphid and Mactera include, but are not limited to;
- Radioactive and electrified crystals.
- Bees.
- Cave Leeches; picture Half-Life's Barnacles, but with more reach.
- Fungi that release poisonous gas when you move near them.
- Plants that explode (and/or release freezing gas) when shot.
- Lava geysers and wind chutes, which can burn you, launch you to your doom, or freeze you solid.
- Rocks thrown by Ommoran Heartstones.
- The first two seasons add a Killer Robot faction to the mix. The third and fourth have a comet spreading The Virus over Hoxxes, infecting the rock and the Glyphids to make things even more hazardous. The fifth...
  Dwarf: Intergalactic rifts and cosmic horror... not my cup of beer!
Excuse Plot: You work for Deep Rock Galactic aaaand that's about it. There's no overarching plot beyond whatever content the season brings.
Exploding Barrels: Exploding Plants and Cryo Bombs.
Explosive Overclocking: Update 25 introduced Overclocks, which are craftable at the Forge from Matrix Cores (awarded for completing special endgame missions). Some of them are "clean" or "balanced" overclocks, averting this trope. The unstable ones play it perfectly straight with both huge improvements and huge penalties, though.
Explosive Stupidity: A rather common occurrence, especially with the Gunner's Sticky Grenades or the Driller's C4. Reckless usage of these things will result in someone getting downed by Unfriendly Fire, especially on higher hazard levels.
Falling Damage: It's been the undisputed #1 cause of death for players year◊ after year◊, after year◊.
Fantastic Flora: The collectible Apoca Bloom flowers and Boolo Cap mushrooms — as well as everything you might see in Dense Biozone, Azure Weald, and Fungus Bogs, and the exploding plants that can be seen all over the playable locations.
Fantasy Metals: Surprisingly enough, this is completely averted so far. The only metal in the entire game that can actually be mined is gold, and maybe Dystrum. ^Explanation There haven't even been any mentions of the usual fare, such as Adamantite. However, there is a wide roster of Fantasy Minerals. Croppa, Jadiz, Magnite, Umanite, Enor Pearls, and Bismor are used as crafting materials. Nitra is used to call in supply drops. Morkite, Hollomite, and Dystrum are used as objectives with no other in-game purpose... although the news screens in the Space Rig sometimes mention "Dark Morkite Ale" and ordering Glyphid Slammer have the dwarves sometimes asking for "extra Red Sugar on the rim".
Fantastic Slurs: "(Pointy-Eared) Leaf-Lover" is presumably one for elves. Of course it's elves.
- Hilariously enough in the game's community, the epithet "leaf-lover" is usually thrown at toxic players. It's also jokingly used as a Fisticuff-Provoking Comment among the players as well.
Face Death with Dignity: If a dwarf is left behind on Hoxxes while the rest of the team escapes, they take a surprisingly philosophical approach to it instead of panicking or getting angry. This may be excused by the fact that the med-bay implies DRG is somehow rescuing their employees from death.
Dwarf: (resigned) Well, sometimes you live, sometimes you die...
Dwarf: I have lived like a dwarf and I'm gonna die like a dwarf!
Dwarf: Damn! That's unfortunate!
- Conversely, some of their quotes have them cursing the company they work for or losing their shit.
  Dwarf: Damn you, Deep Rock Galactic!
  Dwarf: Okay, this is not happening!
  Dwarf: Ohhh shit!
Fast Tunneling: The game. Most kinds of rock take, at most, three strikes with a pickaxe to dig a dwarf-sized hole in it, with softer minerals taking even less effort. This is basically the Driller's department, as he can just drill a tunnel big enough for a team to comfortably run through in no time at all.
Fire, Ice, Lightning: Some of your weapons are elemental-oriented or can be modded to shoot elemental ammo. Incendiary and Cryo grenades are available for certain classes, and Bosco's main weapon can be upgraded to conduct electricity.
- Fire causes damage over time (if the enemy's heat gauge reaches maximum, "igniting" them) and ignores armor.
- Ice freezes enemies in place and makes them take more damage when frozen.
- Electrocution slows enemies, does some damage over time, and has a small chance to spread in an electric arc with certain weapon modifications.
Flowery Insults: The dwarves are surprisingly erudite when it comes to insulting their teammates for shooting them in the ass by accident.
Dwarf: You leaf-fondling son of a mud golem!!!
Fluffy Tamer: One of the perks added in Update 28 allows dwarves to tame a single Glyphid Grunt at a time. You can even pet them.
Freeze Ray:
- The Driller's alternate primary weapon, the Cryo Cannon. It's not a focused ray-type weapon, though; it's more akin to a reverse flamethrower, with a short range and a wide area of effect.
- The Scout has Cryo Grenades, which act as Freeze Bombs.
- The Glacial Strata has Cryo Bombs — plants which explode and release freezing gas when hit — and Glyphid Frost Praetorians that deal freezing status effects instead of poison damage, as well as Mactera Frost Bombers.
Friendly Fireproof:
- Averted for the most part. Getting in a Gunner's firing line will not end well for anyone, bug or dwarf. You do take less damage from allies depending on Hazard level (for example, 70% of full damage on Hazard 5). So while you can probably withstand a few bullets if you accidentally get in your buddy's crosshairs, it's still a bad idea to be in the way when firing full auto. This also goes for explosive weapons as well and it's not hard to find tales of Engineers downing their own teammates via reckless usage of the Fat Boy overclock, and, of course, there's the old tale of Drillers blowing up Scouts (accidentally or not) with C4.
- Interestingly, the natives of Hoxxes aren't exempt from this either. This is especially noticeable with Glyphid Exploders, or when playing a mission with the Mactera Plague warning, as the huge swarms of Mactera Spawn/Tri-Jaws body-block each others' shots, neutrialzing some of their lethality.
- Played straight with the Driller's Neurotoxin Grenade, which releases a gas that slowly kills everything but dwarves.
- Also played straight by DRG-issue turrets, either the Engineer's or those found on the Minehead in Point Extraction operations; their rounds go right through dwarves with no damage.
- Played increasingly straight depending on levels of the Friendly perk worn, which mitigates friendly fire coming and going; at high enough levels on both dwarves involved, playfully bombing your friend with a satchel charge is a valid option and will probably just tickle him.
- Also interestingly played straight by the Gunner's Autocannon, which despite firing high-explosive rounds that carve chunks out of terrain and bugs, will do absolutely zero damage to other dwarves, possibly because the knockback effect on other players would be too severe and difficult to account for.
Fungus Humongous: Par for the course in the Fungus Bogs. They go from simply large to enormous caps that can hold up the entire team and take three pickaxe hits to break, like the hardiest of terrain. Always remember to ping a certain xenofungus when you see it until Mission Control is annoyed.

G-K

Gatling Good: The Gunner's namesake is the monstrous three-barreled "Lead Storm" Powered Minigun. While it has the odd property of getting more accurate the longer it's fired, it will also overheat if the trigger is held down too long.
Gargle Blaster: The aptly-named Blackout Stout, one of the unlockable beers at the Abyss Bar. Instant and total intoxication awaits the hardy dwarf brave enough to quaff a tankard of this stuff; it instantly knocks you out cold, no questions asked, even if you were sober before drinking it. A variety of other craftable beers have even more extreme and amusing effects (for the player, that is), such as the Wormhole Special, which can teleport you outside the Space Rig.
Game-Breaking Bug: If the host has a poor connection, then the collision physics for everything but the terrain ceases to exist, including bullets and the Drop Pod, meaning that if they don't eventually kick back in then the mission is doomed to failure. This can even occur during solo missions.
Gameplay Ally Immortality: The NPC replacement for a second player, Bosco packs as much firepower as a dwarf (and with the right upgrades, twice the mining power), with the added benefits of full 3D flight and total invincibility. His lackluster free will is the only thing keeping him from straight-up stealing your job.
Gameplay and Story Integration: Getting drunk enough at the Abyss Bar makes your vision blurry and your dwarf stumble around in a daze. Think it'll wear off if you go into a mission right after? Nope — you start that mission while still intoxicated and therefore with a major Interface Screw until it eventually fades away as the mission progresses.
Gameplay and Story Segregation: The Miner's Handbook entry for the Fester Fleas says that employees who fail to kill a Fester Flea on sight will be punished by management. However, in a mission, Fester Fleas can appear as a bonus objective where you have to kill them — typically, if you complete that objective, there will still be fleas left over, and not killing those does not punish you.
Game Mod: Deep Rock Galactic has an active modding community, with the mods running the gamut. From reskinning dwarves into kobolds and adding a firing range, to new overclocks and Hazard 6, there's something for everyone.
Gang Up on the Human: The Glyphids are supposed to be at war with the Rockpox infected enemies, but they'll never attack each other and will always join forces and try to kill the Dwarves. Likewise don't expect Rival Tech and the Glyphids to fight among themselves.
Gas Chamber: Not actually seen in game, but if you vandalize holiday decorations, Mission Control will tell you that management has threatened to flood the rig with radon gas.
Giant Spider: The Glyphids occupy a grey area between this and Giant Enemy Crab, being hard-shelled subterranean insectoids. The game itself refers to them as arachnids.
"Get Back Here!" Boss: The Prospector doesn't directly attack the players, instead zooming all over the map while deploying bots to fight for it and becoming invulnerable when it gets damaged enough, and will eventually escape if not killed quickly. This becomes a nightmare in biomes that are prone to having gigantic open spaces, like the Glacial Strata and the Sandblasted Corridors.
Glass Cannon:
- On the player side of things, the Scout qualifies if he equips the unlockable M1000 Classic, which allows him to shred through pretty much any target in the game as long as he's accurate enough; it doesn't make him any more resilient, though, and aiming properly leaves you open to attack from other glyphids.
- The Glyphids, meanwhile, have the Acid Spitter and Web Spitter variants. Both are fairly fragile and will flee from direct contact, hugging distant walls of the cavern so they can spit acid or vision-obscuring webbing at you; the Acid Spitter's projectiles in particular hurt.
Glitch Entity: Played with.
- Very rarely, you can find strange glowing black cubes buried in deposits within the depths of Hoxxes, with a name that seems like an error code — but those familiar with game development know that this is too coherent and functional to be an actual bug. (And it's your scanner displaying the code, suggesting in-universe anomalous readings rather than a bug.) Nobody knows what they actually are; theories run rampant, and the developers have only said that they should be held onto (not that they can be gotten rid of without a full account reset) as they might become useful in future updates. For now, the cubes give an extra 2,000 XP, multiplied by your hazard bonus.
- In the Azure Weald, one can find mysterious light-emitting pillars that buff both dwarves and creatures with a huge damage reduction. Using the scanner on them gives the glitchy result of "p[[[[[{0}]]]]]q".
Good-Guy Bar: To let the players partake in the "drink-loving" side of the "standard-issue dwarves" archetype embodied by their characters, the Oktoberfest update added the Abyss Bar, a shipboard drinking establishment where the player characters can drink, dance, and compete in precision barrel-kicking.
Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Scout gets a grapple gun that can zip him around the vast caverns of Hoxxes. It's the only "traversal tool" with unlimited use, and the only one that none of the user's teammates can benefit from.
Guide Dang It!:
- There's no clear indicator (outside mods, or checking your equipment in the terminal) that your shields are much lower compared to your health: 25 for your shields and 110 (with no upgrades or masteries) for your health. A lot of players just starting the game tend to either under or overestimate the amount of damage they can take because of that.
- You can set a semi-permanent waypoint with the laser pointer by pressing "action" while aiming at something and it'll be marked as a dark blue dot in your mini-map. The waypoint is a great way to keep track of something you saw or a compressed dirt leading ot the next cave in missions like Mining Expeditions.
- You can hold the "action" button to grab ziplines mid-air or objects thrown your way without needing to time it perfectly. Both things are usually very useful if a Gunner is working on a Point Extraction mission.
- As of Season 5 the Ommoran has a new attack where it tries to trap dwarves in a spherical prison. If this attack traps Doretta, usually by Dwarves camping on top of her, it'll instead deal massive damage to the Drilldozer. This detail is only officially mentioned once in a patch note. It's not unusual for new players to get confused as to why Doretta took a ton of damage out of seemingly nowhere.
- Deep Dives has a few hidden mechanics: used perks (like Iron Will and Field Medic) and Bosco revives will refresh after each stage ends and buff beers will persist through all three missions.
- Some Machine Events (Kursite Grinder and Pickaxe Overcharger) will end with a big shockwave that kills most bugs which is usually helpful, but in Elimination missions this can and might burst open a Dreadnought cocoon. However, something the game doesn't tell you is that the same shockwave can be used to hurt Dreadnoughts as well.
- Some missions have hidden mechanics that summon enemies to your location with no warning from Mission Control.
  - Salvage Mission: Going near broken Mini-M.U.L.Es will always spawn two swarms, with a small pause between them, with no warning. So if the team approaches every Mini-M.U.L.E at the same time, you might have a nasty combined swarm of bugs on you.
  - Point Extraction: Besides occasional mini-swarms, announced full swarms (with no prior warning) will occur at specified times during the mission. Furthermore, the mini-swarms get more frequent the more time you spend in the mission, and after a certain point. It's generally agreed upon that spending more than 15~20 minutes in these missions on higher hazards is a very bad idea, as the mini-swarms might grow bigger than the announced ones.
  - Egg Hunt: Mining eggs will spawn a mini-swarm, but they can also spawn a bigger, announced by Mission Control, swarm instead; the amount is normally one egg less than half of the total.^Details And, like in Salvage Mission, they can stack. If everyone ends up pulling all eggs at the same time, you'll be facing a legion of Glyphids coming at you.
Guilt-Free Extermination War: Suffice to say, none of the dwarves feel guilty about outright exterminating the Glyphids and other hostile lifeforms on Hoxxes IV. Often, they taunt their enemies with lines like "Have some extinction!" or "Pesticide, coming up!" DRG management encourages such behavior, framing the "complete subjugation" of the planet as the only way to keep their mining operations safe.
Guns Do Not Work That Way:
- A minor example with the Engineer's Warthog Auto 210 shotgun. It's a semi-automatic shotgun that uses a magazine, and is pumped after reloading it. Possibly hand-waved by having the pump work the bolt to chamber the first shell. Especially when considering the eclectic tastes of firearms the dwarves have, some guns may be designed the way they are just for user satisfaction. The Pump Action Overclock introduced in Season 5 flips this on its head, with the detachable magazine becoming redundant.
- The Gunner's Bulldog Heavy Revolver is a Hand Cannon firing 26mm bullets. It's also a top-break revolver and it's reloaded by having the Gunner take out the entire cylinder and putting in a new one. Top-break revolvers were more common in the days of relatively weak black powder loads, but having all the recoil focus on the hinge made those designs impractical when more powerful rounds came into being (possibly hand-waved by dwarven metallurgy and gunsmithing just being that good). Removing the entire cylinder to reload the revolver is also pure Cool, but Inefficient, as it would require precisely machining extra cylinders that can properly engage with the revolver's mechanism, when a simple speedloader would be sufficient to reload the cylinder (there's a reason no practical revolver models are reloaded by removing the cylinder).
