Pathologic 3 is the rare game about healing that knows healing can be cruel

Butchering “Butchering Pathologic” - Part 2: The Care

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 . Last time, we butchered the Clock . Today, we’re thinking about bodies, disease and discipline.

Videogames have given us many fascinating healing mechanics and ideas about healing, from the motley support playstyles of Overwatch to the musical cooldown management of Wild Growth , but one thing developers rarely capture is that healing is an expression of power over somebody. However kind, it has the potential to be demeaning, intrusive, even abusive.

In my experience of doctors and hospitals, healing is a competition between interpretations of sickness and injury, where the doctor has at their disposal all the crushing cultural authority and ornate vocabularies of modern medicine. The patient’s own self-knowledge - amassed over years of living in and with their own flesh - risks being recast as ‘amateurish’. And this is before we get into the weeds of different conceptions of bodies and how they relate, which a doctor - especially an overworked, desensitised one, fighting a wider crisis - might be inclined to dismiss as mysticism or superstition.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

Pathologic 3 asks you to heal a plague-ridden Town that doesn’t quite want to be healed, because it doesn’t entirely consent to your imported ideas about bodies. It certainly doesn’t appreciate your bedside manner. Your character, the Bachelor, is an arrogant, deteriorating, overread fool. He has come to the Town chasing the myth of an immortal man, Simon Kain, from whose flesh he hopes to extract and synthesise a cure for death. As fanciful as this may seem, the Bachelor is otherwise scornful of anything his academic training deems impossible. He has no time, initially, for what the townsfolk know and believe about their own bodies, a corpus of provincial custom and meatlore that is only ever half-visible within the circuit of his science.

From the Bachelor’s point of view, healing the Town is an aggravating negotiation with dabblers and charlatans, time-wasters and clowns. Once you finally open a hospital, after unlocking the game’s time-rewinding mechanics, you can meet and diagnose a number of patients each day - talking to them about their symptoms, examining their torsos and limbs, taking samples of their skin and excretions for microscope analysis. Sometimes, you’ll also head out into the Town to investigate homes and workplaces for contributing environmental factors and possible red herrings: poorly ventilated labs, dirt floors full of bacteria, coughing friends.

All the people you treat have the devastating Sand Pest plague, but all have been granted a slower decline by the competing presence of another, more everyday disease. This co-morbidity gives you the opportunity to study the Pest and concoct vaccines, but only if you correctly diagnose the secondary infection. Vaccine rollouts and other emergency decrees such as curfews are drawn up on a board in your apartment, governed by two intersecting lines. One shows the rate of infection, which will end the game if it gets too high, and the other, the fear and anger of the townspeople, which elsewhere manifests in rioters who will beat you to death on sight.

The Decree Board is where the role of the doctor in Pathologic 3 overlaps mostly obviously with the abuses of the tyrant - or of the tyrannising system . The Pathologic games are political fictions as much as they are literary fantasies about disease. Each route through the game to the aftermath of the plague is also a decision about the kind of society you want to emerge from its ruin. At least at this stage in my on-going playthrough, the Bachelor’s decrees make me think of Michel Foucault’s portrayal of plague-stricken towns as bringing about “the utopia of the perfectly governed city”, in which individuals are surveilled and labelled and locked in place against infection. As a healer who can have houses boarded up, districts closed, the Bachelor can’t help but further what Foucault calls “the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life”, even when he is demonstrating some kind of empathy.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

To diagnose your patients, you have to peel away their defences and grope towards some understanding of the person as a whole - an act of both tenderness and predation, control. You have to suss out their loves and regrets, their working days and private lives, their secret shames and unspoken fears, their traumas and delusions. The language your patients use is imprecise, improvised, and there is always a note of contempt as the Bachelor refits their colourful or evasive accounts to the approved terminology of the game’s Casebook screen.

The Bachelor’s tendency to see the townsfolk as ignorant hicks lends significance and character to what might otherwise be regarded as a production limitation. When under physical examination, each patient in Pathologic 3 appears as a headless, spotlit, near-naked torso, with parts brusquely listed for inspection. The majority of the cast share these body models, in curious echo of how the named dead in Pathologic 3 are represented by outwardly identical masked actors, posing beside the corpse. Instead of recognising individual bodies, then, you must distinguish the suffering by their afflictions: rashes, scars, bruises, inflammation. This is how the Bachelor is trained to see people, or rather, to not see them: as reusable canvases for the signs of different diseases, tallied against your Casebook.

