Dune Awakening: The Returnining

I’ve been off Dune: Awakening for awhile. Not because the game wasn’t fun, but because I felt I wasn’t really contributing to the guild progression in the various guilds I’d joined. I get tired of playing the same games every day and really look forward to trying all the new games, or even the old favorites, but — when you’re playing with other people, it’s really important to try and contribute.

And I just wasn’t able to do that anymore.

Keeping a presence, in a multiplayer server, means logging in on a regular basis to gather components for fuel to keep your generators running. This was a little bit of a flex, because in the server I was on, I could have just given up my base and lived in the guild housing — which I was urged to do. It was me wanting to keep my own base that led to the issues with keeping the base running which then led to me not wanting to take the time to keep the base running and so I quit.

It wasn’t them, it was me.

I wasn’t going to play the solo version of Dune; I’d already spent over 500 hours playing. And yet, I wanted to see the new story content without having to go through the trouble of finding out where the folks I’d played the game with before had gone to, setting up the base again, getting involved, etc.

What I wanted to do would be to bring my current multiplayer server progress over to a single, offline server, and just continue from there. This is something you can do in Valheim, for instance. Starting over from scratch, well… that’s really the last thing I wanted to do. I had a lot of fun duoing through the game with Calrain. Retracing the same steps alone sounded tedious.

I was reading about Mailvaltar’s adventures in the solo Dune, where he mentioned you could just… turn off the things that would make soloing hard. For instance, sandworms. Decrease damage you take. Increase damage you make. Make all the hard stuff go away. Just tear through the content.

You could even set the build cost for everything to zero.

Wait, no gathering? I actually had a lot of fun, gathering. Taking a buggy deep into Hagga Rift, dodging sandworms on flour sand fields, and of course, tag teaming with carrier and crawler in the large spice fields of the Deep Desert? That was premium content. But it also took a lot of time.

Zero build cost meant I could build bases, vehicles, weapons and gear… without any gathering at all. Crafting machines, generators, wind traps — all free. I could focus on the story.

I also set the combat to easy; that was one setting I had to restore. Turns out easy combat just isn’t really any fun.

So, currently working through the Harkonnen faction quests along with the main story quests in order to eventually be able to do Landsraad missions and start the long climb back up the specialization trees. It will go faster.

I might even re-enable sandworms. But first, I think I’ll take a carrier and a crawler and harvest some spice in the Deep Desert, see if it’s still fun if I don’t have to be watching for worm sign every single second and pray that Calrain can grab me in time with the carrier. (He always did).