After a few hours, Nightingale feels like one of the weirder Elder Scrolls RPGs

At its worst, it’s about fighting the UI and stripmining the scenery

Image credit:Inflexion Games

The major thing Inflexion’s fantasy survival sim Nightingale gets right is that it makes procedural generation feel like sorcery. “Procgen” has become a ubiquitous concept in game design and especially survival game design, and I fear we’ve all lost sight of how magical it is to summon a landscape full of idiosyncratic flourishes from a hidden dataset. It’s partly, in fairness, that many semi-randomised settings feel indistinct, smooshed together with little of the character you’d get from a “hand-made” environment and setting. Nightingale slices through the ennui in a couple of ways.

One is that this is a relatively storied and text-driven survival experience, with a self-summoning fairy narrator, Puck, who immediately buries you in Shakespearean turns of phrase as he weaves the history of a multiple-dimensional universe of “Fae” realms, roamed by creatures of Irish, English and Scottish myth and legend. I’m not sure Puck will be everybody’s cup of tea as principal quest-giver and narrator - according to Inflexion boss Aaryn Flynn, some early players have struggled to make head or tail of his dialogue. But he helps conjure up an eldritch mood that sets Nightingale apart from most genre fantasies, including the Dragon Age titles Flynn once worked on at BioWare.

Image credit:Inflexion Games/Rock Paper Shotgun

The other way Nightingale makes procgen interesting again is to characterise the generation of worlds as the act of drawing from a deck of enchanted cards. These Realm cards allow you to choose the biome, difficulty and approximate inhabitants of the world you’ll visit when you step under the arch of a mystical portal, with cards for weirder, more challenging and rewarding varieties of Realm created or acquired through quests and exploration. It’s a wonderful idea that ties Nightingale’s world-building to much older, analog traditions of “procedural generation”, immortalised by Tarot cards and carried on by latter-day physical games such as Once Upon A Time . It makes shifting between worlds feel like telling fortunes, and introduces a sly “gotta collect ’em all” mechanic that I’d love to become the basis for some kind of full-blown card-trading scene.

The landscapes of Nightingale themselves are pretty dreamy. The premise is that you’re a British Victorian-era paradimensional adventurer who is trying to find their way back through the Fae Realms to Earth, in the wake of a terrible cataclysm triggered by humanity/the European parts of humanity’s pioneering tendencies. The first biome you’ll visit (beyond an initial accidental trip to an endgame underworld, from which Puck swiftly rescues you) is a forest full of overgrown gaspunk machinery, sweeping, flower-dusted hillsides, and high, ruined towers that are olde worlde with a splash of the Monolith from 2001: Space Odyssey.

Depending on which Realm cards you play, there’s a chance of certain objects, groups and resources appearing. |Image credit:Inflexion Games

The forest was the first biome Inflexion created for Nightingale, and it feels like the game’s soul. Much as procedural generation pulls many variations from the same archive of props and assets, so forests (and perhaps especially, the twisty remnants of Britain’s old primordial rainforests) often seem much larger on the inside.

A little further afield, there’s a Swamp biome featuring huge iron derricks, where you’ll have to worry about slow movement and infections from polluted water. Last but not least, there’s a Desert biome that harbours towering observation platforms, where you can play Realm cards to modify the world in real-time - just watch you don’t overheat while roving around in full sunlight. The game’s weapons and gear include fancy umbrellas, which both guard against hostile weather and can be used for gliding. Initiating a glide after jumping is a little tricksy - I fell to my death, the first time I did it - but it makes for some amusing party multiplayer photography. How’s that for traversal, Destiny 2 ?

Thanks to guides writer Jeremy for this magnificent image of Nightingale players in formation. Chocks away, dearies! |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Inflexion Games

The umbrellas are a gentle homage to Mary Poppins, and the game as a whole is a love letter to British cultural exports. The worlds owe plentiful debts to Narnia, Alice In Wonderland and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You see this lineage in the monster design, too, which ranges from rattling clockwork abominations through monstrous arachnids (or if you turn Arachnophobia mode on, spider-teethed balloons) to sleeping sentient trees who can either be bartered with or felled to obtain rarer kinds of timber. Not every foe is worthy of a campfire yarn: you’ll face hordes of club-wielding goblins and larger, tougher variations of the same. But I’m eager nonetheless to encounter the rest of the bestiary, after a few hours wandering the opening Realms.

