If you, too, have found yourself suddenly missing a boatload of hotly coveted resources out in the sandy landscapes of survival MMO Dune: Awakening, you may be entitled to a time out and a chill pill while the devs figure out what's causing this resource bug.
Addressing some hubbub in the game's community, Dune: Awakening developer Funcom said it's "investigating an issue with traveling after the latest patch that could result in the loss of inventory items."
What absolutely kills me is the current best guidance on preventing this problem. "To avoid losing items, wait up to 10 minutes after filling a vehicle's inventory before traveling to other maps or Deep Desert sectors," Funcom advises.
There's just something immensely funny about the logic here, even if it does make some level of sense. Traveling is causing problems, is it? Well, have you tried not traveling? Also: what does "up to" 10 minutes mean, exactly? I realize this is all patchwork napkin math, but that could be one minute or eight. At least 10 minutes seems like the safer bet at this point.
More seriously, Dune: Awakening is called a survival MMO for a reason, and standing around for 10 minutes with your pockets full of valuables isn't exactly a cracking survival strategy. "Yikes, yea lemme just chill in i-1 for 10 min after I harvest spice, no problem," oKayBye94 remarks on a Reddit post sharing Funcom's workaround.
"Okay Funcom, I'll try to negotiate with gankers on my tail, that they need to wait 10 minutes when I try to run away with my spice," says Sufficient-Highway58.
"Wait 10 mins between zoning between DD tiles?" reads a reply from stud_ent. "That's insane... Take down the servers for emergency maintenance or roll back the changes."
There's an old trailer where Nintendo – shilling a new Kirby game for 3DS, I seem to recall – advises players to engage in local co-op by physically passing their handheld to another person, and this Dune: Awakening workaround somehow reminds me of that. Sure, I guess that works. But have you got anything more convenient and less contrived?
Not yet, it seems, but Funcom says it's working on it. "We are working to address this issue as soon as possible," the studio's report concludes.
If you need me, I'll be in the "Traveled Too Fast" corner for the next 10 minutes.
