Another Crab’s Treasure review: a playful Soulslike for everyone, especially if you like crabs

This will more than tide you over

Image credit:Aggro Crab

• Developer: Aggro Crab
• Publisher: Aggro Crab
• Release: April 25th 2024
• On: Windows
• From: Steam , Game Pass
• Price: £24/€27/$27
• Reviewed on: Intel Core i7-12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3080, Windows 11

Lots of Soulslikes have about as much joy, and the same colour palette, as a burning cowpat. They are grim and dark and often have gimmicks that are a bit middling: mechanical arms that spew gunk, or turning to stone. Or they stand out with incredibly deep combat, with dense menus and rainbow loot. So, Another Crab’s Treasure comes as a refreshing surprise, what with it’s crustacean theme, platforming, and shell gimmick that actually complements fights in clever ways. Not only that, but it’s colourful and funny, with plenty of challenge for veterans and plenty of difficulty tweaks for those who just want a good time. Trade cowpat for coral, I’d say.

You play as Kril, a hermit crab whose shell (also home) gets plucked off their back by a loan shark. And in a sequence of undesirable events, your shell ends up on the back of Prawnathan, a wily salesman who won’t give up your home for anything… except a certain legendary treasure. Despite the fact Kril could probably take Prawnathan in a claw fight, Kril is overly nice and acquiesces. So off you go, gathering pieces of a treasure map scattered across various regions, fighting nasty crustaceans, and uncovering why sea-dwellers have succumbed to a mysterious disease that’s transformed them from crabs to crabby.

While you might look at the game’s cutesy cartoon art style and think its whole setup is a bit juvenile for you, I’d say that you’d be silly to pass it off as a game for big babies. The writing is frequently funny (like, actually funny), and it’s refreshing to play a colourful Soulslike that doesn’t pine after FromSoft’s dark fantasy setting. Another Crab plops you in an ocean besieged by human waste and pollution, which is no doubt grim, but the environmental theme is tackled with humour and a sense that these resourceful crabs can thrive off our junk. I particularly love how a trendy hairstyle is a curled orange peel. A cute dress is a receipt with burned edges, giving it an crisped flair. And that one guy’s smart hat is a bog roll.

Is there a metacommentary about the grimness of crab society being at the whims of us humans and the rubbish we produce? And that we’re corrupting them, forcing poor sea creatures to bludgeon each other for treasure that’s imprinted on the back of a cereal box? Yes, probably. |Image credit:Aggro Crab

Exploration is for the most part linear, taking on a sort of traditional Soulsy angle. You explore, bouncing between the Moon Crab’s Moon Shells that act as your bonfires, letting you rest up and eventually Shelleport as fast travel, and spend microplastics you earn from fallen enemies on levelling up a handful of pleasantly manageable key stats. Eventually you’ll hit the big city of New Carcinia, which acts as a hub with a blacksmith and other vendors, but moreso a place where folks steer you towards the next treasure piece. A wise crab with a Pringle for a hat will tell you to go North from the Sands Between and seek out a mysterious locale, for instance. In this way, it’s easy to know where you’re headed at all times.

You can attach friendly critters and other bits onto yourself that act like charms from the Souls series. These take up a certain amount of slots each, so you can’t equip lots of powerful bits unless you upgrade your stow capacity. |Image credit:Aggro Crab

Even if sometimes those areas can be a bit confusing. Some spots, at least early on, are fairly expansive and can be quite easy to get lost in. Most are wonderfully realised, though, fitting the theme perfectly with curdled towns erected from empty milk cartons and discarded baskets acting as magnificent centerpoints for poison swamps. Even better is your ability to hop and climb and swing through them, as this is as much a platformer as it is a Soulslike. You’ll bounce off sponges, chuck barbed hooks to grapple over to overhanging netting and do ’lil doggy paddles to close tight gaps. And don’t worry, the platforming is intuitive and fairly snappy, with very few annoying moments.

