Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review: a sci-fi RPG that explores new space, yet I yearn for old ground

No more mister dice guy

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fellow Traveller

• Developer: Jump Over The Age
• Publisher: Fellow Traveller
• Release: Jan 31st, 2024
• On: Windows, Mac
• From: Steam , Epic Games
• Price: TBA
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

Don’t get too comfortable. As an RPG that puts you in the synthetic boots of an escaped robo-person, Citizen Sleeper 2 often has you on the run. It’s a crunchy, dicey machine of vibrant world-building that sometimes forgets itself in wandering prose. A compelling universe to sail through, with more habitats and hovels than its predecessor, more stations and stellar gateways. It can’t - for me - escape the dense gravity of the first game’s compact storytelling and novel character building, no matter how often it funnels you from one space caper to the next. But it has a good time trying.

Once again you play a “Sleeper”, a biomechanical being designed to work as slave labour. At the start of your story, you are in thrall to a crime boss called Laine, who’s been keeping you under his thumb in exchange for a drug called stabiliser (an injectable pick-me-up all sleepers need to prevent their bodies deteriorating). But here comes a friendly spacepal, called Serafin, who reboots your body and hauls you cold turkey off your captor’s space station. Together in a stolen ship, you’ll explore a belt of inhabited shucks, seeking to put ever more distance between you and the abusive Laine.

In splintering its sci-fi stories into these many small hubs, Citizen Sleeper 2 can feel more sweeping in its space drama. Each place offers “contracts” that send you into a bubble of local space nearby to complete a task, like rescuing lost crew members or salvaging data from a destroyed ship. But it can also feel less deep and more formulaic with each passing hub-hop, too.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fellow Traveller

Perhaps this is down to the expansion of the game’s more cog-like components. Once again, you’ll roll a bunch of dice at the beginning of each “cycle” (every morning, basically). You slot these into various squares to take an action. Drag a five into working a shift in a “risky” scrapyard, for example, and you’ll probably get paid well and won’t lose energy or accrue stress (two important meters you’ll need to juggle). Slot a one into a “safe” activity, like resting. The twos and threes? Well, those are iffy. But gamble away, work another shift. Why not? On contract missions you’ll also be able to use extra chance cubes provided by your fellow crew members.

But dice can break under certain conditions, making them unusable, or they can become “glitched”, meaning they’ll have a much bigger chance of resulting in a negative outcome. Ideally, you’ll keep all your dice neatly maintained as you go along (you meet an engineer who can gluegun them back into shape). But it’s possible all your dice will rupture in one desperate mission gone awry.

Five broken dice is a tough fail state that puts you on your robot ass and leaves you with a permanent, unfixable glitch dice every cycle. Definitely something to avoid. It’ll mean you’ll have fewer actions every day. Less noodle broth to slurp, fewer cargo shifts to pick up, or perhaps no dice-time to explore dodgy shantytowns spinning in the void. The game’s easiest mode forgoes this punishment, so you can simply carry on the story. The hardest mode doesn’t even humour you. You simply croak it - game over, start again.

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/citizen-sleeper-2-starward-vector-review-9.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“A flotilla of ships makes up an ad hoc space station, with one of the ships labelled “the Narrow Escape”. - 5”>

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/citizen-sleeper-2-starward-vector-review-9.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“A flotilla of ships makes up an ad hoc space station, with one of the ships labelled “the Narrow Escape”. - 6”>

That I have to spend this many paragraphs explaining the dice is itself a sign that the systems and item management feel bulkier this time around (and I have not even mentioned “supplies”, class bonuses, dice-altering abilities, or various other currencies). As before, it’s a solid way of giving the story some gamey bones. But this heavier emphasis on the technicalities sometimes feel overbearing.

The more linear hubs especially can feel like there’s only one railroaded way to distribute dice. You simply pump your gambleblocks into the only slots that seem to matter, making it feel less like you’re gambling with story outcomes and more like a forgone narrative conclusion is being click’n’dragged out for the sake of a fancy system that needs to be implemented everywhere. For me, these numerical systems were always less interesting than the characters and stories that orbited them .

There’s still a lot to like in the people here. The character art has the bright stylishness of a well-inked comic book, soft shadows falling over faces and endless folds of fabric non-fluttering in zero gravity. If you’ve ever bought a concept art book just to see what the artists designed before the modelers got their hands on things, you’ll appreciate the figures that stand against the glowing windows and drifting ships of the 3D animated background.

