Optimizing Deep Rock Galactic Survivor for mobile

Unity details how Piktiv brought Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor to mobile while the PC version was still in active development. That meant a one-way merge strategy, a hard memory ceiling on a 3 GB iPad, and performance targets that had to scale from current flagships down to older Android hardware.

The biggest pressure points were systems that scale with enemy count: pathfinding, physics queries, enemy rendering, damage numbers, and world rendering. The team replaced NavMesh-heavy behavior with flow fields, used a KD-tree to cut down on spatial queries, turned TextMesh Pro damage popups into particle sprites, and baked enemy animation into textures so a shader could drive thousands of units with far less CPU work.

For developers, the interesting part is how aggressively the port was measured and constrained. The team built an automated benchmark mode with six scenarios, including idle baselines and stress tests with 500 to 1,000 enemies, then profiled CPU, GPU, and memory across biomes to catch regressions. That kind of repeatable device testing is especially relevant when the target platform is not one device, but a moving target of RAM limits, thermal throttling, and vendor-specific behavior.

The broader takeaway is that mobile optimization here wasn’t about one magic trick; it was about redesigning core systems around the platform’s limits. Addressables also played a role in keeping the content footprint under control, which is the sort of practical constraint that often decides whether a PC game can survive the jump to mobile at all.