Dune Awakening patch restores missing ornithopters and tweaks dueling ring balance

Funcom pushed a new Dune Awakening patch tied to Lunar New Year, and the biggest practical fix is for anyone who had an ornithopter vanish. If you got hit by a very specific travel bug, your missing thopter should now be back in the Vehicle Backup Tool.

According to the patch notes, the issue affected players who traveled to the Neo Carthag Duelling Ring via the Overland Map, then used the NPC there to travel to Harko, before Overland Map access to the Duelling Ring was disabled in Hotfix 1.3.0.3. Funcom says it only happened if you’d mounted and dismounted a bike during the Smugglers Run mission before making that trip.

Beyond the thopter restoration, the patch is mostly smaller tuning and quality-of-life stuff. Iodine pill costs in Duelling Ring content have been adjusted, and player-applied slow effects are less effective against melee bosses. There’s also a new “mollyguard” added for dungeons, plus an option to hide some messages via the HUD.

This isn’t another big durability shake-up like last week’s hotfix, but it should at least clean up a nasty edge-case loss for affected players while smoothing out a few pain points in Chapter 3’s dueling ring and dungeon content.

Dune Awakening remains incredibly popular on Steam, averaging over 8,000 concurrent players on an average day.