Dune Awakening dev apologizes for Deep Desert PvE issue, promises reimbursement

Dune Awakening developer Funcom is apologizing to players following a recent patch that mistakenly turned a number of the Deep Desert's PvE exclusive areas into PvP ones. This unexpected change caused many players to lose vehicles, items, and materials in the survival MMO, as they venture into the endgame area. Funcom is also promising to reimburse anything you may have lost, while outlining everything else it plans to fix.

Funcom's apology comes after it made some big changes to how the Deep Desert works. As Dune Awakening's endgame zone, it blends together survival, exploration, PvE, PvP, and is constantly shifting, but it wasn't quite what players were looking for at launch. It might be one of the best survival games on PC right now, but there's still a lot of work to be done.

The Deep Desert had a huge focus on PvP interactions, funnelling endgame players into fighting others when they might want to do something else. That's why Funcom changed the entire southern half of the Deep Desert into a PvE zone, giving players a much larger safe space to hunt for resources.

Unfortunately, with the latest patch, Funcom accidentally reverted several of the Deep Desert's PvE areas back into PvP ones. "On Monday July 7, we patched out a layout change to the Deep Desert which caused several areas of the PvE Deep Desert to become PvP enabled. This was an oversight in our development process and internal communications, which led to people suffering an unfortunate amount of lost bases and equipment," Funcom writes.

"This change was intended to only occur with the next Coriolis cycle and not impact the ongoing cycle. We're incredibly sorry that this happened and we want to acknowledge that this should have been handled better. We've changed our internal processes as a result of this and will be better in the future."

To make up for the mistake, Funcom says it's working to reimburse any lost vehicle components, materials, and items. You can expect anything you're owed to be in your 'Claim Rewards' tab by the end of this week.

That's not all, however, as Funcom takes some time to address plenty of other issues it's looking into. The team says it is investigating the loss of vehicles and other resources due to bugs, but calls it "rather thorny to untangle." This is because there's a lot of legitimate item loss as part of Dune Awakening's mechanics, which makes it difficult to identify cases where it's happening due to bugs.

Funcom adds in the message that it has improved its tools since launch, and is going through a backlog of customer support requests to try and give everyone their missing items back. "The development team has been also working to address the root causes of the item loss in game. We have a dedicated team focused on mitigating vehicle/item loss on server crashes, disconnects, server mesh transfers, and traveling between maps."

As you delve further into the Deep Desert make sure you check out or Dune Awakening base building guide. We've also broken down all of the Dune Awakening skills, which is sure to help you out.

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