Dune: Awakening’s Free Blood and Ice Expansion Arrives December 1
Dune: Awakening is getting its next free expansion on December 1, with Blood and Ice sending players to the frozen north of Arrakis. The update launches on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox, and adds a new survival map called the Polar Sink.
The big shift is temperature. Instead of managing desert heat, players will need to stay warm, upgrade gear, gather new resources, and adjust their survival setup for the cold. The Polar Sink is split between tundra territory controlled by wealthy water shipper families and a guarded ice cap where players can harvest ice for new uses, including cooling base equipment and speeding up production.
Funcom says Blood and Ice adds around 35 hours of new progression, along with new vehicle modules, augments, and specialization traits. The studio also says future updates will add more reasons to return to the Polar Sink after players finish the main progression there.
The same update will introduce a dedicated Events tab in the main menu. The current event, The Scourge, has players investigating a disease spreading across Arrakis, while another event called Water Crisis will arrive shortly after Blood and Ice and focus on fighting over scarce water supplies. Events can be completed in both single-player and multiplayer.
Dune: Awakening is also adding an optional cosmetics store with outfits, vehicle variants, and base customization items. At launch, it’ll use a rotating selection, including looks from the Dune films tied to the theatrical release of Dune: Part Three. Funcom says it plans to make the full cosmetics catalogue available permanently later on, rather than relying on rotations.
Some larger community-requested features now have windows, too. Offline single-player is planned for November 2026. Character copying is planned for January 2027, letting players move multiplayer characters into single-player, and move single-player characters to select private or self-hosted PC servers if those servers allow it. Full cross-play across supported platforms is also planned for January 2027.
Further reading: Official Dune: Awakening Blood and Ice announcement
