Pathologic 3 Quarantine drops the hunger meters so you can play doctor

A diseased demo

Image credit:HypeTrain Digital

In Pathologic 2 you played an exhausted surgeon who between incisions would scramble through piles of rubbish for a handful of nuts to keep himself alive. In Pathologic 3 the developers want you to approach the same plague-stricken town from a different perspective. This time you’re a well-fed and well-dressed city doctor whose pompous attitude and diagnosing minigame makes him more like Hugh Laurie’s Dr House than the scroungey hero of a survival game. Pathologic 3 Quarantine is a demo on Steam that lets you try out this secondary hero, the Bachelor, and it sets the tone for another trip into Ice-Pick Lodge’s janky-if-interesting townscape.

We got the gist when the game was announced in October last year. You’ll be playing as Dr Daniil Dankovsky, a vaguely disgraced and obsessive doctor who arrives in the Steppe town just in time for it to become wracked by the Sand Pest, an illness that quickly spreads from district to district. In this demo, you relive the fifth day of the plague via a flashback during an interrogation (this is a frame story that allows for retrying “failed” days - more on it later).

Instead of battling a handful of meters governing hunger, exhaustion, thirst, and infection, the doc will spend that day interrogating patients, noting their symptoms in a casebook, and investigating their lives to uncover any secrets they’re hiding which might inform his diagnoses. It’s not the plague that ails these patients, but a library of other diseases that you’ll need to pick and choose from when giving the final diagnosis. The Bachelor’s theory is that other illnesses can slow the progress of the plague, an idea that brings to mind the embattled immune system of Mr Burns from the Simpsons. Probably not the image the creators intended, but that is really what he thinks, medical degree be damned.

You’ll examine the body parts of your patients for bruises, marks, discolouring, and so on. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / HypeTrain Digital

Judging from the demo, this loop of asking questions, noting symptoms, and crossing town to do a little detective work, has a lot of promise. It lends the sequel a very different feel. There is still one big meter to worry about though, described as the “seesaw” in your head. This is basically a meter that swings between mania in red and apathy in blue. Degenerating too far into blue apathy will see your movement speed slow to a painful crawl. To counteract this natural decline, you can huff tobacco and take strychnine in small doses to lurch into red mania. This regains your faster movement, but too much will harm your health and it can become addictive. The effects of each drug will lessen over time. There are other options to get back up to manic speed. Furiously kicking trash containers in the street, for example, will boost your mania (and provoke an ethereal inner voice that mocks you for being frustrated).

The Steppe folk don’t have a great relationship with this arrogant doctor. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / HypeTrain Digital

As for the streets themselves, well. Navigating the town is not the open worldish wander of Pathologic 2, but a more fast-travellish matter of plotting a course on the town’s map. A red dot flits across this map towards your destination, only bringing you back into the game world if you pass through a “dangerous” or infected district. When this happens, you’ll need to navigate on foot, rooting about for drugs in abandoned suitcases, kicking garbage cans, avoiding the outstretched arms of the infected pleading for help, and cranking up a prototype do-hickey that evaporates germs in a wide radius around you.

In more riotous districts armed or punchy men will run at you and try to murder you on the cobblestones. Here comes a familiar bit of not-quite-combat - the doctor has a revolver, and unlike the Haruspex of the previous game, he can’t hand it to a child beggar in return for a few matchsticks and a bit of old bread. It’s your permanent weapon, if not always loaded with actual bullets. Holding your gun up at approaching reprobates will make them freeze and raise their arms in hesitation. It doesn’t quite ape the face-offs of dustily forgotten adventure I Am Alive , which did a similar trick way back in 2012. But it does allow for a frantic dash through fiery neighbourhoods. This never needs to fully degenerate into a shootout, provided you keep pausing to point your gun at anyone suspicious.

You can threaten people with your gun even if it’s not loaded. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / HypeTrain Digital

If all this is sounding to you - a Pathologic uberfan - like things are getting a little too video gamey and not opaque, buggy, and anxiety-inducing enough, then relax. There were still plenty of moments in which I felt lost and sorry for myself. Sometimes during dialogue the perspective flips completely, and you are suddenly speaking as an interrogator or assistant instead of the Bachelor. There is a lot of unsettling music, and that same megaliterate dialogue that oscillates between janksome nonsense and lyrical threat. Sometimes it feels familiar simply due to bugs, like the one that had me walking around an empty field looking for a house that only existed on the map and not in the actual town. This is very Pathologic.

