Ara: History Untold review: a pretty, almost great resource management game chafing under a 4X suit

Delegation of a nation

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Xbox Game Studios

• Developer: Oxide Games
• Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
• Release: Out now
• On: Windows
• From: Steam , Microsoft
• Price: £60/$60/€60
• Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 3400G, Radeon RX 590, 24GB RAM, Windows 10

I am puzzled by Ara Colon History Untold’s priorities. At its heart are a couple of interesting ideas undermined by its own determination to put the wrong thing on centre stage. Make a rich and elaborate resource management game with an unorthodox research system, but then spend so much time on a simultaneous turn system and detailed animations that you’re left with a cumbersome interface and lifeless AI, and you too might wind up making Ara.

There’s an almost great game here, but it’s all neglected and bruised from being shoved into the packaging of a lacklustre 4X.

The premise is, for simplicity’s sake: Civilisation again. You pick a historical people and take them from Unk and Thogg scratching shapes on a rock with another rock to Unkbot Is God Now, probably conquering Ugg and Thonk’s tribe along the way.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Xbox Game Studios

Ara reveals its best ideas right away, although it’ll be a hell of a time before you really figure them out. In a sort of Endless Legend way, after researching enough topics in one of its 12 eras, you can move on to the more advanced technology of the next. But doing that discards any unresearched topics, so any buildings, units, even resources tied to them are lost to you forever. More interestingly, many goods and buildings can be unlocked by multiple topics, so if you miss out on, say, the wheel, you could unlock it later by researching algebra. But you’d never get chariots. It’s even possible to lock out major resources by carelessly skipping every chance at them. Witness me inventing libraries and building Oxford University long before figuring out how to make paper.

Another side effect if you linger to research more is that a later topic might become less desirable since you’ve already unlocked most of its rewards, gently encouraging replay variety as early priorities influence your later ones. I’d have had an interesting oral-only academia if I hadn’t eventually researched windmills.

Some daftness aside, it’s a fun system, and vital because all those buildings and resources and items it unlocks are far, far more important than any new types of soldier. Resources in your typical 4X are just another +1 to something, but Ara’s economic/production system is basically the whole game. You don’t buy buildings with just construction points; you also need timber and stone in specific amounts, and later more advanced goods. Build a workshop and it’ll produce equipment (consuming specific goods to accelerate the rate), which could be anything from bread to televisions. Each of those could be consumed to produce something else again, or installed in another building to speed its work, added to housing to give the whole city a tiny bonus, or consumed by a city to give it a bigger but temporary bonus.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Xbox Game Studios

But first you have to extract the resources, which means building the right mine or farm on a specific slot within a region within a city. Instead of squares or hexes, you unlock procedurally generated regions as a city grows, which provide varying rates of food, gold, timber, and materials. All but gold can be multiplied again with the relevant farm/mines, but each region has a different number of building slots, some containing useful resources. Some buildings apply bonuses to others in their region (encouraging specialisation of certain industries like baking or metallurgy), and others apply bonuses to the city’s quality of life ratings - five measures like health, wealth, and happiness that divide or multiply other things each city is doing. Growth is always a careful decision. You’re seldom just expanding into wherever the number is biggest.

If that was a lot to take in… well, yes. It is. It is a hugely complex system with loads of variables, and easily the defining feature of the game. By proportion of time spent, Ara is not a competitive 4X but a manufacturing puzzle. There are no logistics, and roads are as trivial as they are irrelevant, but it’s factory builders who might enjoy it most. I initially did, but it runs afoul of two major problems. The first is that diplomacy is almost pointlessly simplistic, but its AI civilisations are crap at the game anyway. I was soon running rings around them on middling difficulties despite having no army and making a mess of my cities.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Xbox Game Studios

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Xbox Game Studios

The second is that Ara’s robust item tooltips are where the convenience ends. Map overlays and summary screens are almost non-existent, and the longer you play, the more desperately you’ll want even some basic macromanagement tools. I liked the planning challenge, but the longer it went on, the more bogged down I got in the busywork of it. Manually equipping every factory with every tool, then zooming back out to search for that toolmaker and why it stopped working, trying to remember what materials hurry up that item, which city is constructing what where. You’re pointlessly notified of every single item produced or consumed, but not when they run out. God help you if you conquer a city, because it will be laid out all wrong and you’ll have to relocate ten buildings, while repeatedly reallocating all the manufacture. And the menu layout, god.

Ara’s world is teeming with detailed and varied animations, all to serve the 1% of time where you won’t be looking at the map (which doesn’t zoom out far enough) or the menus on either side of the pretty building (which consequently require far too much scrolling). Its battles show countless fully animated wardudes for completely non-interactive combat whose outcome is already revealed beforehand, removing all excitement.

It has dozens of playable civilisations, many under-represented in games and with less obvious leaders, with unique flavour text during rare era transitions. Yet they show no personality or discernible differences in behaviour, which is so fluctuant and opaque that I was ignoring all foreign relations messages before long, and a great many innate bonuses are so useless that the joy of playing as Boudicca, Osh-Tisch, or Step On Me Business Suit Sappho quickly fades to forgetting which you even are. That its simultaneous turn system was so hard to implement makes its utter irrelevance all the more baffling.

Ara is an interesting and enjoyable spin on the Civ concept but becomes unwieldy long before it’s over. Figuring out how to build a thriving empire will be an enjoyable challenge to people looking for a certain kind of production chain game, but I don’t see its malnourished AI and ballooning micromanagement keeping them around once they do.

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Ara: History Untold

Xbox Series X/S , PC

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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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