Hacking Minigame: Starting with the Rival Incursion update, there are several objects which can be hacked.
- The rival patrol bots have a chance to float to the ground in an incapacitated state after their health is depleted. A disabled bot can be approached to hack it. The hacking minigame is a 4-stage timing puzzle, where the player must quickly click as a scanner passes a designated point on the hacking screen. Once completed, the patrol bot will reactivate and aid the dwarves in fighting bugs or its former robot comrades. Up to 3 hacked patrol bots can exist at a time; if a new one is hacked afterwards, one of the pre-existing ones will harmlessly explode.
- Rival Turret Controllers and Antenna Nodes have a different hacking minigame, involving multiple 3-stage timing puzzles to select and cut wires.
- In Season 4, Jet Boots were introduced and can randomly appear in a mission. Opening them up requires you to play "Jetty Boot", a mercifully short Flappy Bird clone.
Hair-Trigger Explosive: The Volatile Compound mod for the Driller's Satchel Charge makes it sensitive to weapons fire in addition to increasing its explosive power.
Hand Cannon:
- The Flavor Text for the Gunner's Bulldog claims that the gun is chambered for 26mm ammunition. To put that into perspective, the largest developed small arms cartridge in real life is the .950 JDJ, a rifle round measuring about 24mm in diameter.
- As of Season 2, the Gunner gets the even more ludicrous ArmsKore Coil Gun, a handheld coilgun that fires inch-wide spheres with such force that they punch clean through solid bedrock. An Overclock gives it even more damage if it fires through layers of terrain before hitting the target.
Hard Mode Perks: The hazard level, mission length, cave complexity, and any additional hazards all have a difficulty value which is added up to get the end-of-mission "hazard bonus". This is a percentage that all your money, EXP, and resource earnings are multiplied by, so the harder the mission, the more you'll make from it. Even getting the hazard bonus up to 100% is quite stiff — a Hazard 3 run of a mission with maximum length and complexity but no other modifiers is only 105%.
Harder Than Hard: Hazard 5, the highest difficulty, pushes players to the extreme. Enemies deal extreme damage (common Slashers can take a full-health dwarf down to 0 health in just 5 attacks, while exploders straight up one-shot you at point blank) and move absurdly quickly, their projectiles zip across the map in a fraction of a second, certain enemies attack much faster (the Dreadnought's spike stomp attack comes with less than a second of warning), the first swarm wave can show up as early as three minutes and future swarms occur more frequently, friendly fire is cranked up to lethal levels, the environmental hazards kill you quicker than ever, and so much more. However, on its own, hazard 5 awards players 2.33 times the rewards, making hazard 5 runs a fast (if dangerous) way to get rich.
- Elite Deep Dives are even worse. They start on hazard 4.5, and end on hazard 5.5, and there can be up to 3 warnings. Fail on the last stage, and it's all the way back to the beginning if you want that cosmetic overclock.
- Rarely, missions can have two warnings. Depending on the combo, this can be arguably harder than an EDD's hazard 5.5. Fancy facing off against elite enemies that deal double damage? That Elite Slasher will kill you in just two hits. How about having no shields and a constant spawning of swarmers? They'll attrition you down rather quickly if you aren't proactive. What do you think of dealing with an unkillable ghost Bulk Detonator and having only a few safe spots to recharge O2 lest your dwarves suffocate? Stay in one place to recharge your oxygen, but then the Unknown Horror might be right next to you.
- Season 5 introduces a customizable difficulty option that allows for an even harder Hazard 5+. Players can now boost enemy aggression, enemy toughness, enemy count and/or player vulnerability to make things even more challenging for even better rewards. Enjoy fighting enemies that can deal double damage, can have nearly 50% more health, attack in even huger swarms and/or attack and move so fast even a Scout grappling away can have trouble avoiding them!
Harmless Freezing:
- Zig-zagged. Getting frozen turns the player into a light blue ice statue in whatever position they froze in, but it's possible to either break free with inputs or have a friend break the ice with their pickaxe, with no damage to the victim. However, frozen Glyphids and Dwarves take triple damage from enemies when vulnerable and Glyphids shatter into pieces when sufficiently damaged, ignoring any armor resistances.
- Played with by the Driller's Cryo Cannon in Update 19; it can freeze enemies solid with minimal damage dealt, but one of the high-end upgrades gives any enemy you freeze with it a chance to just shatter immediately.
- This is averted with any organic Airborne Mook; if they get frozen they'll fall to the ground and instantly shatter, killing them regardless of their health or how far they fall from. This makes freezing immensely powerful against Grabbers who tend to flee once shot at, and Naedocyte Breeders who normally have beefy HP pools to chew through. However, mechanical enemies such as Shredders and Patrol Bots are far more resistant to freezing, making it less effective against them (though they instantly and terminally short-circuit if they're fully ignited to compensate).
Have I Mentioned I Am a Dwarf Today?: The dwarves will frequently remind the Glyphids that "dwarves don't die easily!", among other things.
Dwarf: Mining is hard work. Good thing we're dwarves.
Helium Speech: The "Rich Atmosphere" anomaly increases dwarf and enemy movement speed, and also makes everyone's voices 50% more high-pitched as a hilarious side effect. The 5 year anniversary event also added helium tanks on the space rig where you can huff some and gain the same squeaky voice effect.
Heroic Second Wind: The Iron Will perk allows a dwarf to stand up after being downed and fight for a short time with increased statuses; after the perk time expires, they'll go down again... unless they find a way to get even a sliver of health back.
Hideous Hangover Cure: Leaf Lover's Special will "kill your buzz faster than a pay cut, and leave you with the same empty feeling in your gut." Sure enough, drinking one removes all drunkenness immediately. The dwarves despise it, but not for its taste, apparently; it's because it's a Leaf Lover's Special.
Hit-and-Run Tactics: What every mission boils down to. It's impossible to hold any ground on Hoxxes, as the dwarves will inevitably run out of ammunition and be swarmed to death eventually. Instead, they drop in, hit whatever resource deposits that they can find, and retreat once the quota is met. In the few cases where there has to be a facility deployed into the caverns of Hoxxes, it's a short-term, disposable platform that allows the dwarves to very briefly hold the area and extract a high-value resource before they retreat.
- Rival Prospector fights go this way. It runs away and calls for backup when shot and can turn itself invulnerable twice to give it more time to run, all while calling in Shredders and patrol bots to defend it and slow your pursuit.
Hitbox Dissonance:
- Molly, mini-Mules, Bosco, and BET-C all have smaller collision boxes than their models. Handy for making it easy for them to follow dwarves while being less likely to accidentally shove them off cliffs. Potentially a problem if Molly decides the best way to the escape pod is through a tiny gap in the ceiling of a high cavern.
- The Drop Pod sides, especially the small bits protruding from the door, have a larger collision box than it appears which can lead to infuriating situations where your character gets stuck on seemingly nothing, which is particularly bad if you're really in a hurry becuase of the endless swarm of bugs giving chase.
Hit the Ground Harder: As the Scout, you can cancel out any and all fall damage by grappling towards the ground before you hit it.
Hired Guns: The dwarves are all mercenaries as much as they are miners. This appears to be fairly common in the setting, going by the Flavor Text on the "Corporate Marine" helmet.
Hoist by Their Own Petard: Rival Prospectors will call in Patrol Bots to defend themselves, and sometimes you can hack one of these patrol drones to fight for you. Hacked Patrol Bots are exceptionally good at killing the Prospector that called them.
Hold the Line:
- At the end of most mission types, the Drop Pod will only open once the slow-moving M.U.L.E. has reached and docked with it. Until then, any dwarves who arrive early have to hold off the constantly-spawning bugs.
- The actual salvaging in Salvage missions is easy. The difficulty is staying alive during the lengthy bug-magnet process of uplinking and refueling the Drop Pod, while being forced to stay in a small zone both times or risk jeopardizing the mission. After that, there's still a minute and a half of waiting for the Drop Pod to start up while bugs swarm all around.
- The tail end of Point Extraction missions. After collecting the required Aquarqs and pressing the button, the dwarves need to survive 2 minutes before the Drop Pod arrives and immediately opens for them.
Holiday Mode: There are special events for Lunar New Year, the game's anniversary, Easter, summer, Oktoberfest, Halloween, and Christmas. During these events, the Space Rig gains fitting decorations, players have the opportunity to obtain themed cosmetics, and missions gain a collectible that doubles the season pass performance points gained from that mission.
Holler Button:
- Press the taunt button (V by default) to raise your pickaxe and ROCK AND STONE! The exact line may vary, but that is among the more common lines. Pressing the taunt button while holding a mug of beer makes your dwarf of choice deliver a toast instead.
  Dwarf: May your beards be thick, and your gold satchels heavy!
- Press X instead and your dwarf yells out for attention. Good for indicating your position to your squadmates, who are shown the location of the hollerer. This button is similarly context-sensitive; use it while grabbed by an enemy or after being downed, and your dwarf's lines change to more urgent ones. When used in the Space Rig, the dwarves will just make random noises, such as clearing their throat or burping.
Hollywood Darkness: Averted. While most biomes have at least a few native features that naturally luminesce to aid in orientation, these tend not to actually project much light and the engine is perfectly capable of rendering pitch black. You have an infinite supply of flares (and the Scout's Flare Gun) for a reason.
Hollywood Hacking: Played for Laughs. You sometimes need to call in a hacking drone and guard it while it hacks into a power station or data deposit. The drone is a robot Rapid-Fire Typing on a physical keyboard.
Hot-Blooded Sideburns: An option for your dwarves, and the Gunner has them by default.
House Rules: The game's "etiquette" has two rules that are generally widespread among players, ignoring them is generally considered from obnoxious to downright mission threatening:
1. Don't "double dip", that is, take more than one resupply without asking if the team is ok with it. A team of four players and only three resupplied dwarves (with one at 100%) is usually much worse than a team with four player and four resupplied dwarves with 50% ammo each.
2. Type "r" to check if everyone is "ready" before initiating the next step on missions (calling Extraction, starting random events, starting Dreadnought fights, starting Uplink, starting Doretta, starting Refinery, etc.). If the team isn't fully prepared, especially at higher difficulties, there's a real probablity of things spiralling out of control with the team needlessly struggling with what could've been much easier with some preparation.
I Call It "Vera": The M.U.L.E., the APD-Drone, and the Drilldozer all have technical classifications, classifications DRG would much prefer the dwarves use and they've even made against company rules to name them. Instead, the dwarves don't care about said rule and refer them respectively as Molly, Bosco, and Doretta. Even Mission Control gets in on the fun at some points!
I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: All over the place! Come and visit Hoxxes IV; begin your trip with a scientific expedition to the Radioactive Exclusion Zone! Looking to relax? Why not go on a safari through the Fungus Bogs! If you're tired of all that moisture, finish things off with a visit to the Magma Core!
I Want My Mommy!: Dwarves may cry out a little "Mommy!" if they have been falling long enough.
I'm Melting!: Anything killed by the Corrosive Sludge Pump's goo will dissolve, melting away.
It Has Been an Honor: Parodied in the tutorial where in your very first swarm Mission Control says this fully expecting you to die... then backpedaling, half-embarrassed, saying he knew you had it in you.
Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Difficulty levels, Hazard levels, have names, but are more known by their numbers:
- 1) Low Risk - Easier Than Easy.
  2) Challenging - Easy.
  3) Dangerous - Normal.
  4) Extreme - Hard.
  5) Lethal - Harder Than Hard. Must be unlocked by finishing an assignment with missions in Hazard 4 first.
  5+) Beyond Lethal - Harder than Harder Than Hard with customizable modifiers such as Player Vulnerability, Enemy Aggression, Tougher Enemies and/or More Enemies. Like Hazard 5, it must be unlocked first by completing an assignment with missions in Hazard 5 level.
Implausible Boarding Skills: While grinding on pipes from On-Site Refinery missions, dwarves can rotate their body in any direction, shoot high-power firearms without falling off, and grind up slopes without needing to build momentum first.
Impossible Insurance: A little downplayed, but there are several very particular yet unfortunately common situations a dwarf can face that are explicitly not covered by his employee insurance. With things like "Overconfidence", breaking your knees because you shot to the roof with your Grappling-Hook Pistol, getting crunched under a resupply pod or any environmental burns acquired in the Magma Core, it seems the only things it covers are bug bites and inebriation (which is admittedly still a lot).
Improbable Aiming Skills: Can be invoked with ricochet mods, which have bullets home in on enemies after bouncing off surfaces rather than obeying physics.
Indy Ploy: A necessity given the Procedural Generation element of the gameplay. Planning and preparation will get you only so far and more often than not teams find themselves improvising to survive from start to finish.
Infinite Supplies: Entirely averted — once your dwarf's ammunition or other tools have ran out, you have to refresh it from a resupply pod to use it again. If the group lacks the nitra to call a resupply pod in, all they can do is use their pickaxes to get more nitra (or in the Scout's case, also his grappling hook), extract to the Drop Pod, or die trying to do either. Indeed, compared to other co-op shooters (such as Left 4 Dead), a harder limit on the player's supplies rendering them unable to effectively fight back is more likely to be Deep Rock Galactic's catalyst for a game ending in defeat, as also unlike those games, players can never be rendered outright impossible to revive for any point in time (...usually) and enemies that render a single player helpless until they or the player are killed are much, much more rarely encountered.
Intoxication Mechanic: The in-game graphics blur as your dwarf gets drunker, and will eventually double. This even includes your dwarf in the Status tab, or the shot of the game's dwarves in the post-game results.
It Came from the Fridge: In Season 4, there is a fridge on the Space Rig next to the Abyss Bar with Rockpox seeping out of it and several chains wrapped around it. A sticky note attached to it says "DO NOT OPEN".
Irrelevant Sidequest: Secondary objectives are just a mean to get some extra credits and a bit more XP at the end of a mission. There's no explanation as to why you need to get Apoca Blooms, Boolo Caps, Fossils or whatever the heck your secondary objective is (or 'are' in case of the "Secret Secondary" Anomaly) and there's no penalty for ignoring secondaries.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
- The dwarves are all extremely jaded and gruff as can be expected of dwarves, freely insulting the Glyphids, their mining equipment, and each other. That being said, a more tender side shines through when they help each other up, pet lootbugs or tamed glyphids, or get drunk, and their primary motto is "Leave no dwarf behind."
- Mission Control is something of a Beleaguered Boss, lambasting the dwarves for doing virtually anything aboard the Space Rig that isn't drinking or prepping for a dig. However, he's always respectful and polite with the dwarves when they're planetside, he shows a lot of concern for their health while they're on the job, he never lies about the company's intentions or priorities, and he sincerely compliments your dwarf's skills if you get promoted.
