Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors – Best Early Game Weapons

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors is a great game with an in-depth progression system. It brings a familiar dwarven twist to the Vampire Survivor-like games, with lots of mining, some questionable employment choices, and lots of guns to fight bugs.

Alongside the multiple upgrade options, players are presented with a whopping 20+ weapons to choose for their dives. However, all of them aren’t available from the start, requiring certain criteria to be met before being unlocked. Here are the weapons that you can unlock the fastest, and can use to crush the alien isopods like they’re, well, bugs.

10 “Lead Storm” Powered Minigun

Okay For Early Stages

• Deals a high amount of damage in the early stages, letting you level up fast at the start
• Starting weapon for the Gunner

In general, directional weapons are very bad for Vampire Survivor-like games. Having to move in a certain direction restricts the potential damage output you can produce. Combine that with the fairly high time to kill prevalent in these games, and you’ve got a useless weapon on your hands.

That remains true for Deep Rock Galactic: Survivors as well, but the Lead Storm Powered Minigun is the best of the sorry bunch. That’s not to say it’s not a powerful weapon in its own right, it’s just severely held back by it’s limitation of only firing in front of the player. Once you reach the latter stages where the enemy HP starts getting very high, it becomes very hard to use. It’s especially difficult to use against bosses and elites.

9 Voltaic Stun Sweeper

Decent [Electrical] Weapon

• Targets a large amount of enemies and deals a lot of arcing electrical damage
• Unlocked by reaching Class Rank 6 on the Scout

What’s better than a boomerang that hits a lot of bugs? A boomerang that electrocutes bugs when it hits them. The Voltaic Stun Sweeper is a good choice in the early game when you don’t have other [Electrical] weapons, but is overshadowed by better options that are unlocked once you’ve progressed your characters to certain levels.

Electrical Damage arcs between enemies, damaging even more bugs than the ones hit by the weapon, and it scales quite nicely if you get certain upgrades during level-ups. If you want to go with an Electric build at the start of your Survivor journey, the Voltaic Stun Sweeper is an okay pick.

8 Cryo Grenade

Great For Bunching Up Enemies

• Slows down enemies, giving the player some breathing room. But it is unreliable most of the time
• Unlocked by default for eligible classes

As the name suggests, the Cryo Grenade slows down enemies. Unlike what the second part of the name suggests, it doesn’t do a lot of damage to said enemies. There aren’t a lot of other [Cold] weapons at the start of the progression ladder so it doesn’t synergize with early builds either.

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Slowing down enemies can be very beneficial if you have enough attack power already. Otherwise, you’ll just give the horde more time to gather together, leading to an even bigger group running behind you. However, with the right AoE weapons, this can help bunch them up and wreak havoc on everything around you. As with all the other grenades, you can’t control where it lands, so it is a bit unreliable.

7 Hi-Volt Thunderbird

Inoffensive Damage Dealer

• A drone that deals electrical damage and helps the player stave off the incoming horde surprisingly well
• Unlocked by default for eligible classes

There’s not much to be said about the Hi-Volt Thunderbird. It’s a drone that deals electrical damage, and it synergizes well with all-drone or electrical build. It’s a fairly inoffensive pick for a weapon. It won’t help you increase your burst damage, but it’s great for crowd control and overall higher damage numbers.

The best thing to do when using drones is to run around in circles. Find a sufficiently squiggly path to lead a lot of enemies around the map, and let the drone do the heavy lifting. They will deal consistent damage, leaving a ton of XP for you to pick up when you make it back.

6 High Explosive Grenade

High Damage, Low Reliability

• Deals a lot of kinetic damage in a large area
• Unlocked by default for eligible classes

The great thing about grenades is that they deal a lot of damage. The bad thing about grenades is that there aren’t a lot of them. But worry not! You can remedy the situation by pumping up the reload speed of the High Explosive Grenade, letting you dispose of large swathes of enemies with a never-ending barrage of explosions.

