Europa Universalis 5 review

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

A deep and intricate historical simulation that will overwhelm you with menus as much as it will compel you through centuries of global history.

• Developer: Paradox Tinto
• Publisher: Paradox Interactive
• Release: Nov 4th, 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam
• Price: £50/$60/€60
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

Europa Universalis 5 is a forever game. Insofar as you might be able to play this grand historical strategy forever, but also because - my god - it takes forever to play. After a mere 45 hours of conniving, trading, battling, and scratching my head at menus, I have just about scraped my way through 150 years of Neapolitan history. I have yet to come across a single pizza with buffalo mozzarella on it, but there are approximately 250 years left to find one. This is the blessing and curse of a typically dense playthrough of Europa Universalis. Paradox’s trademark blend of intricate geopolitical clockwork, hands-tied confusion, and “one more year” compulsion is all here. You just need to set aside a few centuries to enjoy it.

For anyone who’s never indulged in these hypercolonial map scramblers, Europa Universalis 5 is a grand strategy where you pilot a nation through the ages, starting in the year 1337. I picked Naples - one of the recommended starter countries - but you could just as easily puppet the Shogunate of Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Zimbabwe, China, Dehli, or one of dozens of Mayan nations. Each country has its intricacies and quirks. If, say, Naples loses all its land to hungry neighbours, that’s game over. But other countries like the Golden Horde are “army-based”, and can only be destroyed if their military is wiped out. Islamic countries do not buy or sell alcohol. Irish tribes raise 10% more cows, presumably because there would be nothing to raid if they did not.

Your goal is simply to keep your country going. You may naturally want to expand your nation’s borders and gobble up smaller countries. That’s what war is for, and it has its own tempo, full of little toy men to move around on the map and battles to watch with an expression of mild concern as your 30,000 peasants are steadily butchered on a Sicilian mountain by Moroccan men-at-arms. Raising and moving troops is not hard to figure out, but the precise rules of battle can be tough to discern, buried as they are in heaps of stats and diagrams and tiny buttons that do important things. I have the benefit of years of Paradox strategy games, and even I do not fully comprehend exactly how victors are determined in these fights. I usually just make sure I have more troops than my foe, alongside a few of the shiniest new units from the tech tree.

In any case, I find rampant militarism one of the least interesting styles of playing the sim, even if it helps colour the map my specific shade of Italian blue. More inviting are home affairs. I proudly built roads across my entire country (it helps with trade and tax collecting) and made my capital city a book-printing, fabric-weaving powerhouse by building lots of dye factories, scriptoriums, and the like. The people who would come to love me most are the burghers: the growing population of city-dwelling merchants who love a bargain. Unfortunately, they’re not the only ones I need to please.

I’m talking about the “estates”. This is the game’s big balancing act, and anyone who’s played the Tinder-like kingdom management game Reigns will be instinctively familiar with the idea. There are five groups with power: the crown (that’s you), the nobility, the clergy, the burghers, and the commoners. Each estate has a little meter at the top of the screen at all times, showing their satisfaction level. If any meter gets too low, rebels will start to gather unseen in your country.

You can deal with rebels by telling a cabinet member to crack down on them and reduce that rising tide of tension. But generally, you want to avoid giving the rascals cause in the first place. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

This is where the game’s many pop-up events come in, allowing you to side with one estate over another. The clergy don’t like this fancy new “university” idea, but the burgers love it - what do you do? The commoners want a holiday but the nobles think they ought to work harder - who do you favour? These meters will shift from red to green and back again as you try to balance out public opinion.

Sometimes you’ll grant a group special privileges, just to get them to shut up. For instance, I gave the nobles unreserved leadership of the navy (rich people love boats) and I granted the commoners their own representatives in parliament (poor people love universal suffrage). But each privilege granted gives more power to that group, and revoking these fancy rights is horrendously difficult by design. You can do it, but your country will be instantly destabilised. You could have a civil war by the end of the year.

