Pathologic 3 is a sickly horror story about time pretending to be an ’easier’ game

Butchering “Butchering Pathologic” - Part 1: The Clock

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

Butchering “Butchering Pathologic” is a series of articles on Pathologic 3, inspired by Quintin Smith’s peerless retrospective for the original game .

The following contains abstracted discussion of my own experiences of disease.

When you are caring for people fighting a long illness, it can feel as though time has stopped, not just because you are living one day at a time, but because each day needs to be built from scratch. Days no longer simply happen to you. Time is a personal regime, put in place to maximise the odds of more time, in the face of symptoms that worsen and abate.

In Pathologic 3 , time itself is sick. Not just out of joint, though that certainly fits the English script’s arch fondness for Shakespeare, but palsied and delirious. Time is a huge, shrinking, seizured, broken dream. The days are all piled on top of each other, their causality in rags, curled protectively around a groaning bellyful of people, decisions and consequences. The game’s terrible epidemic doesn’t march tidily toward total obliteration, but skips and reverses as you try to pull the Town from the mangler.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

You are the Bachelor, a creature of reason and contempt, who arrives by train from the Capital seeking endless time. Alighting a couple of days prior to the outbreak, he is investigating rumours of an immortal man, from whose tissues he will cultivate a cure for death. In a sense, he is immediately successful. Early in the story, the Bachelor procures the ability to time-shift, jumping between the days as he organises the Town’s battle with the plague and pursues his own histrionic research. This ability is to some degree a metaphysical negotiation with the Town itself: a geography of mystics, architects and butchers that proves to be a time machine of another sort, shipping hours on demand like the meat that emerges from the humped and neolithic Abattoir.

The Stillwater observatory is where you’ll jump between days, care of a grandfather clock. It’s also where you’ll drag out the theatrical piano interlude at the end of each day, before tampering with that clock (technically, the Bachelor never sleeps through the night). The Cathedral is a dispensary, both taking away time and increasing your capacity for it. The Theatre may enclose the events of the game, reducing the story to a cycling dress rehearsal. The streets are full of querulous mummers and tragedians who offer gameplay tips, and who appear to inhabit a timeframe of their own - unsure whether they are living, acting, symbolising, or heckling.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

Even the dumpsters and playground swings of the Town are mechanisms of time control, used to modulate the Bachelor’s unstable emotions. Red-tinted objects increase his Mania, speeding his steps while eroding his heart. Blue-tinted objects make him Apathetic, curdling his movements to the point that he becomes too depressed to speak. In place of the hunger, infection and fatigue systems from previous Pathologics, surviving minute to minute is about finding balance between these states. You’ll barter for, manufacture and, most often, loot drugs that offer a quick fix for an excess of excitement or gloom, their efficacy lessening with each dose. Still, it’s always tempting to abuse Mania and risk self-harm or cardiac arrest when you need to pack a few more footfalls into each day.

The time-shifting mechanics, together with the removal of generic survival gauges, make Pathologic 3 ’easier’ in some ways than its predecessors, with less risk of running aground because you neglected to stock up hours before. In general, I’ve not had to worry much about basic resource-gathering in my opening 12 hours with the game. True, inventory items are lost when you change days, unless you store them inside a grandfather clock, but crates of morphine, caffeine and other commodities spawn generously throughout the world, and there’s a ‘concentration’ mode that highlights them for discovery.

Even so, Pathologic 3’s new emphasis on time control isn’t just a bid to win over people deterred by Pathologic ’s vicious pedantry about the bare necessities. The first game and Pathologic 2 are themselves works of temporal disorder. Pathologic is three parallel attempts to tell the same story from clashing perspectives, while Pathologic 2 is at once a remake and a sequel and a bleeding third of the original story, waiting to be healed by the launch of Pathologic 3 and Pathologic 4. Still, the older games are, at least, works of steady escalation: the plague expands, the streets grow less tractable, and your mistakes return to haunt you with mostly logical severity. In Pathologic 3, a gentler, ‘rewritable’, ‘pick-up-and-play’ format is obtained at the cost of feverish unreality.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

The plague is an apocalyptic terror, reducing districts to echoing underwater ensembles of green silt and stacked bone, but then you roll back a few days and it dwindles to nubs of viral activity in the hindparts of the Town – a coffee stain on the map screen. As the Bachelor winds and rewinds from morning to morning, he must think about each stage of the pandemic at once, chewing over his mistakes as he tries to save critical individuals, solve smaller mysteries, diagnose the disease, and learn the precise order of interventions that leads to the aftermath.

The Bachelor keeps mind maps of events and decisions on each day: these persist across the time jumps, much like the ship log in Outer Wilds . Individual event chains may be preserved or reset without disturbing all of the others, allowing the Bachelor to act in tandem with fractions of his own past, re-assembling the world from splinters of many others. Again, this saves you some labour – no need to complete every daily objective in one fell swoop - but it is intrinsically a threat to the Bachelor’s sanity. Or a manifestation of his insanity, as you might decide from dialogue responses. He must remember what he isn’t supposed to know yet, and forget what has no longer taken place, and he must do this in the shadow of judgement and shame.

