I swear, every time I hear the word “spice” nowadays, there’s a little voice in my head that whispers “the Spice Melange…” That’s what happens when you name your super-powerful space resource after something people keep in their kitchen cabinets. Still, I guess if you can’t get the Spice off your mind, you just gotta go out and get some more of the stuff. Here’s how to harvest Spice in Dune: Spice Wars.
Before you can go about harvesting Spice, you need to have control of a Village within close proximity of an active Spice field. To make this happen, your Faction will need to be strong enough to create a military unit. Assuming a Village is occupied by an enemy Faction, you’ll need to attack with your military unit and drive them out of town. Once the fighting’s over, you’ll want to opt to Liberate the Village, assuming control of it.
How to Harvest Spice in Dune Spice Wars
Once you’re in control of a Village, click on it to get a readout of its current capabilities, including whether or not the local Spice is ready to harvest. If you’re ready to go, then you can construct your first Refinery. Click the little plus sign under the Buildings tab to bring up your buildable constructs. To make a Refinery, you’ll need:
- 500 Plasticrete
- 4 Fuel Cells
- 4 Days
After 4 days have passed, you’ll have your shiny new Refinery, which comes bundled with a Spice Harvester. Click on your Harvester and click “Deploy” to send it to the Spice field and start gathering stuff up. The longer the Harvester is out there, the more Spice it’ll bring home. However, and this part is super important, you can’t leave them out there forever.
Every Harvester has a built-in Auto-Recall function, which you can enable (and should) when you first click on it. The Spice fields of Arrakis are regularly patrolled by gigantic Sandworms, and if they get a whiff of your Harvester, they’ll attempt to trash it. If the Auto-Recall is enabled, your Harvester will automatically retreat to safety the moment a Sandworm is detected.
You will incur a 5% penalty to the Spice you harvest while the Auto-Recall is on, but it’s worth it because, if your Harvester gets gobbled up, you’ll lose all of the Spice it harvested. At least this way you’ll still have a Harvester to send back out when the Sandworm moves on.
If you’re feeling gutsy and don’t have your eye on too many other things, you can turn the Auto-Recall off and leave your Harvester out for as long as possible until the Sandworm is right on its doorstep, but you’ll need to give the order to retreat yourself, so this does require your constant attention.
