Dune: Awakening beta players extracted nearly 9 million liters of blood last weekend, enough to fill 3 Olympic-size, extremely gross swimming pools

Best Dune: Awakening homeworld, caste, and mentor - A close-up shot of a customised masculine character standing with a backdrop of fire. — (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.

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.

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.

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.

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