Morsels review

We aren’t rotting, we’re fermenting

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Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Furcula / Annapurna Interactive

• Developer: Furcula
• Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
• Release: November 18th, 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam , Epic Games Store
• Price: 16/£12/€14
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11

The word “morsel” comes from the Latin “mordeo”, meaning “I bite”. Every time you play Morsels, you are bitten and eaten by a horrible cat. The beast’s incisors crash shut around the screen, and you tumble slowly down its oesophagus after the game’s squealing mouse protagonist.

I could write a whole article about the bastardly antics of cats - there’s one living next door who’s at that stage of feline youth when she really, really enjoys playing with her food. But the first time I succumbed to those jaws, I thought instead of the plughole in my bathroom sink, a trivial hellmouth full of hair and toothpaste. I thought, too, of the tenacious little flies that keep emerging from that soap-scummed porcelain sphincter, the life that keeps surfacing from a conduit of my filth.

The cat’s throat in Morsels is a cosmic drain that runs from the heavens to the sewers, its squamous folds furred by invading tree roots. Your task, as the mouse, is to fight your way back up through a dozen or so levels of teeming and beautiful roguelike disorder, enlisting up to three, hot-swappable creatures of weaponised waste to battle all the squirming, indigestible things you encounter enroute.

I felt a weird shame, playing Morsels for the first time. I tried a few runs and looked around my flat at all the yellowing curls of fingernail and bits of tracked-in leafmold, the rags of spiderweb clinging to still-packed and wilting boxes from the move a whole year and a half ago. I went into the kitchen and looked at the binbags torn by aluminium cans, leaking rivulets of coffee. The council don’t collect recycling, and the nearest depot is two miles away on foot - still, I know I could take my cans there if I cared to.

While Morsels is not a “political” game in the sense of being didactic, it is made up of bite-sized reminders of such human carelessness. One of the first “Morsels” you’ll acquire is Gumsel, a Hubba Bubba hooligan who works well as a turtling ranged attacker, its special move producing bubbles that block or slow enemies. Real-world chewing gum is comparably resilient, made up of non-biogradeable petrochemical products that are capable of outlasting the mortar of the buildings and pavements we absent-mindedly stick it to.

Cigarette butts also take a while to decompose, but Morsels focuses on the more immediate cost of chucking them aside. Later in the game, you’ll meet Zigsel, a Rizla caterpillar that is always at risk of being incinerated by its own trail of embers. And then there’s Smugsel, a burly tuft of exhaust fumes that refuses to blow away.

Image credit:Annapurna Interactive / Rock Paper Shotgun

The boss design burps a few notes of more overt and specific satire. There’s a cat in a square suit with a Trumpian combover who transforms into a lolloping cheeseburger (each boss has alternate transformations, encountered on replay). Between levels, you’ll bump into a rotating cast of Lynchian gargoyles who’ll generally offer some rewards or a minigame, and sometimes, take things away. These gatekeepers include a beached sperm whale, flat on its back with a sixpack tab braceleting one fin, and a group of Goyalike children watching news footage of a falling bomb. Still, Morsels isn’t out to be a game with a Message; it’s too engrossed in its own mess.

Which doesn’t make it unfeeling, or lacking in radical sentiment. Morsels follows our waste down into muculent canyons of worms pushing through background surfaces like intrusive thoughts, but there is no weeping in the sewers. There is a choreic and maternal fatberg who sends you off on each run with a hug, belching a heart emoji into the sewer pipe above. There is a busker made of sopping weed and trumpets, burbling away by the ladder to the first area. There is a raccoon tapping their feet to the busker’s music, and another, sleeping raccoon who farts obligingly when struck. There is a strange love here, radiating through the grease as though from some ripening magma pocket. Love and silliness and good-natured malice.

The scurrying things in the realms above will kill you endlessly, sending the mouse’s body back down the catpipe to the bowel, but you and they are matter that can only be remade, not destroyed, and there is a kind of embrace in each failure, like being warmly enveloped by the mud of a polluted estuary when the tide pulls out. The procedural level generation is deathly, but it loves you. It dances for you. It throws ingenious shapes for you, cosy CRT-fugged labyrinths of maybe six to a dozen ‘rooms’ and corridors apiece, comprised of padlocked walls, big-lipped turrets, sweeping chainsaws, canalina dentata, and flaming chum. The individual critters are delightful, both for their visceral personality and for the crafty way they choreograph what is on some level a bullet hell game.

Image credit:Annapurna Interactive / Rock Paper Shotgun

There are the Bubs, grousing lipomas that wiggle through the pores of each map: barely a threat in themselves, they are often lethal when you fail to notice them in amongst salvos of toxic sputum. There are the goddamn inextinguishable fairies introduced by one level modifier, who flit through walls and glance away from your attacks like wily blue bottles.

There is the roaring spectral adder that serves the same purpose here as Spelunky ’s ghost, slithering in from the outskirts of the playspace after an unpredictable time, blocking routes with its coils as you hurry to scoop up stars for level-ups and cheesecrumbs to spend on power-ups. There is the slumbering bus - a porcine, centipedal variation on the evening circular from My Neighbour Totoro - who’ll whisk you direct to the next biome, providing you acquire a ticket, and providing you’re happy to play a little Frogger on the way.