It’s just one of the new plates to spin in this rich circus of history. I haven’t mentioned all the trade outposts I’ve seeded in other countries, or the sneaky way I’m annexing half of Greece, or how I’m pushing this new-fangled idea called “literacy” to the masses (it ramps up your research speed). The benefit of a historical sim of such terrifying scope is that you have access to an intense ahistorical anecdote generator, something you could probably play for the rest of your natural life. The trade-off is that you must face down an intimidating cavalcade of menus and buttons and keywords highlighted in bold.

To steal a quote from a wise architecture book I once read: “Accept as normal the anxiety that comes from not knowing what to do.” This is the secret to enjoying Paradox games. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

It’s like waking up in front of a submarine’s control panel: an exciting and paralysing array of buttons to push, not always tidily arranged. You can study the manual closely (it has a sometimes-patchy encyclopedia of hints, and tooltips appear when you hover over a keyword). Or you can just dive in and start pulling levers until something expensive breaks. Either way, it can be an overwhelming start, even with the text-heavy tutorials doing their best to guide you.

This tutorial tries to quickly cover as many gritty systems as possible. Here’s the finance screen! Here’s how to build roads! Here are the different map modes! It seems to constantly say: “Oh, just one more thing” because, good heavens, there is always one more thing. This is a giant, intense sim, more granular than finely ground espresso and ten times as overstimulating. It might take days just to get familiar with its maddeningly labyrinthine user interface, although for seasoned EUIV veterans, much will be familiar.

The game’s language sometimes doesn’t help. A foreign country has an “opinion” of you, but also a “trust” level and a little currency called “favours”. All of these differ in minute ways but they all contribute to the same thing - your relationship with a foreign power. Many keywords are nearly synonymous. A “rival” is not quite the same as an “enemy”. One tab is called “diplomacy” and another “geopolitics” (the latter might have been more accurately titled “colonialism” - but we’ll get to that). The only way to learn the intended meaning of the designers is to painstakingly hover over the tooltips, as whole minutes of the game are spent frozen, a brow-furrowed expression of pure conceptualisation on your face. What is the difference between “food” and “food raw materials”?

I guess a “food” might be pizza, but a “food raw material” would be buffalo mozzarella. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

I’m not going to explain all that. Partly because I already did and partly because it’s kinda dull to read about. Why spend time explaining the overelaborate markets menu, or telling you how the research tree is split into six distinct “ages” when I can instead tell you about the time 1.1 million people in my country died from the bubonic plague. It swept through the nation like a fart in a lift: immediately noticeable. The population numbers dropped massively. Events triggered every month or so, in which I had to make finicky decisions over who to infuriate and who to simply disappoint.

It was one of the first big dramatic changes to my nation. And yet, it remains a machine-like tale. I do not so much get the sense that a million people have perished. I get the sense that a big invisible hand has come along and shoved my numbers into a meat grinder to make the simulation a little more spicy. This is fine - EUV is a machine. But this was also the moment when I knew it would not supplant my beloved Crusader Kings 3 , which is more focused on humanity and the characters of history, as opposed to the drier graphs and charts of history. Crusader Kings is for history graduates who watch Vikings and have a subscription to Ancestry.com. Europa Universalis is for statisticians who read books on military history and have watched every episode of Map Men . (I’m sure some of you freaks fit both descriptions.)

I just vote yes to anything the Pope says. Out of respect, you understand |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

Here, a dry inaccessibility is aided by new “automation” gizmos. Basically, you can hand over whole systems to the computer. Don’t want to manage all the goods in your kingdom? Click a little cogwheel to automate those. Don’t fancy having to manage taxes? Fork it over to the blessed machine. You can cognitively offload the hiring of admirals, the construction of buildings, the next items on the research tree - almost everything - to the AI.

