Dryft racing, hip-hop and pirates: the cheeky, eclectic games of Aussie studio Nonsense Machine

Wackos down under

Image credit:Nonsense Machine

For most of his game-making career, Australian developer dweedes has projected an image of cheeky, punkish rebellion. His website WET GAMIN has accumulated a trove of experimental games over the last decade: short works by various freeware developers that exemplify a scribbly, DIY spirit. Now, making and selling games on Steam under his studio Nonsense Machine , dweedes finds himself in the position of stepping up his commercial and craft ambitions while trying to stay true to his anti-corporate roots.

“I’ll put out games for free because it kind of lightens the load off my head,” he tells me as we chat over Discord. “I don’t have to market it, I don’t have to invest time in it. I just want to get the idea out, and then people can play it. There’s no quality target, so it’s fun for trying new ideas and throwing whatever you want out and not thinking too hard about it.”

This light-headed mode has agreed well with dweedes, whose creative strength lies in an offbeat, anything-goes jokeyness. Among the “stupid little ideas” he’s dashed off over the years: a Justin Bieber karaoke sim ; a public toilet maze of strategic bladder-relieving; and — my personal favourite — A True Western Romance , a weird mix of poetry and Wild West exploration, featuring a hilariously nonsensical conversation with a senile, potato-faced cactus. In Braid 2 , his unauthorised sequel to Indie Gaming’s First Masterpiece™, the player rides a skateboard mowing down Monstars with bullets, while a very loose cover of Eminem’s Lose Yourself plays — in high likelihood, one suspects, improvised by dweedes himself.

Image credit:Nonsense Machine

With racing life sim Dryft City Kyngs , dweedes has tackled his most commercial project yet. Made with the help of local arts funding bodies Screen Australia and VicScreen, two newly-recruited artists, and a narrative designer, the game is set in Greater Dryft City, a near-future, fluro-coloured version of Melbourne. Locations are loosely based on real places, such as Melbourne’s many Timezone arcades, or penguin-inhabited tourist attraction Phillip Island. (Amongst VicScreen applicants, it’s generally agreed that a touch of fair-dinkum local flavour is a reliable way to catch the grant-makers’ attention.) The game’s written dialogue is peppered with old-school Aussie slang, and it’s no small pleasure — for this fellow compatriot, at least — to see idiomatic phrases like “catch you round ay” and “bitta fishin t’boot”.

At first, Dryft City Kyngs’s sprites and top-down sandbox bring to mind the 90s Grand Theft Auto games, with their snarling satire and tough-as-nails difficulty, but the game itself quickly reveals itself to be quite breezy. In contrast to Rockstar’s neoliberal hellscapes, Greater Dryft City is a veritable utopia: there are no police in sight; residents happily give you their number at first g’day; and democracy has reached such radical levels that the council will repaint the roads to whatever eyesore hue you wish within a day. Got ‘wasted’? No worries, medical bills can be placed on an infinite tab. (The welfare state is in relatively decent nick here in Australia; but jaywalkers, I must warn you — this is an exaggeration.) You play as a starry-eyed romantic who has quit their stable job, and is clocking in at a boring but undemanding internship in order to sustain their true passion, the Dryft .

Image credit:Nonsense Machine

The protagonist is not entirely unlike the figure of the hopeful, entrepreneurial game dev. Since the rise of the ‘indie’ as a marketing term, an image of game-making has persisted: the move from small, free productions to commercial ones as an inevitable, necessary rite of passage. The amateur (so the narrative goes) mucks around on a hobbyist scale so they can perfect their craft, increasing ambition step-by-step, all in service of eventually bunkering down, risking every sweat and teardrop to birth their “real game” — that is, one that turns a profit.

But while dweedes refers to Dryft City Kyngs as a “proper game”, his use of the phrase doesn’t imply the value judgement it often carries — for him, amateur experiments and commercial projects each have their affordances. “For free games, it’s doing whatever the hell I want with no constraints or deadlines, and it’s all fun. You can improvise as you’re making it, and you don’t need to keep super organised either,” he says. “The Nonsense Machine stuff — that’s us trying to do a good job and make business out if it, and that’s really fuckin’ hard. But on the flip side, even with just two extra people, there’s no way would Dryft City Kyngs ever look the way it’s going to look just by myself. Working with other people who are the best at what they do is also really, really cool.”

