MMO

Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I played some more Dune Awakening and spent a good chunk of the evening running from Sandworms. I’ve crossed the gap from Hagga Basin South into the Eastern Vermillius Gap, signifying a shift from Copper-based crafting to Iron-based crafting. I am not sure if this is true, but every time I have ever crossed the gap… I end up summoning a worm. Since I made several crosses yesterday to truck resources to the north, that means I spent quite a bit of time running like hell from sandworms. I also had the bad luck of triggering a sandworm when coming back from the Anvil as well, and then on one of my runs, got clipped by a Sardaukar stun beam thingy, thankfully did not have a worm on my ass… and was able to just run like hell once it unfroze me. I tried the build base from template thing, but it was a bit too fiddly for my tastes, and I just built a new design.

I am way happier with the placement of my Vermillius base than I was with the previous start at the launch of the game, and I have ready access to plenty of Iron just within easy distance of my base. The big problem once you cross the gap, however, becomes that every bandit camp has folks with a Holtzman shield and seems to deal way the hell more damage than before. I find myself constantly struggling to get enough water, because once you move into the Iron tier… refinding metal starts to take copious amounts of water. There is a small bandit camp across the way from my base, and I kept going over there to bleed them dry so I could keep my water reserves stocked. I desperately need a dew reaper, but I have no way of getting flour sand other than randomly looting it off baddies. I have gotten enough to craft one block of silicon, but I need four to make my reaper. I might just go over to The Anvil and see if they have one for sale.

One of the things that annoys me about Dune Awakening is how strictly you have to align with the quests. For example, when I got the quest to cross into the Vermillius gap, I had to craft bike parts… even though I already had a bike. I also had to demolish part of my base so that I could place down an advanced doohickey. It also forced me to abandon my base in the south… but I did so by going back down there, demolishing the base gadget, and then placing another one right back there. I have been maintaining that base so that Ace can come raid my stores and use it as a temporary location when they get to the point where they have to do the Imperial Testing facility. I just hate how much the main quest sequence is dictating my actions, and I wish there were a way to opt out of specific steps. However, you can’t really do that because the crafting sequence is hard-gated based on your progression. There was a bunch of useful stuff gated behind abandoning that base… so I had to do it in spite of not wanting to in the least. The south is still way easier to farm fremen materials than anything up in the north.

I was able to make a bunch of upgrades, including my first Holtzman Shield, which is wild because I swear last time playing this game, I had an MK1 one much earlier. It makes me wonder what quest I unintentionally skipped. I also outfitted myself in a full Kirab Stillsuit, which I prefer to use over the more protective armors. As part of this, I upgraded my power pack again and cutterray, and crafted my very first handheld resource scanner. I did not make one of these the last time I was playing, and ultimately waited until I had a dune buggy with a scanner before even playing with this functionality. Seeing how limited the range is… I question if this is even worth researching. I can easily see all of the resources it is pointing out for me, so I am not really sure what the idea behind this gadget is. Maybe it is for folks who are bad at discerning what a resource is from what is just a set decoration greeble?

I might hold off a bit from playing and let Ace catch up with me. I think a lot of the larger camps in Vermillius Gap would be way more enjoyable to farm with another person. Hopefully, I can connect up with them this weekend or one of the other AggroChat folks playing on this server. There is also supposedly a Welcome Back cache, and I sent a note to support about that, and they asked me a bunch of questions. My character seems to have poofed from the last time I played, so I am going to have to feed them the information about that character. Apparently, with Tam, they flooded him in resources, so here is hoping that I can get a similar carepackage because if nothing else, it will ease the transition for some of the other folks just starting out. I was harvesting Cobalt when I last played, so if I can get some of those resources, it would be amazing.

Sometimes things happen really quickly. We had been commenting recently that, at some point, we wanted to give Dune Awakening another go. For me, it landed at exactly the wrong time… right before a Path of Exile league. One of the big turn-offs was the real-world upkeep aspect of the game, and the fact that I needed to log in periodically to refill the power packs on my base so that it would not deteriorate. All of that said, I had a lot of fun while I was playing it and learned a lot of things about the game itself that would make a restart feel so much better. Saturday night, after the podcast, I logged pretty quickly, and then when I got up Sunday morning to edit said podcast… I noticed a chain of messages in our games of the moment channel. Essentially, Tam had made good on the plans and reactivated our private server, and as such, Sunday morning after posting the show, I was back in the character creator building a new desert dweller.

