Best Dune: Awakening class mentor, homeworld, and caste to pick during character creation

Unlike most sandbox survival games, Dune: Awakening gives you a great deal of character customisation beyond just the appearance of your poor little survivor. After deciding on their look, you'll have an intense…discussion (read: interrogation) with the reverend mother, where you'll need to pick your homeworld, caste, and mentor.

Each of these three character customisation options has an impact on your survivor's abilities in gameplay, whether it's during combat or conversation. Arrakis is a harsh desert filled with hungry sandworms, so it's wise to give yourself the best start possible. Below you'll find an overview of all the homeworlds, castes, and class mentors, plus which ones you should pick. I'll start with the best classes, as that's the most important decision during character creation.

Best Dune: Awakening mentor/class

Mentors are effectively different classes, granting you a unique skill tree full of abilities and passive buffs. You'll unlock the first ability in your chosen class straightaway, and you'll have to unlock the rest as you level up, earn skill points, and train.

Importantly, choosing a mentor only decides your starting class—you can unlock additional skill trees through trainers. Use our Dune: Awakening trainer locations guide to upgrade your starting class, unlock the remaining mentors that you didn't pick, and unlock brand-new skill trees like the Planetologist.

The best class mentor to pick is the Mentat, which immediately gives you the Sentinel turret that can easily take out entire camps on its own, and the skill tree also has a few poison-based abilities. These are perfect at the start of the game, when your character is weaker, as they do all the hard work for you. The Mentat skill tree also provides passive bonuses to ranged weapons and repairing, among other things, which are fantastic to pick up early.

The second-best skill tree of the bunch here is the Trooper, but there's no point picking this class at the start of the game since it happens to be the first trainer you'll meet anyhow, while the Mentat trainer is much later on. Picking Mentat first means you can have your cake and eat it too, using both the turret and the handy grappling hook very early in the game.

These are the four mentor classes you can pick during character creation:

Best Dune: Awakening homeworld

Your homeworld is actually the first choice you have to make, and it's largely lore-based, with little actual impact on gameplay, so pick whichever one sounds the coolest to you.

In gameplay, you will occasionally see a dialogue prompt that uses your unique trait, but these won't significantly impact or alter your experience. Each trait is about as useful as the others, it's more a matter of whether you want your character to be wise, deceptive, techy, and so on. You'll also unlock a unique emote to rep your homeworld out in the wilds, for what it's worth.

These are the five homeworld options available to you:

Best Dune: Awakening caste

Much like your homeworld (even more so, actually), your caste is a roleplaying feature first and foremost, giving your character a backstory about their rank in society. You'll also unlock a second dialogue trait, which is unique and separate from the homeworld ones, so don't worry about overlapping. These traits also crop up every now and then during conversations with very little in the way of tangible consequences.

Here are all three castes you can choose from: