DREGS Update: Friendship, Failure, and Hyperion

Happy International Friendship Day! To celebrate the bonds that hold a crew together we’re dropping our first major update. In DREGS friendship means blame, betrayals, and spectacular crew fails.

Since launch, you’ve sent us a mountain of feedback, bug reports, clips, and suspiciously conflicting stories about what happened to your crewmates. We’ve been working through all of it.

This update introduces Hyperion, a new map designed for veteran crews. We’ve also expanded the post-game experience, improved voice chat and online stability, shortened loading times, and fixed problems across the existing maps.

Here’s what’s changed:

New Content

New Map: Hyperion

Designed as a challenging map for your crew, Hyperion joins the map rotation. It is only available on DANGER 3+ and requires substantial game knowledge and expertise to make quota.

Lasers + Hover Drones, what could go wrong…

New Helmet: Suspicious Monkey

It’s all sus.

Bug Fixes & Improvements

Gameplay and Systems

• Danger levels now have progression, you’ll have to complete a few missions at a danger level to unlock the next danger level.
• Keycards are no longer lost when you die.
• Reworked zombie resurrection to fix most cases where players saw different resurrection states.
• Doors and chompers now detonate volatile objects when closing on them.
• Angry CWR-KEY can now open locked airlock duct doors.
• Teleporter orbs now spawn according to the selected difficulty.
• Co-op triggers no longer erase scanned text when successfully completed.
• Fixed crates occasionally appear as the wrong object.
• Fixed a damage-classification issue.
• Hand Tools now apply more force to corpses - please use this information responsibly.
• Exploding Creep Goo Pods now have longer and more predictable fuses. No more extremely short surprise detonations.

Map Fixes and Tuning

Mothership

• Fixed the vending machine dispensing items from the wrong side.
• Players can no longer become trapped behind the second-floor shelves.

Hecate

• Fixed several locations where players could become stuck inside monster closets.
• Moved the Alien Realm teleporter to a new location.

Kronos

• Removed geometry blocking a scorpion spawner.
• Updated flame-trap tuning.
• Reduced the number of doors affected by the Server incident

Plutus

• The purple laser hazard now appears only on the highest difficulty.
• Drones now respawn correctly and will ‘timeout’ if left unattended for 30s
• Cleaned up duplicated biomass spawners.
• Fixed the “ice steps” route that looked climbable but wasn’t.

Other Maps

• Demeter: The Server incident is now contained to the Research Wing.

• Tethys: Restored the introductory difficulty to Difficulty 1.

• Apollo: Fixed a monster spawner issue.

• All maps: Updated flame traps across every map.

Online and Voice Chat

• Voice chat now defaults to Global instead of being disabled.
• Updated the online and voice chat backend.
• Improved voice audio buffering to reduce dropouts.
• Fixed a crash when joining a friend through a Steam lobby invitation.
• Improved the accuracy of active player counts in sessions.
• Discord Rich Presence now displays accurate, up-to-date lobby player counts.

Creep Void Improvements

• Adjusted lighting to make Creep Voids easier to navigate.
• The exit teleporter now has a distinct visual effect, making it easier to identify.
• Greatly reduced the number of pod launchers found inside Creep Voids.
• Goo Pods inside Creep Voids can no longer become teleporter pods.
• Creep Void teleporters now use designated destinations, preventing players from being deposited inside locked rooms.

Performance

• Precompiled Shaders to dramatically reduced the load time on first launch

Spectator Improvements

• Spectators can now watch the death of the player they are following instead of immediately cutting away.
• Spectating now respects your Reduced Arm Motion accessibility setting.

UX and Accessibility Changes

• Redesigned the post-game screen.
• Expanded the Accolade system celebrating the many impressive (and questionable) things your crew accomplished.
• New item unlock notifications now remain on screen longer.
• You can now reopen the post-game screen after closing it.
• Fixed incorrectly scaled player names, inaccurate credits earned, scrolling problems, and Accolades duplicating when the screen was reopened.
• The “Bring Loot Here” indicator will show while viewing your inventory or loot list, even if your inventory is not full.
• Added a flashlight icon to the interface.
• Completed a general audio mix pass.
• Added a Motion Blur setting that may reduce motion sickness.

Thank you to everyone who has played DREGS, shared feedback, streamed the game, or convinced their friends to board a clearly unsafe spacecraft.

This is the first of our regular updates. Keep sending us your feedback, and keep showing us all the inventive new ways your crews manage to fail.

-The DREGS team