Minecraft’s “vibrant” update has me thinking about video games as time capsules

Making self-preservation an artistic objective

Image credit:Microsoft

In the latest Minecraft Live, developers Mojang revealed a “Vibrant Visual” overhaul for a game that is now older than many (most?) of the people playing it. Initially planned for the game’s Bedrock edition, with a Java version update to follow, it garnishes Minecraft ’s blocky wilderness with directional lighting, volumetric fog and other gimcrackery you might recognise from more recently published open worlders.

Back when I was a mod-phobic Vanilla player, I would have sneered at all this. Minecraft is not supposed to have “subsurface scattering”, whatever that means to regular mortals. It is not supposed to look high fidelity, or high tech. It is supposed to look like, well, Minecraft. These days, my reaction is less outrage and more curiosity, mingled with vertigo at the entangling of these trendy flourishes with the pixelgrain of what is still, on some level, Infiniminer touching grass. Whatever you think of these Vibrant Visuals, it’s interesting to follow Mojang’s efforts to tinker with and flesh out an aesthetic that was arguably ‘perfected’ in 2009. It’s also interesting to think about what “vibrant” might look like, 16 years from now.

Image credit:Microsoft

I’m always tempted to call Minecraft’s aesthetic “timeless”, which is objectionable for a bunch of reasons. It risks brushing aside how the developers have tinkered with that aesthetic since the first public alphas - devs like Mojang’s lead artist Jasper Boerstra, who joined the crew in 2017 and was promptly asked to redraw every last block texture while introducing himself to the fans.

In general, “timeless” is an utterly vacuous descriptor. No artwork and no visual aesthetic has some kind of essential baked-in magic that ensures it will always find a following. Contexts alter and expectations change. People die and other people are born. Artworks find attention and lose it and find it again. Still, if it’s silly to suggest that certain aesthetics simply have more staying power, I wonder if there’s something constructive about aiming to be “timeless”, inasmuch as it’s another way of framing the issue of video game preservation. Cultivating timelessness is a form of speculative, gently anti-capitalist fiction: what will different individuals, groups and generations consider “vibrant”, a few decades from now? What will they hold onto, amid efforts to repeatedly sell them all-new, soon-obsolete “vibrancies”?

I wonder if Minecraft’s long-departed and disgraced creator Markus “Notch” Persson asked himself that question, back in the noughties. I’ve never met Persson, but I’ve spoken to a lot of the people who worked with him back then, and his original approach to texture creation seems fruitfully open-ended.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mojang Studios

Minecraft is a proud example of what Mojang creative director Markus ‘Junkboy’ Toivonen once appreciatively described to me as “brute-forcing” art production. The original block textures are based upon minimal formal training in the visual arts. To fashion them, Notch created a bunch of tiny 8-by-8 or 16-by-16 pixel squares and futzed around with the mouse until he had something resembling soil, stone and treebark. The limited canvas size helped in that it makes a virtue of approximation and abstraction.

Combine that deceptively artless texturing with layered, procedurally generated landscapes, introduce a rainbow of “cloth” block types for the fancier builders, and you have a mix of pastoral LEGO sandbox and 3D pixelart editor that lent itself well to the emerging Youtube Let’s Play scene. The other advantage of this ‘programmer art’ is that it’s easy to copy and replicate, tempting to improve upon: just load up the textures in Microsoft Paint, and jimmy those pixels as you please. If this was a strategy on Notch’s part, it has paid off amply: there’s now a whole industry of people who specialise in making Minecraft look like everything from an unholy X-ray dimension to the European Middle Ages. Mojang’s efforts to make Minecraft more vibrant are just one strand of this community-wide experiment with Minecraft aesthetics.

Ironically enough, the developers who are currently thinking hardest about how their aesthetics might endure are probably the creators of live service productions, with business models that require a certain lifespan. These are projects that aim to become “platforms” while also committing to the precarity of an online requirement (and the crushing ambitions of executives who dream of making the next Fortnite) – however endless their roadmaps, they are Faustian bargains and sandcastles in the sea.