Jump Physics:
- Every Dwarf can change their jump mid-air to the sides at least to some degree and it can save you from a bad jump to a nearby ledge.
- Bunnyhopping is a common technique to stay on the move while firing, particularly important at higher difficulties where backpedalling is not enough to avoid getting hit by the Glyphids.
- Certain jump boosting abilities are available to a few classes: the Scout has Special Powder that gives him a powerful Recoil Boost while the Engineer has the RJ250 Compound allowing him to Rocket Jump with his Grenade Launcher.
Jump Scare: Cave Leeches are prone to causing this, especially since the camera angle changes and the hapless dwarf grabbed by one will also yell. Glyphid Stalkers are also prone to this since if their attacks lands it makes a mild Scare Chord on top of its loud noise.
Jungle Japes: The Fungus Bogs are half this and half Bubblegloop Swamp.
Kaizo Trap:
- Even if the team completes the mission objectives, gets the Mule to the Drop Pod, and enters the Drop Pod, there's a bug that can cause Grabbers to abduct players inside the Drop Pod and drag them out. If that was the last surviving player in the Drop Pod, the Pod will take off without them and the mission is counted as a failure. An exploding Bulk Detonator right in front of the door can sometimes cause enough damage to kill players within the Drop Pod even with the damage reduction by being within, and cause a mission failure. Sometimes, the Drop Pod can even take off without any of the dwarves that were in it, causing a failure as well.
- Core Stone event ends once the Core Stone is defeated, but the Crawlers will stay alive for a few more seconds which is enough for them to down anyone low on health due to how strong they are (especially in higher Hazard levels), they also leave toxic puddles of blood upon death as well.
Kill It with Fire: Most of the Rival Corporation's mechanical units are instantly destroyed should they be fully ignited. This is quite useful as their flying units are resistant to cold, unlike most Airborne Mooks, which are instantly killed when frozen.
Kill It with Ice:
- Exploders do not explode if they're killed while frozen. Bulk Detonators won't lethally explode when frozen, but will instead send out a non-damaging shockwave that sends dwarves flying.
- Organic Airborne Mooks will drop to the ground and shatter when frozen, be it a small Mactera Spawn to the large and durable Naedocyte Breeder. Averted with mechanical fliers like Shredders and Patrol Bots, who are highly cold-resistant but are instead destroyed when ignited.
Killer Robot:
- Bosco. Even after he was nerfed, he can still take out a whole group of Swarmers and most mid-range Glyphids before they can even touch you.
- Most of the Rival Corporation's mechanical units are robots with deadly weaponry like sniper guns, homing missiles, burst fire cannons and even deadly forcefields. All these robots are not hesitant to attack dwarves on sight.
Klatchian Coffee: Leaf Lover’s Special is an "anti-beer" that instantly makes you sober. It’s there for if you don’t want to enter a mission with drunk effects on you.
Kneel Before Zod: Downplayed, but present; Deep Rock Galactic's stated objective for Hoxxes IV is nothing less than the "complete subjugation" of the planet. Their propaganda contains such imagery as a hand seizing the planet in a way that would do the Forresters proud.
Know When to Fold 'Em: A decision that has to be taken by dwarves sometimes. There's no shame in running away from a Machine Event and let it time out, run from that Korlok Tyrant-Weed if they feel it's going to end with everyone either dead or so dry on ammo they'll be unable to finish the main mission.
Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Zig-zagged: Generally enemies native to a certain biome have resistances to elemental hazards found within that biome For example, enemies in the Glacial Strata are harder to freeze, enemies in the Magma Core don't burn as easily, enemies in the Radioactive Exclusion Zone are hardened against radiation, and so forth. However, there are some notable exceptions to these rules that apply regardless of biome:
- Glyphid Bulk Detonators are highly resistant to explosives, somewhat resistant to cryo and thaw quickly, and flat-out immune to stuns and fear effects.
- While most bugs have some form of breakable armor that can be stubbornly chewed through given enough firepower, Glyphid Oppressors' plates and heads are indestructible, requiring you to Attack Its Weak Point.
- All Q'ronar Shellbacks are completely immune to being frozen, stunned, feared/scared, webbed, or gooped. While neurotoxin will still damage them over time, it does not appear to slow them down at all.

L-N

Lag Cancel: The wind-downs from animations can be canceled by momentarily doing another context-sensitive action, like depositing or using your pickaxe (or deposit cancelling with your pickaxe). This can allow players to speed up reloading after the point that their magazine is refilled or even throw multiple grenades faster.
Leeroy Jenkins: Every once in a while you may come across a fellow Dwarf that's overconfident in their ability and may do imprudent things like rushing out of the Drop Pod, charging headlong into new big caves without any care in the world or starting events/bosses unprompted... To elaborate why these things are phenomenally reckless:
- Sprinting out from the Drop Pod immediately in certain mission types – Egg Hunt, On-Site Refinery, Point Extraction and Deep Scans – is dangerous, especially at higher hazard levels and doing this will incur a massive risk, lest you jump right into a swarm of bugs and other nasty dangerous like Spitball Infectors, Cave Leeches and whatnot surrounding you on all sides and with little preparation to handle them nor any team support to survive. Patiently waiting in the drop pod to thin the swarm and check if something dangerous is at the front door first is generally advisable.
- Whenever the team approaches a bigger cave of the map they're in it's extremely dangerous to just rush in without at least looking around as you never know if you're going to bump into dangerous stationary enemies like Spitball/Barrage Infectors or Cave Leeches. Failing to do minimal scouting can also get you fighting in unfavorable terrain which is all but suicidal at higher hazard levels.
- Even when playing with randoms, it's a common courtesy to avert this trope and quickly check with the team before doing anything critical, like pressing the escape button or activating a machine event. Playing this trope straight, on the other hand, will incur frustration at best or cause a Total Party Kill at worst.
Level Drain: Promotion assignments, available when a Dwarf is at max level, 25, will reset the class rank back to one and put a star over their profile, alongside a Blank Matrix Core, a Weapon Overclock and a Cosmetic Overclock.
Long Song, Short Scene:
- "Beneath the Crust", the music that plays during the post-game scoreboard, is a few minutes long, but players will probably only ever listen to the entire thing if they decide to keep in it out of curiosity; otherwise, they'll just be hitting continue after the seconds it takes them to read out all of the stats on the scoreboard.
- "The Descent" plays while you're waiting to load into the match, so you'll only ever hear the entire thing by listening to the soundtrack if your computer has decent specs for playing the game.
Luck-Based Mission: Where the Drop Pod lands in most missions when the extraction button was pressed is a completely random location. This can make it so that, rarely - but not impossibly - the Drop Pod can land in some spot that's over fifty meters up in some cliff just below the ceiling that would be exceedingly difficult for teams lacking a Scout or Driller to have even one of them reach it even if the place wasn't crawling with bugs as extraction tends to be.
- Similarly, Kursite Infection and Tritilyte Crystal events can be made nigh-impossible for some teams depending on the caves and where they were generated in them, with Kursite Grinders being generated next to high ledges making it likely the Kursite will fall straight down those ledges if the enemies to be killed for the event are Glyphid Acid Spitters or Mactera Spawn up in the ceiling/air unless an Engineer's platforms can widen the ledge or the Nanite Bomb Dispenser spawning in a winding tunnel at a distance that's not in sight of the Tritilyte Crystal without a Driller's drills to help facilitate bringing the bombs over.
Macross Missile Massacre: A Gunner can achieve this by choosing the right mods and Overclocks to max out the fire rate of the Hurricane rocket launcher. Alternatively, the Salvo Module overclock allows for a salvo of up to 9 high-damage rockets to be launched all at once, at the cost of guidance for any rockets launched in the salvo.
Made of Explodium: Where to begin?
- The lava geysers in the Magma Core and steam geysers in the Fungus Bogs are under pressure and will explode if disturbed, though that at least is logical.
- Numerous bulbous, glowing plants found in the Magma Core, Dense Biozone and Fungus Bogs will glow brighter, swell up, and explode if they take enough damage. They are often found in dense clusters, allowing a single detonation to set off a chain reaction.
- The Glyphid Exploders and Bulk Detonators glow orange with angry, unstable pustules on their back, and will explode (catastrophically in the Bulk's case) on death.
- One mission modifier, Volatile Guts, makes every alien explode. What's more, this explosion damages other nearby enemies, which can result in chain detonations where one dead alien sets all its allies off in sequence.
- The Driller has an optional flamethrower modifier that can allow him to explode aliens if he kills them with direct damage. The Wave Cooker also causes bugs to burst on death, with an upgrade allowing the explosion to do damage.
- During Season 1, once the team establishes a connection from Hack-C to a Data Deposit or a Power Station, any Transmitter Nodes that weren't used to build said connection spontaneously detonate (doing no damage).
- The Scout's Season 2 weapon is the Nishanka Boltshark X-80, a crossbow that fires Trick Arrows. One possible type is the Chemical Explosion bolt, filled with a compound that reacts to bug blood and turns them into explodium.
Made of Indestructium: The only standard-issue Deep Rock Galactic property that can be damaged in any way is you. Molly, Bosco, the Escape Pod, Supply Drops, and the Point Extraction minehead are all completely invincible. Even BET-C is indestructible, and can only be taken down by killing the energy-sapping parasites causing it to go haywire. The aversions in the game are rather few:
- The Drilldozer, despite its bulky, metal-plated frame, can get killed fairly quickly if it's swarmed by bugs and nobody's doing anything about it. Damage from players, on the other hand, barely even scratches it.
- Onsite Refinery pipe nodes can be deconstructed by the player by hitting them with a pickaxe, as long as said node is the most recently-placed one in the pipeline and the pipeline hasn't connected to a pumpjack yet. Also, they spring leaks during the extraction process, but these are scripted to occur at set times, not caused by enemy attacks. The same goes for the Drillevator's claw tracks during its descent, which won't break down if you can keep an eye on them.
- Finally, the Project OMEN Towers feature indestructible outer shells; the coolant tanks within, however, can be exposed to take down the tower proper.
Magnetic Weapons:
- The Scout's M-1000 Classic is a railgun.
- The Gunner's ArmsKore Coilgun is a Hand Cannon that fires magnetically-accelerated shot pellets at such fast velocities that they not only penetrate rock and Oppressor armor, but also leave a damaging residual trail behind.
Major Injury Underreaction: The dwarves tend to have a rather subdued statement to say in response to standing on nearly-molten rock, like just going "ouch" or "hot" repeatedly not very loudly like someone who finds they're touching something unexpectedly hot, complaining about their boots, or saying morosely that they smell bacon, rather than screaming in agony as one would expect.
Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: One of the lines a dwarf can deliver while killing a glyphid is "Die like your mother did!" This line has yet to receive an explanation; perhaps the dwarf is merely boasting he kills so many bugs that he must have killed that one's mother by now.
Manchild: All of the dwarves. There is not an ounce of professionalism in their stubby little bodies, and they will run amok on the Space Rig doing whatever they feel like, no matter how strenuously Mission Control objects. This includes kicking barrels into the launch bay, breaking seasonal decorations, turning off the artificial gravity, and getting wasted at the Abyss Bar. Of course, since the dwarves are controlled by players, that probably says something about you.
Mission Control: How old are you? You are behaving like ill-mannered children! Please, stop it!
Marathon Level:
- Generally speaking, missions with Length 3 can easily surpass 20~30 minutes or even more in extreme cases which can be exacerbated by higher Cave Complexity. Tales of Complexity 3 + Length 3 missions going nearly or over an hour are not that uncommon among players.
- Deep Dives take the form of two runs per week, each with three pre-seeded missions one after the other with no break in between. Each mission has two "main" objectives that must be completed, and your health, ammo count, and mineral depository persist between missions. Resource expenditure must be carefully managed, as wastefulness early on can screw you over hard later. Promotional material describes the Deep Dives as "the sort of ultimate Deep Rock fantasy," as they put all of your combat mining skills to the test.
The Medic: Averted for all the dwarves. This class archetype is completely absent from the set of classes a player can choose to be. Dwarves of any class are perfectly capable of reviving downed allies, and directly healing your teammates is impossible (although you can boost their shields or heal yourself). The perks you'd expect a Medic to bring are available to dwarves of any class, and Red Sugar healing crystals appear in the caverns where any dwarf can mine them. Somewhat defied/parodied in a voice line where a dwarf reviving himself with the Iron Will perk will shout "Medics are for pansies!" Bosco, on the other hand, comes equipped with the capability to revive any downed dwarf in a Solo mission. He will fearlessly charge into a swarm to revive you, robotic ambulance sound effects blaring, should you fall to the Glyphid hordes.
- The closest you have to a Medic class is the Gunner, as he's the only one who can directly refill another dwarf's life bar, or rather the Shield bar. A Shield Generator deployed in the right time can provide a clutch burst of healing to survive a bad situation. Tellingly, the de facto Medic is also armed with the biggest guns available.
- Of course, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from making a DIY Medic build if you're so inclined; the Gunner and the Engineer tend to be the most suited to this, due to their excellent crowd-control and ability to defend themselves against hordes while they're reviving the downed dwarf. Scouts can also be very good at reviving the team when the chips are down since as long as they kill off any ranged enemies, their grappling hook can allow them to "kite" the other enemies toward them before they grapple over to a downed ally and get them back up before the chasing enemies reach them.
- On the Glyphid's side there's the Warden which not only gives a big defensive bonus, but also gives a small but annoying health regen to anything its buffing.
Meaningful Name: "Morkite" literally means "dark mineral", referencing its dark turquoise color. According to Ghost Ship co-founder and DRG Game Director Mikkel Pedersen, this was on purpose.
Basically, it's 'Murk', which in Danish means 'Darkness', and then we added 'ite', as in stalactite, so it becomes 'Morkite'... the "Dark Mineral".
- The Lithophage, or "rock-eater", is a virus that literally infects and corrupts solid rock, complete with nasty boils found wherever a Contagion Spike is located.
MegaCorp: Downplayed, but certainly present. Deep Rock Galactic is a self-described interplanetary mining conglomerate, and none of the technology they're directly shown to possess contradicts this. That being said, they have the resources and manpower to effectively stage an orbital invasion of a Death World like Hoxxes IV, and the Flavor Text on a few cosmetic items suggest that they're infamous, or at least feared, among the more far-flung reaches of the galaxy.
- Update 27 brings this into greater focus with the introduction of Project OMEN, which is explicitly described as "a massive network of modular extermination towers". They appear to be military-grade weapons platforms, definitely overkill even by the standards of Hoxxes IV; this suggests DRG is involved in some projects that are only tangentially related to mining. Even before then, there was the lingering question of what exactly the company wants with the Alien Eggs extracted via Egg Hunt operations, one that remains unanswered so far.
