Enginefall’s Snowpiercer-meets-DayZ promise is put at risk by mechanical troubles

One train I wouldn’t mind being delayed

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Red Rover Interactive

Enginefall is as much about fabricating bandages and building hovels as it is about mad locomotive sci-fi, but upon being invited to try out an early build, its concept proved compelling enough to punch through my survival crafting fatigue like a runaway… I dunno, bus. Basically it’s a first-person Snowpiecer-em up, where a typical session sees postapocalypse survivors raiding enormous trains, fighting (or joining forces) from tail to tip to usurp the conductor’s position and steal precious fuel cores before escaping back to their own private engine.

Again, I like the idea. I especially like that Enginefall isn’t massively fussed how you deal with other Tailies – alliances, truces, and armed banditry are all permitted and accommodated for. What I played last week, sadly, was awkward, janky, and undercooked, to the point where the one thing more ambitious than the game’s railriding concept might be its Q1 2026 release plan.

I specifically joined a Titan train mission. Raids against smaller, player-owned Marauder trains will be possible, but are intended as more of a late-game endeavour. The megavehicle itself was a nice piece of linear action-arena work. Your path to the conductor’s office means advancing through the three main passenger classes, making for distinct progression from third class’ filthy on-rails slums to the opulent art-deco lounges and leafy pleasure gardens of first class.

While each class is gated by keycard-locked doors, the intervening carriages are wide and tall enough to provide a choice of routes through. You could, for example, try sneaking through a lower-level maintenance sector, if you don’t fancy a firefight in the busier passenger quarters – though the Shinkansen this ain’t, and poisonous emissions mean you’ll need to spend some time scavving for parts, building a base, and crafting a gas mask if you want to take the quiet approach.

Hence, survival crafting. It’s cute how the upper tiers of your tech tree unlock as you push through each carriage class, letting you ditch your shitty plastic pistols for the upper crust’s assault rifles. Even so, this aspect of Enginefall comes across as pretty thin, or at worst, actively boring. Gathering resources either takes an age, as it does when sledgehammering plastic out of the train’s chairs, or is trivially easy, like when a new room opens to reveal piles of metal and chemicals strewn across the floor.

Base building doesn’t have much architectural meat to it, either. I can appreciate the novelty of these strongholds being transient - where a Rust or Minecraft base is supposed to be treasured and protected at all costs, Enginefall forces you to ditch and rebuild every time you reach a new class. The catch of this purely utilitarian mindset, though, is that every base my team built was ugly, structurally bland, and only ever big enough to hold some crafting benches and bedrolls for respawn points. It’s something you’d do because you need to, not because you’d want to.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Red Rover Interactive

The lack of more engaging or adventurous resource-gathering also quickly made it clear that the best way to get geared is to just shoot people and take their stuff. A truth which, as it has in many survival games before it, could undermine the potential for more interesting interactions, like silent stand-offs or uneasy team-ups.

That said, I did get to enjoy a couple of these moments during my raid. On a scavenging run for the materials we’d need to craft a first class ticket, we were startled by a lone survivor who’d followed us down to the train’s well-hidden furnace area. She had the drop on us but, seeing she was outnumbered, offered us her own ticket in exchange for us leaving peacefully. A deal we gladly accepted, only realising later that we’d essentially mugged someone by accident. Later, in need of more strength to breach the conductor’s locked-down headquarters, we approached, quietly surrounded, and “recruited” another straggler into our ranks. That one was on purpose.

Still, given how much quicker and easier it is to gather loot through murder, I worry that Enginefall’s social facet could suffer the same fate as DayZ ’s: tense, unpredictable, highly anecdote-able encounters giving way to bland kill-on-sight deathmatching. The spirit of cooperation (or, at the very least, coexisting) showing through in a game full of devs and journos is one thing, but will it survive in a mic-less pub game environment? I’m not sure.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Red Rover Interactive

Either way, Enginefall might have an even bigger problem: it just doesn’t feel that good. The gunplay lacks drama, even with the upgraded weapons in the posh section. Base building, in the confines of siderooms and storage cupboards, is fiddly. Performance is sluggish and choppy, even on my RTX 3090 running at an upscaled 1440p, though that naturally might not be the case at release.

Considering it’s the game’s main hook, I would have also liked a much stronger sense of actually being on a train. The Snowpiercer film was shot by building train carriage sets on top of gyroscopic gimbals, to authentically recreate the effects of high speed rail travel on Chris Evans. Enginefall, however, barely manages a rumbly sound effect. You wouldn’t even know you were on a train throughout most of third and second class, unless you caught a glimpse of the wrecked Earth whizzing by through one of their tiny windows.

I still think there’s a respectable action-survival game in here. Putting the improvised tooling-up and anarchic, sandboxy player interaction of an endless PvP sim into a raid structure - one with a clear beginning, middle, and end - remains an intriguing idea, and the setting is unique among games, if not technically original. But navigating Enginefall’s most central systems just isn’t that fun right now, and retooling them with less than half a year to go would be a big ask. Maybe not Titan big. But Flying Scotsman big, for sure.

Enginefall

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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