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.

Not sure why the herb brides are lying about in the street like a sexy plague harem but oh well. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / HypeTrain Digital

Some quirks annoy me more than others. Characters often deliver long audio lines that are distinct from what’s written in their dialogue text, for example, causing a linguistic clash in my brain. In many text-heavy games if you open a dialogue with a character and they address you audibly, they’ll tend to limit it to “hey” or “yes?” or “what is it?”. Some short interjection that just signals a conversation is starting, but doesn’t distract from the important text. But Pathologic games hate being ordinary. So here, characters will muse full inner monologuey thoughts aloud, dense ponderings that sometimes border on poetry. If you’re like me and can’t read a sentence while someone talks to you, it makes for an interruptive and frictional reading experience. It’s like trying to scan the menu at a Spanish restaurant while the waiter explains Aristotelian metaphysics. Does this game want me to read or to listen? I don’t know.

As ever with Ice-Pick Lodge games, it’s hard to tell if this is intentional, meant to heighten some sense of unease, or if they are simply the result of a contrarian design philosophy (or a basic reluctance to act on feedback). Players of these games tend to give credit where it’s due, as when it provokes thoughtful pain, but they also ascribe meaning to the jank and cut corners of a series that, let’s face it, is sometimes simply borked. For me, the Quarantine demo, like all Pathologics before, remains interesting to read and write about, less so to actually play. Sometimes a delight, sometimes a chore.

Towards the end of the fifth day, some other tasks are dangled in front of you. As the only doctor in town, the municipal government has given you emergency powers. You can make decrees using a display board in your home, for example. Decrees such as “Pest control”, which uses up patrolmen but reduces the contagion level of the town. Or a “Food Distribution” decree, which greatly lowers unrest levels but will spread the contagion further. There is also a flat out “Denial” decree which simply reads “prohibit dying” (it has no effect). But these are abstractions on a graph, and there isn’t time in the demo to see how your decrees are reflected in the world.

One big feature that isn’t fully fleshed out in the demo is the time travelling idea. The doctor’s struggle to contain the illness takes place over twelve days. At certain points you’ll be able to wind back the clock and revisit a previous day. But this requires a certain amount of Amalgam, a white substance “acquired through successful euthanasia and breaking mirrors”. (Yes, you earn time travel gunge by playing a euthanasia minigame where you ease the passing of dying people in the street by administering morphine or other drugs. I’ll let you unpack that one yourself, it’s too early in the day for me.)

I didn’t have enough drugs to ease the death of this patient. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / HypeTrain Digital

You’ll use Amalgam to turn back a grandfather clock in your home tower and revisit those past days. But the further back you go the more it’ll cost. And this demo cuts off before you zip back to the past. It’s not clear how deep this rewind feature is. Do you just go back and change a few things? Or do you repeat the whole day again? Does it undo everything you’ve enacted up until that point? In other words, if it’s day seven and I travel back to day two, will I have to replay days three to seven yet again?

None of this is clear. It may prove a novel save system (the game still autosaves throughout each day too) or it might just end up softlocking you into an Amalgamless failure spiral. Whether it frustrates players or intrigues them, we’ll see. Probably both, knowing Pathologic.

And that’s the thing. This sequel feels, even from the Quarantine demo alone, like it is exclusively for long-in-the-tooth explorers of this town. And some of those may already be miffed that all this was originally meant to appear in Pathologic 2 . Some good will earned by the studio over the years might have also dried up due to the recent news that the founder of Ice-Pick Lodge, Nikolay Dybowski, left the studio earlier this month amid allegations of abuse and kidnapping . The project continues without him, but how much more blood can the developers extract from a cult favourite before even the most ardent fans get tired of talking bulls and women arranged in transparently sexy compositions? The original Pathologic did include one playable woman, the Changeling, who now takes a back seat as Ice-Pick Lodge work towards a release for Pathologic 3 this year.

We’ll likely have a full review of the sequel once it’s out. The previous game frustrated me on release but I did enjoy its eerie world much more after it was patched to allow for other modes of difficulty. Let’s hope Pathologic 3 can retain some of that otherworldly appeal.

Pathologic 3

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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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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