- Releasing alongside the game's launch from Early Access are two mega-corp-themed cosmetic packs that intentionally invoke this trope, making the dwarves resemble a squadron of Elite Mooks you'd expect to be going up against in a different videogame, like so.
- Season 1 includes good old megacorporate warfare in the form of a rival company trying to muscle into Hoxxes; Industrial Sabotage missions are issued to keep them out by wrecking their operations and stealing their assets. The last unlockable helmet from Season 1, the Shock Trooper, lampshades the trope with its description:
Perfect for that 'faceless corpo goon' aesthetic.
Mellow Mantas: Mobula Cave Angels are flying alien manta rays that float harmlessly high above certain underground caverns. The player dwarves are able to hitch rides underneath their claws and even control them.
Memetic Badass: The late In-Universe example, Karl, personifies this trope. Many of the salutes, toasts, and other one-liners in the game reference Karl and how badass he was — and how he would be proud.
Metal Slime:
- Huuli Hoarders. Cowardly, incredibly tanky bugs who run from players when attacked or spotted, eventually disappearing if they get far enough away. Successfully popping one will cause a heap of crafting materials to scatter across the cave.
- The rare Golden Loot Bugs don't run away like other Metal Slimes, but they do produce an incredible amount of gold (over two full gold bags' worth) when killed.
- A patch added the Crassus Detonator, a variant of the standard Bulk Detonator. Unlike regular Metal Slimes they are highly aggressive and highly dangerous. But when they die the crater they leave behind is coated in gold instead of slag. Killing one in the open creates a crater with a decent payout; killing one in a comparatively tight Driller tunnel will result in a near-complete sphere and several missions' worth of gold.
- The Rival Prospector is a mini-boss that constantly runs from players when attacked, but if destroyed drops a valuable Data Cell.
- The Yule 2022 event introduces Yuletide Elves, malfunctioning toys that must be shot to be immobilized and then desposited. The wind-up Easter Bunnies work much the same.
Mini-Boss: These can appear as cave generation spawns in either regular missions or either variation of Deep Dive.
- BET-C: An experimental combat variant of the M.U.L.E. that has gone rogue because of a Xynarch Charge-Sucker infestation scrambling its friend-foe identification system. It's as mobile as Molly is but is equipped with a portable shield generator, machine gun, and a grenade launcher that can and will chew through your shield in one burst. If you manage to kill the parasites, BET-C can be rebooted as a friendly support unit, but with reduced damage output and no shield projector. It makes a warbling sound on a one-second interval while idle and hostile — you'll hear it before you see it.
- Korlok Tyrant-Weed: A network of stationary hostile flora with a centralized core. It either grows shoots that attack with projectiles like miniature Spitball Infectors, or pods that heal the core. Kill anything that can take damage and the core will expose itself. It can only be truly damaged when the core is exposed and only for a brief period before it snaps shut and regrows its defenses. Kill it and it will drop Tyrant Shards, a valuable gem.
- The Rival Prospector is this combined with a Metal Slime, constantly running away from the dwarves while it calls drones to defend itself.
Minmaxer's Delight:
- Certain mutations are cycled throughout missions to spice things up. In exchange, these mutations apply a reward bonus upon completion. Most mutations can be difficult to deal with. Others, not so much...
  - Parasites involve little worm things popping out of defeated enemies. It's just another annoyance to deal with and involves more killing. It's a breeze to deal with even as a Scout.
  - Regenerative Bugs allow the bugs to heal after not being damaged for some time. But what kind of dwarf leaves a bug simply injured and not slain? This also has the side effect of making any Steeves basically immortal unless they get stepped on by a Bulk Detonator.
- Resupplier is a perk with little to no bad points. It makes you grab ammo and health up to 50% faster (invaluable when a fraction of a second could be a life-or-death difference), and on top of that, it restores more health on resupply and health is at a premium, especially on higher hazard levels where you don't regenerate nearly as much naturally.
- Dash is an active perk that has no drawbacks. It gives any Dwarf a short, but very high burst of velocity that ignores any slowdown effects. At higher hazard levels where any attack with these effects, usually from a Grunt Slasher or Web Spitter, can lead to death this perk is considered almost invaluable.
Minimalist Cast: Not counting Bosco, Molly, Lloyd, Doretta and Hacksy, there's a grand total of five main characters in the game: the four dwarves and the Mission Control.
Minor Injury Overreaction: The dwarves can be surprisingly perturbed over getting poked by thorns. Compare this to their reactions of being standing on nearly molten rock.
Misapplied Phlebotinum: Deep Rock Galactic has figured out teleportation technology and apparently decided that the best use of it is to make it into a craft beer. The dwarfs are more than happy to point out how ridiculous this is.
Mission Control: His name is Mission Control, and he guides you in your objectives.
Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: In DRG Survivor, the Drunk Mission Control mutator does what it says; your handler will occasionally mumble instead of talking about the drop pod, which takes longer for him to requisition and lands far from the beacon.
Money Sink: Promotions are this, especially after unlocking all overclocks and cosmetics. They'll serve no purpose other than to give your dwarf's picture a fancy star and use up resources.
Money Spider:
- Huuli Hoarders drop loads of crafting materials when they die. Taking one on, though, needs some mild coordination; it'll squirm and skitter away as soon as it's attacked, and given enough time, it burrows into the wall and escapes.
- Golden Loot Bugs are golden recolors of normal loot bugs that explode into multiple chunks of gold when taken down. Unlike Huuli Hoarders, their passivity makes them a lot easier to take out for their drops.
- Crassus Detonators are Bulk Detonators but covered in gold. The death explosion is just as powerful, but rather than leaving slag behind, it coats the former Crassus' immediate surroundings in gold. Kill one in a small room and get ready to swing your pick for quite some time after it dies.
- With the "Golden Bugs" mutator, anything that can be killed will be guaranteed to drop a chunk of gold no matter its size, including Swarmers, Exploders, Naedocyte Shockers, and even parasites if that hazard exists within the same mission.
Mook-Themed Level: Various mission-modifying Warnings will cause the enemies in the cave to spawn more as one type. For example, "Swarmageddon" summons a ton of Glyphid Swarmers, "Mactera Plague" spawns more Mactera, and "Duck and Cover" will generate the cave with tons of ranged bugs.
More Predators Than Prey: How Hoxxes' ecosystem functions are anyone's guess. The Glyphids are so numerous that dying by the hundreds in any given operation doesn't put a dent in their numbers, and the only lifeforms present that could be considered prey are the Loot Bugs (which the game explicitly notes as inedible due to their diet), Silicate Harvesters, Maggots, Cave Angels, Hexawing Gniffers, and Huuli Hoarders, all of whom are typically rare to the tune of "only a couple dozen in any given cave system."
- That said, Glyphids aren't actually carnivores if the description of the Dense Biozone is any indication. It says that said region has an overabundance of flora due to being on the blasted-off chunk of the planet, which means that the Glyphids can't get up there to eat all the plants. Then again, Glyphids spawn just as abundantly there as in any other zone during actual gameplay, so take that with a grain of salt.
MST3K Mantra: An in-universe example; this is DRG's attitude towards the fact that Hoxxes has a several-miles-thick core of frozen underground ice plates, rather than conventional polar regions, as well as the implied attitude at its other various bits of impossible weirdness. At least one of their xenogeologists didn't share the same viewpoint.
Glacial Strata Flavor Text: As always, DRG recommends a "don't ask" approach when dealing with the peculiarities of Hoxxes' makeup.
Multi-Directional Barrage: In Season 3, one of the throwables added is the Tactical Leadburster for the Gunner. It sticks into whatever surface it lands on and proceeds to unload three barrages into the area around it.
Multiple Life Bars:
- The Drilldozer has three separate life bars. The left side takes all incoming damage until it's destroyed, followed by the right side, and then the main body, which gives a Non-Standard Game Over if it's destroyed. The dwarves can repair the current bar to gradually heal it, but any side that's completely destroyed is gone for good. Also, no matter how strong a single hit is, its damage cannot carry over to the next part, meaning that a Bulk Detonator's devastating explosion will only remove a single one of Doretta's health bars instead of one-shotting her.
- Dreadnoughts have an extra life bar in addition to their normal one, representing the hardened shell over their abdomen. Once this bar is depleted, the shell breaks off, leaving the vulnerable flesh underneath exposed. Put enough rounds in that, and the Dreadnought finally dies.
- The Hiveguard works a bit differently — after all its minions are down, it will expose three weakpoints that each have their own health bar. Once those are shot down, it'll temporarily open up its actual weakspot which must be shot at to kill it, before closing it up and spawning minions again to repeat the cycle.
- The Facility Caretaker has four exhaust ports on top with their own health bars. Once those are down, it'll open one of its eye-shaped vents, which must be shot at to deplete its actual health. After a third of its health bar is depleted, it closes all vents, summons a few minions, and the exhaust ports become vulnerable again. Unlike Glyphid Dreadnoughts, you cannot defeat the Caretaker in one go with a particularly powerful attack (i.e. a Bulk Detonator's explosion) — it will become invulnerable immediately after a third of a health bar is depleted, with no damage being carried over to the next third.
- The Korlok Tyrant-Weed has its health bar divided into three sections, limiting how much it can heal itself with its healing pod.
- The Lithophage Corruptor has six bars of armor in addition to its actual health. As you peel off its armored segments, its core can take damage and said damage can increase if you keep removing its armor.
Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Many. Enemy classifications do not mince words about the danger of Hoxxes IV's wildlife.
- Oppressors are larger, mutated Praetorians that make up for their slower speed with much tougher, bulletproof front armor and the added damage to match.
- Dreadnoughts, elite Glyphid enemies dangerous enough to be treated as bosses. While the strongest and toughest of them all, the Hiveguard, ironically doesn't have that threatening a name, the twin threats of the Lacerator (slashing ground damage) and Arbalest (ranged explosive projectiles) definitely do.
- The Bulk Detonator. Ordinary Detonators are already irritating when they explode, but this thing's Dreadnought-sized and, unlike its smaller counterpart, more than willing to fight for its life; when you finally whittle its giant healthbar down, make sure you get far away from the blast radius.
  - Haunted Cave mutator events spawn a ghostly Bulk Detonator, named the "Unknown Horror", that stalks miners across the map. Completely unkillable, it's like a curse from beyond the grave, and all players can do is run from it in fear.
- The Nemesis, introduced in Season 2, has a fitting name, as it's one of the most powerful robots the Rival Corporation has produced, and its sole purpose is to lure the dwarves in so it can destroy them violently.
- OMEN Modular Exterminator, an optional machine event definitely lives up to its name being easily capable of destroying even a full team of Dwarves if they're not prepared and careful.
Nameless Narrative: The player characters have job descriptions, not names. Mission Control's name is never given. The aliens obviously don't have names (save for Steeve, but they're all named Steeve). The only "characters" who do are Molly, Bosco and Doretta, though Management would rather its employees not give names to the equipment to begin with, and Karl himself.
Necessary Drawback:
- All of the unlockable guns suffer from one of these compared to the starting weapons. This is because they are intended to be sidegrades that give the class tactical flexibility, more than straight upgrades. For instance, the Gunner's Thunderhead Heavy Autocannon deals splash damage, matches the Minigun's single-target DPS, and carries roughly as much, if not more ammo when accounting for total damage. However, it's significantly less precise than the Minigun and relies on slow manual reloads, whereas the Minigun feeds from a single drum and can simply stop shooting to naturally cool off.
- Overclocks other than Clean offer better performance at a cost. Clean Overclocks offer minor bonuses without any penalty. Balanced Overclocks offer bigger bonuses with a drawback. Unstable Overclocks offer the biggest bonuses with significant drawbacks that can truly change how the weapon is used.
New Resource Midgame: Blank Matrix Cores is a very valuable resource only available to players after their first promotion. They can be turned into powerful Weapon Overclocks, fancy Cosmetic Overclocks or, once you've gotten all of them, into Mineral Containers which gives 120 of a random mineral when crafted.
No Body Left Behind:
- Most enemies killed when frozen will shatter, leaving no body behind. This also prevents most of them from using any effects that usually occur upon death, such as Praetorians leaving a poison cloud or Exploders blowing up.
- Enemies killed by the Corrosive Sludge Pump's acid damage will melt away, leaving only fumes.
- Enemies killed by most energy weapons such as plasma weaponry, the Flamethrower, and the Shard Diffractor have a tendency of having their bodies rapidly combust and disintegrate, though this does not stop certain death effects such as poison clouds from triggering.
No Peripheral Vision: Everyone makes fun of this trope until they realize how easy is to become a victim of a Cave Leech simply because they didn't bother looking up when entering that big cave.
Not Rare Over There: Crafting materials can be plentiful in one biome and scarce on others. For instance: Magnite is more easily found in Glacial Strata, but Umanite is rather uncommon there. However in Radioactive Exclusion Zone, Umanite is common, but the scarce crafting mineral there is Enor Pearl.
Noisy Nature: And you'll be thankful for it. Every dangerous enemy has its distinct noise so you can tell one is around just by paying close attention to what you're hearing. Keeping your ears open will also prevent you from getting ambushed as you might hear enemies closing in long before they are able to attack you.
Never Split the Party:
- The game strongly disincentivizes splitting the group up a significant amount of the time. Missions will either have a singular objective that the whole party will naturally gravitate towards (Escort Duty), multiple objectives that are tethered to a singular point to offload resources (Mining Expedition, Egg Hunt), or multiple objectives that are borderline suicidal to attempt without a full party's strength (Elimination, Industrial Sabotage). The exceptions are the first parts of Salvage Operation and Deep Scan, where splitting up to cover more ground and find the scattered objectives is more lucrative, or On-site Refining and Point Extraction where splitting up to fulfill the objectives (building pipes or finding Aquarqs) is the usual approach, but even so, these missions will still funnel the whole team back into one area to work together and fight the bugs.
- Certain enemies like Cave Leeches, Mactera Grabbers and Nyaka Trawlers are also meant to at least keep you paired with someone else as if they get the drop on you it's very likely you're not going to get freed until you either get downed or remain helplessly flailing around the map for a considerable amount of time unless someone comes to your aid.
No Celebrities Were Harmed: One line your dwarf can deliver while grinding on a refinery pipeline is "Look at me, I'm Stony Rawk!"
No Fair Cheating: The Pots O' Gold special brew greatly increases the amount of gold you collect when mining them. However, the bonus only applies if you mine the gold yourself with a pickaxe. Using other methods to mine the gold like having Bosco doing the mining or using the Driller's drills to "pop" the gold veins won't count. This also applies to Morkite with the Dark Morkite brew active.
No Kill like Overkill: The dwarves appear to adhere closely to The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. Even the resident Fragile Speedster, the Scout, is packing an assault rifle and a sawn-off shotgun. He's the most lightly armed of the bunch. The Smart Guy is packing a grenade launcher, and don't even get us started on the Gunner. Given that they're up against an endless horde of ravenous, heavily-armored bug monsters, however, it makes sense.
