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.
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