Before each day begins, the Bachelor is dragged back to the Capital and into the future, where he is interrogated for his overall failure by an obnoxious Inspector. The evidence presented obviously changes as you replay each day, trying to avoid that failure. This has a deranging effect on the sober process of elimination that is the traditional whodunnit. As the timelines fray and reknit, the Inspector’s accusations slide between hard truth and malicious gossip, without altering a word. The Bachelor’s wild evasions and self-aggrandisements are either outright lies, or corrections of reports that have become/were always false.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

The price the Bachelor must pay for ‘defeating’ death at the outset of Pathologic 3 is to forever play out his inability to defeat death. Death has become his neighbour, never quite confronted. The price the player must pay for being freed from Pathologic 2’s relentless attrition is to oscillate between degrees of suffering and reprieve, to build each day anew and see every part of the Town as simultaneously bright and clouded and burning and flowering and pillaged and breathing and buried. It’s not just ‘convenience’, though it definitely makes the game more approachable: it’s punishment. It’s horror like you’ll find nowhere else.

It’s hard to know how much of what’s happening is the Bachelor’s projection, a prospect toyed with by writing that commits to self-referentiality early on and, so far, marries this effectively to grotesque, wry or callous, naturalistic descriptions of ulcers and stabbings and squalor. The Town’s brittle disarray reflects the character’s own rigidity: it’s what you see when you are too clever by half, too sure of your own brilliance and so, easily shattered by anything you consider impossible, irrational.

The Bachelor is a sneering big city toff, attempting to apply the imperial scientific method to a carrier bag of motes and threads that is being devoured from within by mold. His tools are appropriately megalomaniacal, childishly direct when compared to the indigenous methods and twisted ‘family stakes’ of Pathologic 2’s Haruspex: curfews, quarantines, a ratcheting gasgun that can be used to disperse plague clouds, as though you were playing a very reluctant first-person shooter. The Bachelor has an ordinary pistol, as well, but you’ll seldom have much ammo for it – as such, it’s best wielded as a bluff to keep desperate people at bay.

One conversation suggests to you that the very layout of Pathologic 3’s Town - the slicing of the old open world into separately loading districts, accessed via fast travel - is an expression of the Bachelor’s professional tendency to split things up, their parts atomised for safer appraisal. Where do we draw the line between dissecting, and smashing? Or to put that more forgivingly, at what point does compartmentalisation become self-sabotage?

The ability to rewind time is fuelled by ‘amalgam’, a mercury alloy used in the manufacture of mirrors, which is here obtained by breaking them, freeing up their stolen hours. I don’t need to belabour the psychological implications of breaking a reflection: the Bachelor spells it out for you in various unkind notes-to-self. It actually seems healthier to obtain time from acts of euthanasia. You will encounter townsfolk in Pathologic 3 who are beyond rescue: persuade them to accept their deaths, and their remaining time is yours, providing you grant the victim a peaceful passing.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

Pathologic 3 is a retreatment of Pathologics gone by, and this series of articles on Pathologic 3 is a retreatment - probably, a mistreatment - of an older article series, Quintin Smith’s brilliant Butchering Pathologic . Quinns wrote that series as a post-mortem, an invaluable recutting of a game many will bounce off in the first hour; I’m not sure we’d be reviewing, or even playing Pathologic 3 without his writing. Both because it seems apt and because I, myself, do not have enough time, I am approaching this new series like the Bachelor himself, combing the fog for a diagnosis and a throughline, unable to see the cracks in my own thinking.

Like the Bachelor, I arrogantly reserve the right to revisit and edit my misapprehensions, developing my thesis as I push through the game and write each instalment, calibrating my own mind map. What I have written today will be altered when I realise what’s wrong with the time machine described above, and how I need to build today better. Next up, Part 2: The Care .

Pathologic 3

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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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Pathologic 3’s full release is set for early 2026, and there’s a fresh Steam Next Fest demo to examine

Contagion incoming

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge

Shortly after you finish celebrating the arrival of next year, a plague will rock up. Well, the full version of Pathologic 3 , a game in which you play a doctor tasked with saving a town from a mysterious contagion will rock up. I’m sure that if you turn off all of the lights and pay someone to sit in the next room coughing every two minutes, the difference’ll be negligible.

This full release has taken a tiny bit longer than developers Ice-Pick Lodge initially planned , but it’s just barely slipped out of 2025, with January 9th, 2026, being the freshly revealed release date. “That date is nailed down, screwed in, wrapped in commitments, and it isn’t moving,” the studio wrote in a Steam post .

Alongside this announcement, they’ve released the first in a series of trailers, because apparently Pathologic 3’s far too “hard to explain with keywords” for a single video to do it justice. Multiple trailers apparently aren’t enough to accomplish that task either, as the studio have opted to release a second demo - following Pathologic 3: Quarantine’s arrival this March - as part of the latest Steam Next Fest.

“This demo is a slice from the beginning of the upcoming game,” Ice-Pick Lodge explained. “Daniil Dankovsky, the Bachelor, arrives in the City-on-Gorkhon. He wants to meet an immortal man. And then everything goes sideways.” Sounds like the average trip into town.

As Brendan discussed when he delved into the plague doc sim’s Quarantine demo, Pathologic 3 treads a more detective-coded plague-doctoring path than its scrappier predecessor Pathologic 2 . Here’s an extract from his impressions :

For all its stitched-togetherness, the Quarantine demo remains good at building atmosphere. As a taster menu for the unreliable narrator story that is planned for the full game, it is flavourful and stacked with familiar names and faces for long-suffering fans. As a showcase for what the player will be doing it’s also something of a disjointed mess. I’m writing out many of its features in simple terms, but the demo itself doesn’t always deliver them that way, with minimal tutorials and a UI that mostly lets you figure things out yourself.

Pathologic 3’s also the first entry in the series the studio’ll be releasing after the departure of founder and long-time Pathologic director Nikolay Dybowski, who left amid allegations of kidnapping and abuse earlier this year.

The game’s Next Fest demo can be found on its Steam page .

Pathologic 3

PC

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