You have to have goals in any MMO, some reason to get you logging in, day after day. It could be levels, it could be dungeon runs, it could be raiding.
But in D:A, levels come quickly and are really only a mechanism to earn skill points, dungeon runs — research facilities — are cut from just a few templates, and all the boss monsters are solo fights. The D:A endgame is based around PvP, and here that’s usually guilds coming out against solo adventurers in the Deep Desert. I don’t mean to demean the PvE content; some of the research facilities tell interesting stories through their recorded messages — but there does come a time when you’re just eager to get the loot and get out of there.
What keeps me coming back is this vision I have of scout ornithopters and assault craft flying across the desert, flanking a huge, lumbering carrier darkening the cloudless sky like a huge, mythological raptor, a spice harvester slung beneath it. The squadron reaches a huge spice blow. The scout craft separate to watch for worm sign and enemies. The assault ‘thopters patrol nearby. The carrier lowers the harvester to the ground, and the harvester hoovers up all the spice.
Worm sign! There’s a distant line of dust curving to head straight toward the spice blow. If it gets here before we leave, it will kill us all and we will lose — everything.
A scout peels off to place a thumper to distract the worm while the carrier recovers the harvester and the squadron flies off to safety as the sandworm erupts from the ground beneath the spice blow, snapping its three-part jaws on empty desert air as its meal flies away on many wings.
That. That screenshot above. That’s what I want to be part of.
And after yesterday, we’re very close to making this a reality.
Most MMOs these days emphasize the importance of mounts. You can move around more quickly, they look cool, they open up new parts of the game.
In Dune: Awakening, all these things apply. Building your first vehicle, a sandbike, marks your graduation from the starter zone. Building your first ornithopter, typically the scout, lets you travel to the Deep Desert and the PvP endgame (and is required to advance and finish the game’s plotline).
With the scout ornithopter, you’ve finished all the required vehicles. You can add different attachments to give it more PvE or PvP abilities. Even at the highest level of the game, the scout will be your most useful vehicle for most of the things you’ll do.
If the scout ornithopter is a sports car, the assault ornithopter is the pickup truck. With the storage module attached, it can carry a truly impressive amount of cargo between the Deep Desert and the main guild bases in the Hagga Basin. When we’re taking down the desert base ahead of the weekly everything-erasing Coriolis Storm, it is our assault thopters that are carrying the precious materials and expensive components to safety.
With thrusters and rocket launchers attached, the assault thopter becomes the primary means of making war against other guilds. It is armored and deadly. I felt I’d leveled up when I made mine; with rocket launchers attached, I could attack the NPC defenders of downed starships without having to put myself in personal danger. (This turned out to be not so useful; the rockets are tough to aim against individual NPC targets).
I was almost to my vision of a flying squadron. I needed just one more ship; the carrier.
We haven’t yet started to participate in the “Control the Landsraad” endgame, where controlling a majority of the control points in the deep desert allows you to select buffs for the coming week. The Landsraad is a council made up of all the major and minor Houses on the planet. The two Major Houses — Atreides and Harkonnen — attempt each week to enlist enough minor Houses to their side in order to gain control of the Landsraad. This week it belongs to the Harkonnen, and among other things, they decreed that all crafting costs have a 25% discount.
Making the carrier and a spice harvester is expensive, requiring vast quantities of the rarest items in the game. I made a spreadsheet.
The 25% discount meant that making the carrier would have to happen this week, or we’d have to work even more to make it next week.
The components with a green background are the ones we were short. We’d need to collect all of these.
- Plastanium is the high level tier 6 material, used for most everything. The other tiers are copper, iron, steel (iron + carbon), aluminum and duraluminum (aluminum + jasmium crystal). Like steel and duraluminum, it requires two components — titanium and stravidium fiber, which itself is processed from stravidium ore in a high level chemical refinery.
- Advanced Servoks are found in dungeons and downed starships.
- Cobalt Paste is refined from crystals in the highly contested Hagga Rift
- Plasteel Composite Armor Plating (abbreviated Plasteel Armor in the spreadsheet) comes from downed starships and shuttles in the Deep Desert, but can also be crafted in an Advanced Survival Fabricator.
- Spice Melange is refined from spice, which is harvested in any open desert part, but is most common in the PvP sections of the Deep Desert. Harvesting spice will summon sandworms. In worlds with active PvP, it will also summon enemy guilds who want to get spice the easy way — by taking yours. The base conversion rate is 100 raw spice makes 1 spice melange, but higher level spice refineries can improve this ratio somewhat.
- The other components are also looted from high level research facilities and Deep Desert downed starships.
By the end of the day, we’d obtained all these items.
Calrain made the plastanium we needed, and he often takes his buggy down into the rift to get crystals for paste. He’d also harvested the vast majority of the spice we had at the start of the day.
In our world, there is an infamous Deep Desert denizen, Talonqueen. She seems to always be on. Yesterday, she broadcast that she’d dumped hundreds of spice melange, the incredibly valuable processed spice, on the Arrakeen auction house for a very reasonable price.
I went back to my base in the Hagga Basin, gathered up all my gold, went to Arrakeen and bought every bit. Spice Melange obtained.
There is a downed starship near-ish to our Deep Desert base that has great loot and no enemies. I farmed that all day, along with downed shuttles, to get most of what we needed. We were still short on the plasteel composite armor plating. The answer: crafting. They can be crafted in an Advanced Survival Fabricator. Problem: we didn’t have one. I went back to Calrain’s base to get some stuff I’d need, and then I built one in the Deep Desert, used that make the last component I needed, made the carrier parts in the Advanced Vehicle Fabricator, and found that there was no space in our base that was large enough to hold the carrier.
Frustrating. I made the hangar area bigger. I removed everything from the hangar — even the stairs. Always something in the way.
It took me awhile, but I realized that what was in the way, was the force field that comprises the hangar ceiling.
I removed the pentashield ceiling, raised the walls all around, reset the pentashield and built the carrier. It was BIG.
I found a (mostly full) large fuel cannisters and fed it into the carrier. 16% filled! I took the carrier up in the air, took some screenshots, had it pick up my scout thopter and place it back down, and that was the end of the fuel.
I brewed up some more large fuel cannisters and used most of three of them to fill it up.
Done. One step closer to my vision of an ornithopter squadron.
Next step is the harvester itself. Making that is almost as difficult as making the carrier, and these are both very expensive vehicles to be the number one most at risk PvP targets. They are slow and valuable and have nothing but their armor with which to defend themselves. Destroying one or both would set most guilds back days, or longer.
Solo players who make the carrier typically use it to haul a sand buggy around to do world-class harvesting and portage back in Hagga Basin. The problem with that is that the resources in the Basin aren’t really that hard to get with the buggy, without needing the carrier. You can drive right into the rift for crystals; aluminum is commonly found in Eastern Shield Wall. Jasmium crystals in the Sheol region of Hagga Basin might be the one place where the carrier could ease the way, but taking a scout in for targeted harvesting runs on foot tend to provide all the jasmium we really need.
We will likely use it to take a buggy between the rock outcroppings in the Deep Desert to supercharge plastanium production. We may have made the endgame vehicle, but we still have our own gear to upgrade, and that takes vast amounts of material as well.
Unfortunately, neither of our buggies can currently actually mine things in the Deep Desert; it requires a Mark 6 Cutter Ray to be mounted on the buggy.
No problem, though — I just checked, and we can make a Mark 6 Cutter Ray, but just one of them. And the two of us in the Deep Desert, each with a buggy.
Who gets it?
Might be that PvP happens, after all…
