Dustland Runner Story Missions follow the player, Dustcap, Each missions consists of audio clips interspersed with the player's own music, and typically last 20-30 minutes.
Season 1[]
In Season 1 Dustcap returns to the settlement Kettlemine only to find it under attack from pirates. Fleeing the attack with valuable plans for a large scale desalinator you make contact with your operator, Sketchy Galore, who tries to keep you alive.
Operation Ape Missions[]
Only players who hold an Operation Ape: Access Pass will be able to play the Operation Ape story missions featuring Buster, Bored Ape (#8222), who is fully voiced in these missions.
Special Missions[]
Occasionally special missions are run that are not part of the regular seasons. Check them out here.
Mission Requirements[]
Every mission will come with different distance requirements for players to achieve in order to earn a green tick on the distance badge. Regardless of energy, players who start a mission and turn on GPS will have their distance achieved recorded cumulatively. This also holds true when players pause and resume the mission.
Additionally some missions will only unlock when certain inventory items are obtained or previous missions have been completed. You will need to collect all of the required items to unlock the mission.
Dustland Background[]
How did it all begin[]
Climate change and a massive solar flare have transformed the world forever, and as far as anyone knows, the survivors in the towns scattered across the Dustlands are what remains of life as it was.
The player is a Dustcap, a messenger working among the various settlements. Some Dustcaps run, some ride. Others row, surf, drive or fly. All of them carry information, technology, light and hope between what they think are the huddled remnants of humanity.
Or at least, that’s where the game starts.
The Dustlands[]
The Dustlands span a broad parcel of North Carolina and this is where the game is set. In game terms, the Dustlands marks the edges of the vast campus of land bought by the White Barrow Initiative to serve as accommodation, testbed and ultimately petri dish for its plan to save the world.
Dustcaps[]
The most common name used for the groups of couriers and porters who work out of each town. They are transporters, postal workers, occasionally sheriffs, scientists, medics, assistants and messengers. A Dustcap can be called upon to do almost anything. And, sooner or later, all Dustcaps will be.
Each town’s Dustcaps have their own unique wardrobe and style but all Dustcaps are united by three common factors:
- A headset including a mic, a camera, and varying levels of additional technology;
- A Halycon-A full body suit designed to keep the Dustcap cool in the punishing environment of the Dustlands;
- An operator, working out of their hometown, who provides assistance, context and off-site backup for every Dustcap. To borrow the term used in Spider-Man: Homecoming, the operator is the ‘guy in the chair’ for each Dustcap.
Dustcaps do the same job in wildly individualistic ways. That’s reflected in their Halycon suits, their garb, their headsets and their approach to the work.
Dustland History[]
The Past[]
The White Barrow Initiative was a global attempt to repair and reverse climate change. United by the reality of the situation, government, industry, religion and science came together to create a series of ‘campfire’ sites.
The campsites focused on five umbrella projects each with hundreds of other projects operating under them. Nothing was off the table, and research began into everything from consciousness transferal and cybernetics to Artificial Intelligence and genetic modification. All of which was steered towards addressing the five core issues at the heart of climate change, as expressed in the .
The five projects were based on ambitious nanotech, hopeful of success, occasionally looked like something from wild sci-fi, and in one case totally classified. The aim was to fix the world.
They almost made it.
The Flare[]
The Carrington Event was the most powerful solar event in history, setting fire to telegraph systems and causing global aurora displays for a week.
The Martin Event dwarfed it. A solar flare of unprecedented strength broke across the Earth with barely twelve hours’ warning. Every satellite fell, every communication system collapsed. The electromagnetic web we rely on fell apart. Worse still the flare exacerbated the existing damage to the climate. Extreme weather erupted across the globe, and the storms that ravaged North Carolina didn’t abate for weeks.
When they did, Kettlemine, the port of entry for White Barrow L, was all but crushed. White Barrow itself remained, as did the other sites, but only just. The world went dark but the campfires of White Barrow kept burning. Barely.
The Fall[]
White Barrow survived the end of the world but its spirit didn’t. Over the decades that followed the desperate attempts to heal the damage became embittered attempts to retain control of what little remained. The ruling body fragmented, the towns began to rise up and civil war broke out in the bones of the past, culminating in the Firewalker Battle. The collapse of the mech, and the conflagration that it left in its wake, devastated the region anew.
But didn’t destroy it.
The Present
An uneasy peace has descended over the Dustlands. The pirate nations of Pallas’ Tears and Salty Mudlands are known quantities, each town has enough to survive but not quite enough to thrive. The Dustcaps maintain that fragile peace. For now.
The Future[]
The Dustlands change forever at the end of season 1. Kettlemine becoming a source of functionally infinite fresh water upends the region’s economy and power structures, and that’s just the start.
As the Dustcaps make their way through the world, they’ll discover more examples of White Barrow’s sins, and their miracles. They’ll encounter new settlements and survivors who’ve hidden for decades. They’ll encounter new forms of life that have adapted to their world better than they ever could and old forms of life that cling tenaciously to a past that burned before the Dustcaps were born.
But most of all, the Dustcaps will find themselves at the crest of a wave of change that will change their world forever and do so for the better.