Marauding medieval masses mash together beneath the mainsail in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord War Sails

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhhh, slash, glug, glug, glug

Image credit:Taleworlds

I’m relatively new to the Mount and Blade series and its medieval warlord roleplaying in a siege-heavy sandbox. That said, it’s not taken me long to find its rhythm. The world is a constantly bubbling cauldron of small skirmishes and big battles. The nations that dot the continent of Calradia throw untold numbers of bodies at their neighbours with the goal of expanding their land. It’s an orgy of violence that’s often charming in the ways it can be slightly wooden or how you can feel the combat simulation creak under the weight of swordsmen you’re trying to sic on a settlement or castle wall.

It’s a good time to dive into Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord for the first time, as the incoming War Sails expansion and accompanying beefy base game update essentially serve as a Bannerlord 2.0. Old saves will be wiped, as the very landscape of Calradia’s been rubbed out and redrawn to accommodate War Sails’ new naval combat and economy. Everything generally feels more of a trek apart, especially in the north, where a land mass has been added to house the new viking-inspired Nord faction. Seas and rivers have been poured into the gaps, swelling out to form arteries across which War Sails’ fleets of ships can roam or commute.

Despite the significant changes to accommodate the addition of what design lead Gökçen Karaağaç tells me is “roughly 2.62 times more sea”, the map remains familiar. Though, you will find a trickle down of changes throughout Bannerlord’s sandbox. The previously most northerly faction, the Sturgians, for instance, had to be made a bit less viking-ish, so they wouldn’t overlap with the Nords. The faction’s also moved eastwards, allowing the Nords direct routes to cross the seas and feud with Battania and Vlandia in the west.

The economy had to be reworked to reflect the shifting of some cities towards coasts or away from their previous locations. You’ll now find the likes of Ostican and Chaikand as natural hubs for sea-trading, with each city now on the water also boasting a nation-specific port you can wander around as you can the town center. These ports are suitably bustling, and feature models of their country’s main vessel being constructed, which are cool to check out.

Image credit:Taleworlds

Those who suffer from seasickness may be glad to hear that it’s still very much possible to spend your life on land. Indeed, the few campaigns I’ve fought with the AI nations have seen my allies and enemies use their boats to commute between sieges and battles over castles and towns. Battering in a front gate’s still the name of the game when it comes to conquest, though it can help if some ships arrive to blockade a port or head off a reinforcing army on the water. When you do get into a large-scale naval fight, up to sixteen wooden vessels can crash together amid the waves.

I’m far from the most advanced Bannerlord tactician and prone to just charging in, so most of these skirmishes I’ve had have quickly devolved into on-deck grinding matches. That said, you can be clever and try to take out or soften up targets from afar before going in for the kill. Each of the nicely varied vessels from which you’ll patch together a fleet has its own strengths and weaknesses, but keeping the battle at arm’s length really demands you having one with a ballista, a strong ram, or just a crap tonne of archers given the lack of cannons. There’s a lot more to think about than in the much more arcadey sea battles in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag .

Your craft has both sails and oars, with the former needing to be tucked away if the wind’s moving in a direction which doesn’t suit your goals. Needless to say, movement’s key in battle, as it’s rather hard to do a quick three-point turn in a frigate. I’ve found it easy to sink foes with well-placed ballista shots, but the ramming’s been a bit hit-and-miss. The game grades each ram hit and rewards hull damage/crew member kills in line with that, with it seeming pretty picky in terms of what it considers a good hit. One mission in the new naval questline requires you to ram a damaged ship to sink it as it tries to escape. You get one good hit in at the start, but from that point on I found regaining momentum quickly enough to get more substantial strikes in before it scarpered very difficult.

Unless you’re happy losing all of the ships you could scavenge and add to your fleet to the depths, you’ll need to do some boarding before the fight’s over. This is when things devolve in the more typical Bannerlord mass of bodies thwacking and heeeuughing at each other until no one’s left standing. The decks are generally pretty confined spaces, which often results in warriors having to patiently queue up behind their comrades for a chance to biff someone. On at least one occasion, two enemies ended up pressed into the tapered end of a boat, with a six-or-so-deep line for the privilege of finishing them off. Because the battle being split across ship decks fragments it more than on land, I’ve also found it’s easy to end up with a handful of enemies left which you can’t locate and kill for the life of you. The game’s HUD seems good at letting you know when a ship has lots of enemies on it, but sometimes hesitant to spit out the smaller numbers you need when you’re cleaning up.

Image credit:Taleworlds

I’ve not had a chance to test out every one of War Sails’ unique ships yet, but a captured ballista-toting Dromakion heavy galley has quickly become my flagship. It’s mostly been paired by medium-sized viking drakkar and longships so far, but I’ve also recently nicked a massive Vlandian roundship that I’m keen to work into the lineup, given it’s about the closest the game has to a more modern renaissance-era galleon. I’ve invested in some upgrades for my ships, but aside from adding extra weapon capabilities via the likes of fire braziers arrows can be dipped in, these are mainly the standard ‘take or do more damage’, ‘row faster’ and ‘more ammo’ affairs you’d expect, which is fine. No laser cannons as in Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, but you can at least rename your craft.

So far, naval Bannerlord mirrors the base game in really starting to sing once you’ve amassed a decent-sized party and progressed up a couple of clan ranks. The new naval questline you can head straight for out of the campaign tutorial helps you get just about there. Telling a short tale about getting one of your stolen siblings back from pirates this time, it has some decent characters that give the world a bit of colour and some set pieces that do things with the naval toolset which aren’t easily set up in free-flowing gameplay. Sailing a fire-ship into another vessel, running a blockade as a merchant, sneaking aboard a ship while your crew distract those manning it.

Within it, there are some faces put to the pirate presence of Calradia, but once you’re back in the regular sandbox, pirates just work like tougher bandit clans. For example, crews of corsairs roam the southern waters near the Aserai domain. As with the merchant vessels they hunt, their crews are more numerous than land-dwelling bandit clans, often boasting 40-60 men per group. This helps make them a tougher challenge to move on to once you’ve pillaged your fill on land, as the developers envisaged, but the fact you can often go a while without running across them makes sea travel a lot more financially risky unless you’ve already got an income.

Image credit:Taleworlds

Unless you’re targeting merchants yourself, you won’t be able to knock over little gangs of looters mid-commute to help offset your running costs, which go up a fair bit thanks to the need to repair ship wear-and-tear after a voyage. That said, the fact they aren’t cleared via hideouts can help these pirates “stay around as a threat longer” in specific areas of the map they’ve been assigned to patrol, which does help them feel a bit less like a naked ‘kill this’ game mechanic than the land bandits can on occasion.

All in all, War Sails Bannerlord feels like a fitting evolution of the base game. As ever, it’s very ambitious and sprawling, with a lot of moving parts that are really impressive to behold when they’re not being a bit glitchy or janky. If you’re looking specifically for large-scale medieval warfare, it’s tough to beat, even if other games do specific bits of its massive whole a bit better or with more depth.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

Video Game

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord

PC

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.

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

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.