Deep Rock Galactic is a great game! (150,000+ reviews with Overwhelmingly Positive ratings)
Like, who doesn’t love yelling rock and stone with their fellows?
If you’re new to the game and want to efficiently progress into the game deeper and deeper, let’s take a quick glance at our Deep Rock Galactic beginner guide!
Recommended Read: Deep Rock Galactic – Machine Events List
Deep Rock Galactic is a co-op FPS game about dwarves, bugs, mining, minerals, and fancy beards. Although it’s a simple game, new players can be easily distracted by how detailed it is and forget about the objectives, what to do next, etc… That said, you should pay attention to the assignment board and the season terminal, always collect gold, and don’t be afraid to try new things.
Table of Contents
- Deep Rock Galactic: Danger, Darkness, Dwarves
- The Objectives and Goals
- How to Progress in Deep Rock Galactic
- Tips & Tricks for New Players
Deep Rock Galactic: Danger, Darkness, Dwarves
Imagine playing Left 4 Dead with your friends, but you’re not a normal human being. You play as a dwarf!
Together with the other three dwarves, you create a quartet team to explore and gather resources on the Hoxxes planet. You can also play solo with Bosco – the APD-B317.
Instead of fighting zombies and reaching safe rooms like L4D, you go on missions and missions to gather minerals, shoot bugs, promote yourself, annoy the management, and blow each other up.
The Objectives and Goals
After a few hundred hours of playing Deep Rock Galactic, we are pretty sure that the game’s main goal is to please the management and the DRG company as a whole.
Oh, wait!
Introduction
Deep Rock Galactic is a nonlinear game, so you don’t have to go on a pre-defined story. Instead, you can do whatever you want and progress further into the game at your own pace as long as you have some fun.
After you’ve completed the tutorial mission, you’ll end up in the Space Rig.
This is the mother ship in which you’ll spend most of your time to:
- Select a mission to play
- Pick assignments
- Track the daily to-dos at the season terminal
- Change class, buy and equip perks, track your performance
- Upgrade and equip weapons
- Promote
- Forge and equip overclocks
- Fun activities (kicking barrels, soccer, drinking beers, dancing, and more)
- And respawn in the med bay after each death
Although there are many things to do here, you should check out the assignment board and get on a series of missions.
The Mission
Currently, there are seven different missions in DRG. They are:
- Mining Expedition
- Egg Hunt
- On-site Refining
- Salvage Operation
- Point Extraction
- Escort Duty
- Elimination
For each mission, you’ll have two objectives (primary and secondary) to complete.
The primary objective depends on your chosen mission, and the secondary objective is randomly picked from the pool, such as collecting mushrooms and flowers or eliminating the fleas.
Moreover, each mission in DRG occurs in a specific biome. And depending on the biome, you can expect different terrain types, minerals, and enemies.
For example, the Magma Core biome is well-known for its flaming terrain and the annoying explorers. Or the Glacial Strata biome is famous for its Umanite resources and the icy bugs.
Not to mention that the environment can help you a lot in combat. See the spiky stalactite on the ceiling? Shoot it to penetrate the bugs! Or are you fighting with icy bugs? Use any fire-damage guns to increase your damage!
Besides mission type and biome, each mission in DRG can also come with mutators, which are red or yellow icons next to the mission.
The mutators can be warnings (red), anomalies (yellow), or even both in the same mission. They provide advantages (anomalies) or disadvantages (warnings) to that specific mission.
For example, two of the most annoying warnings are Shield Disruption and Low Oxygen. Shield Disruption completely disables your shield, and Low Oxygen forces you to stay around the MULE for oxygen constantly.
On the other hand, anomalies provide a significant buff to your dwarves, such as Double XP, or deal more damage to the bug’s weak point.
The Goal
After you’ve finished the primary objective, you can press the button on the MULE to call the drop pod to go back to the Space Rig. In contrast, completing the secondary objective will give you more gold and experience points.
Later on, after your first promotion, you’ll unlock deep dives, a series of three consecutive missions in a row without returning to the Space Rig.
As mentioned, Deep Rock Galactic has no end.
So, it entirely depends on you to set the goal for the game.
Your goal could be to unlock all the overclocks, reach blue level 1000, or get legendary promotion for all four dwarves.
How to Progress in Deep Rock Galactic
To progress in Deep Rock Galactic, you must play as one of the classes (Gunner, Scout, Engineer, and Driller), go on missions, collect minerals and gold, unlock and upgrade new features, promote your dwarves, and finally, repeat.
1. Greenbeard Stage (0-25 Red Level)
Most features in DRG depend on three things: your blue level, red level, and the first promotion milestone.
Blue level is your player rank. It’s like your account level in general and can only be leveled up by leveling red levels or promoting your dwarves.
Red level is the dwarf’s level. That said, each class in the game has a separate red level.
To level up your dwarf (red level), you must earn XP through missions and deep dives.
