Microsoft Flight Simulator and the quest to replace Earth

How high-fidelity does a flight sim need to be?

Image credit:Microsoft

Early on in Terry Pratchett’s novel The Light Fantastic, a spell is cast to map the world. It begins as a “fireball of occult potentiality,” dangling in the Great Hall of the Unseen University, which evolves into a ghostly “embryo universe.” The embryo expands “lightly as a thought,” with spectral continents “sleeting” through walls and people. It surges across the landscape until the entire population and geography of the Disc is exactly duplicated and enclosed by a shimmering shadow-self of “shining threads that followed every movement.”

Real-life software developers, including video game developers, have been casting spells like this for decades. One of them is the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, whose latest incarnation is a full-scale, always-online representation of the Earth’s surface, derived from a mixture of satellite imagery and terrain generation supplied by Microsoft’s Bing mapping and Azure AI technologies. Like the embryo universe from The Light Fantastic, this Earth is getting more Earth-like over time, albeit much slower. As of 2024, you can land your aircraft and perambulate around a 3D landscape that, while riven with uncanny omissions and glitches, does a fair job of satisfying the digital tourist. What was once a game about slipping surly bonds has become that most despised of genres, a walking simulator.

One question I have for Microsoft Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann is whether he envisages an upper limit for the simulation’s fidelity. At what point will this phantasmagorical planet be Earth-like enough? It sounds like there’s not much further to be gained from bumping the resolution of the environment. “We increased the resolution of the ground terrain 4000 times, between 2020 and 2024,” Neumann tells me in an interview, just before the 2024 edition’s release. “And when we turned on the terrain wireframe, at first we actually thought we had the textures, because the wireframe is so dense, that it actually looks like a mesh with textures. Do we really need more resolution than a few millimetres? No, I think on that side, we’re fine.”

Image credit:Microsoft

Neumann does, however, see potential for growth in terms of the technology that supplies the imagery on which Microsoft Flight Simulator is based. Satellites, he suggests, will eventually be able to fly lower than they currently do, and will be armed with better optical instruments. The 2024 game calls upon 50 centimetre resolution photography, but Neumann says that 30 centimetre resolution imagery is already available for certain regions. Drone photography, meanwhile, might allow for footage that would be impractical to obtain by human pilots.

“Right now, you either take satellite imagery which is really high and then you have a bunch of refraction in the atmosphere, or you fly a plane,” he continues. “For the plane you need to hire a pilot, there needs to be enough fuel, you know - it’s kind of limited from the logistics perspective, what you can get. So that’s why some places on Earth are much harder to get higher resolution data for, but with these drones that people fly around nowadays, maybe - we think that there’s going to be another step.”

The prospect of incorporating user drone footage is a new threshold in Flight Simulator’s relationship with its community - and thereby, a reminder of its debts to non-game consumer mapping software such as Bing Maps. As with those smartphone mapping tools, the latest versions of the game depend on an intricate, “participatory” relationship between a corporation, which creates or licenses the terrain data, and users, who fill out, hone, adorn and perhaps even deface the maps, albeit within firm constraints.

As Scott McQuire explains in a 2019 paper , corporate digital mapping tools are unique in being both imposed from above and contested from below, a tug of war that unfolds in real-time as the software is used, and that largely works to the benefit of the corporation. Amongst other factors, he links the success of the market-leader Google Maps to a strategy of releasing the tools to third parties, from rival entrepreneurs to ordinary users, then making their various alterations part of the product. Google Maps today is both highly editable, with the ability to add reviews and personal photography, and a passive data-harvesting service that learns and profits from the motions of billions of users worldwide.

If the editability and dynamism of digital maps allows for a measure of “popular cartography”, McQuire notes, it’s important not to succumb to any utopian people-power fantasies. “Public participation, such as the provision of co-created content, was crucial to the success of Google Maps,” he writes. “But it is Google’s structured shaping of such participation - enabling it while setting constraints on it - through a combination of technical, cultural and legal protocols that defines its particular enterprise.” Digital maps may be user-modifiable, but they also exert technical and legal control over any changes you make to them. And if there is a commitment to fidelity, this is shaded by commercial priorities, such as the injection of advertising and thus, the definition of public space in terms of market forces.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Xbox Game Studios

In Microsoft Flight Simulator, you are always, in a way, tinkering with the map, much as you’re contributing data to Bing Maps every time you prompt it for directions. The game generates and streams terrain to you on demand, in ways familiar from other video games - for example, it displays more detail in the direction you’re facing, with generated terrain data then beamed to other players visiting the same region to conserve processing power.

Whilst fundamentally a bid to minimise installation sizes (which might otherwise stray into the realm of hundreds of gigabytes), the reliance on streaming is a show of how playing Microsoft Flight Simulator is an act of “co-curation.” Being generated on demand, the game’s Earth is an evolving, combined reflection of the flightpaths and fascinations of its players. But this reflection is, nonetheless, tightly circumscribed. As Neumann explains, much of the data in Microsoft Flight Simulator is “rented” and refreshed over time, so even if it were physically practical, the developers aren’t permitted to ship the game’s Earth as a “permanent” download. “We are not really allowed to download it anyways. It’s kind of how Bing Maps works - if you look at Bing, you don’t download those textures either, right?”

These mundane legalities notwithstanding, the relationship between player and developers in Microsoft Flight Simulator is often a playful one, with an emphasis on active collaboration. Neumann recalls showing a trailer and being contacted by a player immediately afterward as he left the Los Angeles Convention Centre. “It was some person I’d never even heard of, I don’t have any idea how they got my phone number, and they said, hey, I just watched your trailer and I’m from Hobart, Australia and it looks great, but there’s something wrong with the colours.”

