Dune Awakening: Where should you set up your starter base?

Your starter base is incredibly important in Dune Awakening; while you can build a different base somewhere else if you’re unhappy, and move locations, that’s incredibly tedious. You’ll have to pack up all of your placeables, and use the Solido Replicator to make a blueprint. Then on top of that you’ll have to make sure you have enough materials to replicate the base. It will be easier to do that later in the game, but at the start? Placement definitely matters.

While where you place your starter base is entirely up to you, I’ve got a few locations in Hagga Basin South that are worth exploring in Dune Awakening. This is based on my trials, tribulations, and ultimately failures, during the Dune Awakening beta testing phase.

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Tips for setting up your starter base in Dune Awakening

One of the most important tips for picking a starter base location in Dune Awakening is never build on the open sand. I’m not even entirely certain it will let you; but if it will, do not. I’ve watched sandworms come up right next to rocky areas, so if you think it will be clever to put a base on the sand between two rocky locations, I can tell you from experience, it will not go well.

Here are some potentially useful locations in Dune for your starter base (Image via Funcom)

You can see a map above, where we’ve circled a few really solid locations. The pink circles denote important areas for the story, and for farming. The one on the right is the Wreck of the Alcyon, which is a story location, and a great place to farm certain materials like Plasteel Microflora Fiber and Mechanical Parts.

The one on the left is where you find one of the trainers, as well as one of the Imperial Stations. It’s a fantastic place to farm Salvaged Metal, as well as pick up one or two Uniques. With that in mind, I recommend putting your starter base as close to these locations as possible in Dune Awakening.

It’s a bit far away from where you start, and a bit of a trek to get to the Hagga Basin South Trading Post, but it’s worth it. It puts you close to pretty much everything you need to farm for the first hours of the game.

I’ve circled a few locations on the map, in black. The blue circle in the southeast is where my first base was. It was far off in the east, but it did put me close to three farmable locations, and a short walk to the Alcyon. This time, I’m planning to put my base in the rocks to the west of it, if there’s space.

The starter base locations above offered me decent resources, as well as close proximity to important locations on the map of Dune Awakening. That’s the most important thing for a base, for me: how close is it to anything useful to farm?

One final thing to consider: are you playing Dune Awakening solo, or with friends? If you're playing with friends, consider where they want to start, and stay close, so you can work together easier.

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Check out our other Dune Awakening guides and features:

• Is PVP mandatory in Dune Awakening?
• Is there PvE content in Dune Awakening endgame?
• Dune Awakening: Landsraad Decree voting system, explained