Dune: Awakening review

Dunescrolling

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

The world of Dune is well-realised in multiplayer survival game format, offering a harsh planet of unintentional comedy, braindead NPCs, and plenty of grindy crafting.

• Developer: Funcom
• Publisher: Funcom
• Release: June 10th, 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam
• Price: £42/$50/€50
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

A survival game lives or dies on the personality of its world. Subnautica is a wonder because its world is a wonder. Abiotic Factor is a cracking farce because its world is a lab staffed by idiots. Dune: Awakening , meanwhile, has the fortune of coming with a pre-packaged world, already built by scores of sci-fi novels and movies full of beautiful scowlers. Developers Funcom therefore have existing rules to play with, a culture and geography which is basically ready-made for a video game. It’s almost cheating. Sandstorms rage, forcing you indoors. Sandworms give chase, prompting you to run or bike faster across the desert. Military ships scan the dunes at night with spotlights, and launch tough enemy patrols if you get caught. Everything here already lends itself to the kind of adventurous fantasy any hardy video gameser would like.

Yet introduce to this the long-established survival tropes of online multiplayer crafting games, and you walk away with something that is somehow both fitting to Frank Herbert’s world and comically incongruous. A very hot Valheim . You scrounge endlessly not for spice but for rocks and twigs. You slap little devices down not to attract worms, but as spawn points. You drive your sandbike across the desert, then take out a magical Ghostbusters device that slurps the vehicle inside so you can carry it around safely in your pocket. For every line of dialogue delivered with the seriousness of a 19th century naval captain, there is a moment when you catapult yourself 50 feet into the sky with a grappling hook and tumble to earth in front of a robotic NPC who doesn’t see you. There are comedy radio stations and they are playing chiptune. This is Dune, yes, but it is also Dunc .

Awakening is set in an alternate universe of Dune in which Timothee Chalamet forgot to be born. The conflict over the desert planet remains a slow-burning stand-off between two factions: the honour-obsessed Atreides and the aggressively pale-faced Harkonnen. You’ll get to pick a side in this kerfuffle in later missions. But first, you land as a love survivor, told to seek out the native people of the planet, the Fremen, who have supposedly been wiped out. Thus the grand space opera is magnified down a powerful microscope to become a survival and crafting game with shooty dart guns and griddy base-building. We can perhaps call it a very sandy Animal Crossing . Perhaps.

The various survival systems reinforce all the childlike fantasies of living on Arrakis. A heat meter rises whenever you stay in direct sunlight. “Better stick to the shade,” you chuckle. Another little waveform meter appears when you cross open tracts of desert sand, a measurement of how likely you are to attract a huge sandworm. “Better get across this gap fast,” you snicker. Your thirst meter goes into its last quadrant, threatening health loss. “Better drink 300 millilitres of my own recycled piss,” you think to yourself with a chortle. Press the F key to slurp on the straw of your urinal tuxedo.

Press F to drink your own piss. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

I played as a Trooper, a character class that is all about mobility and ranged firepower. They get a handy skill that throws out a bubble which slows time and prevents fall damage. Even handier, they get a grappling hook, as well as a bunch of grenades and buffs to gun damage. Other types of sand tourist are available. You can be a Bene Gesserit (a space nun), and learn to convince enemies that you’re invisible, or become immune to poison. As a Swordmaster you can deflect enemy projectiles and learn to recuperate stamina faster.

You’re forced to pick only one class as a starting option, but you soon find special characters who open up the other skill trees. For example, you can discover a Planetologist hiding in the earliest zone who will unlock the skills of that class, provided you complete a short fetch quest. It was worth this detour for the passive benefits of the Planetologist: a longer battery life for techy tools and a buff to stamina while climbing. Ah, very important in an open world that has embraced the “climb any surface” philosophy of Breath Of The Wild. I basically did everything possible to turn my character into a kind of bloodthirsty Link. He has a shotgun and he ascends rocks very well.

Combat is serviceable, but the enemies aren’t particularly clever. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

Putting that firearm to use is mostly an expressionless and dead-brained exercise in finding a baddie and shooting them like a harmless lamb. Combat can be as simple as spitting your machine gun or pistol at these barrelfish, along with a rare moment when you have to switch to a dagger to puncture the shield of some close-combat warjerk charging toward you. True to the source material, the best way to break enemy shields is with a strongly held stabbing attack, though unweildy parrying and cumbersome target tracking led me to avoiding melee combat wherever possible.

Dune: Awakening is also labelled an MMO, but there are rarely more than a handful of people exploring or operating in the same canyons. You see evidence of others mostly in the form of player hideouts, or the sound of distant gunshots. There are PvP zones which are, in theory, more populated, and hubzones let you sell items to other players. But overall it still feels closer to Rust than World Of Warcraft. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

Usually you only face a handful of scumbags at once, and you can use your abilities to supplement these brawls. As a Trooper I could lob little seeker missiles, or stun enemies with my grappling wire. But for the most part, you can put a few bullets into any belly and your foes will eventually fall flat. They are barely sentient rodents, seemingly easy to kill by design. After all, to earn the water needed to survive you must farm the blood of your felled enemies and pass it through an extraction machine in your home base. Making baddies easy to kill perhaps lightens the load for players who just want water fast.

This, along with some very plain level design, makes the combat feel functional yet never truly slick or smooth. If you compare Duwakening’s action to, say, other MMO-ish shooters, you’ll feel a big difference. There’s no additional layer of combat nuance like the sticky cover of the Division games, no dancelike fluidity as in Warframe . And the dungeons are formulaic corridor-room-corridor affairs without much flair.