No Name Given: The other corporation exploring Hoxxes and filling it with killer robots is only referred to as "(our) Rival".
Non-Standard Game Over: There are a few ways to fail a mission without everyone being wiped out or running out of revives from Bosco.
- At the end of a mission, the Drop Pod will take off after a period of time. If there are no dwarves in it, the mission ends in failure even if there are surviving dwarves outside.
- For Salvage Operations, failing to stand within range of the Uplink or Fuel Cells will cause the progress to decrease. If either hits zero, the mission fails.
  - Subverted for the Black Box secondary main mission in Deep Dives. Although they share the same mechanics of the Salvage Operation above, if the progress gauge reaches zero the mission will not fail, but the team will have to restart the process.
- For Escort Duty, failing to prevent the Drilldozer from getting destroyed will fail the Escort Mission.
No One Gets Left Behind:
- The dwarves will frequently rally around the cry of "Leave No Dwarf Behind!" It applies to gameplay as well, as it's very common to see players risk their lives and the mission itself to make sure everyone gets topside safely, even despite their fallen teammates' protestations to go on without them.
- At the end of an Escort Duty mission, Doretta's head flies off of her body, and can be picked up by the dwarves. Players will often take her all the way back to the Drop Pod, even though there isn't a reward for doing so.
Not the Fall That Kills You…: But you can avoiding breaking your legs by Hit the Ground Harder with Scout's grappling hook. Vaulting a ledge will also deny any fall damage if you manage to do it, riding pipelines in On-Site Refining missions will also prevent any fall damage to be taken if you keep the "Interact" button pressed.
Noob Bridge:
- The game emphasises that Lithophage events entail first foaming the Rockpox with the LithoFoamer and then vacuuming up the foam with the LithoVac. Newer players tend to continuously use both the LithoFoamer and the LithoVac when engaging Contagion Spikes or Lithophage Corruptors. This is counterproductive, as midair foam that has not adhered to the target will be sucked up. The correct action is for the LithoVac user to activate it in bursts, giving the foam time to adhere to the target.
- Beginner players tend to follow the advice to follow the M.U.L.E. and its markers back to the Drop Pod after missions. However, becoming reliant on this is not a good idea, as the M.U.L.E. can return to the Drop Pod through routes that players cannot easily take (e.g. up through a shaft left by a Resupply Pod). On-site Refining and Point Extraction don't have M.U.L.E.s either. Learning to get to the Drop Pod without reliance on the M.U.L.E. trains the ability to read the Terrain Scanner and understand the cave generation patterns of each mode, which are essential for advanced gameplay.
- Point Extraction is basically Noob Bridge: The Mode. Caves in this mode are non-linear, with minimal hints where the objectives (Aquarqs) are. All minerals and Aquarqs (which are heavy items carried with both hands) must be deposited at a stationary Minehead. The mode also uses a unique enemy spawn system which increases enemy density over time and will likely overwhelm the team at the 20 minute mark. Basic lessons include throwing heavy items like the Aquarqs and the situational awareness to stop mining and fend off approaching bugs; intermediate lessons include quickly determining when mobility tools will be needed and using the Terrain Scanner to detect unexplored areas; advanced lessons include reading up on the special fixed swarm timings in this mode and deciding based on team progress whether to do events and side objectives, including making the call to abandon events to save the team and mission.
Noodle Incident:
- One of the messages that can appear on the Deep Rock Galactic Information Channel: "PSA: Please flush after using the restrooms. Let's not have a repeat of The Incident." A possibly related message in the same Information Channel: "PSA: The L4 bathrooms remain closed for extensive maintenance. The clog is not yet cleared."
- Whatever it is that happened to Karl. So far, the only things we know are that it was apparently the stuff of legend, that some amount of Skull Crusher Ale may have been involved, that he's either missing or in hiding, and that the four dwarves still bear a grudge against the local wildlife for it all.
- When you get the Colette Wave Cooker, Mission Control reminds you that using weapons for non-weapon purposes is strictly prohibited; going by his statement, someone (presumably a Driller) tried to cook with a flamethrower before and it didn't end well.
No Such Thing as Space Jesus: Averted. Lines such as "Let there be light!" from the Scout and "Light 'em up like Christmas trees!" from Mission Control mean that, intentionally or not, Ghost Ship Games has included Christianity as we understand it in their Space-faring Standard Fantasy Setting. The jukebox even has an acoustic guitar version of "What Child Is This?" on it. One can't help but wonder how Deep Rock's version of The Book of Genesis describes God creating the elves and dwarves. It's notable that during Christmas, the Coorporate Assignments and accessories will prefer to use the term "Yuletide". It isn't abundantly clear if this is meant to be an irreligious designation for the season, refers to the Germanic holiday, or the Christian adoption of the name. Mission Control can sometimes say the scanner has "lit up like a Christmas tree" when a swarm approaches.
No Swastikas: When the achievement icons were originally rolled out, there were complaints over how certain achievements had icons which resembled a Rising Sun flag (due to the color scheme and prominent sun ray patterns), which lead to the devs having to alter them slightly.
Nothing Is Scarier: Whenever you gather an egg on egg hunt missions, the entire cave groans and shudders. All that happens is maybe a Glyphid swarm comes for you, but it's worth noting that Mission Control has never said what species laid these eggs...
Notice This:
- Morkite, the objective mineral in Mining Expeditions, has a shimmer that makes it visible even in pitch-black conditions. In general, chunks of resources that have been mined but not collected glow faintly to make them easier to spot.
- Glowing spots on the wall or floor indicate the presence of a buried gem or egg, and said gems/eggs will also give off a lot of light so you don't lose track of them.
- Secondary objective resources all glow faintly in the dark, making them easier to find. Similarly, Fester Fleas glow in the dark and leave a trail behind them when they fly, helping you track of them when they slip away from your line of fire.
Not the Intended Use:
- Supply Drops are meant to be just that: supply drops containing ammo and health for the dwarves. However, they will also gib anything they land on, be it a dwarf or a bug; the only exceptions are Dreadnoughts, who will still lose a respectable chunk of HP. As such, it's entirely possible to use them as makeshift orbital strikes rather than simple resupplies. Supply Drops can also be used to dig through terrain above you, making it easier to pop out eggs and other items that are buried within the terrain that's very high up. Also applies to pipelines to some degree, although the rail grinding is completely intentional (and the dwarves even comment that Deep Rock's R&D department "did good with the pipe riding"). Management probably doesn't approve when you decide to ignore the mission objective in favor of using pipes to build a subterranean roller coaster...
- Believe it or not, the soundtrack can be used like this. Obviously it was purely intended as atmospherical flavor, but having various songs memorized will let a miner roughly be able to tell how long a swarm has been going and when it will end.
- Enor Pearls are mere minable resources like anything else, but thanks to their bright glow, they can be used as inexhaustible flares. They never go out, can be thrown respectably far, and can light up anything short of a fully-fledged cave. Just make sure to put them in Molly before calling extraction.
- The Fat Boy overclock for the Engineer's PGL turns its modest stock of small grenades into a small number of miniature nuclear bombs. The devastating damage radius and the bug-melting radiation they leave behind are well-suited to staunching large swarms of Glyphids with one well-placed shot, but they also happen to leave gaping craters that can knock holes in walls, ore chunks out of terrain or even veins of minerals loose off of high ceilings, similar to EPC mining. Just... don't mind the radioactivity. If a dwarf gets incapacitated in a high place and it's too difficult to reach, the Fat Boy can be used to destroy the terrain around them to make them fall down to your level.
- The LithoFoamer is normally made to cover the Rockpox infection for the LithoVac to suck up. However, the LithoFoamer deals 0.1 damage per hit, which still causes Loot Bugs to drop minerals they have eaten since they have a chance to do so upon taking any damage. Players thus can use the LithoFoamer to obtain minerals from Loot Bugs the "humane"/"pacifistic" way.
Nuclear Mutant: On Hoxxes, the Radioactive Exclusion Zone, which is full of mutated, radioactive Glyphids. The local Praetorian variant makes its immediate surroundings suffer radiation poisoning when it attacks; same applies to the Exploder.

O-R

Oh, Crap!: The Dwarves have voicelines reflecting this whenever they are falling through the air long enough. And when a Bulk Detonator shows up.
Dwarf: Aw, shite... Detonator! REPEAT, DETONATOR!!
Oddly Small Organization: Despite the fact that they are conducting wide-reaching mining operations of an entire planet, Deep Rock Galactic's Space Rig has accommodations for a crew of four dwarves, not counting Mission Control. It isn't clear whether the Space Rig as it appears in-game is just meant to be one of many on the same ship. Season 3 does confirm there are more miners, though the numbers aren't clear besides establishing that losing three teams of dwarves in the space of one of your missions is an unusual and painful loss, financially and otherwise. The easiest explanation is that the Space Rig is pragmatically scaled down, given that from in-game details such as the PSA messages, it — to scale — would be a company town IN SPACE! if not a small city.
...Or So I Heard: When unlocking the Cryo Cannon for the Driller, Mission Control remarks that, in addition to its obvious use, it's "also handy for keeping drinks cold... or so I'm told."
Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Voice actor Javier O'Neill is Puerto Rican, and there are some times where the Danish/British accent of his dwarf voice slips. Especially so during the dialogue spoken after drinking the Smart Stout beer.
- Mission Control (voiced by GSG art director Robert Friis) also has his moments, though in those cases it may simply be a Mid-Atlantic accent.
Obvious Rule Patch
- Until this strategy was patched out, if you had an Engineer in your team and Molly for the mission, you could put everyone and Molly into a sealed hole with the Platform Gun before calling for the Drop Pod. This messed with Molly's pathing so that she can't find any valid route, resulting in the Drop Pod landing right at your position. You wouldn't get squished or take damage from it and it was damn convenient if you ddn't want to make a trek to the extraction point.
- At release of Season 5, the Core Stone event was very liable to cause a Total Party Kill if the team didn't know what they were doing. Until it was patched, the best strategy to extract Core Stones was to not bother with the fight at all: placing a Gunner's shield projector on top of a Core Stone pillar and starting the event while the shield is still active would cause the Core Stone to instantly break without summoning in any of its spawn.
Officially Shortened Title: Dwarves, and even Mission Control on occasion, abbreviate the company name, Deep Rock Galactic, as DRG in some of their lines.
Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Played so straight you could use it for precision measurement. Our heroes are a group of surly, stout-bodied, drink-loving, honor-bound warrior miners. Some of the more ornate weapon skins feature time-honored dwarven standards such as foaming mugs and fists. Recent updates have also been steadily adding ever-more-magnificent beards, some of which are braided. On the other hand, beards are optional, with two of the classes starting beardless by default, and their accents are Danish rather than Scottish (and the Ambiguously Human Mission Control has an upper-class English accent).
- Literally so: if you take away the class specializations and differences in hair colour, the four dwarves are physically identical.
Our Elves Are Different: Implied. Elves never make an appearance, but their presence in the setting is alluded by "pointy-eared leaf lover" being a common insult among dwarves, with Leaf Lover's Special being a much derided flavor of beer in the bar.
Overheating: The Gunner's minigun, the Scout's Plasma Carbine, the Driller's Experimental Plasma Charger and his drills all draw directly from their ammo stores, but jam if they're used for too long without cooling off. The Driller's Cryo Cannon works similarly, but loses pressure rather than building heat. If it runs out, it simply needs to repressurize a bit to fire again.
Pay Evil unto Evil: Industrial sabotage is generally a bad thing, but given how the mysterious Rival Corporation is literally trying to stake a claim to DRG territory with a robot legion, it's hard to blame wrecking their stuff to gum up their operations.
Percussive Maintenance:
- Several scenarios in the game present the player with some broken piece of machinery that needs to be fixed or activated. Examples include broken Mini-MULEs that have been left in an abandoned mine, uplinks and Black Boxes, cargo crates, and fuel cell pods. The animation for most of these has you simply whack the machinery in question with a hammer until it turns on, good as new.
- Constructing pipes and fixing the Drilldozer share a unique animation featuring somewhat more sensible tools, but also includes a few less sensible ones, and often includes whacking it with the back side of a wrench as well.
- Inverted with dislodging the backup power batteries for the Caretaker's force field. It uses the same "whacking it with a hammer" animation as the above, but doing this breaks the machine instead of powering it.
Pet the Dog: Or Pet the Bug, as the case may be; an update eventually gave players the ability to pet Loot Bugs; although the prompt to do so is currently invisible, you can do it by pressing E on them. As of Update 28, you can also pet tamed Glyphids, and with her introduction in Update 32, Doretta can be petted too.
Plasma Cannon: In multiple unique forms!
- First is the Engineer's Breach Cutter unlockable secondary weapon. Explicitly described as a mining tool repurposed as a weapon, it fires a pair (or with an upgrade, three pairs) of nodes that fly straight forward, stringing a horizontal arc of plasma between them that passes through terrain and enemies and damages anything it touches.
- Next is the Driller's unlockable secondary, the Experimental Plasma Charger or EPC. A (large) pistol-sized weapon, it is a Flawed Prototype par excellence, as in its stock form it's an even less practical weapon than his normal Subata 120 due to the slow projectiles, poor accuracy, terrible battery capacity, and tendency to overheat at the slightest provocation (including every time you fire a charged shot). With the Thin Containment Field upgrade, however, it becomes extremely useful as a ranged mining tool (even after the update that made the implosion fling minerals caught in the blast all over the cave).
- The Scout has access to the DRAK-25 Plasma Carbine, a mass-produced automatic weapon that seems to function very similarly to the EPC's primary fire but with all the kinks worked out (well, other than the fact that it can't be fired continuously for more than a couple of seconds at a time without overheating).
- While not quite a "cannon", there is also the Engineer's Plasma Burster grenade, which appears to be a set of four plasma containment capsules haphazardly strapped together. When thrown, they will explode one by one as the grenade bounces along the ground.
Player-Guided Missile: The Gunner's "Hurricane" Guided Rocket System fires out a slew of missiles that are guided by the player's targeting reticule via a laser pointer.
Please, Don't Leave Me: Pressing the "Attention!" button while downed will prompt your dwarf to beg for help. If your dwarf is downed and everyone is aboard the Drop Pod, one of their quotes will be yelling this verbatim.
Poor Communication Kills: This is a 4-player co-op game, after all:
- In general, triggering a swarm, machine event or miniboss before everyone is prepared and near each other is a surefire way to lose a mission. Canny dwarves will therefore always check with their teammates that everyone is ready before starting anything. Players usually just type "R" (for "Ready") in the chat beforehand to signify that they are ready to proceed with the relevant objective, and not obeying this rule is seen as a major faux pas.
