Dune: Awakening is a wonderfully immersive game that allows players to insert themselves in the world of Arrakis and play among the sandworms and political intrigue the series is known for, but before you get to any of that, you need to live long enough to see it.

Surviving on Arrakis in Dune: Awakening is, whether you like it or not, painfully accurate to what it would be like if you were to try living on the desert planet for longer than a day. And it doesn’t exactly help your case that the game begins with your player character crash-landing on the planet, with barely anything but the clothes on your back.

While you are guided through some concrete survival steps in the game’s opening hours, this guide will take you through the minutiae of what it takes to survive on Arrakis, and the new way of thinking you’ll need to adjust to in order to make sure you’ll be able to see the sun rise on a new day on Dune.

Dune: Awakening – Tips for Surviving Arrakis

ABP – Always Be Prepared

On one level, always being prepared means having the tools and resources you’ll need to survive at the ready. But more accurately, it means developing habits that ensure you never get caught off guard.

For example, having enough dart ammo in your backpack or making sure your literjon of water is filled before heading out is easy enough to remember, but you also want to make sure you’re not without survey probes. Surveying new areas is an absolute must because it’ll clear away the fog from the new parts of the map you’re exploring and give you a clear picture of how to travel safely.

If you don’t know where the actual closest rock formation is to your current location, it’s easy to get caught out in open sand for too long. And you do not want to be caught in open sand for too long. That’s a fast track to losing everything in the gullet of a sandworm.

This is also why your map is arguably your biggest support for everything you’ll do in Dune: Awakening. Knowing where to go next so you’re safely travelling across the planet is one thing, but another is the fact that your map will also show you where to gather resources you need to stay alive and craft the vehicles and devices you need to aid your survival. ABP means keeping your map up to date, your inventory stocked with essentials, and ensuring that you can handle whatever situations come your way.

Store your vehicle(s)

Take it from someone who has already gone through this experience. Store your vehicle, do not simply leave it next to your base in a shaded area, thinking that’ll be enough to keep it safe from the elements on Arrakis. It isn’t, and you’ll return to your time away from the game with a bike that’s wrecked beyond repair.

When you reach the point where you’re crafting your first bike to drive across the sands, you’ll also be able to craft a device that’ll let you store your bike and redeploy it when you need to make those longer treks across Dune. You should consider this device now part of your permanent inventory, as it is a key piece of kit to have if you plan to do any kind of quick travelling between various points of interest on the planet.

Build for mobility, not for settlements (at first)

When you first start building your own base, it’s tempting to begin to design your dream home on Arrakis. There’s already excellent examples on the Dune: Awakening Reddit page of really impressive bases, in terms of design, and functionality. These are not the kinds of bases you should look to grind out and build off the top.

In the same way you can store a vehicle, you can store a bases design – but not the base itself. That, you’ll have to rebuild, using your construction tool as you move deeper into Arrakis and away from Hagga Basin.

You will reach a point where it is worth building a more permanent settlement that you’ll return to time and again, but there’s no point in trying to make your first base that permanent home. Not only will it make your attempts at keeping it with you as you move into Arrakis more difficult, since you’ll almost certainly not be able to hold enough materials to build it all at once wherever you decide to put down your sub-fief, but abandoning your first base is in fact a mission objective in the early hours of the game.

So until it makes sense, don’t get attached to your base. Oh, and as a side note for when you do build your permanent base, make sure you’re not blocking anyone’s path. It’s annoying enough to have to plan your travel across the sands around not being out in the open for too long. You don’t want to add to that by being the person who build their base between two rock formations causing a route blockage for everyone else in your server.

Keep the lights on in your base, or risk losing it

Speaking of your base, you absolutely need to ensure it always has power. The generator you build for your base does more than just keep your fabricator or blood purifier working, it also generates a shield for your base to protect it from the elements on Arrakis. If you don’t keep it powered up, you risk your base being picked apart by the elements – or worse, picked clean by other players raiding your stuff.

You’ll be able to see how long your base can maintain power for, and if you don’t have every machine in it crafting large-scale devices then the drain on its fuel won’t be too dire at all. It’s not a difficult thing to keep it powered, but it can be an easy thing to forget. And survival always seems to come down to not forgetting the little things.

You won’t win against a sandworm, a sandstorm, or the sun, so don’t chance it

There are three elements of Arrakis that you simply won’t win against and should not take your chances on. Sandworms, sandstorms, and the sun.

The sandworms are a pretty obvious one. They’re huge, will swallow you and everything you have on you whole, and are to be avoided at all times. Shai-Hulud is respected and worshipped for a reason, and as far as we know, Funcom has no plans to add a skill-tree where the end goal is gaining the powers of Atreides descendant Sheeana. Make sure you have an escape plan, whether that’s heading to the nearest rock formation, or flying out of there with an orinthopter, when sandworms are close by.

Sandstorms on Arrakis are to be feared just as much, and you’ll need to ensure you have a way of taking shelter should you hear the warning that one is headed towards your area. Once the warnings begin, every moment spent out in the open to gather more resources or make it to your next destination is done at your own peril.

Lastly, the sun is the third part of this trifecta of terror that you need to always be aware of when travelling the sands of Arrakis. It will boil you faster than you think, dehydrate you faster, and slowly tick down your health if you’re caught out in it for too long. This is why you should always travel at night, especially in the early hours of the game when you’re working your way up to building your first bike. You travel, build, basically do anything, at your own peril in the heat of the Arrakis sun.