For all the changes that Funcom has made to the world of Dune for the purposes of telling their own story in Dune: Awakening, the large-scale multiplayer survival game is very faithful to plenty of key aspects of Dune lore.
The Fremen might have been eradicated in Funcom’s version of Dune, but their technologies and impact are everywhere, as is the everlasting and iconic weapon, the Crysknife.
You can actually make your own Crysknife in Dune: Awakening, and this guide will show you how to do it. Unfortunately, this is one of the areas where Funcom made some significant changes to the lore that make the weapon more of a collectors item than anything else.
Dune: Awakening – How To Craft A Crysknife Guide
Ingredients and Requirements
Before getting into the ingredients required for crafting your own Crysknife in Dune: Awakening, you’ll need to have completed the Fourth Trial of Aql. Even if you have the ingredients, the option to craft an Unfixed Crysknife (which is the only kind you can craft) will not appear. Once you’ve completed the trial, the option to craft a crysknife will appear in your crafting menu.
The basics of crafting a Crysknife are easy, since you only need two items. One is Plant Fiber, the basic grass you pick up practically anywhere on Arrakis in order to craft healing items, and a bevy of other useful pieces of kit. The other, you might’ve been able to guess if you’re a fan of the Dune universe, is the tooth of a sandworm.
That is a little more difficult to acquire, but not too much more difficult. All you need to do is get swallowed up by Shai-Hulud himself. When you respawn after giving yourself up to the worm and dying, you’ll find the tooth of a worm in your inventory. It’s possible that you’ll need to do this twice, since there is also a cutscene that you’ll see if you’ve never died to a sandworm before.
Critically, though, before you head out to into the desert to jump on some drumsand, make sure you’ve stored everything in a chest or storage unit in your base. Make sure you have absolutely no equipment on you whatsoever, not in your backpack, not on your person, nothing. You’ll respawn, but the equipment you had on you when Shai-Hulud grabbed you for a snack won’t. That will stay in his belly and will be lost forever.
This does not apply to quest items, though, so you don’t need to run around emptying your inventory of items you can’t be rid of without completing quests if you’re hankering to make yourself a Crysknife as soon as possible. Everything else besides quest items that you can’t take out of your inventory or off your person, is viable to be lost if you leave it with you when you go out worm-tooth gathering.
Once you have 1 Plant Fiber and 1 Worm Tooth, you’ll be able to craft a Crysknife.
Sadly, the Crysknife is not a Viable Weapon
On the one hand, the Crysknife is one of the most powerful weapons in the game, living up to the reputation it is given in the original Dune books. It deals 191.6 points of damage, which is sure to spill the water of anyone willing to stand in your way while you wield the ancient weapon.
The problem is that it’s incredibly fragile, which is where Funcom’s changes come in. It will break after that first swing. It has absolutely no durability and cannot be repaired. This is even the case for any potential Crysknives you may obtain after certain story beats, which is all I’ll say without going into spoiler territory. Dune-heads will know that Crysknives are praised for their durability in the books, but that’s not the case here.
It’s an incredibly powerful weapon, living up to the legend, but, in Funcom’s version of Dune, due to the eradication of the Fremen, it seems that no one knows how to make one that can withstand more than one strike. Or perhaps making it incredibly brittle is just Funcom’s way of ensuring you’re not walking around with a weapon that does 191.6 damage fairly early in the game. Or, it’s a bit of both.
So yes, you can craft a Crysknife, and just like in the lore, it’s not permitted to leave your side, meaning that it’ll become a fixed item in your backpack until it’s destroyed. Yes, it will still look cool, and yes, it’s nice that Funcom has them in the game at all.
Unfortunately, it’s not really something you use unless you want to deliver a powerful one-shot blow to an enemy, whether at a particularly significant moment in Dune: Awakening’s story, or if you have some personal vendetta against an enemy that’s made you particularly annoyed. You could try it in PvP scenarios, though, due to how hairy those can get, you’re better off not leaving yourself unarmed after one strike.