- It is also crucial that dwarves do not accidentally or otherwise take another dwarf's resupply unless they explicity say it's ok, as every bullet counts and you do not want to have a Gunner with an empty minigun when the glyphids are on the move.
- In Point Extraction, calling for extraction immediately causes the Minehead to be launched, removing the team's sole deposit point. After that, the team must survive 120 seconds and then make their way to the Drop Pod amidst an endless swarm. Calling for extraction at the wrong time can make the team unable to deposit held Nitra, which could leave them unable to call a Supply Pod, which in turn can be the difference between life or death if the team is low on ammunition.
Power Crystal: The ultimate goal of any Escort Duty mission is to defend a mobile drill as it makes its way towards the prize: an Ommoran Heartstone buried deep in Hoxxes. The Heartstone is not only valuable, it is apparently powerful and possibly sentient, as drilling into its outer shell causes the crystal to fight back. It is capable of smashing levitating boulders into the drill, erecting beam towers to burn it with lasers, and creating bursts of energy that push away dwarves and clear out the Engineer's platforms. Once the drilling is complete and the Heartstone itself has been extracted from the shell, it seems to lose its power (or at least the will to fight back) and it can be safely carried back to the Drop Pod by tying it to the M.U.L.E.
Powerful Pick: Naturally, the pickaxe can be used as a melee attack against enemies, though it can't match up to the guns. An upgrade for it lets players unleash an even stronger attack with it, but on a cooldown timer.
Praetorian Guard: There's a Glyphid known as the Praetorian, and it's the largest one before the Oppressor.
- Dwarves who reach Player Rank 60 can unlock the Regal Aegis armor paintjob. The assignment description implies that the colors are worn by special guards who protect Deep Rock's holdings and enforce their rules. It's worth noting that the color scheme involved — blue, black and white — matches the weapon skin unlocked for buying every mod a weapon has.
Precursors:
- Rarely, on deep, high-level digs, strange black cubes can be dug out of the ground, much like gemstones. They are clearly manufactured objects of some kind, and neither the dwarves nor their scanners recognize them, suggesting they weren't made by dwarven, human, or elven hands; this suggests that space-mining companies are not the first to visit Hoxxes. The game files even refer to them as "Precursor Artifacts".
- Similarly, large double helix structures may occasionally spawn in the Radioactive Exclusion Zone. They share the same scrambled name as the cubes, aiming a pointer at them makes the dwarves say similar lines as if they pointed a cube, and their smooth uniformness indicates that these things aren't naturally-made.
- The Azure Weald has two forms of glowing structures that provide health and zero-gravity buffs, and they too bring up the scrambled name of "p[[[[[{0}]]]]]q" when scanned. These ones even let out serene and eerie hums.
- Dwarves at the bar will occasionally toast to "the empires of old," which may potentially be another example of this trope.
Press X to Die: Go ahead, jump into the barrel hoop. The exact same barrel hoop you see violently explodes barrels that pass through it. See what happens.
Protection Mission:
- The tail end of every Escort Duty mission turns from an Escort Mission into one of these, where the Drilldozer becomes immobile when drilling into the Ommoran Heartstone. The dwarves need to protect her from huge waves of enemies entering the field, while the Heartstone itself attempts to destroy her by Dishing Out Dirt.
- In Industrial Sabotage missions, the dwarves need to protect a Hacking Drone for a time period in order to take down the Caretaker's shields. Mercifully, "Hacksy" can't be destroyed, but if it takes too much damage in a short period of time, it hides and hacking is paused until the dwarves reactivate it.
Punch-Packing Pistol: The Gunner's Hand Cannons, the Bulldog, the BRT7 and the ArmsKore Coil Gun all fit the bill being smaller than any of the Gunner's primaries, but still doing more solid damage per shot than his any of his BFGs.
Pupating Peril: Glyphid Dreadnoughts, basically the game's bosses, are usually found inside of cocoons that need to be actively popped. According to Mission Control, this is necessary because having them ambulatory and ready to crash other mining operations (as they may rarely do to you) is bad news, and because their cocooning means they're trying to turn into something even worse than the chitinous, fiery juggernauts themselves.
Quick Melee: An odd variant where the actual intended use is for digging, but swinging your pickaxe is as easy as holding a button, and it goes through enemies as well as dirt. There are also several perks that can amplify the combat effectiveness of this feature.
Ranged Emergency Weapon:
- The Driller's piddly Subata 120 pistol counts, being a semi-automatic peashooter (by dwarven standards at least) on a class all about getting up close and personal. Again, by dwarven standards; it's still packing a ton of ammo and good damage and can put the hurt in anything's weak spots if aimed well.
- The Gunner's Bulldog revolver is an odd case. Unlike most examples of this trope, it is extremely powerful and accurate, fully capable of one-shotting standard enemies and making short work of big bugs such as Praetorians. However, it still fits the trope for two reasons. Firstly, it has a very limited magazine size of only four shots, and its base ammo pool is a petite 24 rounds. Secondly, being able to one-shot enemies only gets you so far when you're dealing with enemies like the Glyphids, meaning that all but the most eagle-eyed players will have to switch back to their Minigun as soon as the bugs close in; the Bulldog won't help hold off a swarm. It's mostly for picking off distant enemies too far away for the Minigun to reach without wasting a lot of ammo.
Random Event: Certain things like Season specific challenges and Machine Events are random and have a higher chance of appearing if you have the right season activated, although they can appear in any given mission (sans Deep Dives) albeit at much lower chance and more than one Seasonal event can appear in the map. Things like Cargo Crates, Lost Equipment are also random and both can appear in the same map if the team is lucky.
- Season specific events like Rival Data Rack and Prospector (Seasons 1 and 2) or Lithophage Meteorite and Lithophage Corruptor (Seasons 3 and 4) can show up with greatly increased chance if you have the correct season active, and while they can show up outside their home seasons, they'll be exceedingly rare.
- On the flipside some maps can spawn or special, tougher, swarms at players and there's the extremely rare case of a Dreadnought showing up outside Elimination missions. If the game is feeling particularly spiteful it can spawn more than one Bulk Detonator or Nemesis right after you kill one.
Randomly Generated Levels: The layout of each cavern is generated every time. Missions have length and complexity modifiers that make the caves deeper or twistier.
Rated M for Manly: Can't be more manly than a team of foul-mouthed, beer-guzzling space dwarves sent to a dark Death World to mine for rare minerals and mow down entire swarms of giant, monstrous bugs with military-grade weapons. And if that's not manly enough, there's the Abyss Bar where you can order beers for you and your teammates to either get buffs or get stone-drunk on your arses. And if you order the Leaf Lover's Special, you'll be shamed by your dwarven brethren for ordering a tree-hugging elf drink and not being a true, manly dwarf.
Real Is Brown: Averted; each of the biome landscapes is a particular dominant colour once you light it up. It makes the actual brown patches of soft dirt (which mark passages between caverns) stand out.
Recoil Boost: Scout's Boomstick has an Overclock, "Special Powder", that allows him to do this.
Redemption Demotion: The corrupted BET-C automatic combat rigs that can be encountered in the caverns will put up a decent fight, but once the Charge-Suckers are killed and the robot restored to working order, it won't fight as effectively as it did before. It entirely loses the ability to use its shield, and while it retains both the machine gun and grenade launcher, its rate of fire is reduced and it will no longer do the close-range bomb shower attack it does when you fight it.^note
Redemption Promotion: The Beast Master perk allows you to tame a Glyphid Grunt to your side that will be called Steeve. Steeve can have 100% to 300% extra damage dealt at perk levels 2-4, will take much less damage from players, is twice as resistant to freezing and unfreezes twice as fast, and is immune to sticky flames.
Refuge in Audacity: Sometimes it rains and snows in this game. Be reminded that this game is set underground, in caves.
Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Dwarves are equipped with an upgradeable shield that recharges after a period of not taking damage, but can only restore health with supply drops and Red Sugar. If a dwarf's health is particularly low, he'll slowly regain up to about a sixth of his health bar while his shield is up.
- The bugs get in on this as well. A Dreadnought has two sets of hit points (see Multiple Life Bars above), both tied to its glowing abdomen. The abdomen has a hard shell that must be broken off, and soft flesh underneath. The shell always grows back after a short duration, instantly resetting to 100% health. Any damage to the fleshy bits remains, however.
Reset Milestones: Upon your first promotion (reset) you'll be able to find Blank Matrix Cores which can be turned into Weapon and Cosmetic Overclocks to craft. Each subsequent promotion will give you one of each as well.
Rhymes on a Dime: A few lines:
Dwarf: (calling Molly when she's absent) It's not cool - when we don't have an M.U.L.E.! Hey it rhymed!
Dwarf: (ordering Bosco to vacuum lithofoam) Drone! Suck up that foam!
Dwarf: (trying to refill Fuel Canister with something other than Oil Shale) We need oil, not soil!
Dwarf: (killing a Mactera Brundle) Die, Brundle fly!
Riddle for the Ages: Who was Karl? What happened to him? What did he do that was so awesome/badass/memorable that the already very tough and very badass dwarves constantly pay deference to his memory? The devs have all but publicly said that they'll never reveal the answer, at one point saying "Maybe the real Karl was the friends we made along the way."
Rocket Jump: The RJ250 Compound Overclock for the Engineer's Grenade Launcher allows him to perform this feat at the cost of damage. The aforementioned Special Powder also counts.
Rollercoaster Mine: Update 32 added in two new missions, one of which revolves around building pipelines to pump liquid Morkite back to an on-site refinery. These pipes can be built in any direction as long as terrain exists to build it off of, and there is no resource cost for building pipe segments. The "roller coaster" element comes in when the dwarves ride the rails along the top of the pipes. Many teams playing on low hazard levels go out of their way to build and ride the most ridiculous pipe roller coasters they can, because it's just as (if not more) entertaining than actually completing the mission!^note

S-Z

Satchel Charge: The Driller's unique Support Tool. The Satchel Charge is able to stick onto vertical as well as horizontal surfaces at any height provided you can throw it far enough (which, admittedly, isn't very far). Once set, a single charge can be detonated by a remote unit held in the Driller's hand. These can be customized to the player's tastes in terms of raw explosive power, blast radius, a disarming switch for retrieval, and even sensitivity to weapons fire.
Science Fantasy: There are vague hints that DRG takes place in a Standard Fantasy Setting that averted Medieval Stasis long enough to become an outright galaxy-spanning civilization. One of the toasts the dwarves will give mention "the empires of old". The clean-shaven option is described as "progressive", implying that going beardless is against dwarven tradition, but that times are changing. Various weapon cosmetics such as "First Relic" and "Scale Brigade" feature golden crests in medieval European and Nordic rune styles, respectively. Magic hasn't made an appearance (with the possible exception of the Ommoran Heartstone), but the presence of elves is alluded to, and the dwarves will insult those who commit friendly fire with comparisons to goblins and trolls.
Schmuck Bait: It might seem enticing to start and complete random events when found, but doing them without consideration for the mission type and the team's resource levels can be a death sentence if you are on a high hazard level and/or don't have a competent team to back you up, especially those that involve additional enemies or bug waves. In particular:
- Point Extraction's unique enemy spawn system means that speed is a priority, and the team will be overwhelmed beyond 15 to 20 minutes. Furthermore, there are timed swarms with no prior warning. Being distracted by events can mean the difference between life or death for the team.
- In general, it is a bad idea to trigger random events with additional enemies when a key objective is active, but in Escort Duty missions, the need to protect Doretta continues until the primary objective is completed. Sidetracking to an event can mean the team is unable to protect Doretta and fails the mission. The general advice is to complete the primary objective, then delay calling in the Drop Pod and go back to do the event.
- In Elimination missions, events can spawn in the same cavern as a Dreadnought cocoon. Should the team rush to do an event involving extra bug waves, stray gunfire can pop the Dreadnought cocoon and cause a Dreadnought to spawn, resulting in the team having to simultaneously fight both the event's bug waves and the Dreadnought.
- In On-Site Refining, completing the refining process triggers an endless, increasingly dense swarm until the refinery is launched, which triggers the extraction sequence. If any event is missed by that point, it should be abandoned.
Scratch Damage:
- The LithoFoamer's primary purpose is to clean the Rockpox infestation, but it is capable of dealing damage to enemies it hits. At 0.1 damage per "hit", though, it's not going to be killing things like Swarmers anytime soon.
- Rockpox Grunts and Rockpox Praetorians have such insanely high defense that all damage they receive to non-weakspots is turned into this. However, they suffer massive damage when their pustules are damaged and exploded.
Screw Learning, I Have Phlebotinum!: When a dwarf drinks Smart Stout, he briefly suddenly knows specific things like how to make the Drop Pod land where needed, Karl's whereabouts, why gold has its color, and so on.
Secondary Fire:
- The Scout's M1000 can hipfire as fast as you can pull the trigger, but holding the fire button down allows a charged shot with more power, accuracy, or special effects (with the right Overclock).
- The Driller's Cryo Cannon has two optional Overclocks enabling special fire modes that trade ammo efficiency for long-range power shots. His Sludge Pump also does this by default.
- The Engineer's LMG Gun Platform can have three different ones powered by the Primary Weapons:
  - The "Warthog" Auto 210 Shotgun has the Turret Whip mod, which lets you shoot any deployed LMG - not just yours, but other players' as well - and have it expend 5 rounds to fire off a supercharged explosive shot.
  - The "Stubby" Voltaic SMG's Turret EM Discharge Unstable Overclock lets you shoot any deployed LMG to unleash a burst of electricity without expending any of the LMG's rounds, useful when swarms reach your turret(s).
  - The SMG also has the Micro-Conductor Add-On Unstable Overclock (formerly Turret Arc), which lets you charge turrets and platforms with electricity. When a pair of charged turrets are close enough, they conduct a stream of electricity between them just like the Electrocrystals in the Crystalline Caverns, frying anything near or along the arc.
Sentry Gun: Present to assist or oppose the dwarves:
- The Engineer's unique Support Tool, the LMG Gun Platform. Customizable with purchasable mods.
  - First Tier mods let you choose between the Gemini System which gives you two sentry guns and additional ammo, or the (single) LMG Mk II which has improved range, ammo capacity, and damage.
  - Second Tier offers increased ammo count, quicker setup time or quicker reload.
  - Third Tier includes armor piercing, stun modifier, or increased ammo capacity for the sentry gun(s).
  - Fourth Tier offers two different Systems for the LMG: The Defender System, which limits the gun to a (still wide) forward arc but increases the damage, and the Hawkeye System which extends the firing range and also turns your Laser Pointer into a target designator for the gun(s).
  - Gemini System + Defender System = UA 571-C Automated Sentry Gun
- The Minehead Platforms in Point Extraction missions come equipped with 3 LMG Mk II turrets mounted in a triangular formation for defense.
- Rival Burst Turrets and Sniper Turrets will attack the dwarves in Industrial Sabotage missions and missions with the Rival Presence mutator.