Still, I can think of at least one non-live-service project that is deliberately angling for Minecraft-style longevity in terms of its art direction, albeit in a very different way: Billy Basso’s superb creature feature Animal Well . As I wrote for the Guardian in 2022, Basso conceived of Animal Well as a “time capsule”, designed to be playable and worth playing for a decade or more. The game avoids some of the features that make preservation more difficult: it doesn’t have online requirements, and there’s no DLC or update strategy, though Basso has inevitably had to patch a few bugs after launch. The game file is absurdly compact at less than 50MB - you could send it as an email attachment. It also contains software libraries that other games would expect to find installed on your computer, making it more independent of operating system changes.

Image credit:Bigmode

It’s not just about ‘future-proofing’ the code, however. Basso’s time capsule parallel also extends to the design and aesthetics of Animal Well. The game’s most elusive puzzles were designed to take years to solve, and this opaqueness of design suits the emphasis on preservation, because a game that keeps its secrets is one players will keep returning to. This idea feeds through into the pixelart and its symbolist or archetypal vocabulary of tools and objects. Discussing the usage of rotary-style telephones as save points in Animal Well, Basso told me that he wanted “to make something that feels timeless, in a sense, but also anachronistic” - a landscape of objects that are both peculiar in the context and “immortal”, in the same way that anvils remain a familiar trope in North American cartoons.

I enjoy the echoing ambiguity here: Basso wants the phones to feel like they belong to a certain era, but also like they transcend chronology. It’s the irreducible contrast between those things, you could say, that makes Animal Well “immortal”, in that the disconnect sharpens the suspicion that this chasm of creatures still harbours a few more discoveries.

Image credit:Bigmode

Basso’s project is a template for what I will presumptuously call a more “constructive” approach to video game preservation, which treats longevity as a positive and holistic artistic principle, informing the entirety of a game’s concept and execution. I’d love developers to think and talk more about how a game might become “timeless” – not just in terms of “purely” practical or external problems like operating system compatibility, but in terms of, say, the textures and choice of objects and how these things might kindle a player’s curiosity, even if you strip away all contemporary context. Again, while “timelessness” is a vacuous ideal, designing for it can be a useful social project. It might help the culture of game preservation seem less sorrowful and nostalgia-driven - less about rescuing old games, and more about nurturing the conviction that good art should last.

This is an absolutely terrible closing parallel, given the above emphasis on positivity, but perhaps Minecraft’s next visual update should take inspiration from another, less romantic kind of time-capsuling: long-term nuclear waste storage. Back in 1992, the US Sandia National Laboratories commissioned a panel of experts to design a 10,000-year marking system for radioactive burial sites – places of “vibrancy” in the sense of vibrating with energy. The Sandia panel published a report detailing some possible hostile architectures they felt might deter unsuspecting visitors from future cultures: “immense lightning-shaped earthworks radiating out of an open-centered keep”, and fields of “wounding forms, like thorns and spikes, even lightning”.

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/Forbidding-Blocks.png?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“A diagram of a possible surface-level architecture to mark a nuclear waste disposal site, published in a report from the US Sandia National Laboratories in 1992. It looks like a landscape of “forbidding” broken blocks. - 7”>

Image credit:Michael Brill / United States Department of Energy

In the context of Minecraft, my eye is caught by the Forbidding Blocks, a maze of “deliberately irregular and distorted cubes”, each roughly 25 feet a side, which form streets that “lead nowhere, and… are too narrow to live in, farm in, or even meet in.” The writers summarise it beautifully as “a massive effort to deny use”, but inevitably, these descriptions and the accompanying illustrations are as enticing as they are disturbing. They look like something you’d find on Minecraft’s infamous 2b2t server . They absolutely look like somewhere you’d expect to find treasure, regardless of the era. Game developers might take inspiration from that feeling of troubled enticement. Is it helpful to consider what mixed emotions your creation might evoke, a hundred centuries from now?

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/coa77e.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“Minecraft’s “vibrant” update has me thinking about video games as time capsules - 9”>

Minecraft

Android , iOS , PS4 , PS5 , Xbox One , Xbox Series X/S , PC , Nintendo Switch

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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.

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/co9rk1.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“Minecraft’s “vibrant” update has me thinking about video games as time capsules - 19”>

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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