At its strangest and most elusive, Nightingale reminds me of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls RPGs pre-Oblivion. The Realms compare to the loose cosmography of the Elder Scrolls universe, and the moment-to-moment of this first or third-person adventure has something of the hush and obscurity of Morrowind. I’ve enjoyed roaming the initial “Byway” realms rather more than I’ve enjoyed dredging the mists of Enshrouded , or going on safari in Palworld . These are worlds that hold mysteries, as hard as the quest logs and waypoints try to spoil everything.

A small anecdote: after trying out the single player last week, RPS attended a group play session with Inflexion’s Aaryn Flynn in which we took on several later-game quests, including a hunt for one of the aforesaid sentient trees. At first, we couldn’t find the tree, leading to a suspenseful tour of the surrounding, misty forest, testing our axes on any especially ominous-looking vegetation. Flynn was naturally worried that we’d all lose interest, but I for one loved the experience of getting lost in the woods. Until an over-zealous NPC lumberjack dropped a trunk on me, anyway.

After such glorious tours of the undergrowth - the low sun springing through the boughs and colouring the ensorcelled air, forming a kind of Golden Hereafter at the forest’s distant perimeter - it’s a shock to stumble out into the open and get told to smash rocks 30 times so you can build a bungalow. The downside of Nightingale’s fancy-dan “gaslamp fantasy” premise is that certain underlying survival game routines feel all the more banal in context.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Inflexion Games

If you’ve played Ark: Survival Evolved or Valheim you’ll know the drill: run around spamming the collect button to hoover up rudimentary crafting components, such as sticks and rocks. From these you will assemble tools such as woodaxes and mining picks, which allow you to break down larger chunks of scenery and obtain the ingredients for floors, walls, roofs, and ambient fixtures such as candles. You’ll also construct crafting tables of one kind or another, from tanning racks to sewing stations.

People who adore tweaking a frontierland estate will find much to optimise here. Amongst other things, you can place facilities such as campfires and worktables near one another to unlock ambient bonuses, and the holographic building tool is fairly easy to use. It lets you plot out a series of structures to see what they look like, before you commit the materials.

Building a base is the start of your Nightingale adventure. From there, you’ll make contact with various factions, including other groups of human refugees, and embark on quests to ancient temples and so forth to acquire the cards for more distant realms that progress the overarching plot. The dungeons I tackled were quite straightforward: in one, I had to descend through the inside of a ruin to a bossfight in the catacombs, where the biggest difficulty was being unable to see my opponent. But during our co-op session with Flynn, we were able to sample a few endgame “raid”-style events that seem worth grinding for.

In one, you have to explore a sandy sunken temple consisting of a series of “find the glyph” puzzle rooms and wave defence encounters. In another quest, we also took on a giant, poison-belching bat ogre, albeit with the benefit of endgame equipment that made said poison-belching bat ogre a pushover. In the absence of artificial playtester advantages, I can well imagine these climactic battles stretching past 10 minutes as players experiment with debuffs, search for weakpoints, and contend with waves of summonable minions. The weapon selection starts you off with crude knives and bowguns, with most fights coming down to managing your stamina. Later, there are hammers with a healing aura alt-fire, shotguns you can load up with elemental ammo, and pistols that can be wielded while gliding with your umbrella.

Nightingale stands apart from the current survival game competition better than I was expecting. It’s not the nakedly trashy work of trend-splicing Palworld is, and may undeservedly suffer as a consequence - this isn’t a game that lends itself to social media gifs, with too much of the thrill buried in the literary texture and atmosphere of the world. Those literary inspirations also make for a stragglier but more engrossing species of fantasy next to Enshrouded, which I enjoy more in the moment-to-moment but don’t feel as intrigued by.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Inflexion Games

Aside from cleaning up the UI, the major thing I’d like Inflexion to work on during Nightingale’s early access period is endowing the bread-and-butter survival game building and crafting elements with something of the mystique that suffuses the world concept, lush set dressing and the Realms card mechanic. This may be too big an incompatibility to bridge, because it runs up against the basic settler mindset of survival games at large, which tend to become tales of imperial expansion and consolidation that drain their environments of interest. By contrast, one crucial trait of a good fairy story is that it’s fleeting. The children who discover Narnia might get to be kings and queens for a while, but they’re always sent back to the everyday world eventually. You’re not supposed to settle down in these curious liminal places, these faraway landscapes that linger between standing stones or in the shadows behind the door: the enchantment of the other realm is that it never becomes home.

If you’re thirsty for more, we also have a group interview with Inflexion boss Aaryn Flynn , carried out during the aforementioned co-op session. Pullquote: “Norman is a fabulous name for a bear.”

Nightingale

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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