Serial Numbers Filed Off: Jetty Boot, an arcade game available to play on the Space Rig, is a pretty obvious one of Flappy Bird. Gameplay consists of tapping a single button to go up and trying to fit through oncoming pipes. The game is also meant to train players to unlock the occasional Jet Boots crate on Hoxxes.
Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Since Friendly Fireproof is generally averted, this is a legitimate way to fight the swarm. The Scout has the Pheromone Canister that attracts other bugs to target the unlucky ones covered in it, and Exploders' explosions will harm nearby bugs as well, potentially setting up a chain reaction if there are multiple Exploders around. The biggest of this is popping off a Bulk Detonator next to a Dreadnought; as long the Dreadnought is in its vulnerable state, it will die in one hit from the Detonator's massive explosion.
Shattered World: Combined with Floating Continent — a solid 20%-30% of Hoxxes has been forcibly ripped off of the rest of the planet, leaving it orbiting over the massive crater it used to occupy; it even seems to have its own biome inside it, the Dense Biozone. Important questions, such as who did this, why they did it, how they did it, how Hoxxes is still intact, and why the debris has not simply crashed back to the surface as its gravity is the same as the rest of the planet's yet remain unanswered. But "as always, DRG recommends a "don't ask" approach when dealing with the peculiarities of Hoxxes' makeup."
Shock and Awe: Both in service of the players and against them.
- Engineer:
  - The "Stubby" Voltaic SMG and its Micro-Conductor Add-On and Turret EM Discharge Unstable Overclocks.
  - The Breach Cutter's High Voltage Crossover Balanced Overclock.
- Scout:
  - The Electrifying Reload Unstable Overclock for the Deepcore GK2 Asssault Rifle.
  - The M1000 Classic's Electrocuting Focus Shots Unstable Overclock.
- The Gunner has the Electro Minelets Unstable Overclock for the BRT7 Burst Fire Gun.
- The Crystalline Caverns contains the "electrocrystal" stage hazard which are glowing blue crystals that will arc lethal electricity between each other, also sporatically changing which crystal they arc to.
- Naedocyte Shockers (obviously) and Hatchlings will attempt to swarm dwarves and zap them repeatedly, like Darker and Edgier Bikini Bottom Jellyfish.
- The Facility Caretaker will punish dwarves who try standing on the vault platform by charging up a set of Tesla coils that electrocutes any dwarves still standing on it when they discharge.
Short-Range Shotgun: Zig-zagged depending on which class is being played. The Scout's Boomstock is incredibly deadly at close range, but is more or less useless past that, due to how short the barrel is. However, the Engineer's default combat shotgun is quite reliable from anywhere up to 30 meters. This can be greatly extended if the player chooses accuracy- and recoil-focused upgrades, and pushed even further with the Magnetic Pellet Alignment overclock... or the trope can be played straight with the Pump Action Unstable Overclock.
Shoot the Bullet: The Spitball Infector's acid blobs can be shot out of the air by your weapons, negating the danger of being hit by their highly damaging projectile. Don't try this with Glyphid Acidspitters or Web Spitters however.
Shotguns Are Just Better:
- The Scout's Jury-Rigged Boomstick is a double-barrel break action sawed-off that can kill a Praetorian in two shots at close range.
- The Engineer's "Warthog" Auto 210 Shotgun is a versatile weapon that's handy at all ranges (but the closer the better), which helps him mop up any enemies that get past his sentries.
Shout-Out: Has its own page.
Simple, yet Awesome: Each and every one of the classes' platforming tools. Yes, they aren't anywhere near as flashy as the weapons, but just try and complete any high-level digs without them and see how long you last. In general, any of them are a necessity for traversing the dark caves of the planet, and having all of them at your team's disposal means no obstacle will get in your way with proper use.
Single-Biome Planet: Averted. Hoxxes is home to several biomes and climates, although they're all underground. The surface, meanwhile, is a lifeless wasteland.
Situational Sword: Heightened Senses perk is only useful when there is a grabber enemy (Cave Leech, Mactera Grabber, Nyaka Trawler, Nemesis) around, but since they are infrequent spawns (or in the case of the Grabber, loudly telegraphed), the perk is mostly deadweight. But when they do spawn and get the drop on you, you'd be glad you've got it.
Sleeves Are for Wimps: Introduced in Season 4, certain armors can toggle between sleevless options for most of the sets. Barring those that are already sleeveless to begin with. Certain sleeveless armors are even complimented with alternate handwear such as tough-guy fingerless gloves.
Skewed Priorities: Played for Laughs at every turn. Deep Rock Galactic is very blunt about the fact that they view the lives of their employees as substantially less important than making money, but the dwarves don't seem to care about this at all; they aren't even particularly upset if they're left behind on a dig. Possibly handwaved by the implications that the medbay is rescuing fallen dwarves from death somehow.
Fungus Bogs Flavor Text: "We're almost sorry to send employees in here, but the rewards are too great to ignore. So therefore: welcome to the Fungus Bogs! A truly awful region, built mostly from slime, mold, stinging insects, fungus, stinking mud, and corrosive lichen."
Smart Gun:
- The Scout's Deepcore GK2 rifle can be converted into one with the AI Stability Engine Unstable Overclock. Recoil is removed completely, spread recovery is at 1000% speed, and weak point damage is increased. However, the system and specialized ammunition reduce default firing rate and damage.
- An even more involved example is the Engineer's LOK-1 Smart Rifle, which can lock onto a whole series of enemies and let loose all at once with bursts of homing bullets, Panzer Dragoon or RAY Series style.
Sniper Pistol: The Gunner's Bulldog revolver, especially with the Elephant Rounds Overclock (which practically doubles damage per shot and reduces spread even further, at the cost of wrist-shattering recoil, a slower reload, and less reserve ammo).
Socialization Bonus:
- The price for everything sold at the bar is for one round of drinks, rather than for a single beer, so it's always the most cost-efficient to buy for a team of four (assuming your teammates will reciprocate your generosity, that is).
- The end-of-mission bounty includes a stacking credit bonus for every dwarf who made it back to the drop pod alive, giving you good reason to play with a full team and make sure no dwarf is left behind.
Speedrun: Played straight and inverted with two achievements. "Deep for Speed" asks you to complete a Deep Dive (three consecutive maps) in under forty-five minutes, while "I Like it Here" asks you to stay in one map for at least an hour.
Spider-Sense: The Heightened Sense perk has the top portion of the screen illuminate in white if the player is about to be grabbed by an enemy so they can get out of the way in time. In the event that you're grabbed anyway, you can use the perk to break free, but it only works twice per mission.
Dwarf: My beard sense is tingling!
Stalactite Spite: Stalactites made of salt appear in the Salt Pits biome, and will fall to deal damage if shot or disrupted via explosion. The green icicles in the Glacial Strata do the same thing (though they shatter on landing instead of sticking into the ground), but any other type of icicle found there won't.
Stalked by the Bell: Point Extraction missions start off with only a minor enemy presence, but the longer you and your team stay, the larger the enemy swarms become. It escalates to the point where 30 minutes in, there's at least 30-50 glyphids pouring out of the walls every 30 seconds.
Standard Fantasy Setting: Subverted. There are implications throughout the game that the setting was this historically, but it averted Medieval Stasis long enough to transition to Science Fantasy.
Stealth Pun: The M1000 Classic is an M1 Garand, futurized. Or, in other words, it's an M-One-Grand.
- The Smart Rifle's LOK-1 designation seems a lot like "lock-on", which works two ways: spelled out, it's "lock-one", and 1 represents "on" in boolean logic (versus 0 for "off").
Stealthy Mook: Season 5 introduces Glyphid Stalkers, which have an Invisibility Cloak that makes them harder to see, can burrow around to avoid attacks, and have a Sneak Attack that can instantly take out your shield and disable it for a longer time.
Sticky Bomb: The Gunner's Sticky Grenade can adhere to any surface or creature before detonating. The Engineer's Proximity Mine and the Driller's Satchel Charge can also stick to surfaces.
Stop Poking Me!: When you use your laser pointer to highlight something for your team, your dwarf will voice an alert to the team members about it, such as "Mushroom!" If you keep spamming this on the same thing, Mission Control will react, usually with a reprimand.
"Mushroom, mushroom!", shut it! Get back to work!
- Similarly, if you're playing with other players and you all happen to find a chunk of compressed gold or bittergem and stand around repeatedly pinging it, Mission Control will eventually chime in with a very exasperated demand for you to get back to the mission.
Stout Strength: Well, these are dwarves we're talking about. The Gunner and the Driller are the most noticeable examples, but all four of the playable dwarves are short, strong enough to cave in a Glyphid's skull with a pickaxe, and tough enough to take a serious beating. Molly also qualifies, being a squat, virtually-indestructible "minecart on legs" who is around the same height as the dwarves are.
Strong Enemies, Low Rewards: As every enemy is worth 1 experience point when killed regardless of what it is, any difficult enemy falls into this by default. Downplayed in a level with a Parasites warning - while each enemy still only gives one experience point, so does each parasite, and larger enemies house more parasites.
Subsystem Damage: Many bugs have a hard outer shell, which reduces or negates damage to the bug's Hit Points when shot. However, the shell itself takes damage and can be cracked and blown off, leaving the bug's flesh exposed. The Drilldozer also takes damage systematically, starting with the left, the right, and finally the centre section of the chassis.
Super-Persistent Predator: Glyphids constantly swarm towards the dwarves relentlessly. If they ever flee or get stunned, it's only temporary and they'll be back to chasing you down in short order. The only way to get them to stop permanently is by befriending them, or with bullets.
Suspicious Video-Game Generosity:
- Point Extraction missions have a lot of Nitra lying around the level, and the minehead you need to deposit the Aquarqs into even come with a triplet of heavy autocannons to fend off any nearby bugs. This is of course merely to offset the fact that the aliens in Point Extractions are much more aggressive than in any other mission, and you will be swarmed every few minutes at minimum with the swarms getting bigger and deadlier each time.
- Escort missions also have quite a bit of Nitra (and have a lot of it concentrated in the starting room, unlike other missions), but this is more due to the levels being far more linear and requiring the Drilldozer to be escorted to the endpoint. Which of course, means a lot of ammo needed to protect it against the bugs and not a lot of time to grab Nitra for it while the Drilldozer is moving.
- Industrial Sabotage missions also tend to have huge amounts of Nitra, to the benefit of dwarves keeping bugs and robots away from Hack-C and eventually taking down the Caretaker — this is probably justified in the rival corporation presumably needing to use said Nitra to keep their robots and turrets stocked with ammo as well even though they seemingly do not have to during gameplay.
Take Cover!: While a common strategy is to terraform areas to fight off swarms if you notice you're fighting too many ranged enemies, especially in "Duck and Cover" warnings, it's wise to leave a pillar or two to hide behind in case you need a quick protection from something shooting you.
Take Your Time: On most mission types, periodic enemy waves are the only time pressure put on the team until the call for extraction. Even once objectives are complete it can be wise to look for crafting ores and establish ways back up cliffs before starting the countdown (Which can become moot if you have a Driller). Point Extraction missions don't offer this luxury, however, and the unannounced bug waves will become more and more frequent until the team is overrun or leaves. Mining, Escort, and Refining missions have unpredictable enemy waves appearing at random, though not as aggressively as in Point Extraction missions.
Taking You with Me: Goes both sides:
- Dwarves have access to the "See You In Hell" perk which can be only triggered when they're downed. It deals quite a bit of damage easily killing up to Grunt Guards and potentially wounding even Praetorians a lot all while causing a Fear effect.
- Glyphids have the Exploders which will explode on death and at higher difficulties they can one-shot a Dwarf if they don't move from its epicenter. Their bigger relative, the Bulk Detonator, causes a much larger and potent explosion and will kill anything, even Dreadnoughts caught in it. On a smaller scale regular Praetorians and Oppressors will leave a noxious gas on death while Spreaders will leave large pools of acidic blood that can damage anyone that kill them too close.
A Tankard of Moose Urine: Leaf Lover's Special is an "organic" beer available only due to the insistence of Management. Dwarves despise it both due to its elven origin and its ability to turn you stone-cold sober with a single swig. Ironically, this last effect is quite useful due to the effects of drunkenness in normal gameplay, although many players have found and chosen their own ways of getting sober.
Teleporting Keycard Squad: During a salvage mission, a swarm of bugs will appear the moment you dig up a leg for one of the mini mules. The same thing also happens in seasonal events when you dig up the season's buried item.
Temporary Online Content: Averted wholesale. Prior to Season 5, all content unlocked through the seasonal performance pass and associated elements were cycled into standard methods such as the shop after the season's end, and season specific elements and events such as the Industrial Sabotage mission, the Rival Company and Lithophage meteors are still present in later seasons, only somewhat rarer. Season 5 takes this aversion even further, allowing players to select and access any season they wish, complete with perfomance pass and heightened bias towards certain events; all content was returned to their respective performance passes as a result.
Timed Mission: Every mission is ultimately this, though most of them are on a very soft timer limited only by Nitra availability, and the hard timer is only during extraction phase. Point Extraction has the distinction of being the hardest on the soft timers, though.
Too Fast to Stop: The Dash perk and the Scout's Get In, Get Out mod for his Zhukov NUK17 can give the player quite the speed boost. Although said boost lasts only for a few seconds, using it at the wrong time near a deep pit or cliffside can send you plummeting over the edge for massive fall damage. Doubly so if Rich Atmosphere is in play, which gives everyone a movement speed boost by default.
Trick Arrow: Season 2 gives the Scout the Nishanka Boltshark, a crossbow that fires normal reusable bolts as well as your choice of three special bolts that inflict status effects. Overclocks allow replacing your normal bolts with even more trick arrows that set bugs on fire, freeze them, ricochet, and more.
Trick Bomb: Every class gets a number of throwable devices that either explode or otherwise hinder the Glyphid hordes. At first, these were mostly standard frags, but Update 24, and later Season 3 as well, added a diverse selection of grenades and grenade-like objects to each class's loadout.
- The Scout gets Inhibitor Field Grenades (or IFGs), which initially were the only non-standard grenade in the game — creating a slowing field that increased damage against targets within it. With the updates, he has three other options that fulfill the crowd-control role: the bug-baiting Pheremone Canister, the Cryo Grenade, and the Voltaic Stun Sweeper.
- The Gunner has a number of high-yield area-of-effect tools, including the notoriously friendly-fire-prone Cluster Grenade and Tactical Leadburster, the intense but short-lived Incendiary Grenade, and the spike-covered Sticky Grenade.
- The Engineer's options are focused on area denial and battlefield control. There's the startlingly lifelike L.U.R.E., the multiple-detonation-capable Proximity Mine, the chaotic, bouncy Plasma Burster, and the reprogrammed Rival Shredder Swarm.