Still, there is a delicacy to the examinations, a trace of empathy and consensuality fostered both by the kinder bits of dialogue writing and by the animation of intervening movements. If it’s the same body each time, the body itself has personhood. It turns slowly on instruction, placing its feet like a sleepy dancer. There’s a simple grace to how it rotates its forearms outwards to show you the palms. In any case, indexing those symptoms will only get you so far. I’ve yet to meet a person in Pathologic 3 who had every symptom given for a certain diagnosis, and every diagnosis I’ve made has been an educated guess, not least because the passage of time and the pressure from other tasks makes it hard to gather every last scrap of data.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

This dependence on guesswork – softened by the game’s time travel mechanic , which lets you replay each individual diagnosis if you get it wrong – is part of the process by which the Bachelor learns to compromise with the Town, which is far too phantasmagorical and strange to fit Foucault’s reading of the quarantine zone as a tightly disciplined ‘utopia’. The Bachelor’s methods do get results, but neither the Town nor the Sand Pest entirely agree with his disciplinary categories and measures, shrinking away from his hands without appearing to withdraw; there is always the sense that he is operating upon his own reflection. In particular, there is little room in the Bachelor’s mind initially for the notion that the Town might actually be a single, suffering body, encompassing the buildings, their denizens and the soil beneath.

These notions manifest frequently in character descriptions and dialogue, with people openly characterised as pieces of a larger organism. The Town’s spiritual leaders, Simon Kain and his brother Georgiy, are referred to as the “shining mind”; their brother Victor is “the hands that create the bricks for building castles in the air”. The Saburov family are the “load-bearing bones”, reflecting their role as administrators, while the local beef baron Vlad Olgimsky has a belly “as vast as his abattoirs”. In homage to the Town’s dominant industry, the districts are named for parts of cattle - the Marrows, the Hindquarters, the Flank. Even time in the Town is somatic: it’s a fluid “like blood, or dew, or tears”, that is produced in the Cathedral and kept in bodily “vessels”. Stop the clocks, and locals may stop moving in “solidarity”, reducing infection levels by a fraction.

If this is a body, it is a body formed through tense and choppy compromise between the requirements of industry, emblematised by Olgimsky, and the bloody and bovine mysticism of the indigenous Kin. The Kin maintain that the ground beneath the Town is a fickle, furious deity. They object to any violation of this sacred sunken body, even if it’s just laying water pipes. They are mistrusted and resented by other Town dwellers, but they are also respected and relied upon, for their allegiance with the bellowing earth is a central component of the Town’s meat trade.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

As a university-trained outsider, the Bachelor is the least equipped of the original Pathologic’s three healer protagonists to grasp and work with these animalistic insights and incorporations. He is frequently at odds with the other two healers, the Haruspex and the Changeling, who appear unpredictably in Pathologic 3 as they continue their own, shadowy fight against the plague, using very different methods. Still, the Bachelor is also obliged to work with the Haruspex and Changeling, if only because he needs more hands at the wheel. In the process, he must acknowledge that they sense and are capable of things that elude him.

Local custom forbids the Bachelor from wielding a scalpel, for example. He can only scrape the epidermis, tick his boxes, and make airy judgements about unseen organs. Sometimes, even to look at a body is an affront. When the Bachelor attempts to study the corpse of a murdered man, an embalmer reproaches him that “the wounds belong to the body, they must not be disturbed, just like the body must not be disturbed by a gaze.”

To get inside the bodies of the townsfolk, the Bachelor must conspire with the Haruspex, a native physician who has the right to break the skin. The Haruspex sheds light in passing on the Bachelor’s own apparent bodylessness. In a departure from the previous two games, the Bachelor doesn’t eat or drink or experience fatigue. His is an intellectual struggle, as you are openly told in one of Pathologic 3’s many thinly veiled self-commentaries. Still, the sharp-nosed Haruspex notes that the Bachelor does have a body, and that it is ailing - “it smells of pond scum”. It’s a jolt because of course, you can’t smell the Bachelor’s body either. It makes you wonder whether you’ve been playing a traditional survival sim after all, and only think otherwise because the Bachelor defiantly refuses to perceive his own flesh.

Image credit:Ice-Pick Lodge / Rock Paper Shotgun

The Changeling, meanwhile, attends to certain fantasies the Bachelor conceals with his learning and microscope, including a susceptibility to the occult that cuts the varnish of his professorial manner. Early on, she tells you that the plague itself has a singular body, Shabnak - a crawling vortex of bone and miasma who prowls infected districts and is more visible and dangerous, the more her existence is acknowledged. The Bachelor may scorn this as mumbo jumbo, but Shabnak appears to him regardless, and he can even crudely fight her using his funky prototype fumigation devices. As The Changeling archly points out, “why you, with your head of solid oakwood, can see her is a very interesting question”.

Pathologic 3

PC

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.

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

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.

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

Rock Paper Shotgun is better when you sign in

Sign in and join us on our journey to discover strange and compelling PC games.