As is often a complaint in MMOs, these roomy holes feel like mere wells for ratty enemies, rather than having any of their own meaning or identity. They have audio logs and holograms littered about in an attempt to give each dungeon some sense of place, but this too is subject to formula - the same scientist type gives the same kind of speech as the last scientist type about the same environment with the same voice. Injecting variety to MMO environments which exist only to be looted on repeat is a task of narrative triage I do not envy. The dialogue elsewhere does manage to bring some colour to the dodgy water merchants and haughty space nobles of the game, even if the overwhelming amount of lore terminology makes some lines unreadable to a Dune agnostic.

All video games too, mate. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

You can - if you prefer an opponent who might actually hurt you - get into PvP scrapes by visiting ship crash sites, or by flying off the edge of the map and entering a much bigger PvP zone called the Deep Desert, which can house hundreds of players at once. This is a high-risk, high-reward expedition that’ll entice a certain kind of adrenaline fiend while repelling anyone who prefers their survival stories to play out as solitary conquests against nature. Years ago, in my Dark Zone liking days , I would have belonged to the former camp. But I find myself enjoying the survivalist trials of Arrakis most when done in isolation.

You might have friends for co-op though, folks who can help gather granite for the walls of your home base. This base building is another classic survival game affair of modular blocky wall placement. You place down foundations and ceilings and windowed walls on a strict grid. The resultant player homes are not very “Dune” when compared to the striking architecture of the movies. Where Denis Villeneuve can hire artists to design awe-inspiring brutalist ziggurats, you will create a boxy abode that is the sci-fi equivalent of a Croydon apartment block. You might unlock new structural blueprints as you go, and the natural creativity of players can still sometimes produce an interesting looking home. Largely, though, I found the building process dry and basic.

Build a decent abode and you’ll be “watersealed”, which means your thirst meter won’t deplete while inside. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

The visual language of Dune is grand. It is of a scale that dwarfs a lonely sand tourist. Some of that translates to Awakening, as with the hovering Sardaukar ships that scan the environment, or the palacial corridors in ruined substructures. But in other places, that visual design falters into a lacklustre genericism. Much of the beveled machinery you create in your base looks vaguely the same. The power generators, chemical refineries, fabricators, ore refineries, blood enwaternators - they all appear as homogenous tubegizmos. And mechanistically, they all adhere to well-worn survival game principles: you need stuff to make more stuff to make more stuff to make more stuff.

In hubzones, the geometric griddiness of that same visual design sometimes suits the otherworldly feeling of MMO levels - disjointed right angled corridors and military symmetry - but in other places, the grand scale actually works against the standard principles of MMO task-completing. Vast concrete lobbies and spaces can take a relatively long time to cross, just to speak to a random character about the 100 do-hickeys they wanted. The city of Arrakeen is a stony warren of rooms that all feel much bigger than they really need to be, which is both fitting for the overbearing nature of Dune’s palaces and vexing to the average player concerned with resource gathering, XP-scrounging, and other ideals of efficiency.

My point, again, is that Duwakening is a game where a desire for strong atmosphere becomes messily entwined with a traditional type of MMO design centred on gettin’ more stuff. Not in a bad way, per se, but in a noticeably gamey way. Gargantuan worms threaten you during long treks across dunes; let’s stop to harvest 20 floursand! Heatstroke and duststorms will force you to take shelter in the shade of a downed ship; let’s cut it up for salvaged metal! A camp of scavengers stands between you and the safety of home; mmmm, BLOOD!

As a game it is funny, enjoyable, jarring, and safe. There is a large amount of stabbing corpses unintentionally in their groin for blood. As with many a craft ’em up, the opening is enough of a stroll to ease you into the world, its rules and quirks. This intro demurely suggests the game will be more merciful with your time than others of its ilk. Sand dweller, this is not true. There are still crafting bottlenecks - gizmos and trinkets you need to farm from particular sites. And you will eventually hit a plateau, when the research menu opens up into a larger array of improved items (power packs, shields, dew scythes) and you are suddenly overcome with a great greed for different coloured rocks.

At this point gathering material becomes the second job most MMOs are wont to be (at least, this is how it felt as a solo player). I would have sobbed at the hefty crafting costs of an ornithopter were I not concerned about wasting the water from my eyes. That’s not to mention the ongoing needs of maintaining your base, your mining equipment, and your other vehicles. As both an MMO and a survival game, much of this is to be expected. The genre is a playful reproduction of that most gagsome economic reality: the cost of living. We play these games, sometimes, despite ourselves.

As survival games go, however, I cannot call it “bad”. Fair warning: there are weird glitches and choppiness (one bug saw me backdashing every time I exited the inventory screen). And I had to abandon playing on a controller because of the obnoxious virtual cursor in menus. But this wasn’t enough to interrupt my bloodsucking. Awakening is dense with lore, and loyal to the childlike “sand is lava” flavours of Dune. I’ve enjoyed it for the strength of its world, and I admire how straightforwardly Funcom have adapted the memorable features of Herbert’s fiction in exactly the most sensible way. If you walked out of the cinema after the Dune movies of recent years only to have your thoughts and dreams peppered with imagery from those films, then this is probably one of the best ways to visit and inhabit that distant desert. Just so long as you acknowledge, going in, that you’ll be doing a lot more rock mining, water farming, and unexpected laughing than Timothee ever did.

This review is based on retail code provided by the publisher.

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Dune: Awakening

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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