- The Driller has the weirdest assortment, with the sharp-edged and recoverable Impact Axe, the bog-standard HE Grenade, the highly flammable and non-dwarf-affecting Neurotoxin Grenade, and the self-propelled and highly dangerous Springloaded Ripper.
Tunnel King: Every dwarf worth his salt can dig, but the Driller is the best at it, digging wide tunnels faster than anyone else.
Ultimate Job Security: No matter what kind of shenanigans the dwarves get into in the level hub, Mission Control always sounds like he's on his last straw but never acts on his threats. Kicking dozens of barrels into the launch platform, bringing them into the drop pod, getting drunk off your ass and passing out at the bar, playing with the gravity controls, and entering restricted areas are all things you can repeatedly do without a punishment harsher than being told off over comms. All this is because DRG's operations simply cannot function without the dwarves going on their digging missions, and there's no replacing them since no one else is crazy enough, or badass enough, to try digging on Hoxxes IV.
Underground Level: The Space Rig is the only area in the game that ISN'T underground.
Unexpected Gameplay Change: Season 3 introduces the Rockpox Lithophage, which has infested areas that need to be removed. In-game, cleaning a Lithophage infestation turns part of cave exploration into a cleaning game like PowerWash Simulator, where you need to equip a LithoFoamer to spray foam onto the infection, then use the LithoVac to suck the foam up along with the infection. Cleansing a high enough percentage of Rockpox around a Plague Spike will destroy it and remove any remaining infestation generated by it.
Unwanted Assistance: Defeating and rebooting a BET-C gives you a powerful allied mobile gun platform that shoots and throws bombs, but unlike sentries or Bosco, its grenade launcher is not Friendly Fireproof. Ol' Betsy also has an annoying habit of getting in your way even worse than Molly, since she rarely stands still and is thrice as big, and Betsy can also push you from ledges if you're walking on precarious terrain...
Useless Useful Spell: Subverted with Fear. At first glance one would wonder "why make creeps afraid when you can just kill them?", which is true on lower hazard levels, but with higher hazard levels or just bigger groups, fear can give you much-needed breathing room and prevent your group from being overrun.
Video Game Caring Potential:
- Update 33 added, at the request of players during the experimental branch, the option to carry Doretta's head back to the escape pod after an Escort Mission was completed. Of course, in the developers' own words, "Just don't expect any rewards or praise for doing so — Management couldn't care less!" Indeed, there's no exprience or credits rewards for doing so, but dwarf dialogue expresses a desire to bring her home, and the dwarf that walks it into the drop pod will be ecstatic about it. Doretta's head will then appear on the mission completion screen alongside the party and even on the Space Rig.
  Dwarf: We're not leaving Doretta behind!
- Season 3 adds the LithoFoamer, which is normally used to clean Lithophage infestations — but it also deals 0.1 damage per hit on things. This still triggers a Loot Bug's chance to drop minerals on a hit, meaning that it's now possible to use the LithoFoamer to extract minerals from Loot Bugs while leaving them (relatively) unharmed.
- As trigger-happy as the dwarves get, it's also possible to pet pretty much any living creature that doesn't attack on sight, with the Loot Bugs — put-upon Butt Monkeys that they are — even wriggling happily and purring when you pet them. Keying into Doretta's Caring Potential, you can even pet her on the trip to the Heartstone to reassure her.
- To drive the point home, there's a chance that petting a Loot Bug will get it to spit up its minerals and just give them to the player. With enough patience, it's possible to get a Loot Bug's entire collection without having to harm it. That said, as the odds of an individual pet eliciting such a drop are on the low side...
Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- Virtually every dig you go on will feature Loot Bugs — bulbous, slug-like aliens who explode into a shower of gold and nitra when killed, but are completely harmless. It's up to the player whether they're left unmolested, popped for the rewards, or petted by the dwarves.
- For that matter, there are several species of neutral wildlife on Hoxxes IV, such as the Silicate Harvester, Cave Cruiser, and Cave Vine, who pose no threat to the dwarves. This doesn't stop you from shooting or smashing them to death if you're so inclined. If one kills the Mobula Cave Angel and Hexawing Gniffer in Azure Weald, the dwarves will even lampshade the fact that they're "being such a badass" for killing a harmless creature.
- Even when hostile bugs are involved, you can still be a complete bastard. The Driller's arsenal in particular is full of weapons that would get him tried in the Hague for just showing up around a battlefield, like the microwave emitter that cooks enemies from the inside out until they pop like popcorn kernels, or the corrosive waste cannon that melts them alive; you can even hear Glyphids cry out in agony while they turn into puddles with that last one. The microwave emitter even has an overclock that gives organic enemies cancerous tumors which can be popped for amplified damage.
Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Averted. The Driller's CRSPR Flamethrower can wash over an oncoming tide of Swarmers and leave nothing but a carpet of charred ashes in its wake. Not only that, it has an effective range of ten meters and fires in a tight stream, meaning it's plenty effeective at shooting flying enemies at medium range.
- One upgrade path allows the CRSPR to set the ground on fire, called Sticky Flames, creating a potentially massive Damage Over Time field that ignites Glyphids that charge through it.
- A later optional upgrade also adds the feature of causing enemies killed via direct damage to explode into a shower of fire and boiling hot viscera — quite useful for quickly killing lots of small and/or bunched-up things.
- The Sticky Fuel overclock takes the potency of the field of fire example above to the logical extreme by extending both the duration and the damage of sticky fire. Combined with the upgrade that causes the sticky fire to slow enemies, a Driller can create walls of fire and simply watch as Glyphids try in vain to reach them and are incinerated.
Video Game Settings:
- Bubblegloop Swamp: The Fungus Bogs are complete with pools of sticky goo, noxious gas, and big ol' mushrooms.
- Crystal Landscape: Comes in several flavors.
  - The Crystalline Caverns: massive caverns teeming with crystals and a vast amount of other valuable resources, making it a particularly good spot for farming. Its caves are wide (making a Gunner almost a necessity for proper navigation), and the place is filled with energy crystals that arc chains of high-voltage electricity between each other at regular intervals, which can fry a dwarf in seconds.
  - The Salt Pits are a variant, in that everything down to the majority of terrain is made of solidified and sometimes petrified salt crystals, in both red and white varieties.
  - Radioactive Exclusion Zone, as it names implies, has dangerous volatile uranium crystals that are dangerous to even get close by and some of its wildlife has mutated into order to survive it... by also allowing some of its members to unleash radioactive attacks as well.
- Floating Continent: Overlaps with Shattered World. Something, or someone, appears to have blown an enormous chunk of Hoxxes into orbit, leaving behind an enormous crater that seems to extend straight down to the planet's core. According to the loading screens, it's where the Dense Biozone is. It has yet to be explained why this chunk has yet to crash back down.
- Lethal Lava Land: The Magma Core is an underground version, with lava geysers, flame vents, and patches of molten rock that hurt to walk on.
- The Lost Woods: Azure Weald where the flora is plentiful and so are the risks of getting lost or even walking past mission objectives if the Dwarves get distracted by its treacherous beauty.
- Noob Cave: Shallow Grotto, available only in the tutorial of the game. As it names implied it's simple and offers the perfect opportunity for new DRG employees to learn the ropes in a minimum risk environment.
- Shifting Sand Land: The Sandblasted Corridors. It has the softest terrain, but is home to plenty of aggressive Swarmers and doubles as Gusty Glade due to its sand jets that can launch you across a room to your death by fall damage.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Glacial Strata. Fully made of ice some frozen dirt. Beware of Stalactite Spite, thin ice and freezing blizzards.
Tree Trunk Tour: Update 33 brings the new Hollow Bough biome, a biological anomaly beneath the planet's surface filled with cavernous growths resembling the inside of hollow trees, complete with bark coating the "cave" walls. The area is also infested with writhing thorny red vines, which appear to be an invasive species eating away at the wood that makes up the caverns.
Violation of Common Sense:
- If a teammate's been knocked down by bugs and are surrounded by them, one common tactic is to throw a grenade at them; if the crowd is big enough, said teammate might be the epicenter of a satchel charge instead. This only works because downed teammates are immune to all damage until revived, and realistically, an explosive would have a way higher chance to further injure the teammate than bullets.
- A Praetorian's barf attack at higher hazard levels has a wide cone shape that's almost impossible to avoid by sidestepping, so if you want to avoid most of the damage you need to run towards the Praetorian. The same goes for Tri-jaws and their Spread Shot, moving forward or backwards makes it much easier to dodge their attack than in comparison to a rather tricky sidestep, which is the usually first instinct of most players.
- Spotted an Oppressor, that huge, nasty looking bulwark of a glyphid, coming your way? Power Attack it, even at its otherwise invulnerable shell, for massive damage. Given what kind of enemy Oppressors are, you'd need to be batshit insane or plain desperate to find this out on your own.
- Players who take a dislike to using Leaf Lover's Special to sober up but don't want to be drunk on duty can use various techniques to achieve sobriety:
  - The primary method of doing so being to get even more drunk by drinking Blackout Stout to instantly pass out, because being revived resets your drunkenness completely (and, as a bonus, Blackout Stout uses Starch Nuts exclusively, which appear everywhere, so you get to save on the paltry cost of a Leaf Lover's). Of course, passing out won't suddenly eliminate all the alcohol in your body if this were attempted in real life, although we don't exactly know what the liquid used to revive a dwarf is comprised of.
  - Alternatively, you can dive into the barrel hoop and die (respawning in the medbay also resets your drunkenness). You shouldn't need to be told why blowing yourself up in the barrel hoop is an overkill solution, but most players don't really care.
- Really low on health, and the gains from a resupply pod not going to cut it? Call over a friend, then call for a resupply and deliberately stand below it. Have your friend revive you, and take one of the resupplies to bring yourself close to full.
Wall Crawl: A trademark ability of Glyphids and the MULE, allowing the former to attack from every conceivable direction and enabling the latter to follow the team wherever they go. However in the latter's case this can cause problems, especially when the drop pod is recalled, as Molly will sometimes only take paths that only she can take (unless someone is playing the Scout or the team has access to Jet Boots).
The Walls Have Eyes: A semi-common terrain feature in the Radioactive Exclusion Zone and rarely the Crystalline Caverns consists of large, seemingly-aware clusters of eyes covering the walls, blinking and looking around or at the dwarves. You can mine them to destroy them.
Weaponized Exhaust: Several of the weapons that utilize the overheating system instead of reloading include an optional upgrade for "Aggressive Venting," which, upon overheat, will output a large area-of-effect burning attack around the player at the cost of the weapon being rendered non-functional until it cools off completely. On the less intentional side, the Hover Boots perk lets you arrest your fall and walk on air for a few seconds, burning any enemies unlucky enough to be beneath you; same goes for Jet Boots.
We Do the Impossible: Deep Rock prides itself in actively seeking out the toughest mining operations and successfully making a killing from them. The whole reason they've come to Hoxxes is specifically because its considered the most dangerous planet in the galaxy.
We've Got Company: One of the lines when pinging a Glyphid Oppressor is "We've got company! Oppressor here!"
Weird Trade Union: The Interplanetary Miner's Union, a trade union for extraterrestrial miners. Being a part of one of their three chapters will grant players a monthly bonus if they achieve certain objectives. If all three chapters complete all their objectives, the Abyss Bar starts serving Glyphid Slammers, Oily Oafs, and Leaf Lovers for free.
What the Hell, Player?: Regarding the few bugs that aren't hostile, the dwarves may occasionally remark that they don't like shooting Lootbugs and only do so for their minerals, and are apathetic towards the disgusting Maggots. Towards the Hexawing Gniffer and Mobula Cave Angel though, killing them will result in their remarking that they have no reason to attack them.
Dwarf: I killed the Cave Angel for no good reason!
Dwarf: (audibly confused) Why am I killing the wildlife?
With This Herring: DRG will give the barest minimum of equipment to their employees so long as it's cost-efficient, which means that employees have to prove their ability to use the guns and then buy upgrades for those DRG-supplied guns separately, DRG equipment like the Morkite Refinery and Drillevator are insanely prone to malfunction or other weird behaviors, and they're stingy to the point of refusing you precious ammo and health resupplies unless you can collect enough Nitra in the caves.
Wreaking Havok: Not very much in actual gameplay, but the kickable barrels provide a nice distraction between matches. Don't kick them into the launch tube, though, or you'll get chewed out for it. Apparently the dwarves love kicking the barrels around so much that they made a sport out of it when the Abyss Bar opened.
Yet Another Stupid Death: A graphic posted by Ghost Ship Games in 2021 declared that fall damage was the overwhelmingly most-common cause of players' deaths◊^note(though with the enemies each being listed as a cause separately on the graphic, in total, enemies would be responsible for around 34 million deaths to fall damage's 20 million... which is still a lot for fall damage). It's not for nothing the Scout's grappling hook says "Risk of Accidental Death: High" on the equipment screen. It doesn't help that downing yourself by Fall Damage is embarrassingly easy: you can overestimate how far your jump can reach with a jump, underestimate the amount of damage you'll take from a fall, get pushed or spooked into a pit by an enemy, or just fail to notice a hole or failure in the terrain that will lead you to test the harsh laws of gravity.
- Other stupid deaths include downing yourself from self-damage with explosive weapons (C4, Fat Boy, Cluster Grenades), and although unusual you'll sometimes see someone getting downed by a Resupply Pod due to a brain fart.
Yin-Yang Bomb: Temperature Shock happens when a burning enemy is hit with an attack that induces cold, or a frozen enemy hit with an attack that warms them. The effect of this status is that the enemy takes a large amount of damage and instantly returns to neutral temperature and thaws/extinguishes. It's most relevant when two teammates have clashing temperature weapons, but certain builds can exploit it without outside help, such as Scout with Cryo Grenades and his double barrel's white phosphorus shells upgrade, or any solo dwarf that has a heat weapon when combined with Bosco's ice missiles.
You Require More Vespene Gas: Every weapon upgrade and overclock requires more than just Credits to buy. They require some craftable minerals found across Hoxxes: Bismor, Jaditz, Magnite, Enor Pearl, Umanite or Croppa. More expensive cosmetics costs them too, or a hefty price in Phazyonite.
You Shouldn't Know This Already: A strange aversion of this is in Deep Scan missions. Normally you need to locate all Resonance Crystals to triangulate the location of the Morkite Geode, but players can manually find the geode and harvest the Morkite Seeds without using the Drillevator.
Zerg Rush: What Glyphids don't have in intelligence and tactics they more than make up in sheer numbers. If Mission Control warns you of a swarm expect to fight off dozens of them, especially if it's a Grunt swarm. The Swarmageddon warning make packs of Swarmers attack on regular intervals and the kill count on missions with this warning can potentially reach over 1000 while even the usual numbers is around 100~300 for normal high hazard missions.

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Deep Rock Galactic

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Deep Rock Galactic

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