But such automation is a double-edged halberd. There are moments when something under the hood suddenly slurps 50 proto-euros from the treasury, and you’ll have no idea why. I wanted to build an Entrepôt in my capital (a big market dock for all my scumbag businessgoons). It cost 320 ducats. But every time my income neared 300, a chunk of change would disappear, the game’s gremlins deciding I don’t need all that surplus cash. I have no idea what caused this or where the money went. It stopped when I temporarily de-automated trade and production methods.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

The automated navy and army commands are not always reliable either. More than once I ordered my forces to “hunt enemy navies” or “blockade ports” or focus on sieges, only to see them idle around doing nothing, even as defeatable enemies sauntered by or castles sat unconquered. The computer probably has some internal reasoning for this, but damned if I can figure it out. After that, I just clicked armies around by myself. Artificial intelligence once again bested by a single human finger.

All these overlapping systems and sneaky auto-tweaks and baroque menus create an intriguing monster. When the game is understandable, it is hugely gratifying. But it also feels a bit “you cannot press this button until you press that other button”. And that other button is obscured in a warren of menus you must spend nights coming to understand. It’s a hugely deep pool of wonderful tricks to get lost in, but a pool still sweaty from all the confused forum posters who dived in before you.

For example, France is forcing countless other nations to embargo me. For the longest time, I had no idea how they were doing that, what to do to alleviate it, nor exactly what effect it was having on my trade income and economy. There’s so much going on underneath this hood, and much is not cogently explained within the game itself. This process of coming to learn how to tackle your nation’s problems is itself part of the charm, but it nonetheless demands patience and time - two things you may not have in abundance.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

You can opt to play as a non-expansionist power, of course. But I find that building an empire is very much the meat of this simulation, and since empires are built to extract riches from the periphery and pull them to the centre at the expense of those conquered, this is generally what the game is all about. I don’t say this in a fit of judgement - it is how history actually passed, and developers shouldn’t be afraid to build systems that simulate these things. I only mention it because players may want to know that EUV is determined to be blunt about the reality of these centuries. Colonialism happened, it seems to say, and this is how. You are not getting a sanitised version of history.

Without going through the fiery, clicky baptism of learning, you will be locked out of the batshit cloisters of history. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

Neither are you getting a humanised version of it. Aside from intermittent pop-ups with flavour events about people you’ve often not met, Europa Universalis 5 still largely abstracts its horrors out to a numbers game, and in this sense its attitude to colonialism remains dressed in the dispassionate fabric of colourful maps and statistics. It is a top-down atlas of a world ready to carve up, and in this core respect it is mostly designed and expected to be played as a coloniser, even if other options are open. You have to be okay with roleplaying a jackass in a crown, is what I’m saying. Historical simulations can encourage thoughtfulness as much as they can reinforce sticky notions about our globe’s history. And Europa Universalis as a series at least has some experience in this regard . It’s a complex subject in a complex game. My 150 years on this earth have not granted me wisdom enough to address it.

But I can tell you that this is a moreish, deep, and long-lasting piece of work. My biggest complaint is that it could offer better instruction. Stellaris and Crusader Kings 3 have, for my ducats, been the most approachable Paradox strategy games for newcomers. Aside from not being so dry, their tutorials do decent jobs of introducing you bit-by-bit to the bitty machinery of ruling dynasties and star systems. Europa Universalis 5 has a more complicated task. The ambition of its simulation is so vast that it’s hard to simplify and teach. The common advice is to bathe in that sense of overwhelm and learn to accept disaster and confusion as part of the fun. Everyone in Sweden will die because of a button you forgot to press twenty years ago. And that’s fine. Italian kings do it all the time.

Part of me yearned to finish this playthrough before giving my final verdict, but considering it took Naples a full century just to discover there is a “south” of the globe (omg), I’ll just tell you now: it’s confusing as heck and I like it. Even though I’m playing at the second-fastest speed with judicious pausing, I would likely need to play for another 40-50 hours to make it through the full span of history. This statement is both horrifying and exciting - a game that disrespects my time? Disrespect me more, my huge messy map monster.

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Europa Universalis V

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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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