Eternal Strands review

An ambitious, colourful mystery to unravel

Image credit:Yellow Brick Games

• Developer: Yellow Brick Games
• Publisher: Yellow Brick Games
• Release: Jan 28th
• On: Windows
• From: Epic Games , Steam
• Price: £34/$40/€40
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i5-12600K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

When I’ve had enough of fighting the dogs in a respectable, straightforward manner, I pick them up with my mind and - with a casualness that has to be extremely insulting if you’re a dog - drop them directly off a cliff. This ends the fight immediately. Sometimes I resort to this low move out of frustration, when a dull fight has dragged on for too long. Sometimes I resort to it out of panic, because I’ve accidentally set fire to every hard surface within ten feet, or frozen myself to a wall. Often it’s just for the pleasure of it.

In Eternal Strands , Yellow Brick Games’ debut title, you play the leader of a “weaver band”, a crew of freelance magicians, in a world where something extremely bad happened to magic. Some years ago, the Enclave, a city state acting as the isolationist heart of the world’s magic, exploded in a kind of power surge - one part tsunami, one part blown fuse - and just as quickly sealed itself off from the world outside. Somehow managing to breach the wall, your band finds themselves the first people to set foot inside the ruined capital since the calamity and sets about uncovering the mystery of what exactly went wrong.

It’s a compelling mystery! From the off, the world is sharply drawn and the stakes made clear. The lands outside the Enclave (a rogues gallery of various countries familiar to anybody who has spent time in Cyrodiil or Thedas) relied so heavily on the magical output and technology of the isolationist state that the surge’s effects spread widely and disastrously. This is told to you first in vague terms: things broke, magical constructs went wild, resources spread thin. Wars started all over. As the game continues, more and more specific consequences come bubbling up: everybody bought Enclave tools to control the weather, for example, and in their failure sickly storms started to roll across deserts and trade fleets were wrecked. Magicians, even those outside the Enclave’s walls, were blamed and reviled. All this happens in the background, of course. But it’s there, and it lends an electric feel to your first steps into the Enclave: you are touching a live wire that started a fire that burned down a continent.

In practice, what you’re doing starts straightforwardly. You enter a series of large, open levels to perform simple “setting up” tasks. Get the Enclave’s teleportation system back online so you can travel deeper. Find materials to get your beleaguered band back on track. The Enclave was wildly famous - the center of the world - and so your party has some understanding of what to expect and what to prioritise, but the interplay between their expectations and the reality of the ruined place is a tension well exploited by the game in its first act. Arkons, titanic magical constructs, roam the outskirts. There’s a dragon in the bog.

You’re equipped from the start with two spells that speak to the game’s systemic aspirations: a rapid freeze reminiscent of Prey’s gloo gun that lets you draw ice onto the environment and a classic telekinesis power for dropping dogs off cliffs. These are broadly unrestricted. Draw ice onto anything. Make a little bridge. Pick up an enemy right off the bat and throw them into a lake. Obviously heavier things are going to take an upgrade, but there’s a freedom on offer here that I appreciate. The ice ability, too, acts as a way into the game’s elemental magic system. This is a world full of plants that explode into ice, and dynamically propagating fire which spreads through underbrush. There’s the sensibility of an immersive sim bubbling away under here, not just in the way you’re encouraged to blend the utility of your powers, but in the cascading, sweaty disasters you’ll regularly turn encounters into. Past a certain point, I was setting myself on fire so regularly that I gave in and constructed a suit of armor that made me functionally fireproof. I found a spell that summoned a small fiery boy to follow me around, but warned me that if he took enough damage, he’d explode. Fair enough, I said. No skin off my nose. Freed from having to worry about flames, the fiery boy become a go-to problem solver. A heavy wooden door I couldn’t open? Pick up the lad with magic and fling him so hard at the obstacle that both exploded. Thank you for your service, my son.

I wish this magic felt better to use. Oh, it’s plenty fun, it’s always fun to whirl around a level on that knife-edge between control and chaos, but under the hands the thing feels spongy and inarticulate. There’s an odd lack of acceleration on objects, or a piecemeal delay, and things feel splashy and weightless. Playing on a controller, there are no haptics associated with the spells, and the sound design never really underscores the weight and power and zip of the raw magic pouring from your hands. The melee combat feels even worse. Attack combos run long and directionlessly, the lock-on at once too sticky and too inexact. You’ll go wailing off at a shrub instead of the hissing suit of armor that’s targeting you, or thwack a greatsword down with all the power of what feels like a baked sweet potato. One enemy, a sort of invisible lizard-dog that hocked gobs of poison in my direction, could barely be locked on to at all, and the experience of fighting it was so teeth-clenchingly annoying that I darted away from any encounter it was involved in.

This conjuring of magical or physical presence, the murky art of “making action feel good in a game”, is an inexact science. Anybody who has tried to explain why one game’s jump feels great and another’s lacklustre learns this quickly, as words start to fail them and they hand the controller off, conceding: “You try it. Doesn’t it feel better?” In actuality, as with so many things, budget plays a major factor. It is arguably unfair to compare Eternal Strands’ telekinesis with Control’s apocalyptic rock throwing, or Half Life: Alyx’s razorwire tactility. This game is the work of a small team with a limited budget, and what they’ve managed to accomplish with their resources is admirable.