Don’t forget to focus on increasing the damage and fire rate of the grenade as well. When all of these get to a sufficiently high level, you’ll be unstoppable. However, since getting every single upgrade for the High Explosive Grenade isn’t a viable strategy most of the time, it’s only an okay option rather than a truly great one.

5 Incendiary Grenade

Great Crowd Control

• Creates a lot of fire explosions near the player where enemies can be kited, dealing a lot of damage over time
• Unlocked by default for eligible classes

Set the world on fire, and walk through it like you’re the anti-Christ. The incendiary grenade doesn’t do a lot of damage overall, but it’s a great utility weapon to supplement your existing options. If you see it after you’ve got a bunch of great options in your arsenal already, there’s no harm in picking it up. Be wary though, it’s not very strong at the start.

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It only starts to show its true power when you overclock it to create three explosions instead of one and increase its radius. Once you have that, you’ll have the best way to deal a lot of damage to a large group of enemies. Since you can’t control where the grenade lands, you should follow it and kite enemies towards the explosions. However, that becomes redundant when you have most of the area around you on fire after the overclock.

4 M1000 Classic

Best For Bosses And Elites

• Targets the highest HP targets, making it perfect for dealing with bosses and elites
• Unlocked by reaching Class Rank 3 on the Scout

Perhaps the single best weapon you’ll have at the very start of the game, the M1000 is a great option, no matter which stage you’re on. It works on the simple principle of hitting the biggest baddie, making it a great addition to a game where randomness is the norm.

Since all the shots are piercing as well, you’ll be able to deal with a lot of smaller enemies as well, only if they’re coming at you in a single file. You can force them to do so by creating a narrow tunnel through a rock formation and kiting them in. Its utility in dealing with bosses and elites doesn’t even need to be stated.

3 Krakatoa Sentinel

Cleansing Flames Of Krakatoa

• Deals a lot of fire damage over the course of its life
• Unlocked by default for eligible classes

Why bother shooting enemies when you have a fully autonomous turret that will burn all those bugs for you? The answer is that you don’t. Just deploy a couple of these bad boys and get to mining. The turret will decimate all the smaller enemies coming your way, but you will have to get out of the way of elites and higher-HP enemies.

If you get lucky and get an upgrade to increase the amount of fire beams coming out of the turret, consider the runover. With some really great overclock options, a great damage output, and wonderful synergy regardless of build, this weapon is a must-have. If you’re not playing a stationary build, make sure you go back to where you previously deployed these turrets to gather the sweet XP it helped drop.

2 Voltaic Shock Fence

Absolutely Electrifying

• Creates electrical arcs that damage anything that passes through them
• Unlocked by reaching Class Rank 3 on Engineer

A Voltaic Shock Fence is not a primary weapon by any means. It is essentially a trap that deals a lot of damage. It doesn’t even do that much damage individually, but since it stays on the same spot for a handful of seconds, and since it connects to ALL the other deployed Voltaic Shock Fences in range, you have a death trap for smaller critters in your hands.

When used strategically on choke points where enemies have to pass through them, you create a way to deal an incredibly high amount of damage in a short amount of time. It shows its true potential when the player stays in the same place for a while, letting the deployed fences accumulate to create an interconnected web that just creates an XP farm.

1 LMG Gun Platform

Simple, But Effective

• Shoots basic Kinectic bullets at enemies, but the overclocks improve it a lot
• Starting Weapon for the Engineer

It might be surprising to some that the basic weapon for the engineer is so broken, but that’s the truth. As a game in early access, it’s no wonder that some classes are more broken than others, giving the player an incredible advantage in almost all stages.

The LMG Gun Platform doesn’t seem like a great weapon at first, but after you get a couple of upgrades going to increase its reload time, damage, and firing speed, it becomes a barrier against advancing hordes. Combine that with some fantastic overclock options, and you get a weapon that will singlehandedly let you beat the entire game.

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