My first week in the Deep Desert was not a full one, but I sure learned a lot. This place would end up being quite the time sink in my attempt to reach the current endgame. The place is quite unforgiving and barren.

The week I decided to give the Deep Desert a real try ended up being a lucky one. Instead of only row A being PvE, with the rest of the place being all PvP. There was a rule change making rows A out to half of E PvE. While the remaining E and out are PvP.

This would end up giving quite a solid push in getting spice sand and tier 6 resources. I would not know how good I had it until weeks later. The amount of progress I made in a single week ended up being massive.

The Deep Desert itself is quite different then Hagga Basin. The cost to build structures and machines is reduced by 50%. There is, however, a huge catch with such a nice thing. The Deep Desert resets weekly. So, anything you build gets wiped out.

The good news is, as long as you remove anything you build, you get those materials back. However, many of the T6 machines have quite a lot of heavy components. Not to mention how heavy unrefined spice, sand, and tier 6 are as well.

This leads to a few hours every week. At the very least, when I do decide to play in the Deep Desert. Having decided to haul stuff in and pack stuff up. For the most part, I end up only doing the Deep Desert every other week. Once you invest time for the week to be set up there you hate to leave. Unless you are hauling in supplies like corpses for water.

I ended up living out of more or less a shack for my first week. It was just me, and at the time I had almost no spice sand. So I did not need a lot of space. My first major goal was getting to a medium spice refiner and then to a large one.

A normal spice refiner will refine 100 spice sands into one spice melange. Meanwhile, the large spice refiner will refine 10k spice sand into 200 spice melange. Getting to the stage of having a large spice refiner is massive. Most solo players or those in a small group consider it to be a massive achievement just having one of them. While it costs more upfront spice sand to refine, you are getting double the amount.

Some people are under the illusion that, as a solo or small group, you should not be setting up big in the Deep Desert. With people thinking you should haul everything back unrefined and refine it back in Hagga Basin. It’s frankly the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

Back in Hagga Basin, the large spice refiner alone costs 1k spice melange and 950 tier 6 ingots called plastanium. Meanwhile, back in the Deep Desert, it’s only 500 spice melange and 475 plastanium ingots. That alone makes it worth it to get access to being able to double the spice melange.

Storms in the Deep Desert are quite brutal. They can be small or massive. They knock the shields out in your base for well over 5 minutes. If you made a base for whatever reason in the PvP section of the Deep Desert, it’s during those times that players can raid the base. I built in the PvE area.

At least if you get enough warning and end up seeing one. You might be able to dodge it. If, however, you can’t, you just hope you were in the PvE area of the Deep Desert and there is somewhere to take cover from the storm. With how barren most sections are. You could be far too far from any island that might have a spot you can go and hide in to avoid taking damage from the storm.

I’ve only a couple of times had to ride though one of these storms. Thankfully, both times I had recently repaired my wings and other parts of my ornithopter. Sometimes they would end up taking 50% damage once I've flown through a storm. Something I try and avoid doing.

While every week you have to explore and prob scan each section if you wish to do such things. I still went out to most areas and found a spot to land to launch a probe. You get a little experience, and it’s kind of nice seeing where all the little islands, if any, are in each section.

I also had a ship scanner on my ornithopter and would fly around the PvE area scanning. I’d be looking for the tier 6 ores, titanium, and stravidium. In the PvE area, they are quite rare. You're lucky to find one of each on an island. Sometimes double that. With most islands not having any at all at times.

I’d often return to where I had my small base setup, almost out of fuel. Most times, I'd be lucky to have the cargo hold half full of ores. Sometimes it would even be slimmer picking than coming back empty-handed.

I also wanted to try some new things. One such activity was treasure hunting. I’d scan for my ship, looking for the icon to indicate something was buried. I’d then fly down and use a handheld scanner to pinpoint the final spot before using a compactor to extract whatever was buried.

I’ll admit I was a bit disappointed by the loot. I did get some strange things, like gems that I've never seen before. While they would, on rare occasions, come in handy. Along with a couple of resources I'd loot. It seemed like this activity was quite lacking.

Despite not wanting to head into the PvP area. Finding any amount of spice in the PvE section seemed near impossible. Luky, for me, just inside the PvP area ended up being a large spice field.

I could tell some kind of heavy mining operation had already taken place down below. I, however, really wanted to work towards my main goal of having a large spice refiner one day. So, I went to town.

I must have started farming spice at like 2 AM. Around 4 AM, I was so tired that I only went on for a short time later. At the time, I did not realize how good this was. It was so close to my base, and I didn't run into anyone unfriendly.

Looking back now, I do kind of wish I had been able to push on just a bit longer. You don’t know how many times since then I'll show up to only have the big sand worm everyone calls “pappa” come and eat the entire field. Other times, I'm flying like 10 times the distance or further out to it. Then you have all the issues I have with gankers.

At the very least, I was able to farm enough spice sand to craft in the Deep Desert a medium spice refinery. For the cost of 750 spice sand, it would produce 10 spice melange.

I ended up catching one more break before the week ended in the Deep Desert. The large spice field popped again and despite there being more players online than the last time. It was on move-out day, as the players call it. Fewer than 24 hours were remaining till the Deep Desert wipe. As such, a lot of players had already packed up and left. So, it remained peaceful.

Not wanting to waste this golden opportunity, I went to town again, farming away in the spice field. Day turned into night and night into day once again. By the time I was done, I had nearly 30k spice sand to refine. Such an opportunity I'd learn later was so rare I feel blessed getting that much spice in one sitting.

Final Thoughts

Like all good things, it comes to an end. Time was running out, and I had to start hauling everything back to Hagga Basin. Despite the modest base I had set up near some massive places where people built. I was able to set myself up so well in this first week that I'd have a large spice refiner the next time I decided to partake in Deep Desert for the week.

Information

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