Palworld’s skin-deep Pokémon parody is part of a bigger horror story

The law is an ass

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair

Dig back far enough into the history of any word and you’ll find something sinister. Take “cute”. Nowadays it means pretty, lovable or charming, albeit perhaps with an undertone of mistrust or contempt, as in the phrase “that’s a cute observation, Edwin”. But the word originally evolved from “acute”, which very broadly means sharp or intense. “Acute” was once a Middle English word for a short-lived fever - it’s related to “ague”, a word you’ve likely come across in a medieval fantasy RPG somewhere, which refers to fits of sweating and shivering. The word “cute”, then, is secretly diseased, and so, perhaps, is the experience of cuteness. There’s a psychological phenomenon called “cute aggression” which refers to the desire to physically envelop, dominate and even abuse the thing you find cute - “I just want to squeeze you till you pop”.

Videogames know all about these queasy, mingled ideas of “cuteness”, especially when it comes to portrayals of non-human animals. Among the contradictions that games somehow thrive around is the insistence on representing animals as both things to adore and things to exploit - a tendency epitomised by the mania for petting mechanics in games where players otherwise spend their days flensing the fluffy critters for crafting materials and XP.

Some games put this act of having-it-both-ways under scrutiny. Pupperazzi , for example, pokes fun at how pictures of pets have become a social media currency - indeed, a literal cryptocoinage , building on centuries of “monetising” animals as dynastic symbols and religious icons. We Are The Caretakers looks at animal companions in party-based RPGs through the lens of decolonisation. And then there’s Palworld , which is essentially Pokémon portrayed as what Pokémon really is, for all its attempts to tell a kinder story about itself - a game of virtual cockfighting.

Palworld’s Penking, one of the game’s rarer creatures and a dependable source of ice magic. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair

Nobody in their right mind would call Palworld a complex parody of Pokémon, or a clever satire of games that both cosy up to and commodify the wildlife. The satire begins and ends with turning the above cute/exploitable disconnect into an openly macabre sales pitch. Rather than emphasising the emotional bond and sense of respect between animal and trainer, as Pokémon typically does, the Steam page boasts of the chance to not only capture, but slaughter the Pals or work them all to death on your factory lines.

It’s not so much a parody as a vindictive pastiche of Pokémon and various other games, one that plays up the “cute aggression” aspect of Pokémon by requiring you to personally clobber the beasties you’re hunting, but which is otherwise a perfectly routine survival game defined by base-building and upgrades, with the monsters doing double-duty as labourers. I like Palworld’s willingness to belittle Nintendo, one of gaming’s greatest sacred cows. But the satire is all edge, without much wind-up or follow-through: cheekily turning the “pet” button into the “butcher” button when you’re holding a cleaver , for example. Or censoring the butchering process when there is nothing much to censor beyond some bloodless writhing-around, which makes the whole thing feel like a pisstake of the player for being squeamish.

You don’t really need to play Palworld to grasp all this - again, it’s right there in the bullet points and gifs on the Steam page. Still, I’m kind of hypnotised by Palworld, and not just because it’s not all that dreadful as a work of “pure” mechanics . The clashes over whether it actively infringes on Pokemon’s copyright are an inadvertent satire of clashes over whether animals can be “copyrighted” in general.

Human beings have been trying to portray other species as their “intellectual property” for decades, depending on how you write the history of “intellectual property”. Selective breeding in modern industrial agriculture is to large degree about stopping other people borrowing your homework. Take US chicken-farming in the early 20th century. Corporate historian Glenn E. Bugos has a paper on the subject that discusses hybridisation, the process of pairing “pure” breeds of chicken to create unique sub-breeds with desirable traits, such as faster growth.

Where purebred chicken species can be “stolen”, simply by acquiring their eggs and breeding the chicks, you can’t do this with hybrids without re-rolling the DNA dice, and producing unexpected new varieties of chicken. Hybrid chicks “would reflect an almost random expression of all traits,” Bugos points out. “From the farmers’ perspective, the pedigrees would genetically self-destruct. Bred directly into the hybrid chick was the means to keep them from being illegally reproduced.”

