Dune: Awakening's survival systems might do the impossible: make smashing boulders and collecting water fun

GamesMMODune AwakeningDune: Awakening’s survival systems might do the impossible: make smashing boulders and collecting water funWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Funcom)

Sci-fi character from Dune

I like survival, but there are a few activities in survival games that almost instantly become mindless chores. I’m talking about smashing open rocks and boulders for ore, and that endless task we also practice in real life every day: keeping ourselves hydrated.

Breaking boulders and drinking water. It’s not that I dread these activities, but they usually wind up being the tasks that get in the way of the stuff I actually want to be doing. I’ll be hunting deer and run out of flint arrowheads: welp, time to murder another rock with my pickaxe. Or I’ll be happily climbing a mountain and realize, whoops, I need to drink or I’ll start losing health… where’s the nearest river?

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At least you won’t be using a stupid primitive pickaxe to crack rocks on Arrakis, but instead a tool called a cutter ray, which is like a handyman’s version of Dune’s lasguns. Using the analysis mode of the cutter ray, you can identify the weak points of the boulder you want to mine, or the structural weakness of a piece of wreckage you want to turn into scrap.

The weakness appears as a line or pattern drawn across the object you’re cutting, and if you trace along the line with the beam of your cutter, it will take you less time to finish and the object will produce more resources.

(Image credit: Funcom)

A person using a laser to cut a rock

It reminds me a little of smashing boulders and chopping trees in Rust: a glint will appear on the boulder (and a red X on the tree trunk), giving you a target to aim for, and it’ll move to another spot with each successful strike. The more times you connect with the target, the quicker you’re able to destroy the boulder and collect its resources. It’s a minigame to help make the mindless chores in Rust a little less dull, and I like it a lot. It’s great to see something along those lines here in Dune: Awakening.

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(Image credit: Funcom)

Person in a cave looking through a hole and seeing a bright sun

Eventually players will acquire a stillsuit, which captures the wearer’s moisture—sweat, urine, and in the books at least, even poop—and recycle it for drinking water. Once you’re wearing a stillsuit, you’ll see a second water meter appear beside your original one. As your character’s water meter decreases, the stillsuit’s water meter will increase: it’s capturing your wastewater and recycling it for you. Gross! But also very cool.

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(Image credit: Funcom)

Person in armor and hood pointing gun

Speaking of gross, those enemies you kill? They’re full of precious water too, though quite a lot of it is unfortunately in blood form. When you’re just getting started on Arrakis you may have to do some grim stuff to survive, like use a rusty needle and a crude blood bag to extract a fallen enemy’s blood and, y’know, chug it.

…drinking blood is not really good for you.

(Image credit: Funcom)

A base on a desert planet

I asked about a couple of other survival systems that weren’t shown in the presentation: food and illness. There is food in the game, said Scott Junior, executive producer of Dune: Awakening, though it will provide buffs and benefits as opposed to serving as meals. “We wanted to put all of our survival pressure, really, on that water [meter],” he said.

As for illnesses: “There is an illness in the form of spice addiction,” Junior said. “That’s the main one. We’re not too ready to talk about that yet.”

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Let’s rock#

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