The developers have been fielding feedback like this for years - as Neumann notes, one of the first things players do in Microsoft Flight Simulator is plot a course for their own neighbourhoods. He’s keen to make such exchanges evermore the heart of the game, hence the interest in drones.

“I actually had an initiative, early on in 2024’s development, that I called ‘Let’s build the world together’,” he says. “So for example our lead artist, he lives in a little village in France, and he took a drone and he captured his area in France. And theoretically, we could be able to merge that into our world.” There are immense practical difficulties to “stitching” drone photography into the world, not least the question of lighting in a simulation with a real-time day-night cycle. But Neumann is sure they can be overcome. “I think in the long term, we’re going to revisit this, because I think it’s the right thing to do.”

The emphasis on community goes hand-in-hand with an ethic of preservation. Neumann sees Microsoft Flight Simulator as a digital archive, beginning with its dozens upon dozens of new and old licensed aircraft. “I go to tons of museums, and a lot of the curators were literally saying, hey, can you help us preserve this for prosperity?” he says. “We’ve scanned their planes, and we put it in the sim, and it kind of sits there forever, basically.”

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Xbox Game Studios

The preservation angle extends to places and periods, fossilised within the amber of older versions of the game. “We have New York from 2015, we have New York from 2020, we have New York from 2024, and that timeline is really cool, you know?” Neumann goes on. He posits a system that would let people switch between eras in the game, so as to witness the geographical and architectural changes from sequel to sequel. “I think that’s neat because I always say, I have two daughters and despite my best efforts they have no interest in looking at an atlas, ever, and I think something like this can actually help revitalise the curiosity about our planet.”

In particular, this might allow Microsoft Flight Simulator to visualise the effects of climate change, a slow-moving apocalypse that remains intangible to a lot of people, and is thus easy to cynically decry as make-believe. Future versions of the game might serve as tools for recording environmental alterations caused by rising global temperatures.

“We need to think about it, but there is, certainly in my head, a plan to do some kind of planetary visualisation,” Neumann says. “For example, NASA has an entire array that looks just at pack ice. There’s another array that is public, actually, for wildfires. Can we get that? One of the things that we have in Flight Simulator is that we can basically take any real-time data source and put it into the sim, and make that a reality.”

There’s a familiar, sinister cast to all this benevolent talk of curiosity and preservation - which, lest we forget, works primarily to the benefit of one of the world’s largest corporations. It’s less to do with Microsoft Flight Simulator, in fairness, than with the age-old imperial politics of maps. Maps aren’t just neutral navigational aids: they are skewed representations that emphasise certain details and minimise or erase others, teaching the voyager to interact with their surroundings in certain ways. Networked digital maps that seem participatory and available to modification, but are in practice directly or algorithmically governed by big business, are only the latest weaponisation of mapping as a projection of power.

One contribution of Microsoft Flight Simulator is to offer up an Earth in which such Jonesian urges can be sated without people flying actual planes down to endangered rainforests in search of butterflies. But these representations aren’t immaterial, of course - Microsoft Flight Simulator’s reliance on on-demand machine generation and streaming technology forms part of the same investment in data centres and generative AI that is even now threatening Microsoft’s plans for reducing emissions . To build this world together adds to the burden placed upon the simulation’s inspiration; to return to my Light Fantastic analogy, it’s as though the Earth were slowly collapsing within its shimmering, silver skin. Microsoft Flight Simulator’s emissions footprint might be trivial by comparison to, say, big agriculture, but in simulating the whole Earth for the enjoyment of explorers and collectors, it exemplifies the idea of Earth as a place to plunder.

With all that in mind, it’s reassuring to hear Neumann suggest that Microsoft Flight Simulator’s simulation might, in fact, be subject to deliberate limits. If there’s a feeling of social responsibility here, it’s as much to do with what not to show. For example, the real-time locations of endangered animals.

There are many creatures in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, but they appear to be generic entities borrowed from the game’s ironically-named stablemate Planet Zoo , and loosely assigned to certain latitudes. The developers could have gone much further. “For 2024, we licensed this thing called Spire, and they have a transponder signal of every ship on Earth, every 30 seconds,” Neumann says. “So we now have every ship on Earth every 30 seconds. We could do that with environmental things as well.

“I was pushing hard to get a bunch of animals in, because the world needs to be alive - it makes people happy when they encounter animals in the world,” he explains. “There is actually data where you could show certain animal types with transponders, and I shied away from using it because I didn’t want to have any poachers get any data that’s useful.” There’s an “angle of responsibility” to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, he asserts. In practice, it’s not just about making it “feel as close to the real thing as we can get”.

I finally got round to playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 last week and, to be triumphantly contrarian, I really dislike the aeroplane aspect of it. The planes are wonderfully realised, and yes, I’m sure hobbyists will relish their detailed interiors and handling models, but for me, they’re just white noise between the player and the game’s intricately recreated Earth, which I am both disturbed and fascinated by.

The first thing I did in the game was engage freecam, slide clear of my aircraft’s cockpit, and swoop down to visit my old stomping grounds in West Yorkshire. I alighted on a main road between Leeds and Bradford like an absent-minded angel, and spent a few moments ghosting between streetlights, peering at the nearby fields and watching boxy cars bumble past. I found my surroundings totally unrecognisable, which filled me with relief. Not yet: the spell is still being perfected. There is still a more Earth-like Earth than this.

Microsoft Flight Simulator

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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

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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