Ghost Ship Games announced Season 07, Season 08 and a paid expansion in one post dated 29 September 2026, delivered at Coffee Stain Publishing’s Big Break Showcase. The expansion is the part with no precedent: the post concedes that charging money is “a first for us.”
This site has never covered Deep Rock Galactic, so this is the first page here on the subject. It does not re-narrate the announcement. It separates the parts of that post that carry a window from the parts that carry a hedge, and it checks the season’s headline systems against rules the game already documents — because two of them run straight into existing systems, and the post’s own wording is looser than the systems it points at.
What this covers: the three items Ghost Ship confirmed — Season 07 “Contingency Protocol”, Season 08, and a paid expansion — with the post’s dates, its hedges and its work-in-progress disclaimer kept intact. Why it matters: only one of the three has a window, that window is a target rather than a date, and the season revisits the Perk System that the wiki last records being reworked in Update 28: Feeling Perky. Who should care: current players sitting on unspent perk points, and lapsed players deciding when to come back.
The calendar, as stated
Three items, two windows, and one of those windows covers two products.
| Item | Window in the post | Cost | How much the post says |
|---|---|---|---|
| Season 07: “Contingency Protocol” | “somewhere in December 2026” — described as an aim | Free | Six headed sections, from overclocks to a new Performance Pass |
| Season 08 | Summer 2027, same day as the expansion | Free | “likely one of the smaller ones”; continues Season 07’s story |
| Expansion DLC | Summer 2027 | Paid, price not stated | No content list; details “still up in the air” |
| Hoxxes Halloween 2026 | 22 October – 5 November 2026, 13:00 CET | Free | Assignments, headgear, skull deposits |
The wording on Season 07 is worth keeping exactly as written. The post says “We’re aiming for a release date somewhere in December 2026” — a target, in a month, with the word “somewhere” attached to it. It also carries the standard disclaimer that everything described is “a work in progress, and may be subject to change.” Nothing here is a ship date, and the wiki’s update-history page lists Season 07 simply as “(December 2026)” alongside “Season 08 + Expansion DLC (Summer 2027)”, which is the same information restated rather than tightened.
Season 07: the five headline systems
The post groups the season into overclocks, the Perk System, tattoo cosmetics, traversal tool paintjobs, a season event and a Performance Pass. Six headings; the cosmetic pair is small enough to read as one.
| System | What the post states | What it does not state |
|---|---|---|
| Overclocks | “about 20 new Overclocks in total”, with secondary weapons as the focus; examples named are Neurotoxin Minelets, Dragonfire Shells, Dismantler Rounds | Which class gets which, or a per-weapon count |
| Perk System | 11 new perks, some old perks reworked, a new “Perk Maintenance” system, and “Perk Proficiency” slots for excess points | Which perks are reworked, and what Proficiency actually buffs |
| Tattoo cosmetics | The Kadoc Inker creature: passive, conflict-shy, camouflage-capable; ink sacs harvested for industrial pigments, with unsanctioned tattoos as a rumour | How many tattoos, or how they unlock |
| Traversal tool paintjobs | Paint for traversal tools, “either to match your outfit, or for another look altogether” | Whether it is a Performance Pass reward or a separate unlock |
| Season event | Drop Pod crash sites; recover onboard Memory Cores; “gravity may still be a bit wonky there” | Rewards, and how the gravity modifier behaves |
| Performance Pass | A new pass, with “Ironclad Tactical” as its signature weapon framework | Track length, or what else is on it |
The Kadoc Inker is worth dwelling on only because it is the season’s one genuinely new entity: a camouflaged cave creature that you find and harvest rather than fight. The post describes it as passive and conflict-shy, which means the tattoo system’s input is a search-and-gather task rather than a combat drop, and it explicitly jokes that the ink is for “industrial pigments” while rumouring that it also works for tattoos.
The perk-point pile is the design problem
Read against the existing Perk System, the revision is less about new toys than about a dead end. Perks are bought with Perk Points, awarded by completing Milestones and claimed at the Key Performance Indicator terminal; the tree is tiered, so a set number of purchases in the lower tiers unlocks the next one, and two extra passive slots are available for purchase at tiers 4 and 9. Every one of those inputs eventually stops.
The post names the symptom in its own words: “solving the issue with longtime players amassing a huge pile of unspent perk points.” The fix has two halves. First, expand the pool — 11 new perks, plus reworks of existing ones. Second, give the surplus somewhere to go: once every perk is unlocked, “Perk Proficiency” slots accept excess points in exchange for “very small baseline stat buffs.” A veteran with nothing left to buy finally has a sink.
