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Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag Try a single issue or save on a subscription Issues delivered straight to your door or device From£35.99View Doom: The Dark Ages Oblivion Remastered Baldur's Gate 3 Recommended reading Survival & Crafting Water is so precious in the Dune: Awakening beta I wound up treating innocent scavengers like my personal juice boxes Dune: Awakening will host a massive beta weekend in just a couple of weeks: 'Tens of thousands of beta keys will be unleashed' Dune: Awakening: Everything we know about Funcom's survival MMO Survival & Crafting After 25 hours of the Dune: Awakening beta, I'm sold on it as a survival game but still a bit iffy on the MMO parts 'Don't leave trash on Arrakis'—Dune: Awakening creative director implores players to 'clean up your old bases' Survival MMO Dune: Awakening launches in May and I am way more excited about it than I thought I'd be Dune Awakening's latest trailer offers a glimpse of its massive coriolis storms, which reshape swathes of the map each week for 'infinite exploration' Survival & Crafting Dune: Awakening Dune: Awakening beta players extracted nearly 9 million liters of blood last weekend, enough to fill 3 Olympic-size, extremely gross swimming pools Christopher Livingston 15 May 2025 Meanwhile, 107,000 players passed through Shai-Hulud's digestive system. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Funcom) Funcom has shared some stats on the Dune: Awakening beta that took place last weekend, and players certainly got up to some bloody business. The only substantial water supply in the early game is the blood of your enemies, and in four days of the beta players extracted 8,715,331 liters of blood from fallen foes (and potentially a few unlucky desert mice). That's a lot of blood. That's so much blood you could fill three Olympic-size swimming pools, though I'm pretty sure they don't have the Olympics on Arrakis. What would the events be? Sandworm races? Slowest blade? Who can keep their hand in the Gom Jabbar box longest before that weird old lady neck-stabs them? Three giant pools full of blood sounds gross, but players (usually) don't drink that blood directly, they put it into their blood purifiers and convert it to water. Players consumed a lot of water during the beta, Funcom says: 151,749 liters—about two regular, residential-size swimming pools—though when it comes to Dune that's really just a drop in the bucket. You may like Water is so precious in the Dune: Awakening beta I wound up treating innocent scavengers like my personal juice boxes Dune: Awakening will host a massive beta weekend in just a couple of weeks: 'Tens of thousands of beta keys will be unleashed' Dune: Awakening: Everything we know about Funcom's survival MMO Though Arrakis is arid and moisture is precious, the Fremen actually have huge underground reservoirs of water, comprising "more than thirty-eight million decaliters," claims Stilgar in the book (that would be about 150 Olympic-size swimming pools), and that's just a single pool of "thousands of such caches" the Fremen have hidden across the planet. A few pools full of water or even blood doesn't really stack up. What else did players get up to over the beta weekend? Dying, a lot: 107,959 were swallowed by sandworms, 65,000 "withered away in the sun" (which I assume means died of dehydration quickened by sun exposure), and just over 10,000 died in the 30-second sandstorms that regularly sweep across the map. Players did some killin', too, wasting nearly 10 million hapless scavengers (that's where all that blood came from), deploying 1.7 million turrets (a Mentat ability) and delivering 2.6 million "swordmaster knee charges," a sort of flying dash popular among melee fighters. The most-used ability by far was the shigawire claw, which can be used both to stagger opponents and grapple up cliffs or walls: the grappling hook was fired 8.4 million times over the weekend. At least 8 million of those were mine: I compulsively use it the second it recharges even if I'm not doing any climbing. It's just fun to yoink myself across a room instead of running. You can check out the full Dune: Awakening stats here. The survival MMO launches on June 10. The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. 2025 games: This year's upcoming releases Best PC games: Our all-time favorites Free PC games: Freebie fest Best FPS games: Finest gunplay Best RPGs: Grand adventures Best co-op games: Better together Christopher Livingston Social Links Navigation Senior Editor Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own. You must confirm your public display name before commenting Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name. Water is so precious in the Dune: Awakening beta I wound up treating innocent scavengers like my personal juice boxes Dune: Awakening will host a massive beta weekend in just a couple of weeks: 'Tens of thousands of beta keys will be unleashed' Dune: Awakening: Everything we know about Funcom's survival MMO After 25 hours of the Dune: Awakening beta, I'm sold on it as a survival game but still a bit iffy on the MMO parts 'Don't leave trash on Arrakis'—Dune: Awakening creative director implores players to 'clean up your old bases' Survival MMO Dune: Awakening launches in May and I am way more excited about it than I thought I'd be Latest in Survival & Crafting For the first time since launch you'll finally be able to craft saddles in Minecraft RuneScape: Dragonwilds creative director says survival crafting has more in common with MMOs than you might think: 'It's almost like the genre was born from MMOs' Nintendo's lawsuit isn't slowing Palworld down as it prepares for a summer collab with Terraria 'Too many games let their players succeed' says developer of notoriously tough survival RPG Kenshi, and 'that's mind-numbingly boring to me' Dune: Awakening's stabby stunlock PvP exploit is being fixed, says Funcom: 'We've got this covered' Sean Murray pours one out for No Man's Sky permadeath player who stranded himself in bittersweet space purgatory: 'All I can do is sit in my ship, watch the lightning storms, and wait for my oxygen to run out' Latest in News A year after Bandai Namco killed its anime MMO, Blue Protocol is getting a second, different anime MMO in the same universe Stellar Blade comes to PC next month with new armor to cover up Eve's woefully exposed ears Today's Wordle is the 5th toughest ever, ending streaks for 50% of players YouTube's top brains crack making its ads even worse: Using AI to insert commercials at moments you're 'most engaged' with its videos With its 1.6 update, Star Wars Outlaws has finally fixed its janky as hell speeder combat Incredible news: Stalker 2 fixes corpse-eating and sausage blood in big ol' patch which also gives enemies less of a death wish HARDWARE BUYING GUIDES LATEST GAME REVIEWS Best Steam Deck accessories in Australia for 2025: Our favorite docks, powerbanks and gamepads Best graphics card for laptops in 2025: the mobile GPUs I'd want in my next gaming laptop Best mini PCs in 2025: The compact computers I love the most Best 14-inch gaming laptop in 2025: The top compact gaming laptops I've held in these hands Best Mini-ITX motherboards in 2025: My pick from all the mini mobo marvels I've tested Keychron M5 review MSI Raider 18 HX AI A2XW gaming laptop review Labyrinth of the Demon King review WD Black SN8100 2 TB NVMe SSD review ThunderX3 Flex Pro Ergonomic Office Chair review PC Gamer is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. 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