Sunderfolk is a gripping co-op strategy game from former Blizzard talent that wants to “bring back game night” - using your phone

Jackbox meets Gloomhaven meets Xbox SmartGlass

Image credit:Dreamhaven

I will not lie to you, gentle reader. When I first laid eyes on Secret Door’s Sunderfolk , while lurking to the rear of a gaggle of journomancers at a preview event last week, I let out an ostentatious sigh. Fortunately, I still mask up to preview events, and am thus free to adopt all kinds of snotty facial expressions without being set upon by burly PRs and shoved into the minifridge for later disposal. To sum it up, Sunderfolk is a hex and turn-based 2-4 player digital boardgame with fantasy animal characters and deckbuilding elements, reminiscent of Gloomhaven . Conceived during the pandemic lockdowns as a way to “bring back game night”, but without the traditional 30-minute unboxing ritual, it’s played on the big screen but controlled using a dedicated smartphone app, with players stroking and swiping to move characters and play cards.

It’s not like I necessarily object to all these things. I like boardgames (current favourite, Cosmic Encounters). I like cardgames (current favourite, Fungi). I think hexes are the ideal form of tessellation, and as a survivor of Farthing Woods, I’ve always been vulnerable to the charms of anthropomorphic critters. Still, Sunderfolk feels rather homely of concept and styling for the first game from Secret Door, whose parent company Dreamhaven was founded by several Blizzard alumni including former Blizzboss Mike Morhaime and former StarCraft 2 lead producer Chris Sigaty, now Secret Door’s studio head. If I’d seen Sunderfolk on Steam, I might have spent a moment admiring the character art, but I probably wouldn’t have wishlisted. So it’s just as well that in the hands Sunderfolk is very good fun, if not yet a transformative hit. I like it well enough that I am prepared to commit the ultimate sacrifice and install a new app on my phone.

So, who are these “folk” that have been “sundered”? Gather by the fireside, children, and I’ll begin: Sunderfolk takes place in an underground world where a community of folksy medieval wildlife live by the light of an enormous crystal. Sadly, the catacombs surrounding their placid village are full of PG-13 horrors, such as giant spiders, scrawny ogres and skeleton dogs. You play one of six heroes, each a bestial spin on a familiar RPG class. The village is your base, where you’ll buy gear and upgrades and accept missions into the caverns beyond. I honestly can’t recall if there’s a core plot, as such: the key thing to know is that the entire English script is energetically voiced by Anjali Bhimani, aka Symmetra from Overwatch , who puts on various accents and is generally the kind of dungeon master who needs to lay off the Mountain Dew.

As for the missions themselves, the key thing to know is that Sunderfolk does a wonderful job of being a combat puzzler that often requires serious coordination to achieve objectives against superior enemy numbers, while also being a game where you can troll your pals a bit. Players and enemy movements are grouped into rounds. Within your round, it’s up to players to decide who goes next, and when I say “decide” I naturally mean “fight like alley cats for dominance, only for your infant niece to play a card ‘accidentally’ and ruin everything”. On a similar note, the player group can only perform one character’s ultimate ability per round, the basis for further raging quarrels as to whether my ultimate is more ultimate than yours.

Beyond that, there’s the ability to move other player’s characters around for either strategic gain or to be a nuisance. Plot a route through an ally, and you’ll shove them into the hex behind. Many abilities also inflict knockback on both foe and friend, and you can steal each other’s loot drops. The classes, meanwhile, are capable of delicate tactical feats, but they all have an edge of mischief to them. There’s a salamander who mixes DPS with terrain control, performing AOE belches that set hexes alight. Being surrounded by burning hexes is fantastic for the salamander, who can guzzle up his own fire to build a multiplier. It’s less great for other characters, who suddenly find their escape routes blocked by flame.

Image credit:Dreamhaven

The mission in question was about retrieving some stolen supplies from a spider’s egg sac. This involved cutting open all the other egg sacs, some of which were, as you’d imagine, home to other spiders. The challenge, then, was to only hack open a certain percentage of sacs at once, to minimise the odds of being swamped. This, we triumphantly did not do. We had slightly better luck trying to rescue some kind of industrial beetle from ogres. Once sprung from its cage, the beetle had to be stood next to and steered to stop it running into lava during its turn. This, we triumphantly did not do. I blame the bird mystic, in this case. Bird mystics in Sunderfolk exist to fulfil three broad purposes - slowly harvesting mana for lategame spells, summoning decoys, and avoiding melee contact. Our bird player, however, laboured under the impression that she was Falco Lombardi, and got herself all messed up by skeleton dogs.

