Everything in Dune Awakening DLC – The Lost Harvest

The Dune Awakening team is at Gamescom this week and news is coming out about everything in Dune Awakenings DLC – The Lost Harvest.  In today’s article I’ll discuss everything we know so far in this DLC that is scheduled to release on September 10th.

This update will include free and paid content. The paid content is included if you purchased the deluxe or ultimate edition of Dune Awakening. Otherwise, it’s available at $13 or $25 from the season pass.  Let’s look at everything in the paid DLC.

Paid DLC Content in The Lost Harvest DLC

First we have a new vehicle, which you do not need to own the DLC to use, but will need it to craft it. This will be crafted like others with various levels. It was stated  this doesn’t have any benefits over other vehicles, so it looks like it fills the role of a sand bike more or less. However, the deep desert doesn’t make use of sand bikes, so this is absolutely a vanity piece to just mess around with rather than having a unique utility.

Beyond that, there are new building pieces and decorations, the Dune Man building pieces.  There’s a cool shot of what looks like a garage closing so this stuff may functionally look a little different too on its doors and such.

The most interesting part they just updated on their steam page is there will be 3 expanded imperial testing stations. I’m not sure where these will be located yet though.  These may reference newer facilities in the deep desert or instanced somewhere else. But that should be something to look out for in the coming days, as this hasn’t been touched on anywhere else yet.

Also in the paid DLC will be 2 new armor skins, 4 weapons skins, and an emote.

Lastly there is the Lost Harvest which is not the main story line that’s included for free. A new event will kick off when you receive message of a brand new harvester that’s been shot down.  Next, lets jump into the free content available to everyone gets in the September patch.

Free Update in The Lost Harvest DLC

Chapter 2 continues the main story quest update as part of its free content update. A series of murders in Arrakeen leads to a quest beneath the Arrakeen archives. This will continue our quest working with the other main players in the storyline of Dune Awakening.  Additionally,  there looks to be new dynamic events that will occur in Hagga Basin.

Also coming in this free portion of the update will be character re-customization, new hairstyles, and tattoos. There will be 5 new archetype armors also included which will tie to each skill tree or class in the game. Also mentioned, are contract missions in Harko Village and Arrakeen.

I’ll be interested to learn more here, but I wonder if these will be tied to faction based missions due to their location as the developers have discussed interest in moving their Landsraad activities into a contract based system rather than delivery based system.

Free Trial

Other news from Gamescom includes a Free Trial available today from August 20th – 24th. This will allows players to create characters and play for 10hours on a different new player server environment. If they wish to continue their journey, new players can purchase the game and transfer their character into a permanent server. This isn’t a bad promotion to get more people to try it out. The early stages of this game are the best parts as well currently.

Beyond these listed points, there are also continued quality of life changes coming in the near future.

Quality of Life Changes

Improved player logging – I’m super happy to see this one as someone whos wondered who took what in our guild. You’ll be able to track things in your base and see who is withdrawing what. That’s nice.

Vehicle Salvaging System – They want to provide a salvage for lost vehicles. I wonder if this is to lessen the blow of lost vehicles maybe in deep desert or just any bugs in general. Almost like an insurance system that’s been suggested, to lessen the blow of resource loss to players.

Inventory Management – Lowering weight of cobalt paste and also adding a container that Ornithopters can carry. This will be nice for moving, and the devs have mentioned providing a container that can traverse zone lines. Moving in and out of the deep desert will be WAY less painful, as this adds to player fatigue in its current design.

Instanced Deep Desert Loot – They’ll be changing how boxes work in deep desert so perhaps all players can loot chests whether they are in PvP or PvE zones. Currently, in PvP areas, only one person can loot a chest in the deep desert and then its on a 1.5 hour cooldown. With this change, more players could access loot. This isn’t necessarily bad, but the deep desert needs more change than this to create a healthy PvP environment.

Offline Notifications – For players taking breaks, you can notify yourself via email about power or tax payments to keep your base up to date. I guess this is a nice reminder tool.

Landsraad Rework

Lastly, the Landsraad is a target for rework from Funcom as it fails on multiple fronts in its current design. In short, players turn in stockpiled resources currently and win this by default every week. Whichever side has larger groups of players stockpiling win this political weekly battle.

Their goal is to shift to a contract based system and likely create series of new activities to complete these. Things like races, crafting challenges, racing, treasure maps, duels and even faction vs faction maps.

Clearly they are looking to include both PvE and PvP activities in the Landsraad, but I’d still prefer a faction vs faction system in Dune Awakening where we work with our allies and fight the other faction head on in designated conflict areas. Since release, Dune Awakening bled off a lot of PvP players early on that would enjoy an area where they fight each other rather than primarily targeting helpless PvE players. The Deep Desert doesn’t successfully deliver that currently, or the things we saw in the game trailers of Deep Desert combat.

Future Roadmap

We will see what they do, as I anticipate the Deep Desert will continue to experience tons of changes. Funcom has stated that the Deep Desert will move closer to its original design once the Landsraad changes are in place. But if there is not a system setup that makes sense, the environment will be branded as toxic by its current playerbase all the same.

The Deep Desert failed to allow either side to really dive deeply into those roles alone. We will see what the future brings, but this upcoming DLC has some interesting content I’ll definitely be checking out as we see how they continue to transform the Deep Desert. I hope by next Spring they can maybe put together new activities for PvP, but it will take sometime until the Roadmap pans out.

For more Dune Awakening content – check out our page for guides and builds: https://alcasthq.com/category/dune-awakening-builds-guides/

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