We usually keep two bases in Dune: Awakening's Deep Desert. A home base where we process the spice and ores we collect, and a forward base, just short of the dividing line, used as a staging point to excursions into the PvP half of the desert.
Yesterday was the last day before the weekly Coriolis storm that erases every structure in the Deep Desert and will kill you if you are found there.
I'd taken down the forward base earlier in the day. Calrain, who is in charge of the home base, was off hunting in real life. He said he'd be back in time to take down the home base. This was important, because that base had our Large Spice Processor and all the spice we'd gathered from our last spicing run.
I hadn't heard from him. I was just heading to bed at quarter to midnight when I thought I'd check to see if he needed help with the base — no response. I got in game and peeked into the Deep Desert. The home base was still very much there.
I flew in with my medium thopter and started tearing stuff down. I was working on that when the system message informed me that the Coriolis storm would hit in TEN MINUTES.
I thought I had an HOUR and ten minutes, even with the ending on Daylight Savings Time. I was wrong. Ten minutes to tear down the base or lose weeks of work — not just the space, but the large spice processor, the ore processor, the spice generator, Calrain's scout thopter, the large storage boxes; these things were expensive to make.
I started madly tearing down the precious machines and getting the spice in my cargo hold. I flew back on turbos to Hagga, stuffed the spice and other stuff anywhere it could fit in Cal's base, flew back.
Calrain had just arrived home and he was logging in as I went for another load, filling up my thopter as much as I could. I left with less than two minutes to go before everything reset. I crashed into the sands of the Eastern Shield Wall just as the storm hit its peak. I had in the cargo hold all of our spice, processed and unprocessed, and as much of our precious plastanium as I could manage.
Cal had managed to get his scout thopter out, just in time. But… we left a lot of stuff out on the sands. It's going to take some time to get it back, especially things like the spice-infused fuel cells that power the spice generator. Those require items found only in the radioactive hell of Sheol.
But… we saved the spice. That, we did.
And now we know that the Coriolis storm comes at midnight, Eastern time.
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