Game Modes
Dune: Awakening features different Game Modes and options, catering to a wide variety of player preferences.
Game Modes:
- Multiplayer
- Official Servers
- Private Servers
- Self-Hosted Servers (Experimental)
- Single Player (Upcoming: September 22, 2026)
Starting the game
To open Dune: Awakening, select the game from your Steam library or another supported PC platform.
When the Funcom launcher opens, click the game's icon. After the game loads, click Continue to load an existing character or New Game to create a new character, as shown in the screenshot.[1]
Continuing an existing game
After you click Continue, you can select a character, change the server, or delete a character.
The character selection screen shows details for each character in your account, including:
- Character name
- Player Level
- Faction alignment: Atreides, Harkonnen, or Neutral
- Character type, such as Standard Multiplayer
- Region, such as North America, South America, Europe, Asia, or Oceania
- World name (Server)
- Sietch name (Hagga Basin instance)
You can navigate through your characters using Previous and Next below the character. The carousel displays up to three characters at a time. Select the character you want to play and click Continue.
Note: You can have up to ten multiplayer characters in addition to one single-player character. Only one single-player character can exist at a time.
Switching servers
If you've clicked Change server in the screen shown above, then you'll be redirected to another screen. (to be updated)
Starting a new game
To create a new character, click New Game on the main screen after the game loads.
On the mode selection screen, select Singleplayer or Multiplayer.
Singleplayer mode
You can have only one single-player character at a time. If you want to create another single-player character, you must delete the existing one first.
A single-player character cannot be transferred to a multiplayer server. A multiplayer character can be transferred to a single-player game.
However, once a multiplayer character is transferred to single-player, it is converted to a single-player character and cannot be transferred back to a multiplayer server.
World difficulty selection
From the World Difficulty selection screen, select one of four preset options. These presets define the survival, combat, and harvesting difficulty for the world where your character will be created.
- Relaxed: Easy survival difficulty, normal combat difficulty, and fast harvesting speed. Recommended if you want a more relaxed experience focused on enjoying the story.
- Survival: Normal survival and combat difficulty, with fast harvesting speed. Recommended for a balanced single-player experience. This setting is the closest to the online multiplayer experience.
- Challenging: Hard survival and combat difficulty, with slow harvesting speed. Recommended for players looking for a more difficult experience. Not recommended for new players.
- Custom: Allows you to configure individual difficulty settings.
When you select Custom, you can configure the following settings:
- Difficulty Preset: Uses the values from a preset, such as Relaxed, Survival, or Challenging, for all difficulty settings. If you manually change any setting, the preset automatically changes to Custom. If you select a different preset, all settings are reset to the values defined by that preset.
- Crafting Costs: Sets the amount of resources consumed when crafting. Lower values make crafting cheaper, while higher values make it more expensive. A value of 0 makes crafting free.
- Harvesting Efficiency: Sets how efficiently resources can be harvested.
- Crafting Cost: Sets how much of a resource is consumed when crafting.
- Building Cost: Sets the amount of resources required for building.
- Crafting Speed: Sets how quickly items can be crafted.
- Water Extraction Speed: Sets how quickly water can be extracted.
- Loot Respawn Speed: Sets how quickly loot respawns.
- Resource Respawn Speed: Sets how quickly resources respawn.
- Player Damage to Vehicles: Sets the amount of damage your character deals with weapons, abilities, and attacks to vehicles.
- Enemy Damage to other enemies: Sets the amount of damage enemies deal to other enemies.
- Enemy Health: Sets the amount of health enemies have.
- Enemy Respawn speed: Sets how quickly enemies respawn.
- Durability Wear Speed: Sets how quickly item durability decreases through use.
- Player Stamina Drain: Sets how quickly your character's stamina is consumed.
- Item Max Durability Loss: Sets how much maximum durability an item can lose.
- Global and Individual Experience: Sets the experience gained globally and by individual characters.
- Disable Area Building Restrictions: Allows your character to build in areas where building would normally be restricted, such as areas marked in red in multiplayer worlds. Building inside caves or enemy bases does not provide shelter. Unexpected behavior may also occur when building in locations associated with content, such as Journeys, Contracts, or enemy spawning locations.
- Maximum Subfief Amount: Sets the maximum number of subfiefs your character can own, from 1 to 5.
- Building Stability: When enabled, building stability is disabled as a building constraint. For example, your character can build floor tiles without adding columns or foundation supports as the floor extends in any direction.
- Heat buildup speed: Sets how quickly a character builds up heat, from sun exposure or other heat sources.
- Dehydration speed: Sets how quickly thirst increases over time and activity.
- Base Decay: Sets the rate at which bases decay.
- Dropped on Death: Determines what happens to your character's possessions when they die. This setting does not apply when your character is killed by a sandworm. You can choose whether everything drops, including backpack contents and the equipped loadout; only backpack contents drop; or nothing drops, allowing your character to keep all possessions after respawning.
- Sandstorms: Disables storms in the world.
- Disable Sandworms: Disables sandworms. This is a future feature.
Note: These difficulty settings are also available when creating a character for a self-hosted custom server. For example, you can set the maximum number of subfiefs that each player can own while playing on the server.
Character customization
Once you've defined the difficulty settings, you'll access the character customization cinematic and interactive game sequence.
Server customization
You can change the server's difficulty settings at any time by selecting Server Settings from the pause menu while in-game. This option is available for both single-player and self-hosted servers.
You can select any of the four difficulty presets described above.
Multiplayer mode
When you launch the game for the first time, a window appears over the main loading screen. It shows a recommended server and sietch, along with the server's ping. From this window, you can join the recommended server, open the Server Browser, or return to the main loading screen.
Server selection
In the Server Browser, select one of the following tabs:
- Standard: Select a region, such as North America, South America, Europe, Asia, or Oceania, and a sietch where your character will be created. The tab lists the worlds and servers provided by Funcom for the selected region. Each server shows its population level, such as Low, Medium, or High, and its ping. If you have previously created a character, its level is shown for the server. The number of your friends who have characters on the server is also displayed.
You can hide full servers or refresh the server list before selecting a server and sietch. You can also rent a Private server. Selecting this option redirects you to a list of third-party server providers.
- Private: Provides the same region and sietch selection options as the Standard tab, but lists third-party servers that you can access and where you have previously created a character, if any.
- Experimental: Lists the self-hosted custom server that you can access.
- Friends: Lists servers where your friends have an active character.
Note: The friends list is populated in-game and is separate from the friends list on the platform where you play the game, such as your Steam friends list.
- Recent: Lists recently accessed servers and sietches from Standard, Private, and Experimental servers.
After you select a server and sietch, click Join. Note: You can have up to ten multiplayer characters in addition to one single-player character.
Character customization
Once you've selected the server and sietch, you'll access the character customization cinematic and interactive game sequence.
References