Water is so precious in the Dune: Awakening beta I wound up treating innocent scavengers like my personal juice boxes

As a survival fan, I appreciate what Funcom has done with Dune: Awakening's water and hydration system. I played about 25 hours of the beta over the past couple of weeks, and water is a major concern right out of the gate—not a surprise on the desert planet of Arrakis. And each time you solve the problem of hydration, another wrinkle in the system presents itself.

After crash-landing on the desert planet without so much as a spare pint of hydration, initially all you can do is slurp water from a few scattered plants that will only hydrate you to about a third of your capacity. If you don't stay out of the scorching sun and stick to pockets of shade, you dry out even faster. Creeping around between spots of shade while licking plants? Paul Atreides never had it so bad (though in this alt-history Dune, he was never actually born.)

Then comes the next step in your hydration journey: harvesting the blood of your downed enemies with a craftable syringe, filling up a couple small bloodbags, and converting it to water in a blood purifier you build at your base.

At moments of great need, like being super thirsty but far from home, you can also drink blood straight from the baggie and take a temporary debuff as punishment. If you're in real dire straits, you can even kill and drink a mouse. Sipping from Muad'Dib? You monster.

So for much of the beta, I wound up treating NPCs as my personal juice boxes. I had a little routine: explore, craft, get chased by a sandworm, and then suddenly notice that whoops, I'm so parched I'm about to die. That meant it was time to go attack some scavenger camps or cut my way into a moisture-sealed cave and slaughter its residents. Blood acquired, fed into the purifier, and soon I've got enough water to not have to kill anyone else specifically to drink from them. For a while, at least.

When I realized I'd built my base very close to a scavenger camp where a single NPC spawned, he became a part of my daily routine. Every time I'd leave my base I'd make a quick stop at the camp, murder him, and drain his blood. By the time I was heading back home he'd have respawned, so I'd stab or shoot him again and fill up my bloodbag. I probably killed and drank that same scavenger 20 or 30 times during the beta. Poor guy. But he goes down smooth.

This water scarcity, and the fact that I became a roaming mass murderer just to stay partially hydrated, made the later hours of the beta much more satisfying when I leveled up enough to explore other water sources. I crafted a special tool that let me electronically harvest water from scrubby plants directly, slowly filling a canteen I could sip from. No more licking plants in Dune for me! Look how far I've come.

And of course there's the craftable stillsuit, which recycles my own wastewater so I can take a swig to rehydrate every so often without needing some external source or even a canteen. There are also methods further up the crafting chain than we were given in the beta, like moisture harvesters that can passively add to your water supply when built at your base.

I bet that scavenger will be relieved when he sees those being built in the full game. Now he might not have to die just because someone's throat is a bit dry.

When it comes to water management in Dune: Awakening, every milestone felt great: just filling my own body to 100% hydration for the first time took ages, but was satisfying as hell when I finally did it. Seeing my blood purifier at full capacity (of water) was another great moment (for that scavenger, too, since I didn't have to kill him at all that day.)

I even got so successful I was able to craft a cistern to store my water surplus. A surplus! Having an extra tank of water on Arrakis was a pretty big accomplishment, and even though I lived in a tiny little base it was hard not to feel like I'd conquered the planet.

And you need all that water, too: manufacturing higher tier ores and chemical compounds requires not just ores but water. Yep, just as you're getting a handle on your water supply, it turns out your machines need to drink, too. Sorry, my scavenger neighbor. I'm no longer thirsty, but my ingot factory is. I'll be seeing you again soon.