The Alters review

Middle management sim

Image credit:11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

• Developer: 11 Bit Studios
• Publisher: 11 Bit Studios
• Release: June 13th 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam , GOG , Epic Games Store
• Price: $32/£27/€32
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11

11 Bit Studios have a thing for circles. Their 2018 hit Frostpunk had you plant rings of buildings around a massive coal-fired generator in a frozen crater, picking research paths to steer your fully overlapping class/temperature Venn diagram of a city toward either fascism or theocracy. Frostpunk’s radial design is hypnotic, putting across the theme of humanity versus the engulfing cold with claustrophobic symmetry, and 11-bit’s later colony sims have struggled to either evolve the motif or depart from it. Frostpunk 2 , for instance, shatters and smooshes the circle to form a district-based frostland republic that gets lost in its own chatter.

The Alters is weirder than Frostpunk 2, and more successful. It tips the circle on one side. The crater city is now a wheel-shaped spacebase, strung with modular dwellings, which trundles across a landscape you will also explore on foot. It’s one genre, the colony management sim, bowled through another, the third-person action-adventure. The game also develops Frostpunk’s urban faction dynamics into a more intimate, tortured blend of psychological allegory and workplace soap opera, with the quirk that every member of that workplace is technically one and the same guy.

In this winningly uncategorisable endeavour - equal parts Severance, Moon, Astroneer and The Sims - you play Jan Dolski, the solitary survivor of an interplanetary geological expedition. You are marooned on a planet where time is both managed and mined in the form of Rapidium, a magical substance that groans like a foghorn and can be used to accelerate the temporality of creatures and objects.

As in Frostpunk, the apocalyptic rhythms of the planet itself are your greatest enemy. While you wait for rescue, you must keep your spacebase rolling in order to escape a devastating sunrise, its proximity advertised at the beginning of each in-game 24-hour cycle. The immediate problem is that you can’t operate the base alone. But your employers at Ally Corporation back on Earth have a solution: use Rapidium to flash-grow clones of yourself, based on the speculative alternate lifepaths mysteriously mapped out for Jan in the base’s Quantum Computer.

Image credit:11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

The result is a narrative-led strategy experience of two, fidgety halves. On the one hand, you need to expand the base using resources extracted from the surrounding landscape, exploring mildly labyrinthine 3D maps in your spacesuit and setting up drills and fast-travel pylons, while dealing with hazards such as radiation and billowing, transparent anomalies. These maps have a touch of the metroidvania, in that exploration is sharply and, at times, laboriously constrained by gadgets: you’ll need battery power for your grappling gun, and charges for your laser drill in order to blast through walls of rubble. They are also littered with drop pods containing Jan’s belongings, conveniently scattered across the campaign path during the crash landing.

On the other hand, you have to supervise your growing team of roads-not-taken - each heroically voiced by the same actor, Alex Jordan - whose feelings toward you predictably range from grudging empathy to searing hatred. You need to attend to their overall living requirements, slotting dormitories and leisure facilities into the wheel, while also fielding individual requests, gifting them emotive relics (such as university hoodies), and helping them figure out the sheer insanity of their existence. You need to keep them alive during the periodic magnetic storms that, as with Frostpunk’s blizzards, induce a gruelling marathon to stay on top of dwindling supplies and deteriorating equipment. And you need to keep them chugging away at the resource deposits, research terminals and crafting stations so that you can reconfigure the base and get it moving before dawn.

In amongst all this, you must bluff and barter with your reptilian superiors back on Earth, who want you to hoover up as much Rapidium as possible. Just to make life a little zestier, one of them happens to be Jan’s ex-wife. All this lasts 20-30 hours and is divided into acts, each of which halts the base in a new region and hands you a fresh major obstacle to overcome, while dealing with any number of competing, smaller-scale crises. Oh, and in the evenings back at base you can play beer pong.

Image credit:11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

It’s a lot to digest, more than many commercial video game publishers would consider “safe” in a market where players can’t go 30 seconds without checking their phones. One of the great pleasures of The Alters is simply the knowledge that it got made, that a group of plucky devs bore this curious chimera all the way to completion, that a crackpot concept such as this dared the waters of triple-A photorealism. Another pleasure is realising that all the majestic, hyper-nepotistic nonsense about literal “self-employment” is a platform for more relatable conversations about crunch and morale, about personality conflicts, labour conditions and ye olde capitalist alienation.

Above all, perhaps, The Alters is an alternately daft and devious deconstruction of the middle manager figure. It positions you as the interface between the execs, each a voice emerging from a wall of static in the Communications Room, and your grumbling subalternates.

The bosses are various flavours of untrustworthy. Maxwell, your overall manager, is a suave and calculating big dreamer, partial to Jobsian rhetoric but careful to wind it in. Lucas, the Nice One, is more obvious and charming in his manipulations. Lena, your ex, is the most sympathetic, but in some ways the least dependable, by virtue of your history. You must broadly keep them all happy to ensure the arrival of a rescue ship, and you will need their help for certain problems along the way. But you will also play tricks on them: lying about your decisions, lying about whether you’re collecting the all-important Rapidium, even lying about which particular Jan they’re talking to.

Your alters, meanwhile, are both soulmates and uncanny aberrations that need to be deftly inserted into the workings of the base, though they’re pretty autonomous once given assignments. One of the initial wrangles when they emerge from the spacebase “Womb” is a question of semantics that doubles as a question of class: are they a version of you, or are you a version of them? Who gets to be Jan Prime, Ur-Jan, and who gets to be relegated to a Janist vocation such as Jan Botanist or Jan Refiner?

