It was time to jump into the Deep Desert for my third week, and this time I had the lofty goal of making a Carrier and the Sand Crawler. This would get my guild the current end-game spice harvesting abilities; there was just one catch.

I kind of had mixed feelings about going into the Deep Desert for my third week. I took some time off from there and enjoyed catching up on a lot of peaceful mining back in Hagga Basin. I still really want to have what is considered, at the time, the endgame vehicles.

There is, however, quite a large catch. I’m in quite a small guild, and it might be a while before we can even go out and use a sand crawler to farm spice with. While it’s possible to go solo. That requires way too many things to go right.

You need at a bare minimum two people. One person flying the Carrier. Along with another person driving the Sand Crawler. That would, however, end badly if you ran into any gankers. Ideally, you have someone running thumpers to keep the sand worms away and people playing guard duty from gankers.

At the time, there was also a real lack of a way to carry all your stuff back and forth. The best you could do was use an Assault Ornithopter, but it only has 1k volume storage. As far as the Carrier, it has no storage. The Crawler, however, has some decent storage. It, however, can’t be transported by the Carrier between the Deep Desert and Hagga Basin.

I kid you not. It’s like the developers just want to make it as painful as possible to haul out to the Deep Desert every week. At best, you set up a dump base in the A row and assemble the Crawler that you can’t drive back to Hagga Basin in one piece. Then load it up and fly out to your base deeper into the desert.

Was it a bit crazy to spend insane amounts of resources just to have a giant cargo container that has to be disassembled every week as well? Kind of. I, however, wanted to be ready for whatever day my guild might need one.

We already had a lot of the other stuff we needed if it was built in the Deep Desert. So, I just viewed it as my next big goal to solo farm for, and that kept me motivated enough to withstand another week of the Deep Desert.

With that said, it was time to load up and head into the Deep Desert. This allowed me to test my plan from previous weeks of just having Deep Desert only chests that we spam load up from.

It mostly worked out. As always. You find yourself needing more building materials than last time. So, while this cut down on the number of trips I'd be making back to Hagga Basin for whatever random item we were short on. We still did not have this organizational system nailed 100% down just yet.

Thankfully, after doing this a couple of times now, it does not feel that painful. Even better yet, the guild builder understood what was needed for a Deep Desert base. On top of that, he was even prepared and made the building large enough for a future Carrier and Crawler to be housed on top of it.

Once everything that was needed to at least get the building of the main Deep Desert base. I made a little dumping base that would end up coming even more handy once I realize the ins and outs later that week of having a Carrier. I also learned that the dump base was going to need more room to fit all the vehicles.

I then started to take the long trip out and offloading and setting up everything that was going to be needed for the week at the main base. First thing I got down where some chests and advanced deathstills. Along with some water containers. Having water as quickly as possible was nice to have.

Once everything was all set up. I did my usual of going around and exploring. I wanted to work out a tier 6 ore mining route. By this point, we also started to use external resources to at least make sure we were setting up near a large spice field. As after all other regions around the world had a reset before we did, and all the resets have the same layout for that week.

I then slowly started to build each piece of the Carrier. The amount I thought it would take to make one ended up being off by quite a bit. Some of the required pieces have a left side and a right side. By the time I realized that, I had already crafted a few pieces and felt I might as well just finish them.

It barely fit on our top deck despite how massive a space the guild builder made for it. We even needed to expand it one tile higher, as this thing was massive. The only times I've ever seen one, they were at a far distance. So, trying to judge its size was not perfect.

It’s fair to say I was quite disappointed by the lack of the Carrier having storage on it. If there were a way to swap out being able to pick up vehicles and have a storage container instead. I’d opt for having that. Even if that means I have extra parts that are not of any use to me now.

It ended up taking a little while to get all the spice and ores I was still missing to finish it. Along with some trips to Hagga Basin for all the other materials you need to make one. If I recall, it was almost 500 Spice Melange and almost 800 Plastanium ingots. The thing looks like a beast as it costs a small fortune to build it.

The thing also ate quite a few large fuel cells just to fill up the gas tank. You would think the first thing I'd want to do is go riding in it. You would, however, be wrong! I treated this thing like a high-end tractor for farming. The last thing I wanted to do was fly around with it and start causing decay to individual parts. It ended up sitting there on top of our roof for most of the week.

I instead celebrated by flying over to A row of the Deep Desert to farm a bunch of the testing stations. It was so nice having a dump base nearby, as I am doing right there in the screenshot. Heading to it to drop off lots of items. I also knew I was going to need to expand it. As there was no way the Carrier was going to fit in there.

There are still some tier 5 schematics that I wanted to get out of the testing stations and wrecks in that area. I even ended up looting another MK5 compactor. So now I have a backup if things go bad.

Final Thoughts

With a large chunk of my third week in the Deep Desert now finished. I at least felt I had made good progress by having the Carrier built. I was also now set for the week to keep going on quite a few farming runs. With mostly corpses and some odds and ends needing to get hauled in occasionally.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Dune: Awakening.