This time around, I went with a Swordmaster and landed on a look that felt more “me”. While I generally play fairly lily-white characters in games, I can’t bring myself to do so in the Dune universe. It is just too unrealistic that anyone who has spent any amount of time in the desert would not have a lovely bronze complexion. I went Swordmaster because it has this bum rush type ability that seemed like it might be really useful early in the game. I was a Mentat previously, and the whole floating turret thing was cool, but felt like it took too much planning and setup for it to really be useful for very long. Swordmaster, on the other hand, has a ton of perks that improve how well you can survive in harsh conditions, which seemed like something I care way more about. Ironically, though I find myself using a rifle way more often than I am using a blade, because if I can keep things at ranged I can generally whittle them down pretty quickly. I desperately need a shield belt, though, so I need to stop stalling and do the quests that I believe unlock it.

One of the huge benefits of playing this already… is that I understand the flow of the early game a bit better. Nothing that I do in the first two zones is likely to have any permanence. I am already on base number three, and instead of building grand constructions… I am building essentially what is needed. I am also not too torn up about leaving resources behind, and carrying only the things that are actually more challenging to acquire, like the fremen materials. Right now, I have a small base situated vaguely between the Imperial Testing Station and the shipwreck, so that I can comfortably farm both of those. My first goal was to gather up enough blue materials to craft a Sandbike, because ultimately, I will need that to transition up into the next zone and start mining iron. I do want to finish doing the various contracts I have before moving upwards, though, because it is not like I am in an extreme rush. Thinking about Dune Awakening characters like Minecraft, or even ARPG characters, helps immensely because I know I will probably reroll again at some point in the future and wipe the slate clean again.

Another thing that I have noticed this time around is that I am way more willing to move around during the daytime. I think during my first playthrough, I was scared to death of being stranded out in the sun for any length of time, and as such, I spent too much time waiting for nightfall, where I felt like I could move around more freely. There are always shadows about, and you can get to the safety of them pretty quickly. It is highly unlikely that you will ever truly be stranded, and in a worst-case scenario, you build a temp base. I’ve even gotten way more comfortable crossing expanses of open desert during the day if I can figure out a way to hop between shadows. Daytime has become the time I farm resources that are easy to get, and Nighttime is when I set out on more serious adventures, like crossing between complexes of rock. When I play next, I plan on heading over to the ship wreck and farming some materials there, and maybe pushing past that to knock out the kill quest for the Trooper at the first city.

The highlight of yesterday was that I have my sandbike ready to roll, which is going to make finishing up everything that I want to do in Hagga South that much easier. Essentially, once I get ready to make the migration to the next area, I will load up some basic materials and then find a safe place to cross the gap. I really should have put in a proper two-wide door into this base instead of having to try to navigate my bike out of a normal door. It works for now, but is more fiddly than I would have liked it. Oh well, these are things that I can fix in the next base, because I know I will be starting over once again just around the corner. Essentailly I am building these 2×3 foundation block huts that have a second story. It gives me plenty of room to put a few power generators down on the bottom floor and all of the necessary machines on the top floor. They are not architectural marvels, but they are efficient… which feels like is way more important while you are still roaming around the map prior to getting your ornithopter. I know Tam already has a decent base in Aluminum territory, so once I get up there, I can rely on that somewhat. I think it will be important that we build bases in decent spots so that we can each utilize the other bases as a bit of a network.

The thing that I marvel at most about this game is its sound design. Moving around the desert feels amazing because you are constantly aware of the sounds and movement of the worms below you. Additionally, combat noises feel really good, and the ever-present threat of the Sardaukar at night keeps you on your toes. It feels like the world is the real enemy that you are fighting against, though, and it is living and breathing and always waiting for you to slip up. All of that said… I am starting to get to the point where I am willing to take more risks because the worst thing that can happen is that I have to start over. Progression goes much faster once you know what you are doing, so the idea of losing everything is no longer as daunting as it once was. Sure, there are some key progression moments… first sandbike, first dune buggy, first ornithopter… but those are also things that other players can help you with. I am sure if I got desperate, I could get someone to craft me Sandbike bits again.

The other big thing that I noticed is that it feels like the world has way more resources than it used to. Even the patch that just dropped seems to have added a bunch of nodes that were not there yesterday. For example, my current base did not really have much copper around it, but this morning when I logged in, there were four nodes in the same valley that I built the base in. Essentially, it seems like the game is way more forgiving than it was at launch, which only serves to make me willing to be a bit more reckless with resources. It felt like, at launch, I spent a lot more time struggling to reach a point of sustainability, and I am not having any of those issues now. So I am not sure if they eased up on how fast you lose water, but that definitely feels a bit easier than it was before. Maybe I just rushed my way to the stillsuit faster this time.

Essentially, I am enjoying my time back in Dune Awakening, and we will see how far I can get before Path of Exile 3.28 drops.