Whether you join the Dune: Awakening Atreides or Harkonnens can be very important. But what do you do if you have chosen the wrong faction? MeinMMO summarizes all the important details about switching factions for you.
How can I switch factions in Dune: Awakening? If you have already joined the Harkonnens or Atreides but are dissatisfied with your choice, you can initiate a one-time faction switch.
To do this, travel to the Anvil Trading Post in the Eastern Vermillius Rift. There you will find the two representatives of each side:
- Levenbrech Maxim Kazmir of the Harkonnens
- Lieutenant Anton Tolliver of the Atreides
With them, you can initiate the betrayal of your current faction through a dialogue option.
If this option is not available there, another contact person is available in the respective capital for the faction switch:
- Thurif Hawat, who stands at the back end of the Ornithopter landing pad in Arrakeen.
- Piter De Vries from Harko Village, whom you can find opposite the fast travel pilot.
When you select the appropriate dialogue option for betraying your current faction, a warning will pop up again that you must confirm again in order to proceed with the switch. After that, you will receive a new quest to implement the planned betrayal.
Attention: At times, none of the NPCs from the opposing faction had the dialogue options for the faction switch available. Whether this was a bug or if the current quest progress for the Harkonnens made switching to the Atreides impossible is unclear.
The future of Dune Awakening in the video:
Consequences and Unlocks
What consequences does betrayal have?
- Once you have betrayed a faction, you cannot return.
- If you had an active mission for your old side at the time of betrayal, it will disappear from your quest log.
- If you belong to a guild that is part of faction A, and you switch to faction B, your character will automatically be removed from the guild.
You retain all purchased unlocks: All acquired schematics and building options from your old side remain yours even after the switch. You can first bring a faction to level 5, unlock and purchase everything, then carry out the betrayal and also level the other faction to level 5 and acquire everything there.
Interesting: According to player ConCon (via YouTube), by switching you take on the level you had achieved with your first faction. ConCon was level 5 with the Atreides, committed the betrayal, mastered a quest, and then automatically reached level 5 with the Harkonnens.
How important are the factions at all? They are essentially important for joining a guild. Followers of the Atreides cannot join a Harkonnen community, and vice versa, similar rules apply. Otherwise, with the choice of faction, you primarily determine access to the respective quest line and the associated faction trader.
You can learn more about this here: Dune: Awakening Landsraad, factions and guilds – what you need to know about Atreides versus Harkonnen
What do I need to know about Dune: Awakening? The new survival MMO from Funcom was released on June 10, 2025, for PC and takes you to the desert planet of Arrakis. However, you will not encounter the familiar story from the books or films, but an alternative timeline in which Paul Atreides was never born.
Hunger, thirst, sun, aggressive enemies – from the very first minute, survival is the focus of Dune: Awakening. By building better and better tools, equipment, bases, vehicles, and weapons, you increasingly ease your daily life, allowing you to focus more on exploring the game world, mastering dungeons, or experiencing the story.
In large parts of the game world, you can encounter up to 39 other players. Exceptions are the two faction capitals and the Deep Desert, a massive endgame area where PvP is active almost everywhere and which fundamentally changes every week due to a storm. You can find out more in our overview: Dune: Awakening – Everything about the release on PS5, Xbox and PC