The third piece is the one to watch. “Perk Maintenance” is described as functioning “similar to the existing Weapon Maintenance system”, and the wiki’s description of that system is narrow: it is tracked per weapon, it advances on mission XP for the equipped weapons, it unlocks paintjobs, and it “carries no benefits for a weapon’s combat performance.” If Perk Maintenance inherits that shape, it is a cosmetic track keyed to which perks you run — a nudge to vary builds rather than a power curve. The post half-confirms and half-complicates this. Its own description of the traversal-tool paintjob system says that system “will likely tie into the Performance Pass, as well as a new ‘perk maintenance system’ that rewards players for exploring different perk builds.” So the same feature is described once as a Weapon Maintenance analogue and once as a reward for build variety. The two readings are compatible, but only one of them is a mechanic as the game currently defines maintenance, and the post does not say which it means.
That ambiguity has a practical consequence. If Perk Maintenance is cosmetic, the season’s meaningful progression addition is Perk Proficiency and its deliberately small buffs. If it rewards switching builds with anything more, that is a bigger change to how players spend points. The post is not going to settle it before December, and its work-in-progress disclaimer covers it.
Twenty overclocks, aimed at secondaries
“About 20 new Overclocks in total” is a real number with a real constraint behind it. Overclocks are an endgame modification unlocked after a class’s first Promotion, and the wiki is explicit that “each overclock can only be equipped on a specific weapon”, with three classes of them — Clean, Balanced and Unstable — carrying progressively larger boosts and penalties. Equipping one also requires at least one purchased modification in each of that weapon’s tiers.
So the twenty do not arrive as a pool you can draw from. They are distributed across the four classes’ secondary weapons, and a given overclock is only reachable by a player who has promoted the right class and invested in the right gun. That is a narrower promise than “twenty new overclocks” reads as, and the post does not say how the twenty split.
The three named examples — Neurotoxin Minelets, Dragonfire Shells, Dismantler Rounds — are names only. The post gives no stats, no class assignment and no Clean/Balanced/Unstable classification, so anyone ranking them now would be ranking a name. Treat the secondary-weapon focus as the real headline: it moves the attention away from primaries, which is where most build advice concentrates.
What Season 08 and the expansion leave open
Three sentences in the post do most of the work here, and two of them are hedges.
Season 08 and the expansion release simultaneously in summer 2027. Season 08 is free, “like every other season before it”, and is described as “likely one of the smaller ones” that will build on the story Season 07 sets up. The expansion costs money, and the post’s defence of that is about ambition rather than scope: a paid expansion “allows us to be way more ambitious with the content we’re adding.”
What is missing is the entire purchase decision. No price, no content list, no platform or edition information, and the post says plainly that “lots is still up in the air” and that the team will talk about Season 08 and the expansion after Season 07 ships. A roadmap that names a product eighteen months before it describes it is a statement of intent, not a pre-order case.
There is also a wider frame the post sketches and does not fill in. It says the coming year covers “not only this game, but the extended DRG universe as well”, and then presents that plan as a single image rather than as text. The only release windows the post states are December 2026 and summer 2027; the universe timeline is not readable as dates in the announcement itself, so there is nothing further to report from it.
What is live right now
The one dated thing in the whole picture is the event already running. Hoxxes Halloween launched on Thursday 22 October 2026 at 13:00 CET and runs to 5 November at 13:00 CET. It carries a Straw Boss headgear for the seasonal assignment, a “Last Year’s Horrors” assignment that unlocks the previous years’ Halloween hats, and flying skulls that pay a Double Performance Point Bonus when deposited. The wiki’s Performance Pass page explains why that bonus matters: some seasonal events spawn a deposit item that doubles a mission’s Performance Points, and 5,000 Performance Points is one rank of the progression track.
The commercial context is a discount, not a launch: at the time of writing the store lists the game at 70% off, $8.99 against a $29.99 base, with 304,253 recommendations in total and 94% of the last 30 days’ 992 reviews positive. Those are snapshot figures from 29 October 2026 and will move.
For anyone weighing whether a free season plus a paid expansion is a fair trade, the site’s existing read on how season cadence and paid tiers interact is the general case; Ghost Ship’s version is unusually explicit about which half of the split stays free.
How to plan around a target
Three things follow from the wording, and none of them require a decision before December.
Do not convert “aiming for somewhere in December 2026” into a date, and do not plan time off around it. The post’s own work-in-progress line covers every system in it, and the only part of the announcement with a hard stop is the Halloween event on 5 November.
If you are short of perk points, note that reworks are promised for existing perks but not specified. The current ranking of what to buy is therefore provisional in a way it would not be for a cosmetic-only season — the post says some old perks are being reworked without saying which, so a purchase made purely on present value is a bet on the rework.
And if you are returning for Season 07, the mechanical entry cost is unchanged. Overclocks still need a Promotion first, which means the season’s twenty new options are gated behind a step that has nothing to do with the season itself.