Crucially, when these characters speak they feel alive. Laine is a heinous pusher man with a slave owner’s cruelty, not to mention a ghostly pursuer whose voice arises in your mind at various intervals. In his eerie desire for total control of your Sleeper’s body, he is a classically dislikable if ultimately diluted villain. Imagine Kilgrave of Jessica Jones poured into a glass with a spritz of Harvey from the 2000s fugitive sci-fi show Farscape (a show the game’s creator cites as an influence ). Laine is a systemic stressor as much as a storyful one - a little red clock often ticks down when you’re exploring a hub, to show that he is on your scent. You will have to get out of dodge before he arrives.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fellow Traveller

There are other memorable folks. Nemba is a straight-talking chef who might fire you from a part-time gig in his kitchens, but only because he has a cheeky side-mission in mind. Kadet is a leatherclad space biker who coolly saves your life from a cargo hauler, then uses her biker chick charisma to rope you into dodgy data dealings. There are a lot more examples of such characters. But what unites many is a sense of transience. Like you, these people are often on the move, disappearing from your station but reappearing in far-flung hubs hours later.

That said, they’re not all so compelling to me. Many of your shipmates seem to suffer a dose of the “niceys”. Conflict is resolved readily, and kindness prevails more often than conflict erupts. The drama you might expect from a crew of misfits forced into proximity on a starship is set aside for a quieter, familial bonding that sometimes makes me smile sweetly, and sometimes makes me yawn and wish for an abrasive bastard to show up. For many others, a kinder-hearted crew may be a winner. But I know I’m not alone in yearning for a scumbag or two in my fictional ensemble.

Take your saviour Serafin, for example. He’s a good-hearted and competent pilot, and your close buddy throughout the game. I would like a friend like him in real life. In-game, I wanted to hiss him out the airlock. As your first companion he fulfills the role of a Mass Effect starter companion - someone who will explain things to you and voice vanilla misgivings. He is strong-willed, caring, thoughtful, and resolute. I wanted to abandon him in an asteroid field after a couple of hours.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fellow Traveller

Instead, Serafin accompanies you along a main quest that never quite interested me as much as the various side gigs. I found his narrative hand-holding irritating even - frequently taking you aside to tell you which spacerock will be the next best hub to visit. It’s nothing a Bethesda main quest character doesn’t do, but after the relative looseness of Erlin’s Eye, where I really did feel in control of my wanderings, there is sometimes a feeling here of being shuttled from plot point to plot point, rather than meandering through the world at your own pace, picking up the stories you want and dropping others at will.

In fairness, some of the shuttlestops are fine adventures. You may help a union organise an interstellar strike, or delve back into the shadowy streets of the Darkside (scumbag territory that belongs to Laine). But I was anticipating a more open-ended tale right from the beginning. By the time this freedom is afforded to you as a player, you’ve basically seen the whole system and met everyone of note. It is geographically a broader game than the first, yet it feels somehow more confined.

Don’t let me scare you too much. Scenes are still well-written, the expressive prose maintaining a good eye for body language and mannerisms. An engineer will wipe their hands on rags as they speak to you, hacker kids will betray their mysterious ulterior motives with steely looks. It has all the panache of well-crafted genre fiction, yet doesn’t overload you with paragraphs of lore, keeping to the cadence of good interactive fiction. At least, this is the case for much of the game. Later sequences can get bogged down in long descriptions of abstract hacking or space architecture, the game sometimes forgetting to check its own wordy enthusiasm.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fellow Traveller

Thematically, it’s loyal to its progenitor. The first Citizen Sleeper hauled its disdain for interstellar capitalism right to the centre of your story. You were a gig economy robot with a terrible addiction to a repair drug; a walking iPhone that grew a heart and ran away from the Apple store. Starward Vector doesn’t deviate from those themes of coercion under capital, except to sometimes explore the fate of refugees fleeing war. It also revisits the dysmorphia that results in having a body that doesn’t feel truly yours, and the relief that might come from realising you are not alone in such a struggle.

In all this, it again treads a line between thoughtful speculative fiction and popcorn sci-fi the likes of Space Sweepers . I liked befriending a stray cat in zero gravity to summon the memory of my previous bio-self in a poetic passage about identity and comfort. But I also enjoyed meeting an ancient drilling worm in the belly of a cursed asteroid, still digging after thousands of years like some robot Shai-Hulud coached by the Energizer bunny.

It often loses itself in the long spool of its main quest, in the runaway passages that could have been shorter, and in the stories of characters who sometimes feel like they’re hijacking your tale, turning it into a choose- their -own-adventure. But Citizen Sleeper 2 still manages to deliver some heartfelt moments in a sci-fi world that feels more colourful than the likes of Starfield ( again ), despite being the work of a much smaller team over far less time. It’s finely made sci-fi, even if I still prefer the noodles on Erlin’s Eye.

Disclosure: Jump Over The Age’s developer Gareth Damian Martin has written for RPS

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

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

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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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