Engineering puzzle designer Zach Barth almost made a Factorio-like automation game, but “got really bored really quickly”

So what’s Zach like?

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Astra Logical

“I’m not a perfectionist,” says the guy who makes niche puzzle games that turn me into a gibbering wreck obsessed with efficiency. And I feel a wave of comical fury. If like me you’ve been whirring and clicking your way through very good engineering puzzle game Kaizen: A Factory Story , you’re probably a fan of previous work from the same developers. The creators of Opus Magnum and Infinifactory may have dissolved their old studio Zachtronics and chemically regenerated as Coincidence Games, but there are still large traces of a Zach present. I caught up with designer Zach Barth to ask about perfectionism, the Factorio -like automation game he gave up on out of boredom, and how the team managed to make a story about factories in 1980s Japan feel human.

Let’s save the story about the abandoned Factorio-ish game for later. First, a bit of background. Kaizen: A Factory story is a puzzle game that sees you plopping down square-ish pieces of TV sets, toy robots, and gacha-pon machines onto a workspace. Using a whole bunch of arms, drills, welders, blades, riveters, and tracks, you have to create the machinery that will fuse all these pieces together into each product’s final form. As a newcomer to Japan, you are thrust into this world of “lean manufacturing”, where every little step could mean a cheaper, faster, or smaller solution. It sounds like a dry setting, but it’s the perfect place to set an engineering puzzler.

“All of our engineering games have this theme of optimization, right?” says Barth. “You’re continually improving your score and you’re continually getting better at this like a real skill, right? And it seemed to align really well thematically with that vibe.”

While working on the game, Barth bought a book all about the Toyota Production System, a method of factory production that the car company pioneered in the 1980s. The more he read, the more he realised it perfectly suited their games. Even the word Kaizen, he teaches me, refers to the Japanese business practice of “continuously improving” every step in a production line.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Astra Logical

“I mean, in tech everybody’s Kaizen-ing all the time nowadays,” says the designer. “It means different things to different people, but one of the things that it does mean is the idea that everybody who’s working on an assembly line is empowered to advocate for quality and efficiency.

“And so you’ll have meetings every day where people are like, ‘Hey, you know, it’s taking me a really long time to do this step. Maybe if we rearrange these things, we can be faster.’ Or… when anybody sees a defective product going down the line, they’re empowered to stop the line because something is wrong further up the line.

“And so it’s this idea that you’re always improving the process because everybody is engaged in the process of making it better. And, yeah, it certainly applies to the stuff we do, but I think that actually it’s kind of the norm now.”

With that constant pushing for efficiency comes a danger, though. The trap of perfectionism has stalled my playthroughs of past games from this crowd, as I search for faster and smarter solutions to early puzzles, instead of carrying on with the next level. It makes me wonder if Barth himself has this problem. If the studio gets as bogged down in the machinery of making a game almost as much as I get bogged down in welding coffee machines together in the most affordable way.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Astra Logical

No, as it turns out. Because they can’t afford to waste time sweating every small detail.

“I would say we have our own culture and it’s pretty pragmatic, right? I’m not a perfectionist,” he says, making my nostrils flare. “I don’t know, it varies on a per person basis, I suppose. But we’ve always been in a position where we have to make games quickly because we don’t make enough money off of our games to make it for years and survive off of that.

“Our games are sort of cursed. We have found success, but only if we keep cranking out games really fast. That’s all we’re allowed basically. And so we’ve had to adopt extremely pragmatic approaches with that.”

Still, there’s a parallel here, even if it’s not intended. The story in Kaizen follows a bunch of factory workers who are shuffled from place to place by order of higher-ups in a company called Matsuzawa Manufacturing, always getting assigned to new assembly lines. Home appliances. Entertainment machines. Mass-produced clothes. There’s little room for down time. But even applying this to Coincidence Games would be a stretch.

“The story in the game, it’s not really a metaphor for us,” says Barth. “Like, it’s really about trying to situate characters in the time and let them do their thing, right? A lot of our stories are less about a person going on an adventure and more about a bunch of different viewpoints, and then they all interact with each other and you kind of see these like viewpoints play out, and like nobody wins. There’s not a thesis that’s like: ’this opinion is correct’.”

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Astra Logical

As a result, it’s a super gentle story, told with the calmness of a slice-of-life documentary. Imagine if somebody took long-running TV documentary How It’s Made, stripped out the terrible music and shot it more like those quiet YouTube videos about how artisans still make certain things the old fashioned way , then passed it all through a visual novel blender.

“It’s a weirdly sober game. It has this kind of non-fiction aspect. And so, you know, that was a tough task for [writer] Matthew [Seiji Burns] to do. And so, the stuff that we end up with is characters talking about manufacturing. But I like that the characters in the game are really engaged and talking about making things - because the game is about making things! The whole game has this slight educational vibe from being grounded in a time and place in an industry.”

We don’t talk about precisely what’s next for Coincidence (probably another game, duh) but I do ask about one tangentially related trend in PC games - the endless automation game. Your Factorios, your Shapez’, your Satisfactorys. The games Barth designs often end up feeling like a boutique, self-contained antidotes to those grand and endless crafting sims. But the drive for the player is often similar: you want to find the most efficient way to make something. When I probe how he feels about those games, it sounds like he gets asked about them a lot.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Astra Logical

“I’ve had meetings and stuff with people who are bigger in the industry and the thing that comes up a lot is: ‘if you could just make a game that was more like Factorio, you’d make a lot of money’.

“And it’s like, if I wanted to make a game like Factorio, it’s not hard to see how to do that, because everybody else is doing that, right? It’s a whole genre now of games that are functionally identical to Factorio. Factorio but 3D. Factorio but abstract. Factorio but… there’s so many.”

But that didn’t stop them from trying at least once.

“Years ago we tried to make a game that was kind of like Factorio,” he tells me. “It was very different. It wasn’t about conveyor belts and all that stuff. You built submarines and kind of explored, and would build factories and stuff. So, it was kind of like a crafting game. But… actually thinking about the amount of work required to put into making it a game, I got really bored really quickly with the idea of the crafting system. Because a crafting system like that is a really obvious puzzle, and it’s just one puzzle.”

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Astra Logical

“Could I spend a year or two or three making this game that just has a tech tree and that’s the whole meat of the game? I’m admittedly not very good at making all kinds of games, because most of them just seem really boring and you have to spend years working on it, right? Puzzle games are really cool because they’re just filled with concepts, right? And filled with challenges and then you can just isolate and do like a whole bunch of different challenges, because each one is its own puzzle and it’s own little world.”

It’s this devotion to the purity of the puzzle as a form that I think makes games by Coincidence nee Zachtronics stand out. Kaizen: A Factory Story is just more proof, if it were needed, that these niche puzzlers continue to be welded and riveted together in thoughtful ways.

Kaizen: A Factory Story

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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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