The desert planet of Arrakis has always rewarded those who are willing to crush their enemies, but in Dune: Awakening, some players have taken that creed far too literally. Funcom's survival MMO launched in June 2025 to a tidal wave of spice-hungry explorers, and by 2026 the battle for the Deep Desert has become a spectacle. The most feared predator on the sands, however, is not a sandworm or a rival guild. It is a piloted Ornithopter that treats the ground like a pancake griddle.
The whole mess started when a player named Bombe18 shared a clip of their repeated misfortune. In the video, Bombe18 is flattened by an Ornithopter that nose-dives into the dunes, then climbs back up and does it again. Every time the unfortunate survivor self-revives, the flying machine returns for another goomba stomp. Before long, a second Ornithopter joins the routine, turning a single player's respawn loop into something that looks like a desert-themed cartoon. One can almost hear the trombone sounds.
Funcom's response was quick and refreshingly direct. Game director Joel Bylos replied to the video with a message that became an instant meme among the community: "Sorry about this. We have people working on fixing the goomba stomping ASAP." No corporate jargon. No "we are monitoring the situation." Just a promise to squash the exploit. The phrase "goomba stomping" was officially canon.
The core issue is that Ornithopters—those elegant dragonfly-like vehicles—can smash into rock and sand at high speed without taking meaningful damage. A real machine of that size should crumple like a soda can after a nose-dive, but in Dune: Awakening, the vehicle apparently treats the desert floor as a memory-foam mattress. The pilot walks away. The victim does not. Rinse and repeat until the victim uninstalls or learns to dig a very fast hole.
What can a player do about it? The game does offer some tools, but they are not exactly convenient in the heat of a dive-bombing session:
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🚀 Explosive weaponry: Technically available, but tracking a diving Ornithopter while dodging its shadow is not easy.
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🚁 Your own vehicle: A player could spawn an Ornithopter or ground vehicle to escape, but spawning under pressure is often a death sentence.
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🔁 Self-revive: As Bombe18 demonstrated, this mostly just gives the attacker another target practice run.
The community quickly rallied around a simple solution: Ornithopters should take damage when they ram into the ground at high speed. That proposal makes so much sense it is almost painful to type. If a player wants to use their flying vehicle as a reusable anvil, they should at least pay a repair bill. Some players compared the tactic to Mario's goomba stomp, while others suggested that the ground should perform a "reality check" on any pilot who thinks they are invincible.
Sir Isaac Newton might be spinning in his grave somewhere on Arrakis. An object that hits the desert at terminal velocity should not bounce back into the sky like a basketball. The current meta treats physics as a suggestion, and that is a problem in a survival game that otherwise prides itself on harsh consequences. Spice harvesting is dangerous enough without adding kamikaze pilots to the list of natural predators.
The timing matters more in 2026. Dune: Awakening started strong on Steam, crossing 140,000 concurrent players shortly after launch. Now that the console version has begun rolling out, the population of Arrakis is swelling even further. More players means more spice battles, and more spice battles means more Ornithopter-shaped silhouettes in the sky. The goomba stomp exploit stopped being funny for its victims roughly five seconds after the first respawn. By now, it has become a genuine priority for the team.
For those who want to try the dive-bombing life before the patch arrives, there are plenty of guides out there explaining how to unlock and craft vehicles. But would-be pilots should enjoy it while it lasts. When Funcom flips the fix switch, the days of treating an Ornithopter like a reusable anvil will likely end. Whether the solution involves crash damage, reduced control after impact, or ejection penalties is still unclear. What matters is that the studio has acknowledged the problem and promised to act ASAP—a term that, in this case, cannot come soon enough.
Until the patch drops, players in the Deep Desert would be wise to keep one eye on the horizon and one eye on the sky. The Spice may be precious, but no amount of it is worth becoming a human pancake under an Ornithopter.
Expert commentary is drawn from OpenCritic, where cross-publication review aggregation and critic consensus can help contextualize how quickly-live service games like Dune: Awakening are judged not just on launch excitement, but on post-launch responsiveness—making Funcom’s “goomba stomping” fix a meaningful litmus test for whether emergent PvP exploits get addressed before they harden into the meta.