In this stage, you should focus on playing only one class.
The main goal is to level up him to 25 as fast as possible for promotion. Here’s a guide for fast leveling in DRG.
2. Authorized Miner (The First Promotion)
To promote a dwarf, you must max out his red level, which is capped at 25. Besides the level requirements, you must do a special assignment, prepare gold and crafting materials.
Go to the Memorial Hall in the single-player mode, then promote your first dwarf.
The first promotion gives you access to all remaining features, including end-game ones. Later promotions provide you with nothing but a new rank border.
After the management had done his motivational speech, there were many things to do after the first promotion, such as equip the second active perk, do deep dives, farm overclocks, do new assignments and more.
Farming and forge overclocks are essential since these are game-changer weapon upgrades.
In this stage, you still need to do any leftover assignments and new unlocked weekly assignments for materials and free overclocks.
In addition, it’s better to play different classes instead of focusing on only one at this stage. This way, you can learn about other classes’ abilities to improve teamwork. Plus, this is the best efficient way to maximize XP gain.
When you’re done messing around with the new features, head to the Deep Dives terminal at the end of the Space Rig and challenge yourself!
Once you get the hang of deep dives (and elite deep dives), you’re basically completing this stage.
3. Graybeard Stage (Post Promotions)
When you reach this stage, your beard turns gray, and you’re near the end game. Or are you?
As mentioned above, if your goal is to unlock all overclocks, you should be able to achieve it in a few months or even weeks if you’re active.
If your goal is to promote all dwarves to legendary rank, it will take at least a thousand hours or more.
Alternatively, if you want to reach blue level 1000, that could be longer. In fact, with 360 hours in the game, we can only achieve 260 blue levels.
At this point, you do your things.
Keep doing weekly assignments and farm those leftover overclocks. Or unlocking new weapons and trying out all modifications. Or try to reach 3000 points in the Barrel Hoop game.
Moreover, Deep Rock Galactic has a great community with many custom mods where you can completely change the gameplay.
Tips & Tricks for New Players
If you pay attention to the tutorial and some quick in-game hints, you should know how to use the Terrain Scanner and Laser Pointer.
Besides that, let’s see our nine tips and tricks for new players in Deep Rock Galactic!
1. Always pick an assignment if possible
Many new players don’t know about assignments or the assignment board. And this is a huge mistake!
The assignment terminal can be found in the middle of the Space Rig, near the Pod and the Accessory Shop.
It would be best if you prioritized assignments first since they provide new guns, resources, overclocks, and skins. It’s a waste to play missions without picking an assignment unless you don’t want to progress.
2. Learn about the bug weaknesses
Some bugs in DRG have weak points you can shoot to double or even triple the damage.
Usually, the bugs’ weak points are the mouth, abdomen, back, sack, glowing, or exposed parts. You can check this info in the Miner Guide in the game.
3. Understand overclocks and modifications (Weak Point vs. Armor Breaking)
Weapon modifications and overclocks are your primary power source. So, understanding what they provide can be a huge advantage.
You may know about the damage increase, fire rate, reloading speed, clip size, or magazine size upgrades. But two upgrades that confuse new players the most are weak points and armor-breaking upgrades.
For weak point damage increase, you can refer to point 2 above.
For armor-breaking upgrades, they increase the damage and chance to destroy the bugs’ armor, such as the Mactera Brundles or Glyphid Praetorians.
4. There is friendly fire
Even though DRG is a co-op game, you can still shoot your fellow dwarves. So, pay attention to any AoE damage weapon, such as the flamethrower, grenades, or the Fat Boy.
If you love using those gun types, there is a passive perk that can reduce your friendly fire damage by 50%.
5. Lighting is important
Flares and Scout’s light is super important in this game since you don’t know what awaits you in the vast dark cave.
On the other hand, fighting when everything is clear is way better than blindly shooting, right?
6. Resupply pods
Based on our experience, new players usually take more resupply pods than they need.
By doing this, you disrespect others and contribute to the mission’s failure. Since there is an ammo cap for all your guns and grenades, there is no point in taking 3 or 4 resupply pods.
7. Fall damage
Although there are many enemies, fall damage contributes to a large portion of dwarves’ death in this game.
If you play Scout, fall damage is not a big problem. Moreover, the Engineer can upgrade his platform gun to prevent minor fall damage.
8. Some guns can destroy the terrain
Most Gunner’s guns or the Experimental Plasma Charger can destroy the terrain. This means a lot when your team almost dies and sees red sugar on the ceiling.
9. Freeze the flying enemies
Unlike walking bugs, flying enemies like Mactera Spawns, Grabbers, or Goo Bombers will die instantly if frozen. This makes the Cryo Cannon or Scout’s Cryo Grenade the best weapon to fight flying enemies.
So that’s how to progress in this Deep Rock Galactic beginner guide.
Have any suggestions for this guide? Let us know in the comment section below.