It’s especially admirable when you see what they’ve chosen to prioritise. The Enclave’s ruined, labyrinthine environments are stunning, possessing a real character and sense of place. The colour-work throughout the game is really something: candy coloured and saturated, like a ring of gems in a crown. Dragons burn with teal fire. Blue-tarnished copper paints the roofs of golden sandstone buildings. The first two levels (a forest path, and a bog filled with those awful lizard dogs) are fine enough. A little underwhelming, given what you’ve been told about the Enclave’s byzantine, sparkling reputation. I thought to myself: “What I really want to see is the ruined city itself, but surely we’re never going to go there,” and then, to my delight, we did. Dynevron, the capital of the capital, opens up in the third level and is an absolute delight. Endless dog-legged streets patrolled by magical constructs. Whole pathways across rooftops. Secrets tucked away in half collapsed basements. And Dynevron continues to grow! The next levels take you up into its bureaucratic heart, or down into its market district. As the game continued, the anticipation of what awaited me beyond the next teleportation gate grew.

Image credit:RPS

The engine by which the core mystery (“what happened to the Enclave?”) is unravelled is the game’s codex, rich in background detail and character and assembled piecemeal via the collection of fragments scattered throughout the large levels. Rather than an abstract “fragment of knowledge”, each of these represents a concrete discovery: a scrawled work order, or a broken toy, or a sabotaged gate. These are added to your journal, filling checklists in categories like “Guild of Crafters”, or “Raw Magic”, or, more tantalisingly, obscure headings like “Asylum” or “Runner’s Cipher”. When a full set is collected, you turn it over to Laen, the party’s loremaster, who collates it only then into the classic RPG codex entry. I really admire this manoeuvre. The gradual, incremental process sidesteps the dreadful, tiresome outpouring of codex entries, when the pace crawls to a halt as you read through 500 words about something like “The Plague”, and then tab down to slog through another 500 words about “Lunar Swordbearer”, and then lose your place, and then lose your patience. More interestingly, it speaks to the acquisition and synthesis of knowledge, the process by which a mystery is solved. These codex entries aren’t coming from nowhere; Laen is assembling them as a result of your actions. What do these disparate objects tell us about the history of this place? What conclusions can be drawn? Where are we making mistakes?

Though the game’s worldbuilding and codex writing is nuanced and successful, its moment-to-moment dialogue is much less so. Your freelance band of magicians contains, to a person, exactly one of Every Single Type Of Narrative RPG Character. There’s the nervous quartermaster, stretching herself too thin, who needs to be told to take a break. There’s the flamboyant, pseudo-chivalric enchanter who the party finds as annoying as he is indispensable. One nervous scion of a disgraced family. One warm, slightly harassed forgemaster, and her assistant, the gruff, withdrawn forgemaster who nevertheless opens up. They are archetypes laser-guided by their individual, thin, character pitch and while they’re constantly gesturing at some sort of internal community (a book club, or the ongoing relationship between the enchanter and the forgemaster) it never coheres beyond the surface level. The narrative voice might be at the root of this problem. Everybody speaks in roughly the same way; sometimes a little wordier, sometimes a little more reticent, but always with a glib looseness that belies that depth of the mystery and excitement with which they’re involved. Brynn, the player character, is maybe the worst of all. A young magician freshly appointed to the tip of the spear, she should be crackling with energy and curiosity but all too often she’s left to deliver “You’re right, I am kickass,” bon mots or reduced to the vector by which other characters resolve their anxieties.

Image credit:RPS

It’s a shame, but it’s not the end of the world. Oria, the band’s senior member, is a bright spot: a brusque birdwoman with a long history, her patience, care and curiosity comes through clearly, delivered in a cut-glass accent. A wounded wing prevents her from taking on your role, and there’s a well-executed and sad tension throughout her dialogue. Possessed of a lifetime of experience, here she is on the doorstep of a vast ruined city and tantalising mystery, unable to make the step inside.

After a few hours, the game hits its stride and everything starts rolling along organically and enjoyably. Discoveries in each level let you learn where resources can be collected, and a (frankly unnecessarily involved) crafting system starts making demands of you. You want that fireproof armour? You’ll need to go hunting for a certain component in a certain level that only appears at night. So off you go, and while you’re out, you stumble into one of the game’s gigantic dynamic bosses. These are a little like Monster Hunter’s beasties, or Shadow of the Colossus ’ titanic foes, though less complicated than the former and less awe-inspiring than the latter. They rumble around the levels, often dropping in on you when you least expect it, and multi-stage fights with them (involving hacking off armour piece by piece, or destroying a wing to ground a dragon, or locating a weak spot) will reward you with the rarest and most useful components. More interestingly, each beast can be harvested for its “strand”, the source of its magic, enabling that most satisfying feeling: getting absolutely wrecked by an enemy’s absurd attack but knowing that, with just a little more effort, you’ll be able to get the power for yourself.

Image credit:RPS

As with the magic and melee combat, the traversal of these beasts is often complicated by a weakness in the control scheme. You’ll try to cling to a terror’s arm and instead you’ll mantle uselessly onto a rock nearby, but these weaknesses are regularly offset by the lovely improvised chaos of physics systems bumping into each other. Every time I get flung directly into the sky, or a triceratops thing mistimes its own attack and slams a rock the size of a piano into its own face, I am filled with the wild joy of being alive.

This is an ambitious, confident debut by a small team that is swinging for the fences. When a game like this arrives, bubbling up improbably from an industry that all too often rewards one million-dollar-sequel after another, it stands to be celebrated. I’d go out into the glittering ruins of Dynevron and rumble into a boss fight and then, somehow, lose the boss, and get sidetracked by some flowers I needed to find, and then go and unlock a teleport gate, and then organically find the boss again stomping obstinately past a fallen cupola, and I’d think “this is a blast, I’m having a blast, this is great.” And sure, I don’t tremendously care about any of these people, and it’s never been less physically satisfying to swing a sword at these dogs, but right about then I notice that there’s this beautiful cliff about ten feet away and I can pick things up with my mind and in a matter of seconds all my problems have been forgotten.

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Eternal Strands

PS5 , 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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