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Choices and Endings
September 9, 2026 at 01:09 AM
Initial version (2026-09-08)
DUST: Origins is built so that a playthrough is a set of decisions rather than a fixed path. The studio's own summary of it is that actions have consequences, and that anyone can live and anyone can die. There is more than one way off Limbo-6, and the game frames the outcome as the player's decision: safely on an escape pod, or very much otherwise.
The main lever is how the player treats the other survivors on the station. Each of them has motivations of their own, and they can assist or impede an escape depending on whether the player helps them in return. Some present optional side missions that unlock new items and areas. The alternative is the lone wolf route, in which the player leaves everyone else to their fate, and that is a supported way to play rather than a failure state.
Those relationships intersect with routes. Helping the right person can open a path; ignoring them can close it. Because progression through the station already depends on found key items and hacked access, survivor decisions and exploration decisions end up modifying the same map.
The game separates its outcomes into three distinct classes, all of which are tracked.
Outcome | What it is | How it is earned |
|---|---|---|
Ending | One of several main conclusions to a playthrough. | Determined by how the player played and the actions they took. |
Epilogue | A post-credits scene revealing the fate of a character the player crossed paths with. | Tied to individual characters. Seeing them all requires completing the game multiple times. |
Dead End | A distinct, elaborate death outcome. The studio counts these as content rather than as failure. | Triggered by dying in one of the many creative ways the station allows. The official site describes over a dozen of them. |
Everything the player reaches is recorded in an Endings Collection, which exists so that it is easy to track what has and has not been seen. Every ending, epilogue and dead end registered there unlocks a unique extra. Those extras are varied: the studio has named exotic weapons and mods at one end and 3D character models viewable in a model viewer at the other.
The consequence is that dying badly is productive. The first time a given dead end is triggered it unlocks something, which turns an unlucky death into progress toward the collection instead of wasted time. The official site is fairly cheerful about it, describing dead ends as a consolation for death, and one of the studio's short clips makes the same point: death can change what comes next.
The studio has said the game is designed to be experienced multiple times to see everything and unlock the extras. A single run can only produce one ending and a subset of the epilogues, so completeness is a multi-run goal by design. Unlocked extras feed forward into New Game Plus, where they can be equipped alongside harder difficulty settings, so later runs are both better armed and more demanding.
Helping survivors is the route to extra items, side missions and areas. Refusing costs access but is a valid path.
There is no indication that any single choice is reversible within a run, so decisions should be treated as committed.
Because dead ends unlock content, experimenting with dangerous interactions has value beyond curiosity.
Resource decisions are a form of choice too, since crafting materials are finite and spending them one way forecloses another.
How many endings exist, or what any individual ending requires.
The names or number of survivors, and which of them have epilogues.
Whether choices are presented as explicit dialogue options, as world actions, or both.
Whether the game tracks a reputation or morality value behind the scenes.
The exact dead-end count. The official site says over a dozen without giving a figure.
Whether any ending is gated behind New Game Plus rather than reachable on a first run.
