Ding 200 -- Max Level in Dune Awakening

I've had a lot of time on my hands with the Government shutdown.  Now that it's all set to end, I suppose it's fitting that yesterday I finished off my leveling in Dune Awakening.

Ding 200 -- Don't mind me, just getting stabbed while taking a screenshot

I started out the week with a level and a half left to go, and previous to this, I wasn't really in a rush to max out good old Tree Trunks McSkinny, but the writing was on the wall that my goofing off during the daytimes on Dune Awakening was soon coming to an end. 

What does an old MMO player do best . . . GRIND. I reran the infamous Secret Lab in Station 163 over and over. It was my favorite instance of the latest DLC, and as it turns out, the exp there is pretty great! If you really want to you can just sit in that end room and grind wave after wave of one boss and four enemies at a pace of one wave a minute.

Grinding Station 163 Secret Lab Boss Room

This is what Dune has become for me, just killing time and trying to complete a few Tom-goals, like . . . "Hmm. I want to build my own carrier and spice crawler and do a solo spicing run." OK! DONE! I even have an hour-long unedited video of it. (11:30 mark is a fun close call . . . 44 minute mark is another.)

If you actually watch that video (I don't expect you to), you'll see me using my awesome thanksgiving turkey base I built for the holidays.

You enter through the legs. It's genius.

Before that was my pumpkin base for Halloween.

Happy Halloween from my goofy base!

. . . and of course, we shall never forget the FREE MAZE, but these are the types of Tom Goals I'm talking about -- self-created ones.

As for the not self-created goals, I have 90 percent completion on the Dune Steam Achievements with my most recent being crafting a Lasgun, which was pretty fun to use when I was grinding experience, but I highly doubt I'll ever break it out to rip apart a base in DD.  I guess you never know though.

Melting away the golden AI guys worth 3 exp each

All that's left for achievements are:

• Kill 50 snipers with a spit dart sniper (doable, but time consuming)
• Release a suspensor blast 25 times (easy, just need to respec)
• Use a hunter seeker 25 times (again, easy, just need to respec)
• Mine 10,000 of each resource type by hand (hard! There's no way to track what you're missing)
• Eliminate 500 Harkonens (would just need to grind Row A shipwrecks in DD)
• Cook up 100 Muad'Dib meatball sandwiches (just need to find and kill the little mice and craft up like 10 more)

So there you go. I'm level 200 and still doing my thing in Dune. Yes, it would be kind of fun to 100 percent this game, but I'm back to work (most likely today or tomorrow) so who knows what's next?!

Happy Dueling!