Dredge will surely go down as of 2023’s biggest indie hits, but fans will have to wait a little longer than expected for the major expansion. Developer Black Salt Games has announced that The Iron Rig DLC for the game will miss its planned Q4 2023 release window and launch instead in 2024.
Announced back in May, The Iron Rig was intended to be developed over the course of “a few months,” the team wrote. However, “we were faced with the reality that, given the time of the year, we’d need more lead time to coordinate our marketing and make the launch as exciting as it could be.” Not wanting to disappoint fans who had been looking forward to the major new addition, the team will still release “some additional content” before the end of this year, though it hasn’t revealed what that is or how much it will cost.
The Iron Rig expansion for Dredge will be center on the Ironhaven Corporation, which is seeking to create a new drilling operation within The Marrows. Given the spooky nature of everything that’s happening in the region, it’s not likely to be as simple as stated. The core gameplay loop of gathering materials and all manner of critters from the deep will return as you seek the truth behind Ironhaven’s goals.
READ MORE: Dredge Proves Fetch Quests Can Be Done Right
Even beyond these planned paid additions, Black Salt has been diligently adding to Dredge since its March 2023 launch. The first major patch added a significant amount of functionality to the in-game map to enable players to plan their trips and navigate better. The second added a photo mode and a large collection of new creatures and aberrations. The most recent introduced the ability to customize your boat. That all is on top of numerous smaller adjustments and fixes to stabilize and improve the overall experience.
In case you’re not convinced, The Escapist’s Frost called Dredge “a humble superstar” in his review, and even Yahtzee had some nice things to say about it.