THE SOUL OF TOO BIRDS GAME , another of Nonsense Machine’s collaborative efforts, released for free, came about when dweedes was approached by local rapper Realname with an idea: a video game to tie in with the identity of his industrial hip-hop outfit, Too Birds .

I meet up with Realname for a chat at a bar in Melbourne’s inner north, intercepting him at the last minute en-route to one of his solo gigs. I ask him about his attraction to video games: “If you screen record a video game at its basic function — whether it’s Pong or a Metal Gear Solid game or Call of Duty — because it’s manufactured in a digital space, all of it is art,” he muses. “Every frame is, in a way, some rare acrylic, otherworldly. The worst games in the world just by nature look good, even when they’re jank.”

Image credit:Nonsense Machine

True to this sentiment, THE SOUL OF TOO BIRDS GAME makes no attempt to smooth over its gamey-ness, asking the player to wander a labyrinthine, art gallery-like structure, using green, kitchen-glove forearms to smash artworks so hard that they explode. As Too Birds’ music throbs, we ascend through the building’s multiple storeys, moving through a carpeted office, an indoor field of corn and marijuana, and eventually discovering blow-up-doll aliens who have arrived from pods sitting on the top balcony. Its crude 3D models and garish, repetitive textures somewhat recall underground FPS hit Cruelty Squad , not to mention its spirit of gleeful, opaque irony — a sensibility, Realname tells me, which grew out of how the group learned to relate to each other.

“Since the first day we met up, we took the process of making shit semi-seriously, and some of our heart was on the line,” he says. “But when it came to the delivery of it — because we’re so sarcastic with each other and we’re constantly, like, trying to pull a Bugs Bunny on one another — communicating our music to the internet, or the world, mattered so little, I guess.”

There’s a link here, too, with Realname’s scabrous gaming habits. “I’ve probably played more GTA Online in my life than any other task that I’ve done. I would go on there and troll. I would genuinely be the most toxic person I could. I’ve stopped doing it because I need to find healthier ways to express my anger.” Though Realname’s tone takes on a hint of regret, he can’t quite disguise his exhilaration. “I found a glitch — you can basically noclip into a specific area and kill whoever. I would turn this game on, and make people’s nights just worse. Like, just spread negativity for hours. People would get on and they would shit-talk me, and I would Bugs Bunny ’em, you know? Like, ‘You’ll never get me!’”

Image credit:Nonsense Machine

When I first heard Too Birds’ music live a few years ago — at Miscellania, Melbourne’s beloved weirdo music venue — I was struck by the complementary flows of its two MCs. Realname’s has a goading energy, a nasally twang, and jumps between dense associations in short, energetic couplets. His partner Teether’s, in contrast, sits back off the beat, with a deep, drowsy delivery that lends an impression of world-weariness. In his verse for eponymous track Too Birds , Teether paints a picture of life blurred with virtual existence:

“Sloshed cunts reverted caveman I’m talking ooga-booga If Tony Hawk had seen our wasteland He’d skate it like it’s wooden I saw the glow, I was elated Tasted like some sugar Hands afloat, I feel like Rayman Leaping over skewers”

The group’s sound — which I’ve heard fellow fans compare, more than once, to influential noise rap group Death Grips — is marked by producer Mr. Society’s oddball digital effects and aggressive production. In THE SOUL OF TOO BIRDS GAME, this harshness finds itself mirrored in the artworks found scattered around its environments. Made by Realname on obsolete phone apps in a deep-fried, depraved style, they range from gross-out pics of spilled food to self-referential memes, from surreal mystery to frightening abjection.

“It’s very simulated-y looking,” Realname observes. “Images and sounds that don’t make sense are such an accurate depiction of the world we live in, in a weird way? Reality is bonkers. If you had to subject someone who hasn’t done reality yet, it would break their brains.”