A breeding farm in Palworld. You’ll need plenty of cake to set a romantic mood. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair

These older means of “breeding copyright into” farm animals now go hand-in-glove with genetic engineering technologies, which allow companies to optimise creatures from the cells upwards to suit their goals. Animals brought into the world this way can be portrayed as pieces of futuristic technology, subject to the associated legal protections when they enter the marketplace. There have been attempts to patent genetically engineered breeds of salmon , pigs , beagles , mice , sheep and oysters . Many such patent applications have failed, because views on the legality and ethicality of treating lifeforms like logo designs vary wildly by culture or country. But legal scholar Lena Anna Kuklińska argues nonetheless that, as of 2021, “patenting living organisms is an accepted practice”.

I find all this fucking diabolical. But I do love a good horror story, and I’m fascinated by how Pokémon and Palworld are accidentally playing out the question of whether a creature can be copyrighted - both in terms of the debate about whether Pals are actually “stolen” Pokémon designs, and in the shared player objective of pairing monster breeds to spawn the definitive, all-purpose subspecies. Pal breeding is both Palworld’s obvious endgame and an ironic counterpoint to claims that it is a copyright-infringing clone of Pokémon. Dip into the game’s Steam forums right now, and you’ll find threads full of players discussing methods for splicing together the perfect Anubis, even as arguments drag on about whether Anubis is actually Lucario with the serial numbers filed off.

It’s a budding cottage industry, the kind most sandbox survival games can only dream of. There’s even the makings of a black market, akin to the brutal underground trade in exotic pets : actual Pal poaching between players (as distinguished from representations of poachers in the world) is already a significant issue, as Pocketpair have just indicated by attempting to patch it out . You can expect the dirty tactics to intensify when the developers introduce arena multiplayer to the game and give players a proper competitive incentive to cultivate the most formidable breed of Pal.

The aforesaid Anubis, one of Palworld’s best fighters. |Image credit:Pocketpair

Pokémon first released in 1996, almost 30 years ago. Palworld is but a couple of weeks old as a publicly playable experience. If I were going to really flesh out the horror story, here - really strain these parallels to breaking point - I’d say that Palworld reflects how far “creature patenting” practices have come since Pokémon’s day, and how much closer we are to treating other beings as fully modular, factory-assembled and yes, copyrightable commodities. Nintendo’s original 1990s trademarks for Pokémon mascot Pikachu can be read against the grain as a piece of livestock industry wish-fulfilment. The accompanying list of applicable goods paints the picture of a fully-optimised, legally-insulated beast of slaughter - a miracle organism generated by copyright law, whose bones are lines of merchandising and whose profitable outputs are limitless: sleeping bags, electric staplers, sucrose, candlesticks, leather, fishing tackle, coffee grounds and microchips.

Where Pokémon’s various storylines portray Pokémon as a protected companion species, Palworld literalises the fantasy that is “intellectual property” and wallows in the mess. The Pals are the commodification of Pokémon in-game, all of Nintendo’s wider revenue streams turned inward upon the simulation that gave them life. They are the Pikachu trademark incarnate. But the Pals are even more bountiful than Pikachu, in practice, because they are both resource and workforce.

The shift from Pokémon’s purebred monster-catching to Palworld’s mongrel survival game pastiche is a collapsing-together of abbatoir workers with their victims - hence the Steam page’s jocular suggestion that Pals could conceivably be subject to labour laws. In addition to being individual sources of food, XP and equipment, the Pals wil help you build and operate the machines you’ll use to exhaust their world’s riches, over and over. They’ll happily participate in the construction of the very machines and weapons you use to entrap, kill and process them, asking little in return beyond a feeding trough and some straw to sleep on. Are these creatures cute? Yes indeed, in every sense of the word.

Palworld

PS4 , PS5 , Xbox One , 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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