Development Diary: January 2026

Hello Reclaimers,

We’re back in full swing after the holiday break, pushing ever closer toward early access. It’s been a productive month for us, too! Fun feeling to see new details start to shine, and to get bigger game features working the way we want.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• Playtest 06 when?

• Upgrading the Ramrod’s bar + fitness area

• A very special cave construction

• We might have figured out late joining

As usual, everything in here reflects a work in progress. Please keep in mind that what we show and talk about here can (and very likely will) change before we reach early access.

Cool! Let’s get after it.

News on the next playtest

First up, a question we get a lot.

Many folks have been asking and speculating (and understandably so) about whether we’ll do another playtest before Rogue Core launches in early access.

The answer is yes!

But before you light the celebratory fireworks, we should say we don’t quite know when yet. It mostly depends on how quickly we can shift gears from “implement a bunch of stuff” to “fix the bugs and crashes” mode. Right now, we’re still focused on building up new stuff. So it’ll be several weeks at the very least before we look at another playtest.

When we do open up for the next playtest (and send out a new wave of invites), we’ll announce it here on Steam. So you don’t need to go checking your inbox until you see that post.

As always, selection for the playtests is entirely random, and invites are sent out via Steam. For more questions on how it all works, we’ll refer you to our handy Closed Alpha FAQ article right here.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2605790/view/574879683755115309

Beers + weightlifting on the Ramrod

One big focus this month has been tightening up the gameplay loop for the fitness area and bar aboard the Reclaimer’s ship, the RV-09 Ramrod.

While the carefree miners of Deep Rock Galactic simply order their beers with their wages, the Reclaimers do things a little different. If you want to drink on the Ramrod, you gotta hit the gym first. Lifting weights puts you in a caloric deficit, which enables you to order up a round of beers from OMEGA. Strict stuff on this ship.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to do very much. But you do have to do some, because there is no place for weakness among Reclaimers.

Implementing this whole system has required our game designers to cook up specific little ‘minigames’ for each lift available at the gym, our artists to animate it all and make UI overlays, our writers (hello!) to write voicelines for everything, and our voice actors (hello again) to record it all. Then our sound guys make sure all the voicelines are hooked up and play at the right time. Oh, and of course then our QA team has to test everything, and our programmers have to fix anything they find.

All this is to say, there’s a lot more work than you’d expect in this relatively minor part of the game. And still a good bit to do in terms of polishing details like animations, UI and the points system.

Hopefully it’ll be ready by the time Playtest 06 rolls around. I’m optimistic.

Bringing the GSG office to Rogue Core

As you likely know by now, the cave systems of Rogue Core aren’t just organic caverns. They’re also populated with loads of manmade (dwarfmade, rather) constructions like scaffolding and giant machinery and carved-out rooms, to give the mining facilities a detailed, lived-in feel.

A week or two ago, one of our 3D artists Arvid (formerly loot bug keeper) came up with an excellent idea: Recreate part of the real-life Ghost Ship Games office as a cave construction in Rogue Core.

So now, while down in the mines, there’s a chance you’ll come across an “employee canteen” sort of room, which is in fact a replica of the top floor of our Copenhagen office.

In real life, it’s where we eat lunch, have meetings, and broadcast our weekly dev streams. Maybe the DRG mining teams use their version in a similar way.

Embedded right below is a quick walk-through of the new room. You can also revisit the shots of the fifth floor from our office tour video, in case you want to compare them.

Testing late joining solutions

One of your biggest community asks during development has been regarding the possibility of late joining lobbies. So far, we haven’t had it in any form. But we might have figured out a solution.

We’re working on some mechanics to allow late joining to a certain extent. It won’t be that people can join at any stage -- in all likelihood, it'll probably something allowing people to join up until the end of the first stage of the facility.

There are two tricky factors that kept us from looking at this earlier, and they still create some challenges as we put this system in place.

1. Game balance. What do we do for late players in terms of upgrades? Should they get to pick, or just get a bunch of random ones? Is it still fun if you spawn in with a jumble of several facility levels’ worth of random upgrades? Gotta find the balance between what’s feasible and what’s fun here.

2. Technical limitations. This is the backend stuff, like how a new player’s computer links up with the rest of the team and loads in new levels without causing crashes, desyncs or weird client/host discrepancies.

So right now it’s more of an intention than a working prototype. But once we’ve got something together, we’ll test it out and let you know how it works. In any case, our big idea is for new dwarves to spawn in at a bathroom down in the mining facilities, for the ironclad plot continuity that the late dwarf simply took a long time on the toilet.

To wrap things up, here’s a look at the toilet we’re working on. Let us know in the comments what you think the Reclaimers are eating that would make this design necessary.

So there’s our month in a nutshell. We’ve been busy over here on several fronts – in case you didn’t notice, Season 06 of Deep Rock Galactic comes out tomorrow! Be sure to give it a spin when you can.

Take care out there, and talk to you soon.

With love, -The Ghost Ship Crew