It’s a dilemma with serious practical import for 11 Bit’s designers. The game needs the alters to be your derivatives, your existential inferiors, your NPCs, in order to function as a management sim made up of generic employees with skills that befit certain base tasks. At the same time, the story’s thrill lies with the fact that the alters don’t see themselves as offcuts, particularly given that some of them were born from moments in Jan Prime’s life where, from their perspective, he chose weakness and they chose strength. Why are you entitled to a Captain’s Cabin, when you’re the Jan who left his mother all alone with his abusive dad?

The Alters does entertain the possibility of an actual uprising, but this is a canned insta-fail event with no meaningful follow-through that I’ve discovered. Still, there is ample room for conflict and angst. The whole thing is an absolute headfuck for all concerned. I cloned a miner to help me gather the metals and minerals I needed to bridge a lava river. Then I cloned a shrink to help the miner deal with how deranged he feels about having his lost arm “grow back”. I ripped our winsome, whiny Jan Botanist from a timeline in which he was happily married, and transformed him into a counsellor for managing relations with the woman who is suddenly his ex.

Image credit:11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

The dialogue captures all this pretty well, both efficiently selling you on the bizarre stresses and gently expressing the differences between Jans. Admittedly, some of them do feel like pantomime creations in wigs with goofy accents, but the differences in, say, vocabulary can be delicate.

I know, for example, that the version of Jan who stood up to his dad is unlikely to use the word “absurd”. The soft-spoken Jan who became a doctor, meanwhile, is frightened by his clone body’s relatively undamaged hands. “They’re so… impeccable,” he breathes. The Jan who became an elite scientist has experience of Rapidium research from his “past life”, and does a lot of the emotional processing before he’s even gotten to his feet. Scientist Jan is powerfully arrogant - “I’m successful because I’m the version of you that doesn’t get discouraged by failure,” he tells you at one point - but he is also quite accommodating, in that he doesn’t much care about certain details as long as there is orderly progression.

Miner Jan is a different case entirely: a craggy, terrified man who finds peace in opiates and endless work. In my playthrough, he was the focus of the game’s very relatable exploration of crunch. While other Jans urge you to force the Miner to take time off, Miner Jan finds the idea condescending, even as he injures himself again and again on the job. “Stop being so noble and take advantage of it like a proper boss,” he tells you at one point. Eesh.

At times like these, you sense that 11 Bit are offering The Alters up as industry commentary. But this is no case study in how to be a caring manager, because the self-cloning premise won’t quite allow it. You’re supposed to look after your workers, and there’s a story ending which sees you siding with them against Ally Corporation, but those workers are also just thought experiments and mirrors in which to hone away your failings. You remain the centre of this rolling circle. As you guide each alter’s personal storyline towards a Lessons Learned reward that unlocks some custom dialogue, Jan Prime flowers under pressure, both confronting his own baggage and fleshing out his people skills in a way that is at once consoling and insidious. The further the base travels, the more complete he becomes, and the more and more he sounds like Maxwell.

Image credit:11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

Inevitably, the writing creaks in places, at once stretched by the multiversal premise and cramped by the game’s conventional, act-based campaign and the rhythms of base management, which often don’t leave much time to track disgruntled Alters down for a chat. Each day is a rush to assign the Alters to tasks, plug in new rooms, capitalise on research that grants access to new areas, and ensure that you’re pulling in all the resources you need. Amid all that, the story would risk feeling rather drawn-out if you had to explain the Rapidium cloning thing to every fresh Jan in full. 11 Bit’s solution is the repeated onboarding instruction “read the mission logs”, which seemingly advances every Alter through their personal subplot to approximately the same point as the others.

There are also traces of Frostpunk’s somewhat clunky moral dilemmas, variations on the old “is this enough of an emergency to warrant child labour” gambit, but they’re better handled here because those implicated are proper personalities with branching dialogue. And there are a few bonding moments that are just cheesy, particularly when they go hand-in-glove with Simmish “morale improvement” mechanics such as watching movies with your Alters in the Social Room. Sure, I sprouted your whole mind and body from the litany of my regrets in order to help me pull a lever, but on the brighter side, let’s all have a jar and catch a romcom, eh?

I’ve been referring to The Alters as a genre hybrid throughout, and perhaps unfairly: rather than defining this as a jigsaw puzzle, we should portray it as a singular fable that has adopted familiar structures as needed. But I do cling to the idea of incompletely meshing genre parts, of wheels tumbling and grinding through worlds, because the tensions between those genres are evocative, illustrative.

The game’s need to be a reasonably performant piece of management software means that it can’t quite be a fluid and believable third-person action game. The spacebase is sort of a glorified menu (though there are proper menus as well) and menus need to be responsive, so the elevator whips you between levels with what ought to be bone-rupturing speed. The lesser Jans should be scraping Jan Prime off the ceiling every time he uses it, and the fact that this doesn’t happen seems appropriate to a story that can’t determine whether you’re a human being or one among many grades of mass-produced screwdriver.

Image credit:11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun

On a similar note, the game takes a pragmatic approach to time even before you start fooling around with Rapidium. When you hold a button to perform a task, Jan lurches into fast-forward, spinning through the hours with the shriek of a boiling kettle, till the standardised onset of “exhaustion” at 11pm sharp slams his blurring body to a halt. This shortcutting is a necessary convenience for the management sim player who doesn’t want to spend minutes watching a dude wield a drill. But again, it has thematic resonance. So much… velocity visited upon the flesh of one man, and none of it is enough, so back we go to the Womb.

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The Alters

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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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