Ramshackle pirate adventure Cape Hideous , the most recent release under the Nonsense Machine label, is the work of fleet-footed stylist and experimental freeware veteran Jake Clover. You play as a pirate in a red dress and bold eyeliner, puffing three pipes as you move around the ship’s decks, windy masts, and scorching bowels via simple arrow-key controls.

After playing an in-progress version of the game towards the end of its development, dweedes suggested to Clover the idea of selling it, offering to provide original sound and music. (As a jumping off point for his games, Clover often uses short tracks from Newgrounds uploaded years before he finds them, which makes contacting the original artists difficult.) dweedes’ collar-grabbing menu track Voyage , a hypnotic, bell- and percussion-heavy tune that rings with strange harmonies, sets the mood for the brief, enigmatic journey to come.

Image credit:Nonsense Machine

Clover initially envisioned Cape Hideous as following in the same vein as his Dino Hunta — an outrageously puerile, slapdash experiment that might have been conceived by an unusually ambitious, war-obsessed 12-year-old boy. Over time, it morphed into something different. “At first I wanted to add speech bubbles and make a quick comedy game, then I slowly started taking more care with the animations and designs,” Clover explains. “Soon I decided to take the project a bit more seriously. It’s the longest project I’ve ever worked on.”

The game’s aesthetic bears the mark of this change in direction, and is a genuine marvel — all the more beautiful for not being so in the obvious ways. Silly, impossible sight gags — a pirate cheerfully eating a glass bottle, a large flag folded so small it can fit into a palm — mix with notes of earnest, understated wonder. While some animations are comically low-effort, others, such as the captain’s graceful movements, are impressively assured. Stuffed with ideas, liberated by a lack of concern for stylistic consistency, the art’s detail varies wildly, from naive, low-res backdrops of timber and swirly clouds, to tattered, intricately-patterned pants that look like a bathroom floor with broken tiles.

Clover elects to burrow into idiosyncratic detail, trusting that the player will notice and appreciate it. Take, for instance, the visual devotion to expressing the effects of a strong wind during Cape Hideous’s mast-climbing section, with its blowing hair, flapping clothes, and lost hats. In one miniature moment, the captain plucks a feather stuck in the wood between her fingers, and lets it fly. The ship’s inner workings and motley inhabitants follow a strange, occult logic of their own: magical tonics, spirit-bindings with sea creatures, wordless communications drawn as shot-reverse-shot POV inserts that give the impression of telepathic exchange.

Image credit:Nonsense Machine

I ask Clover about his tendency to withhold information from the player. “The sense of mystery is important to me because I want to create the sense of a bigger world through a project that’s quite small. I want my games to feel like looking through a window to a small part of a different world,” he writes. “Another idea is that I want the world to feel alien and unfamiliar, almost as if it was made for a non-existent audience, as if the game exists for reasons other than just to be played by someone.”

Clover mentions the influence of celebrated West Australian artist Shaun Tan on his drawings and storytelling, whose picture books such as The Lost Thing and The Arrival share something of Clover’s visual style as well as his sense of open-ended fantasy. Reading the introduction to his book The Bird King and Other Sketches , I’m struck by how aptly Tan’s description of his aims fits Clover’s own:

“Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is ’thought about’ within a bird’s throat… One of the joys of drawing is that meaning can be constantly postponed, and there is no real pressure to ‘say’ anything special when working privately in a sketchbook. Nevertheless, interesting or profound ideas can emerge of their own accord, not so much in the form of a ‘message’, but rather as a strangely articulated question.”

Amongst the Nonsense Machine slate, dweedes holds Cape Hideous in special esteem: “It’s the closest to what I would consider ‘art’ from all the games we’ve published. Thankfully looking at the reviews and responses, many people agree.” But if Clover has reached for something ‘artful’, it goes hand-in-hand with an attitude shared by his stablemates: a refusal to be clamped by the aspiring superego, and a determination to grow by no rules but one’s own.

Cape Hideous

PC

Dryft City Kyngs

PC

The Soul of Too Birds Game

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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