The friendliest of all are the birds. These include pigeons, those hardy, sociable beings we Londoners call “rats with wings” (and yes, there are rats in Morsels as well, all of them sporting sunshades) - you’ll find them hummocked on bricks, watching the chaos of each fight as impassively as they would commuters on a station platform. You’ll also find birdcages you can smash to acquire an escort of auto-firing sparrows, a boon indeed when you’re trying to figure out a more challenging and indirect species of Morsel. The ones I struggle with the most include Hogsel, a cousin of arcade Snake that guzzles its own tail unless you keep feeding it, and Uggsell, a cracked egg with overdeveloped thighs, who “tele-hatches” to a kicked ball in a blast of black yolk.

Image credit:Annapurna Interactive / Rock Paper Shotgun

The variations of Morsel make a point about language, I think, which goes beyond their brief and bemusing bestiary descriptions. “Mordeo” is cognate - that is, it shares an ancestor - with the English word “smart”, which can refer to cleverness and good looks and also, to pain. That contrast captures the ugliness of ‘beautiful’ language, its grammar and vocabulary partly the result of accident and appropriations, of misunderstanding and the workings of power. It accumulates into bad habits like oil in a plughole.

My own vocabulary is a crusted well of privilege, a goblet of pricey adjectives and curdled, mannered phrases like “relatively innocuous” or “sumptuous” or “conjured”, to pick a few that keep stabbing me in the eyes whenever I re-read anything I’ve written on here. In squeezing a menagerie from compound puns, Morsels goads you to get your teeth into the rubble, to chew and reform language with your tongue. What other species of -sel can you think of? Many more than the couple of dozen on show in this game.

It’s tempting to summarise the levels as “ecologies” - another favourite of mine, when describing any simulation - but when I spoke to him at this year’s Summer Games Fest , developer Toby Dixon resisted the term. Morsels doesn’t have an ecology in the sense of a more calculated and graded representation of multilateral relationships between autonomous creatures. The creatures in Morsels don’t relate, as such; they’re only interested in you. Complexity and tactical advantage arise, however, when they get in each other’s way.

Image credit:Annapurna Interactive / Rock Paper Shotgun

You bump into the tiny peaceful snails that fill every level, and they roll over a smoking grill, catch fire and collide with fanged spaghetti monsters that look like decapitated Sweetums. Demon skulls orbiting your character are glued to balls of snot; rodent snipers are clobbered by spiked chains sent swinging by your hasty retreat. All this on top of the curious and competing effects of modifiers, like passives that set off your Morsel’s special move when they’re damaged, or throw cleansing blue water in the direction of your dodge.

These interactions may be accidental, but they feel alive. I thought that was me projecting, but then I remembered the argument that complex life begins with things bouncing off each other - the Epicurean clinamen, whereby plummeting atoms swerve into cascades that, given enough time, add up into a world, rather than just a steady fall of unintegrated matter.

Matter! Morsels simply adores the stuff, adores what happens when you glop enough of it together. One precedent is Mad God , the stop motion magnum opus of Phil Tippett, animator of robots and dinosaurs for Lucas and Spielberg. Mad God is one of the most appalling things you’ll ever watch, and also one of the most wonderful. It is a Miltonic depth of shit and torture and sleepless, atrocious fecundity. Like Morsels, it sort of germinates from trash-compacted materialism and kleptomania. “A lot of the time I had no idea what I was doing, working with a lot of chemicals and dyes where I was pouring one into the other,” Tippett told Variety in an interview , adding that “I’m an obsessive collector of not anything worthwhile, just stuff. This film is like I invited stuff into this gravitational field that eventually condenses into something.”

Image credit:Annapurna Interactive / Rock Paper Shotgun

Mad God takes place in “a memory or a ghost world of mankind,” Tippet went on. “It’s what our consciousness was left with after we left.” The same could be said of Morsels, in which human vestiges are everywhere, but humans themselves are displaced into zoomorphic caricature. These vestiges extend from the literal bodily runoff that forms the menagerie to Dixon’s congealed memories of bygone aesthetics, old playthings and videogames recast as minigames hidden in mouse holes, or slid between levels. Snakes & Ladders, Frogger, table hockey, pinball - the spoiling fruits of an 80s and 90s childhood fished triumphantly from the dumpster, reassembled with intimacy and panache in the face of the parallel soulless perversions of re-generative AI.

The overall structure of the game is comparable to the very first Toejam & Earl, while its pacey and concussed, off-kilter soundtrack riffs on the likes of Hey Arnold, but it doesn’t aim to be the sum of its referencing. It makes me think of Tippett, again: “the nomenclature of the day is content, content, content, and it’s more like hot air, hot air, hot air,” he told Variety. “I wanted to make something that grabs people’s attention and takes you some place where you had never been before, and you have no idea where it’s going.”

Morsels corresponds to certain well-oiled mantras of content, content, content. It’s an ultra-replayable game with some perma-progression to ease the sting of rapidly repeated defeat. The tempo of increasing difficulty is broadly recognisable, as are the ways you can enhance each Morsel to, for example, slow time on damage, or inflict more criticals. Later biomes screw with you in familiar ways: heaven is a cloudscape with many whirring desk fans, and no guard rails.

Image credit:Annapurna Interactive / Rock Paper Shotgun

You could probably reduce Morsels to the status of a well-made genre piece, a reverse Spelunky with a streak of Noita , but there’s a pervasive uncertainty - I’m still not sure what those Goyalike children are for, after seven hours of play - and the sturdiness of the rogueliking isn’t what makes this compelling. What makes it compelling is the story it tells about the roguelike, about generators and their supporting databases, here reinvented as treacherously fermenting landfill. This is the roguelike gone rancid in a time where roguelikes are as common as pigeons, stewed in the juices of overmuch creation.

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Morsels

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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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