When you’re not clambering up a sieve, you’ll spend most of your time fighting crabby crustaceans with your only weapon: a fork. And at its most basic form, the combat again follows the typical Souls formula. You’ll lock onto enemies, dodge roll to avoid their swings, and you’ll munch on heart kelp to heal. The aim is to land hits to chunk health bars, and more importantly, work on maxing out their stagger metre. Once that’s maxed out, you can hit them with a charge attack to Capsize them, making them vulnerable to your attacks for a few precious seconds. Thing is, you’re a crab and this isn’t just your generic Soulslike with middling gimmick. Oh no.

The home on your back isn’t so much a home anymore - cheers, loan shark - but the equivalent of a shield slot. Some enemy crabs might, say, wear a bottle cap, so if you defeat them you can wear the discarded bottle cap on your back and use it to absorb attacks by hunkering down inside it. You can still scuttle a little while hunkered and, unlike some Souls games, it’ll absorb 100% of an enemy’s attack. Once the blue shield metre ticks down to zero, it’ll shatter, rendering you naked and reliant on dodge rolls to avoid pain. So it’s important that you keep an eye on your shield health, or at least a side-eye on any potential new homes you can hop into if that jacked lobster knocks your walls in.

Image credit:Aggro Crab

What’s really neat about this gimmick is - besides it being a thematic treat - that you’re encouraged to hop between shells regularly, putting the focus less on the fork and more on your temporary home. There are loads of shells lying about, like coffee pods and skulls and tin cans and shuttlecocks (my fave, obviously) many of which you’ll hurtle into when in a hurry, and all of which are home to special abilities, too.

Thanks to the Moon Crab, you’re able to wield the power of Umami. Umami’s dictated by charges you’ve got available and these recharge when you bash enemies, rewarding aggression. Coffee pods give you temporary movement and attack speed boosts, while banana skins can be eaten in their entirety for a burst of health at the cost of your protection. There’s even a husk of a dead crab that acts as a decoy when activated, which can buy you critical re-shelling time as it dupes enemies.

Yes, it’s a bit of a shame you can’t slap with soggy cigar butts or shank with a cocktail stick, but you do have some other means of aggression. Umami lets you perform special techniques you’ll obtain after you’ve beaten some of the game’s toughest encounters, like a thunderous punch that capsizes enemies in an instant. The Moon Snail also has four smallish skill trees you’ll invest crystals into (easily obtainable after fights or around) that grant you loads of useful abilities. Those barbed hooks used for swinging over to nets? You can upgrade those so you can actually grapple onto enemies for a sucker punch. My favourite is the ability to stick shells onto my fork, turning it into a makeshift hammer.

Image credit:Aggro Crab

Performance on the Steam Deck has been perfectly doable on lowest settings. And on PC, it’s been fantastic. However, I did encounter one bug on PC where I’d enter an infinite loading screen upon death in a certain zone. |Image credit:Aggro Crab

Shells and all these abilities mean that despite the lack of weapon variety, combat rarely gets stale. But that’s not to say that because your options are so generous it’s all extremely easy. I’d say the default difficulty setting is really quite tough, as enemies have a habit of mincing you in a couple of hits if you’re not careful. This persists throughout, actually, as I found enemies scaled up to your level, so I never really felt my baseline power or protection get stronger as I poured microplastics into them.

Still, there’s a wealth of options to turn the game into a baby’s first Dark Souls if you’d like. The difficulty can be turned from the default Hard, to Easy and Story, with Story making things way easier for people who want minimal challenge. Individual settings like, losing microplastics on death or damage from falls, can be turned off without affecting the overall difficulty, too. You can even just go, “Fuck it” and flip the “Give Kril a gun” slider that lets you bomb around areas with a pistol capable of one-shotting basically everything that stands in your way. I entirely ruined a tough boss fight for myself by tapping some mega-shrimp to death in a couple of blasts. It was wonderful.

Another Crab’s Treasure may be one of the most cohesive Soulslikes out there, in how it’s taken the hermit crab theme and actually turned it into a playful ARPG with interesting fights. And while it’s challenging enough for Souls fans, I rate the plethora of options that let you turn it into a far easier time. This is, genuinely, a soulslike for everyone.

This review was based on a review build of the game provided by the developers.

Find out how we conduct our reviews by reading our review policy .

Another Crab’s Treasure

Nintendo Switch

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.

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

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.