All this might sound too baroque and role-plaguey for the “fun for all the family” experience Sunderfolk is trying to cultivate. Later boss battles turn up the heat by having the boss act after each player’s turn, and there are also character weapons that must be primed by, say, having allies stand next to you.

Still, the smartphone interface makes it fairly intuitive. During your turn, you shuffle cards on your screen and stroke vertically to play them. Each card is actually a series of actions, which can be skipped individually by swiping right - move three hexes, perform an attack, move another hex, etcetera. The constraint is that they have to be performed or skipped in descending order. This guides your approach - in the case of the card I just described, it’s the foundation for a simple hit-and-run assault. But skipping actions lets you tailor each card to the situation. Once you perform an attack, it’s subject to the whim of the Fate deck, which rolls a die to determine the damage. You can customise the effects of different Fate dice rolls between missions.

Image credit:Dreamhaven

The smartphone interface reminds me of forgotten “auxiliary screen” devices and software such as Wii U and Xbox SmartGlass, but when I spoke to him after the hands-on, Secret Door’s boss Chris Sigaty said he “hadn’t really thought about” these hoary old parallels. Sunderfolk takes more inspiration from smartphone party game platform Jackbox, and exploits how fluent people now are with touchscreens at large. “We use these devices to do these sorts of things - scrolling, reading information, typing in information constantly,” Sigaty commented. “So we’re all very well educated in this already.” Game director Erin Marek, meanwhile, cited the influence of Apple’s TV remote apps for iPad and iPhone.

Still, a lot of the language Secret Door use recalls Nintendo and Microsoft’s bygone efforts to transform distracting handheld screens into a complementary element of their games. “Most of the time with my own kids, as an example, they’ll have their phones out in a negative way - the TV’s there and they’re looking at some social media thing or something,” Sigaty went on. “And I want them to be immersed in what we’re doing, and be present. When you’re playing this game, your phone is not being used for those things. It’s being used for something that is a shared experience, where you need to be collaborative, you need to be talking and so, ideally, it helps people break away from that that other escapism, that seems to be very prevalent for folks, who are always on social media doing whatever.”

They’ve also thought about spectator functionality: for example, letting bystanders use the game’s pointer functionality to doodle on the map. But with a team of 28 people, there isn’t capacity for that right now. Sigaty told me that he had misgivings about limiting the player headcount to four, suggesting that two to four players is the norm for most boardgames and therefore, that Sunderfolk could fill a niche by supporting a larger group. In practice, though, having five or more people made things too fiddly. Both Malek and Sigaty are hopeful that Sunderfolk might be the first of many smartphone-meets-TV games from Secret Door. “Ideally, we’re doing a lot of games like this,” Sigaty told me. “I’m very passionate about it.”

Gloomhaven, Xbox SmartGlass and all the rest of my incoherent referencing aside, Sunderfolk could pass for one of Blizzard’s creations. The art is redolent of Warcraft and Hearthstone - stylised and storybook but with just enough heft and teeth and shadow that it doesn’t feel outright cartoonish. Dreamhaven’s marketing department have emphasised the comparison, but Sigaty resisted it. “People say ‘it’s Blizzard 2.0’ and it’s like, no, it’s completely something new,” he told me. “I think we can’t help but be built on values and insights from that time, right? We learned certain lessons - some of them that I’m not very good at even articulating, but feelings about how you interact with the community, and how you form a community, and what you want to pay attention to in the quality level of the game.”

Sigaty traced a little of Sunderfolk’s spirit to his time at Blizzcon, “where you’re watching the best players in the world eat and play, and for me, I would feel chills being in the audience watching that level of skill”. But he added that Sunderfolk was conceived after he and the studio’s former Blizzard staff had left. “I think a game like this couldn’t have been made probably at Blizzard - I didn’t pitch this game or anything there. They have needs that have to meet the equivalent of World of Warcraft .”

Sunderfolk

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC , Nintendo Switch

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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.

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ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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