Dune: Awakening is a lot like real life in that two things are guaranteed: You’ll pay taxes, and you’ll die. The nice thing about dying in Dune: Awakening is you pop back up with almost everything intact and can carry on with whatever you were doing before — unless a sandworm gets you. If one of these Jaws-like monsters catches you, you lose more than just a bit of progress.
Even if you haven’t seen a sandworm in Dune: Awakening, you’re likely familiar with it in some capacity (whether through movie posters or questionable popcorn buckets). Sandworms are effectively shorthand for Dune imagery. In Awakening, they also pose a huge environmental challenge: When they eat you, sandworms will strip you of everything except your underpants. It’s a clever way to make you build your plans around an environment you can never master, but it also created a perfect storm of Terrible Situations that almost made me hang up my cutteray for good, all thanks to one little thing — a respawn toggle.
I became closely acquainted with a sandworm’s gullet on more than one occasion before this point, but always after planning ahead — valuables safely stored away; junky, low-level tools on hand; nothing in my pockets that I’d miss. It was little more than inconvenient, particularly as my sole vehicle was safe from the worm’s intestines. This time, I got a bit cocky while collecting flour sand and thought I could surely outrace the worm on my sandbike should it come calling. I kept my necessaries on my person, parked my bike near the flour sand patch facing away from the desert, and promptly got devoured.
That was a problem. Dune: Awakening was kind enough to let me respawn with the vehicle backup tool, but the worm ate my bike. It ate my clothes, my tools, everything. So here I was, in my underwear, at the Riftwatch trading post, roughly 1,500 kilometers away from home, half-dehydrated and with no way to carry water across the two lengthy stretches of desert separating me from safety. I thought I must’ve clicked the wrong respawn point by mistake, so for science, I tried dying and reviving myself again. It was no mistake. With no vehicle and no active respawn beacon — as I foolishly forgot to craft and place more — my only options were Riftwatch and another trading post at the far northern end of the map.
You can revive at your base, but you have to activate the feature every time you build a new one. Making the situation even crueler was the fact that the sand in Dune: Awakening’s Vermillius Gap region has a unique feature dubbed “drum sand.” It makes thumping noises when you walk on it, which summons the sandworm. In most cases, I don’t mind the friction in Dune: Awakening. The way Funcom builds survival around Arrakis’ ecological complexities is one of the game’s best features. This, however, was just silly.
I can’t remember if Dune: Awakening tells you to activate your base console’s respawn capabilities when you build a first home during the tutorial. It must have, as I vaguely recall reviving at my little hovel in the South Hagga Basin starting area once after dying from thirst. Regardless, when space magic lets you spring back to life at a random trading post, it’s baffling that reviving at home is something you have to go out of your way to enable. After throwing so much additional information at you following the tutorial, the least it could do is ask you if you want to make your new base a respawn location when you build it.
Across 90 minutes, three more accidental worm dinners, and two deaths by dehydration, I finally made it back home, my reserves of patience exhausted and with no desire to start crafting replacements for everything I lost. I’ll play Dune: Awakening again. It’s one of my favorite games of 2025 so far. Just… not for a while — and definitely not without triple-checking that I’ll actually respawn at my new base.