Dune: Awakening gets its first big free expansion, Blood and Ice, on December 1 across PC, PS5, and Xbox, and it sends players somewhere Arrakis has never felt before: a frozen map where the threat is the cold, not the sun.
Funcom detailed the update this weekend, as reported by Eurogamer. The expansion is free and adds roughly 35 hours of new progression.
What is in Blood and Ice
The headline addition is the Polar Sink, a new map built around staying warm instead of escaping heat. Here is what Funcom says arrives on December 1:
- The Polar Sink map, with tundra and ice cap biomes
- Water shipper strongholds to take on
- Ice you can harvest for base cooling and production
- New vehicle modules, augments, and specialisation traits
- A new Events tab, starting with a Water Crisis event that follows The Scourge
Events work in both single-player and multiplayer.
Offline mode, cross-play, and character transfers
Does Dune: Awakening get offline play? Yes. Funcom says offline single-player is due this month, in November, ahead of the expansion.
January 2027 brings the bigger platform changes. Players will be able to copy characters between multiplayer and single-player, and from single-player to select private and self-hosted PC servers. Full cross-play is also set for January 2027.
A cosmetics store pays for the free updates
Funcom has also launched a cosmetics store, which it says will fund free updates like this one. Items rotate, and the lineup will include Dune film looks around the December release of Dune: Part Three.
The studio says the game has picked up more than 1 million new players since its console launch. That growth comes after a hard stretch for the company. As we covered when Funcom cut staff to focus on Dune: Awakening and Conan, the studio restructured around its biggest survival games, and Blood and Ice is the first major result of that bet.
